US Secretary of State John Kerry postpones Mideast visit amid Syria talks

Washington: US Secretary of State John Kerry has postponed a trip to Israel and Palestinian territories this week to attend White House talks on Syria, US officials told AFP on Monday.

"Secretary Kerry has postponed (his) trip to attend meetings in Washington," a State Department official said in an email, asking not to be identified.

Instead Kerry will attend White House talks on the Syrian conflict, in which thousands of Hezbollah fighters are helping President Bashar al-Assad gain ground against opposition forces, another US official said.

America's top diplomat is struggling to try to pull together a peace conference to end the violence in Syria, as Washington comes under increasing pressure to arm the Syrian opposition.

The so-called Geneva 2 peace initiative, bringing together the Assad regime and the rebels in a bid to end the fighting which has claimed 94,000 lives, had been initially tentatively scheduled for May.

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Kerry agreed in Moscow talks in May with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov that they would work all out to end the bloodshed.

But amid wrangling between opposition leaders and a fierce debate over exactly who should attend, the date for the talks has now slipped into July at the earliest.

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Washington is also said to be reconsidering its refusal to arm the Syrian opposition, although it has been the biggest single donor of humanitarian aid to help millions of refugees fleeing the war, which is now in its third year.

It has also provided some $250 million in direct aid to the rebels' Supreme Military Council, including for things like night-vision goggles and body armor.

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President Barack Obama has asked his national security team -- which includes Kerry -- "to consider all possible options that would accomplish our objectives of helping the Syrian opposition serve the essential needs of the Syrian people and hastening a political transition to a post-Assad Syria," National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan told AFP.

"We have prepared a wide range of options for the president's consideration, and internal meetings to discuss the situation in Syria are routine," she said.

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But she said there were "no new announcements at this time."

The postponement of Kerry's Israel trip will be seen as a blow, amid fears it could spell trouble for his peace-making efforts, even though the visit -- which would have been his fifth in four months -- had never been officially announced by the State Department.

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Reports had leaked out, however, with the visit flagged on a tentative schedule by the office of Israeli President Shimon Peres, which said the two men would meet on Tuesday.

Palestinian officials also had announced he would meet Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Thursday.

Last week, Kerry warned that if his efforts to kickstart the peace negotiations, frozen since 2010, fail now there may never be another chance.

"We are running out of time. We're running out of possibilities... If we do not succeed now, we may not get another chance," Kerry told the American Jewish Community lobbying group.

He has warned leaders on both sides that they now need to take the "tough decisions" to get back to the negotiating table.

According to Israel HaYom, a newspaper considered close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Kerry had been due to arrive on Tuesday.

But he put off the visit "to give (Abbas) more time" to decide whether to drop his insistence on a settlement freeze, before talks resume.

Israel has demanded an immediate return to talks "without preconditions" while refusing to publicly freeze settlement building.

Kerry was likely to reschedule his visit for the following week, the Israeli paper said, and a US official told AFP he still was aiming to return to the region.