John Kerry
John KerryReuters

US Secretary of State John Kerry wanted to visit Israel after the recent national election, but Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asked him to postpone the visit until after Netanyahu forms a new coalition, reported Channel 2 Sunday evening.

The TV channel's political correspondent Udi Segal speculated that Kerry might have wanted to get Netanyahu to commit to a continuation of efforts to negotiate a diplomatic agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA). Another possibility is that Kerry wanted to get a sense of the political situation on the ground in Israel after the election, which ended disappointingly for the Obama administration.

Kerry said in December that whatever government will be formed, he hoped it would be able to "negotiate and move towards resolving differences between Israelis and Palestinians."

In April of 2014, Kerry's push for peace talks was torpedoed by the PA, which formed a unity agreement with Hamas after breaching the Oslo Accords by making unilateral moves to join international conventions.