The next meeting of the international mediators...

Lavrov said Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is currently on a three-day visit to Russia and has met with President Dmitry Medvedev, "welcomed our initiative to hold a Quartet meeting as early as next month."

Russia, along with the UN, the United States and European Union, is part of the Middle East Quartet of intermediaries for peace efforts.

According to Lavrov, the Quartet meeting on the foreign minister level will focus on the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which have seen a lack of progress due to the Israeli Jewish outpost expansion in the West Bank.

Talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority launched after a peace conference hosted by then U.S. President George Bush in November 2007 were comprehensively ended by an Israeli offensive on Gaza in December 2008 that left 1,300 Palestinians dead and 5,000 injured.

Lavrov said the Russian and Palestinian leaders agreed that "this [the resumption of talks] is possible only

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