The US President, Mr Bill Clinton, said yesterday he hoped his summit in Oslo with the leaders of Israel and the Palestinians would map out a path leading to a final peace within 10 months. But he said hard decisions lay ahead.
Palestinian officials said the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, and the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, had arranged to meet late last night ahead of their planned summit with Mr Clinton today.
"I would feel that real progress had been made if they made agreements about the modalities under which they will proceed," Mr Clinton told reporters in the Norwegian capital.
"In the end the hard decisions have to be made by the parties," he said.
Palestinian cabinet minister Mr Nabil Shaath said last night's Arafat-Barak meeting would focus more on process than substance.
The three-way summit today is the climax of a two-day tribute to assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose negotiators secretly launched groundbreaking peace moves with Arafat in the Norwegian capital six years ago.
Earlier in the day, negotiators for the two sides said they had agreed to start their 10 months of talks on a final peace deal on November 8th in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
Mr Barak and Mr Arafat have laid down a February deadline for a framework agreement, leading to a final peace deal by September 2000 on the toughest issues, including the shape of a possible Palestinian state and the fate of Jerusalem.
Mr Barak and Mr Arafat met Mr Clinton separately yesterday afternoon, with Mr Arafat saying he wanted Mr Clinton's help in opposing Jewish settlements on the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.
Mr Barak, Rabin's protege and like him a former army chief, said hours earlier that today's three-way meeting could end with a decision to stage a new summit in coming weeks to hammer out the February framework.
Officials have hinted that Mr Clinton could convene something akin to the intensive Israeli-Egyptian talks at Camp David, Maryland, near Washington, in 1978 that ended in landmark peace accords and Israel's first treaty with an Arab state.
More cautious than Mr Barak, Mr Clinton said: "I think it is premature to discuss that at this time.
"I don't think you should expect some sort of major announced breakthrough here. There's no way in the world that they can come here and agree in talks with me on the big issues," he added.
Russian Prime Minister Mr Vladimir Putin, along with representatives of the European Union and several Arab states, were to take part in a series of bilateral meetings on the sides of the main summit.
Security was tight in central Oslo as police, troops and bombsniffer dogs patrolled sealed-off roads around the main summit venues, with helicopters buzzing overhead.
Before the talks began, Mr Clinton met with Norway's King Harald V and Norwegian Prime Minister Mr Kjell Magne Bondevik as part of a state visit to Norway.