LONDON – Prime Minister Gordon Brown will host talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in London later this month to discuss the peace process, he told lawmakers on Wednesday.
The separate talks with Palestinian premier Salam Fayyad and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will be held on December 15, Brown's Downing Street office said.
"We are bringing Israeli and Palestinian leaders to London later in December to help to establish how best we can use 2009 to make real progress towards political and economic solutions in the region," he told lawmakers.
The meetings with the two parties will be held separately, officials said.
Fayyad will be in London for a Palestinian investment conference, a Downing Street spokesman said, adding that Brown had "invited the Israeli Prime Minister Olmert to visit London on the same day".
"They won't all be meeting together," he told AFP.
Middle East peace talks were relaunched in November 2007 after a near seven-year hiatus, with the current US administration saying it hoped for a resolution before President George W. Bush left office in January 2009.
Little tangible progress has been made since, however, and all eyes are on whether the new US administration under Barack Obama can revive the peace process.
There are also questions about leadership in the region: the Israeli premier is under pressure from his own party to step down following a decision to indict him in one of several graft cases over which police questioned him.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas warned last month that he would call snap elections if the Islamist Hamas movement does not rejoin reconciliation talks aimed at healing the rift sparked by their seizure of Gaza in June 2007.
