PALESTINIANS -$50 BILLION ECONOMIC- PALLADIUM

US President Donald Trump's son-in-law launched a long awaited Middle East initiative as he accused their leaders of not caring about their own people for rejecting his $50 billion economic framework.

The Palestinian Authority boycotted the ''Peace to Prosperity'' workshop, accusing the unabashedly pro-Israel Trump of dangling the prospect of cash to try to impost political solutions and ignoring a fundamental issue of Israeli occupation.

Closing the conference at a luxury hotel in the capital Manama, the 38-year old real estate investor promised to put out the political plan at ''the right time''  and said the Palestinian Authority could help people by embracing the US recommendations.

''If they actually want to make their people's lives better, we have now laid out a great framework in which they can engage and try to achieve it,'' Kushner told reporters.

''We're going to stay optimistic,'' he said. ''We have left the door open the whole time.'' He said the  Trump administration was trying a fresh approach to the long intractable Middle East conflict and that the authors of the economic framework had not seen the political plan.

''What the leadership has done is that they have blamed Israel and every one else for all the people's problems., when in fact the common theme coming is that this is all achievable if the government wants to make these reforms,'' Kushner said.

In the occupied West Bank, senior Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi told a press conference the US proposal was an ''insult to our intelligence'' and ''totally divorced from reality.''

''The economic peace which has been presented before repeatedly and which has failed to materialise because it does not deal with the real components of peace, is being presented once again, re-cycled once again,'' she said.

''The elephant in the room in Manama is of course the occupation itself,'' she added. ''The Israeli occupation, which was never mentioned - not once.''

Trump has taken a series of landmark steps to benefit Israel including recognising bitterly divided Jerusalem as the Jewish state's capital in 2017, leading the Palestinian Authority to cut off formal contact.

Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, praised the plan for focusing on jobs and said  ''all the goodwill in the world'' were needed to prevent a  severe deterioration of the Palestinian economy.'

''So if there is an economic plan, if there is urgency, it's the question of making sure that the momentum is sustained,'' Lagarde said. [AFP]

US President Donald Trump's son-in-law accused Middle East leaders of not caring about their own people for rejecting his $50 billion economic framework.