Mideast envoys to keep talking

JERUSALEM – Israeli and Palestinian representatives met Tuesday for the first time in more than a year and, as widely anticipated, came away with no breakthrough in the long-deadlocked peace process.

But they reported modest progress: an agreement to resume talks about the negotiations.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s envoy, attorney Yitzhak Molcho, and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat met with delegates representing the so-called quartet of Middle East mediators in Jordan and later met together with Nasser Judeh, Jordan’s foreign minister.

Judeh hosted Tuesday’s talks at the initiative of Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who has long pressed both sides to negotiate. The foreign minister said the meetings were positive and he found both sides committed to a two-state solution.

“We do not wish to raise the bar of expectations but nor should we underplay the importance of today’s meetings,” the minister said in a news conference in Amman, the Jordanian capital. Tuesday’s meeting will be followed by a series of talks, Judeh said.

Some of the talks are expected to be secret.

The development won’t renew the negotiations just yet but will allow the sides to respond to the initiative of the quartet, the Middle East mediators from the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia. After the Palestinian bid for U.N. membership in September, the quartet proposed an outline for renewing negotiations and concluding them by the end of 2012.

The first phase of the outline called on the sides to present proposals on security and territory issues by the end of January.