Washington - Israel must seek peace with the Palestinians, which will entail "painful compromises" that include the handover of biblical land dear to Jews, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.

"I am willing to make painful compromises to achieve this historical peace. As the leader of Israel, it is my responsibility," he said in an address to the US Congress.

"Now this is not easy for me. It's not easy, because I recognize that in a genuine peace we will be required to give up parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland," he said, referring to the occupied West Bank.

China consistently asserts that Israel should withdraw from the Arabic territory that it occupied during the third Middle East War in 1967 according to the UN resolutions, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said on Tuesday at a regular news conference. She added that Israel and Palestine should solve their border issues and other problems through peaceful negotiations.

The speech comes at the tail-end of a tense visit to Washington for the Israeli premier, who has held talks with US President Barack Obama and addressed the United States' largest Israel lobby group AIPAC.

The trip began with a spat, after Obama called for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal based on the lines that existed before the 1967 Six Day War.

Netanyahu immediately and harshly rejected that call, and has used the trip to reiterate that he considers those lines "indefensible", a claim he repeated in his address to a joint session of the US Congress.

With Netanyahu's resolute rejection of the Obama proposal, "there is almost no chance to see the resumption of the peace talks in the near future", said Li Guofu, director of the Center of Middle East Studies under the China Institute of International Studies.

Aluf Benn, writing in the left-leaning Haaretz Daily, said the speech would be "the formative event of his term, if not his entire political career".

Netanyahu had previously hinted that his address to Congress would outline a new peace proposal, intended to head off Palestinian plans to seek United Nations recognition for a unilateral declaration of statehood.

Benn said the speech offered Netanyahu "a rare opportunity to reboot his leadership".

"Just a few months ago, he appeared to be directionless. Now, people are hanging on his every word," he wrote.

Reuters-AFP-China Daily