KFAR ELDAD, Palestinian Territories (AFP) – Jewish settlers geared up for a burst of West Bank construction on Sunday as negotiators raced to salvage Mideast talks which looked set to collapse when a settlement freeze expires at sundown.

Palestinian Acting President Mahmud Abbas has vowed to abandon the talks should the construction of Jewish homes on occupied land restart after the moratorium ends.
“Israel must choose between peace and the continuation of settlements,” he told the United Nations in New York on Saturday, denouncing Israel's “mentality of expansion and domination” in the West Bank.
Despite Abbas' threats, Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted the moratorium on new West Bank construction will end as planned, and has shrugged off international efforts to convince him otherwise.
Just hours before the moratorium expired, top settler officials and local council heads met in Kfar Eldad settlement in the southern West Bank to discuss a return to business as usual.
The freeze is widely accepted as ending at midnight (Sunday), although the settlers say they will begin building at sundown. And the military order governing the moratorium puts the end on September 30.
When the freeze ends, construction can begin immediately on 13,000 new housing units, Peace Now says. To demonstrate their support for extending the moratorium, the settlement watchdog is to hold an 'emergency protest' outside Netanyahu's Jerusalem residence.
As diplomats scurried to find a last-minute compromise, Human Rights Watch urged Israel to make “permanent and total” the freeze, stressing that all settlement on Palestinian land is illegal under international law.
The settlement issue is one of the most intractable disputes between the two sides. There are some 500,000 Israelis living in more than 120 settlements across the West Bank and east Jerusalem -- territories the Palestinians want for their promised state.
Although there was little to indicate a compromise was in the offing, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak told the BBC he was optimistic the talks would survive the hurdle.
“I think that the chance of achieving a mutually-agreed understanding about moratorium is 50-50. I think that the chances of having a peace process is much higher,” he said before flying back to Israel.
“We cannot afford ... to let this process, with historic potential impact on the lives of many millions, on the stability of the whole region, to be derailed by the fact that Israel doesn't have a way to stop this building totally,” he said.
As the freeze entered its remaining hours, top U.S. officials made last-minute efforts to salvage the peace talks, launched barely three weeks ago in Washington.
Over the weekend, Abbas met Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and peace envoy George Mitchell, but there were no signs of any breakthrough.
Abbas flew to Paris early on Sunday for top-level talks with French officials, but his chief negotiator, Saeb Erakat, remained in the United States, as did Netanyahu's pointman Yitzhak Molcho, in a bid to pursue compromise efforts.
“We are doing everything we can to keep the parties in direct talks,” State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said late on Saturday.
A previous round of direct talks collapsed in December 2008 when Israel launched a 22-day offensive on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip aimed at halting rocket and mortar attacks.
Photo: Israeli soldiers clash with Palestinian and foreign activists during a protest against Jewish settlements in the West Bank village of Beit Omar, near Hebron, on September 25, 2010. (Getty Images)
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