Ramallah  - Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinus said Wednesday that the world cannot wait 18 more years to see peace in the Middle East.

Speaking after meeting Palestinian officials in Ramallah, Moratinus said that Spain and the European Union "will continue to exert every effort possible to achieve Palestinian aspirations of statehood."

"We cannot wait 18 more years since the Madrid conference," he said. "We have to see a (Palestinian) state established on the 1967 borders."

The first official Palestinian-Israeli peace talks opened in 1991 in Madrid but were later overridden by the secret Oslo talks that led to the 1993 signing of the first Palestinian-Israeli peace accord.

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said in the press conference with Moratinus: "Instead of listening to the calls from the international community to freeze settlement construction, Israel had announced the construction of 3,000 housing units, and yet it still talks about settlement freeze when actually what will be frozen is the peace process."

Erekat said: "We have asked the European Union to help us by forcing Israel to stop settlement activities."

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said in a statement Wednesday night that "the coming weeks will be decisive. Either the international community and the (US President Barack) Obama administration pressure Israel to abide by international obligations, or the region will continue in its cycle of instability."

He called on the US administration to "preserve its credibility toward the peace process through actual pressure on Israel to accept international decisions."

George Mitchell, US special envoy for the Middle East, is expected in the region Saturday night for two-day talks with Israeli and Palestinian officials hoping to reach an agreement on an Israeli settlement freeze and resumption of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, which have been frozen for almost a year.

The US is hoping to bring Abbas and Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu to meet during the United National General Assembly meetings later this month in New York.

The Palestinians insist that resumption of negotiations and a summit meeting between Abbas and Netanyahu are conditional on AN Israeli halt of all settlement construction, including ongoing ones, and Israeli acceptance to resume the talks from the point they had ended under the previous Israeli government of Ehud Olmert. dpa