The office of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has hailed meetings with US Secretary of State John Kerry, saying they achieved "progress" towards resuming peace talks with Israel.
"Abbas's meeting with Kerry in his headquarters in Ramallah on Friday evening achieved progress, and will facilitate an agreement on the basis of a resumption of talks," presidency spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina said in a statement.
But he stressed there were still "specific details that need to be resolved," without saying what these were.
"Kerry will send an invitation to Erakat and a representative of the Israeli side to meet him in Washington for initial talks in the next few days," he added.
Kerry announced that the two sides' chief negotiators, Saeb Erakat of the Palestinians and Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, would meet him in Washington "to begin initial talks in the next week or so".
The announcement came at the end of four days of intense diplomacy by the secretary of state as he consulted Israeli and Palestinian leaders from his base in the Jordanian capital Amman.
Talks have stuttered and started for decades in the elusive bid to reach a final peace deal between the Arab world and Israel.
But they collapsed completely in September 2010 when Israel refused to keep up a freeze on settlement building in Palestinian territories.
But the Islamist Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip on Friday rejected a return to Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
"Hamas rejects Kerry's announcement of a return to talks and considers the Palestinian Authority's return to negotiations with the occupation to be at odds with the national consensus," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told AFP.
He said that West Bank-based Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas had no legitimate right to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinian people.
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