Jerusalem - US President Barack Obama's special envoy to the Middle East began fresh talks Thursday with Israeli leaders - as part of an intensive US effort to revive peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. Senator George Mitchell, who landed in Tel Aviv late Wednesday, met Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, before further talks with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Defence Minister Ehud Barak scheduled for the afternoon.
On Friday Mitchell is expected to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, then travel to the nearby West Bank city of Ramallah for talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Israeli media cited a senior US official saying Washington's demand for a moratorium of Israeli construction in the occupied West Bank was "not off the table."
"Our position on settlements has not changed," the official said. He insisted the media reports to the contrary had been misleading.
The talks will be the first round since last month's three-way summit in New York.
The September 22 summit in New York, hosted by Obama, was the first meeting between Netanyahu and Abbas since the former took office in March.
It was held despite a failure by the parties to reach an agreement on a freeze of Israeli construction in West Bank settlements.
Mitchell had attempted in vain to seal a last-minute deal on the issue in a previous round of shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem and Ramallah just before the summit. In its absence, Obama had been unable to announce a long hoped for revival of peace negotiations.
The US official briefing Israeli reporters said he did not "foresee a breakthrough on this visit," but again emphasized Obama's "sense of urgency" and "impatience" with the current situation and expected the sides to move forward.
A recent new flare-up of tensions surrounding a disputed holy site in Jerusalem, and the heated debate about a UN report on last winter's Gaza war had again demonstrated this urgency, the official was quoted as saying.
Obama has said he wants Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to report back to by mid-October on the US efforts to nudge the sides toward reviving peace talks.
