KABUL, Feb 7: Afghanistan rejected on Tuesday a media report that Afghan officials had held talks with their Israeli counterparts, saying that such a meeting would only be considered once a Palestinian state had been created.

Israel’s Maariv daily reported at the weekend that Israeli foreign ministry officials had held backroom meetings with senior Afghan diplomats who had been attending a conference in London last week on aid for Afghanistan.

“That’s not true,” presidential spokesman Abdul Karim Rahimi told journalists in Kabul when asked about the report.

“It is totally baseless,” added foreign ministry spokesman Naveed Ahmad Moez.

“There has been no contact whatsoever between Afghanistan and Israel before the conference, during the conference and after the conference,” he said.

Mr Moez said Afghanistan’s policy remained that it would only consider relations with Israel if there were “a totally peaceful settlement in the Middle East and the Palestinians get their total rights and there is a Palestinian state”.—AFP