The Palestinian leadership yesterday ruled out a future meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, unless he met demands for a total freeze on Jewish settlements, in a setback for President Barack Obama's troubled efforts to relaunch peace negotiations.
Riyad al-Maliki, the Palestinian Authority foreign minister, told reporters: "No one is talking about a new meeting" between Mr Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president.
Mr Maliki said Mr Abbas had agreed to the US president's invitation to meet him and Mr Netanyahu in New York last Tuesday in recognition of Mr Obama's own attempts to secure an Israeli pledge to freeze all settlement activity in occupied territory.
Mr Abbas has been harshly criticised within his Fatah movement for attending Tuesday's meeting despite initially making his attendance conditional on a settlement freeze.
In an interview with the London-based al-Hayat newspaper published yesterday, Mr Abbas said of Mr Netanyahu: "He says settlement will continue and [the status of] Jerusalem is not up for discussion . . . And he also says the refugees are not for discussion. So what shall we discuss and how can we agree?"
George Mitchell, the US special envoy to the Middle East, will spend the next two weeks discussing with both sides how to find a basis for renewing negotiations. The Obama administration is attempting to revive talks suspended in December when Israel launched an onslaught in the Gaza Strip.
Mr Obama told the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday that he would continue to seek a just and lasting peace between Israel, Palestine and the Arab world.
However, he disappointed Palestinians by referring to the "Jewish State of Israel", a description Israel demands the Palestinian side acknowledge but which it refuses to accept.
Mr Obama has met limited domestic opposition to his efforts to re-engage the two sides, with some prominent pro-Israeli Democrats backing his call for a settlement freeze. But the deadlock on talks coincided this week with a Republican Jewish congressman challenging whether he was a "true friend of Israel".
Eric Cantor, the House minority whip, said he opposed Mr Obama's "disproportionate focus" on a settlement freeze instead of dealing with the "existential threat" Israel faced from Iran.
In a speech to the General Assembly yesterday, Mr Netanyahu reiterated his desire for peace with the Palestinians. Mr Netanyahu, his popularity at home buoyed by the perception he succeeded in facing down US pressure on settlement, favours unconditional talks.
But he used most of his address to raise other issues, principally Iran, as he urged all countries to rally against what he described as the nuclear threat it posed.
Waving a facsimile of the Wannsee documents in which the Nazis planned the annihilation of the Jews, he accused Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, Iran's president, of having stood at the UN podium the previous day "spewing anti-Semitic rants".
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