BETHLEHEM (West Bank), July 20: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Sunday pledged new aid to the Palestinians and called for a freeze on Israeli settlement building to bolster the Middle East peace process.

“We have pledged $500 million for economic development in Palestine over three years to 2011,” Brown said after meeting Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

“I can announce a further commitment of $60 million,” Brown said on his first visit to the region as Britain’s premier, bringing total British aid in 2008 to $175 million.

Brown called for a freeze on Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, echoing criticism by the United States, saying their expansion had “made peace harder to achieve.” Settlement expansion “erodes trust, it heightens Palestinian suffering, it makes the compromises Israel will need to make for peace more difficult,” Brown said, adding that there must also be a halt to violence on both sides.

In keeping with his “economic roadmap” to peace, Brown pledged support for a new mortgage finance authority which he said would help to finance some 30,000 new Palestinian homes and generate up to 50,000 new jobs.

Brown -- who spent 10 years as finance minister under Tony Blair, whom he succeeded as premier in June 2007 -- called for increased international investment in the territories, saying “Palestine is open for business.” Prosperity would “make the cost of ever returning to violence so high and so unacceptable that the vast majority will not want to have anything to do with those who preach violence,” he said.—AFP