UN chief Ban Ki-moon today said the international community "strongly supports" Palestinian efforts to build a state as he kicked off a regional tour aimed at reviving peace talks.
He started a two-day visit by meeting Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad in the West Bank political capital of Ramallah and praising his plan to build the institutions of an independent Palestinian state by mid-2011.
Ban is also expected to meet senior Israeli officials and to visit the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, still largely in ruins following a 22-day Israeli military campaign launched in December 2008.
Violence, however, continued today as Israeli troops shot dead a young Palestinian stone-thrower and critically wounded another in the West Bank village of Burin, Palestinian medics and security officials said.
They said troops entered Iraq Burin, a village south of Nablus that sees periodic clashes between Palestinians and Israeli settlers, to break up fighting between villagers and residents of the nearby settlement of Bracha.
Villagers said the fighting broke out when the settlers attacked the village and was not related to the organised protests against Israeli settlements that have rippled through the West Bank and east Jerusalem over the past week.
The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the incident.
Meanwhile, Palestinians fired a rocket from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, but it fell harmlessly on open ground, the military said.
It was the second such rocket to strike Israel since a similar projectile killed a Thai labourer on Thursday. The worker was the first person to be killed by rocket fire from the territory since the Gaza war.
Ban arrived in Ramallah a day after the Middle East diplomatic Quartet called for Israel to halt all settlement construction and for both sides to reach a peace deal by 2012.
The Palestinians grudgingly agreed to US-led indirect talks earlier this month but those efforts largely fell apart two days later when Israel announced plans to build 1,600 new settler homes in mostly Arab east Jerusalem.
Ban "condemned strongly" the decision to build the homes.
"All settlement activity is illegal anywhere in the occupied territories, and this must stop," he said.
Fayyad earlier took Ban to a hilltop outside Ramallah to show him a large swathe of West Bank territory known as Area C which is under exclusive Israeli control and off-limits to Palestinian development.
From the observation point Ban could see Israel's controversial separation fence, a Jewish settlement and the skyline of Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to locate their future capital.
"The visit to Area C was an opportunity for the secretary general to see the difficulties that we face on a daily basis in our efforts to develop and build in preparation for our state," Fayyad said at the press conference.
Fayyad, a former World Bank economist, hailed the Quartet's statement as "positive and comprehensive" but said more must be done, including allowing Palestinian security forces to operate throughout the West Bank.
On Friday, the Quartet (the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States) held a meeting of senior officials in Moscow aimed at getting moribund peace talks back on track.
"The Quartet urges the government of Israel to freeze all settlement activity," the Quartet said in a statement after the meeting.
It also urged Israel and the Palestinians to resume talks on final-status issues -- security, borders, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem -- and to reach a peace deal within 24 months.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in response that "peace cannot be imposed artificially and with an unrealistic calendar."
The Palestinians insist that the freeze also apply to mostly Arab east Jerusalem, which Israel seized in the 1967 Six-Day War and annexed in a move not recognised by any other government.
Israel's announcement last week of the 1,600 new homes to be built in east Jerusalem infuriated the United States, especially as it coincided with a visit by US Vice President Joe Biden.