US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday responded to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s decision to disband the Knesset.

Kerry said that whatever government will be formed, he hoped it would be able to “negotiate and move towards resolving differences between Israelis and Palestinians.”

In April, Kerry’s push for peace talks were torpedoed right ahead of their nine-month deadline by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which formed a unity agreement with Hamas after breaching the Oslo Accords by making unilateral moves to join international conventions.

The PA has been inciting and praising the recent spree of high-profile terror attacks concentrated in Jerusalem; just this Monday a female Arab terrorist with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction stabbed a Jew at Gush Etzion Junction in Judea before being shot and critically wounded.

The US State Department on Tuesday also responded to France’s vote to recognize the PA as the “state of Palestine,” following a recent string of European nations making similar moves in foisting their political agendas unilaterally on the Jewish state.

“The US position is clear, that we support Palestinian statehood but believe it can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the parties that resolve the final status issues,” deputy US State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

Harf stressed that Tuesday’s vote by the lower house of the French National Assembly was non-binding and French government’s position remained unchanged.

But she also said “I think what you’re seeing are people around the world speaking out and saying the status quo is unacceptable.”

“We’ve said that. Everyone has – a lot of people have said that. But we very firmly believe that the way to achieve two states is through direct negotiations,” pressed Harf.

AFP contributed to this report.