Israeli-Palestinian meeting to be held soon

Palestinian and Israeli negotiators will meet this week after more than a year of deadlocked peacemaking and present their positions on core disputes to foreign mediators, a Palestinian official said on Sunday. 

Palestinian delegate Saeb Erekat and Israel's Yitzhak Molcho will meet on Tuesday in Jordan, said Wasl Abu Yossef, a senior figure in the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

"Both sides will offer their positions on security and borders. This is not a resumption of negotiations," he told Reuters, adding that representatives of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations - the so-called peace Quartet - would also attend.

Israel did not immediately confirm the meeting would take place, but a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the government sought peace talks "without preconditions, any time and in any place".

Negotiations stalled in late 2010 after Israel refused to renew a partial freeze on Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank as demanded by the Palestinians, who want to found a state there as well as in East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has spurned Israel's demand he recognise it as a Jewish state. He  drew rebukes from the Netanyahu government by holding power-share talks with the rival Hamas Islamists who rule Gaza.