The Middle East Quartet of negotiators again urged the Israelis and Palestinians to resume direct talks without any preconditions, a high-ranking U.S. official said.
Monday's Middle East Quartet meeting focused on ways to resume direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the official said. The talks came to a halt in September 2010 after Israel refused to extend its 10-month moratorium on settlement construction in the Palestinian territories.
"The quartet principals have conducted a good meeting over the dinner tonight, characterized the discussion as excellent and substantive," the U.S. official said.
"The principals are reiterating... that there is urgent need to appeal to the parties to overcome current obstacles and find ways to resume the direct negotiations without preconditions," he added.
The statement is contrary to a forecast made by chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who said ahead of the meeting the mediators will not call for the resumption of talks between PA and Israel.
The source also said that though serious differences remain between Israelis and Palestinians, they do not make a peace solution impossible. He said the Quartet was ready for any mediation effort in search for a compromise, but both sides of the conflict must make hard decisions and concessions to forge peace.
The Palestinians want to form an independent state within the 1967 borders before Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, while Israel wants Jerusalem to be its "eternal and undivided" capital.
The participants of Monday's meeting of the Quartet, comprising the United Nations, the European Union, the U.S. and Russia, decided not to issue statements on the results of their work.
"The quartet doesn't meet in order to issue statements," the official said. "The quartet meets in order to allow these principals to consult on some very complex and challenging issues, discuss how best to work and push them forward."
"And this evening the decision was that we needed to realistically acknowledge the fact that more work needs to be done with the parties on their gaps and in order to allow us to get to the part when we might be able to have a productive public product by the quartet," he added.
Quartet Meetings at various levels will continue until the end of the week, the source said.
