Mideast Quartet Talks Peace with Israel, Palestinians
Envoys of the Middle East Quartet were meeting with Israel's chief peace negotiator on Thursday, as the Jewish state faced growing pressure to break the logjam in talks with the Palestinians.
Talks with Israeli envoy Yitzhak Molcho were being hosted by the U.S. embassy, with Washington represented by David Hale, assistant to U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, an embassy spokesman told Agence France Presse.
"There is a meeting today with the Quartet," Kurt Hoyer said. "We believe that Molcho is there as well and our Quartet envoy David Hale is there."
The European Union was represented at the meeting by senior official Helga Schmid, said an EU official in Jerusalem.
Middle East envoys Sergei Yakovlev and Robert Serry were also attending, representing Russia and the United Nations respectively, other diplomats said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office would say only that such a meeting was scheduled for some time on Thursday, without giving further details.
The envoys were also due to meet later on Thursday with Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat in an east Jerusalem hotel, officials in Ramallah told AFP.
The Quartet is seeking to push the Israelis and Palestinians into renewing some kind of peace negotiations, which ran aground in September last year over an intractable dispute about Jewish settlements.
As the diplomats shuttled back and forth between the two sides, Israeli and Palestinian media reports suggested Mitchell himself could make an appearance in the region next week after an absence of three months.
Diplomatic efforts to engage the two sides have increased in recent weeks ahead of a key meeting of the Quartet which is expected to take place in Paris later this month.
But Israeli press reports on Thursday suggested the meeting of the Quartet -- which groups the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations -- could be postponed by a month, possibly to allow Netanyahu to float a "new" peace initiative.
One diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP a date for the Quartet leaders' meeting would largely depend on the outcome of Thursday's talks with Molcho.
Although details of Netanyahu's initiative have yet to be made public, the basics have been widely leaked to the Israeli press -- a Palestinian state on temporary borders in the framework of a long-term interim agreement.
Netanyahu aides have suggested he may present his plan in Washington in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Israeli President Shimon Peres said he was seeking to secure an audience in Washington with U.S. President Barack Obama in order to discuss options for reviving peace efforts.
"Because of recent developments in the region, the president believes that this is a real opportunity to reignite the peace process," Mitchell Barak told AFP, saying no date for the trip had been set.
"It's just in the neighborhood of a request at this point," he said, noting that the approach to the White House was made in full coordination with Netanyahu.
Peres is one of a number of senior Israeli officials who has previously backed the idea of setting up a Palestinian state within provisional borders as part of an interim agreement.
"Eight years ago ... Peres was the one who first came up with the idea of recognizing a Palestinian state in provisional borders, together with accelerated negotiations on a final-status agreement based on the 1967 lines," political commentator Akiva Eldar wrote in the Haaretz newspaper.
Since the expiry in September of a temporary ban on settlement building -- which Netanyahu refused to extend -- the Palestinians have refused all direct contact with the Israelis, saying they will not talk while settlers build on land they want for a future state.