Gaza – Ma’an/Agencies – US President Barack Obama will hold a three-way meeting on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in an attempt to break an impasse in peace talks, the White House announced on Saturday.

The meeting, the first such summit between the three, will take place in New York, where the UN General Assembly meeting begins on Monday.

Obama will meet each leader separately before holding the tripartite talks, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement released on Saturday.

Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that the prime minister planned to leave for the US on Monday instead of Tuesday in order to attend the meeting.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomes the United States' invitation for talks with President Barack Obama and for a trilateral meeting with President Obama and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas," the statement said.

A senior Netanyahu aide was quoted by Reuters as saying, "The meeting will be held without preconditions, as the prime minister had always wanted."

While it is a significant first, the meeting is unlikely to signal the resumption of formal peace negotiations, which were broken off last December. Obama’s envoy to the Middle East, former Senator George Mitchell, was unable after rounds of shuttle diplomacy to strike a deal that would constitute the groundwork for negotiations.

The key obstacle to negotiations is Israel’s unwillingness to agree to halt construction in settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank. Obama has insisted on a total freeze in construction, and Abbas says he refuses to renew talks in the absence of such a moratorium.

White Hous spokesperson Gibbs said the New York meeting would "lay the groundwork for the relaunch of negotiations and to create a positive context for those negotiations so that they can succeed."

Mitchell was quoted in the statement praising Obama for stepping in: "It is another sign of the president's deep commitment to comprehensive peace that he wants to personally engage at this juncture."

He said the United States was continuing efforts to "encourage all sides to take responsibility for peace and to create a positive context for the resumption of negotiations."