JERUSALEM
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will head to Rome on Monday for an urgent meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the Israeli press, quoting senior government officials, has reported.
According to Haaretz, the meeting is aimed at coordinating the two country's policies ahead of a UN Security Council vote scheduled two weeks from now on a Palestinian proposal to demand an end to Israel's decades-long occupation of the West Bank by the end of 2016.
The Palestinian draft resolution will seek to apply a "two-state solution," providing the Palestinians with an independent state within pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.
For the draft resolution to pass, nine council members must endorse it – provided it is not vetoed by a permanent member.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had initially set the end of November as the submission date for the draft resolution. But Palestinian officials opted to wait until permanent council members returned from Iran nuclear talks, which wrapped up in Vienna late last month.
According to Haaretz, a senior Israeli official said Kerry had initiated the meeting in Rome, adding that talks were expected to last for a few hours.
The official said the top U.S. diplomat wanted to hear Netanyahu's position on the Palestinian draft and a "more complicated" European version, which would also set a two-year deadline for reaching a permanent agreement.
Washington, which hopes to maintain its Arab allies in its coalition against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militant group, hopes to avoid using its veto to torpedo the draft resolution.
Palestinian-Israeli peace talks ground to halt in April after Israel failed to honor an earlier promise to release a number of Palestinian prisoners.
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