Israel-Palestinian Meet Called Off

A planned meeting on Sunday between Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israel's vice prime minister, Shaul Mofaz, has been called off, a senior Palestinian official said.

"The meeting between president Abbas and Shaul Mofaz has been postponed to a later date," the official in the West Bank city of Ramallah told Agence France Presse on Saturday, without giving a reason or a new date.

The delay came after a disputed vote on Friday in which UNESCO, the U.N.'s cultural body, granted world heritage status to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, another West Bank city.

The Abbas-Mofaz encounter was to have been the highest-level meeting between Israeli and Palestinian officials since May 12, when Israeli negotiator Yitzhak Molcho met Abbas to deliver a letter from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Peace talks between the two sides have been on hold since late September 2010, with the Palestinians refusing to resume them without a moratorium on Israeli settlement building.