The two leaders met at Olmert's residence in Jerusalem in their first public face-to-face encounter in seven weeks when Abbas suspended the high-level talks to protest a massive Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip that left more than 130 people killed.

They last met on Feb. 19 after they launched biweekly meetings at the Middle East conference in Annapolis, Maryland, in November.

Little official information was available on how Monday's meeting went, but preceding official statements and decisions indicated their talks would make little headway in coming closer to any sort of agreement on substantive issues other than to continue their talks and for the negotiators to pursue their discussions.

Indeed, Abbas and Olmert agreed to "continue with the goal of reaching an historic agreement by the end of the year," according to Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev.

Palestinian officials said their talks revolved around how far these negotiations have come since they were re-launched in November, implementing their commitments in the 2003 road map, a mutual ceasefire, opening the crossings into the Gaza Strip and lifting the blockade there.

Regev said that while both sides expressed concerns about the "situation on the ground, it was agreed that those concerns will not interfere in the negotiations," which the two leaders agreed would continue through their respective negotiating teams.

Arab analysts say these meetings, which Palestinian public opinion polls show are becoming increasingly unpopular, are too superficial to arrive at a peace deal, which envisages a Palestinian state before U.S. President George W. Bush leaves the White House in January 2009.

Both sides accuse each other of not living up to the first stage of the international peace Quartet's road map, which calls on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to rein in militants and the Israelis to stop settlement activities and remove restrictions on the movement of Palestinians.

Palestinian sources close to the negotiations told the Middle East Times that the negotiators, led by Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and former Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, have yet to touch on the core issues they were tasked with discussing when they met in Annapolis.

The Palestinians say these negotiations have been marred by Israel's consistent announcements of expanding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, captured in 1967, and its refusal to undertake confidence building measures to ease the daily lives of Palestinians.

Since Annapolis, the Israeli government has announced plans to build hundreds of new housing units on soil where the Palestinians seek to set up their state.

Palestinian officials said that Abbas on Monday objected to the settlement expansion and explained to Olmert "the difficult position" that Israel was putting him in with the Palestinian public, particularly in the wake of Israeli official statements preceding Monday's meeting that the Jewish state was not prepared to undergo measures to remove the hundreds of roadblocks in the West Bank and lift the blockade on Gaza.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, during her most recent visit to the region last week, urged Israel to begin removing more than 600 roadblocks, and Israel vowed to eliminate 50 of them. The Jewish state has said these blocks were part of its security measures to prevent Palestinian militant attacks.

But on Sunday, several ministers in Olmert's cabinet said they opposed the removal of the roadblocks after Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet domestic security agency, advised against removing any of them until Israel completes the 790-kilometer separation barrier in the West Bank, which has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Livni was also reported as using the term "red lines" for the first time on Sunday, telling American Christian Evangelical leader John Hagee: "Israel will continue the negotiations with the Palestinians … but Israel does not plan to compromise on the red lines, and this is something the international community must understand."

The "red lines" in question namely include the final status issues of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees, the same ones the Palestinians claim as their "red lines." The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state and the right of refugees to return to their original homes they were forced to flee in 1948. Israel claims Jerusalem as its "united and eternal capital" and refuses to negotiate the right of Palestinian refugees' return to what is today Israel.

Likewise, Abbas on Sunday also stressed that a peace deal would not be at the expense of Palestinian aspirations and principles.

"We are negotiating in all seriousness and seek to reach a settlement to all final status issues," he told a meeting of his Fatah faction. "But the settlement will not be at any price."