JERUSALEM: President Shimon Peres said today that Israel and the Palestinians should agree on a Palestinian state with temporary borders as a first step towards ending the Middle East conflict. “The roadmap outlines a clear path and (the sides) should implement the second stage of the roadmap — declaring a Palestinian state with temporary borders,” Peres’s office quoted him as saying. Israel and the Palestinians should further make “a clear commitment that the borders will become permanent within a limited period,” he said at a meeting with the European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana. The Palestinian Authority flatly rejected the Israeli president’s proposal. “We categorically reject Peres’s proposal which takes us back to square one,” president Mahmud Abbas’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP. Incidentally, the roadmap was drafted in 2003.