WASHINGTON // US secretary of state John Kerry was expected on Wednesday to meet Palestinian negotiators for the first time since the 50-day war in Gaza ended.
The announcement, which caught commentators by surprise, comes just days after Israel announced its biggest grab of Palestinian land since the 1980s.
It also comes as a new showdown looms at the United Nations with the increasingly frustrated Palestinians planning to push a resolution setting a three-year deadline to end the Israeli occupation.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas will seek Arab League support for his plan at a meeting of foreign ministers in Cairo on September 7, according to Jordan's Al Ghad newspaper.
Negotiations would begin with border talks, then proceed to other issues including the status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees, Al Ghad said.
The Palestinians seek to establish a state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Israel evacuated Gaza in 2005 after a 38-year occupation.
Mr Abbas's statehood blueprint calls for nine months of peace negotiations with Israel, to be followed by an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank within three years.
It will be Mr Kerry's first face-to-face talks with Palestinian negotiators since Washington found itself sidelined from the Gaza ceasefire talks in July, when Mr Kerry, the top US diplomat, failed to broker a truce in the war between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.
It was a further blow after Mr Kerry's high-profile bid to hammer out a full peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinian Authority collapsed spectacularly amid bitter recriminations in April, despite him shuttling back and forth to the region more than a dozen times during his first year in office.
"I think they'll talk about a range of issues. There's obviously an ongoing ceasefire discussion and upcoming negotiations that will take place. There's a range of longer-term issues," state department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Tuesday.
More than 2,100 Palestinians were killed in Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip, nearly 70 per cent of them civilians, which ended last week with an open-ended ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militant groups, brokered by Egypt.
The two sides are supposed to meet soon in Cairo for negotiations on a long-term truce, but no date has been announced yet for the start of the talks.
Israeli finance minister Yair Lapid warned on Tuesday that Israel was eroding its international support, complaining the security cabinet had not been consulted about Sunday's announcement of the confiscation of 400 hectares of land in the occupied West Bank for settlement building.
"Maintaining the support of the world was already challenging, so why was it so urgent to create another crisis with the United States and the world?" Mr Lapid, a centrist, said.
And justice minister Tzipi Livni, a cabinet moderate who served as chief negotiator in abortive US-brokered peace talks, also slammed the land grab. "It weakens Israel and threatens its security," she said.
Economy minister Naftali Bennett, whose far-right Jewish Home party draws much of its support from the settler lobby, defended the move as retaliation for the murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank earlier this year.
Ms Psaki renewed US warnings about continued Israeli settlement building, saying such steps "are contrary to Israel's stated goal of negotiating a permanent status agreement with the Palestinians" and would "send a very troubling message".
She called on the Israeli government to "reverse this decision", while warning against "any unilateral steps that undermine the prospects for a negotiated two-state solution".
The Palestinians now intend to seek a UN Security Council resolution setting a three-year deadline for ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
"We will be seeking a Security Council resolution on ending the occupation on a specific date. We should know that the occupation will end within three years," Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, told reporters, without saying when the resolution would be put forward.
She admitted Washington would likely veto any such resolution, and Ms Psaki stressed "our view has long been that there are a range of productive ways to have discussions about how to achieve a two-state solution. Typically, that's not through international governing bodies."
* Agence France-Presse and Bloomberg News
