Will Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas meet? Both leaders said on Tuesday they were willing to meet to relaunch peace efforts, but no date was set and they traded blame for stalled talks.
Netanyahu, speaking at The Hague with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, stressed again he was willing to meet Abbas.
"I am prepared to meet with Abu Mazen at any time for direct talks without preconditions. I have said this hundreds of times and I am reiterating it now. I do not care about the place be it in Holland, Moscow or anywhere else – this is not a problem, and it certainly could be in Moscow. I have said this to President Putin. I said this on Sunday to his envoy Bogdanov,” he stressed, in a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to host a meeting.
“The main question is, of course, whether Abu Mazen is prepared to meet without preconditions? We hear contradictory reports about this,” continued Netanyahu. “Just yesterday Palestinian spokespersons made it clear that they are ready to meet but they have conditions – releasing prisoners, they want to know if the talks will have results, etc. If Abu Mazen is ready to meet for direct talks without preconditions, I am ready at any time. I have been calling on him to do this for almost seven years already and if he agrees to do this – there will be a meeting."
Abbas, meanwhile, said during a visit to Warsaw that a meeting had been proposed for Friday but an aide to Netanyahu suggested delaying this, leading to it being called off.
"Netanyahu's representative proposed to delay this meeting to a later date. So the meeting will not happen," Abbas said at a joint press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda, according to the AFP news agency.
"But I am ready and I declare again that I will go to any meeting,” he added.
Bogdanov, meanwhile, held talks in Ramallah on Tuesday, following which he said that efforts would continue to work towards a future meeting.
"We are very thankful that Abu Mazen accepted in principle the Russian initiative proposed by President Putin," Bogdanov said, adding, "We'll continue our efforts, discussions and contacts with the two parties about the form, contents and dates of the meeting."
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi recently said Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to host an Israeli-Palestinian summit to revive peace talks that have been stalled since 2014.
Several days later, Netanyahu and Putin held a telephone conversation in which they discussed the peace process, among other things, though a Kremlin spokesman later clarified there was "nothing concrete" yet on a meeting between Abbas and Netanyahu.
Peace efforts have been at a standstill since a U.S.-led initiative collapsed in April 2014 when the PA unilaterally joined international institutions in breach of the conditions of the talks.
The last substantial public meeting between Abbas and Netanyahu is thought to have been in 2010, although there have been unconfirmed reports of secret meetings since then.
Channel 10 News reported last week that Israel had actually agreed to a three-way peace summit with the United States and the PA, but the PA preconditioned such a summit taking place on Israel ceasing construction in Judea and Samaria and releasing additional terrorist prisoners.
The PA chairman has also insisted that any reboot of peace talks with Israel should happen within a clear timeframe and under international supervision.
On Tuesday, Abbas said international help to end the conflict was crucial.
"The peace process has stalled because of the Israeli government's position and we now need the political and economic help of the United States and the European Union, especially to rebuild our infrastructure," he said, according to AFP.