Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are prepared to make “painful” concessions in order to jumpstart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that Secretary of State John Kerry is in the region to promote, according to Science and Technology Minister Yaakov Peri.

“Netanyahu knows there will be a painful evacuation of a number of settlements that are not in the settlement blocs, and that there will be a land swap,” Science and Technology Minister Yaakov Peri told army radio.

“There is no doubt that Benjamin Netanyahu and a not-insignificant number of Likud ministers understand, or have reached the conclusion that it is in Israel’s strategic interest… to return to the negotiating table,” said Peri, who now belongs to the centrist Yesh Atid party.

Peri’s Yesh Atid party is a top coalition member in Netanyahu’s government, and Peri himself functions as a key foreign policy voice within the party. Israeli officials have long called on their Palestinian counterparts to return to the negotiating table, and as Kerry’s efforts expanded in recent weeks, have become more explicit and planned further concessions.

Palestinian officials, for their part, rushed this week to deny that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was preparing to restart peace talks.

Israel’s Channel 2 said Monday that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is interested in restarting peace negotiations with Israel, although Jerusalem remains cautious.

But an official in the PA quickly denied the report, saying it was not accurate.

“Please refer to official Palestinian sources and not the off-the-record game,” an aide to Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said.

Meanwhile three operatives linked to the al-Aqsa Brigades of Abbas’s Fatah faction – a sub-group of Fatah blacklisted as a terror group by the U.S., Canada, Japan, the E.U., and Israel – were detained by Israeli security forces.

[Photo: The Israel Project / Flickr]