Ramallah/Tel Aviv  - Positions between the Palestinians and Israel remained intractable Friday despite the surprise naming of US President Barack Obama as the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

During a meeting with Obama's Middle East representative George Mitchell, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas rejected any concessions to get the peace talks going again.

Before agreeing to resume talks, which have been interrupted for a year, the Palestinians insist that Israel stop all of its settlement activity in Palestinian territories, the Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said Friday in Ramallah.

Erekat indicated that the Palestinians are also unwilling to change any of their other demands. Erekat said negotiations should resume exactly where they ended a year ago.

The Palestinians also want discussions to include the future of Jerusalem and the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees and exiles. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected such conditions until now. Mitchell met with Netanyahu in Israel on his way to Ramallah.

Erekat congratulated Obama on the Nobel prize.

"I hope he will work for peace. We hope he will be able to end the conflict and help building the Palestinian state," Erekat said.

Even before the meeting, it was clear that the Palestinian leadership, which is fighting for its life, was not prepared to make any concessions to the Obama government or Israel.

To the contrary, Erekat said it had been a mistake for Abbas to have bowed to Israeli and American pressure when he asked for the deferral of the vote by the United Nations human rights panel until March on a report about last winter's Gaza war.

The report by South African judge Richard Goldstone recommends that Israel and the radical Islamist Hamas movement ruling Gaza be brought before the International Criminal Court in the Hague, unless they launch credible investigations of their own into "strong evidence" that they committed war crimes in and ahead of the war.

"We made a mistake and we are not going to blame anyone. We want to correct this mistake," Erekat said.

The Palestinians are working to gather support from 16 countries on the Geneva-based rights council to bring about a vote on the report.

Israel's Netanyahu has made clear that his country would take no more risks if it is not granted the right to self defence.

After meeting with Netanyahu earlier in the day, Mitchell said the US would "continue with our efforts to achieve an early relaunch of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians."

Israeli-Palestinian peace talks were broken off late last year, after centrist former premier Ehud Olmert resigned to fight corruption allegations, sending Israel into early elections that saw the hardline Netanyahu return to power after 10 years.

The Palestinians are demanding that negotiations do not restart from scratch and have also made a complete freeze of Israeli construction in the occupied West Bank a condition for reviving the talks.

Mitchell failed during his last visit to the region in September to seal a deal on a settlement freeze. A three-way summit between Netanyahu, Abbas and Obama went ahead in New York without the US being able to announce a revival of the talks.

Obama announced instead that the sides would begin intense contacts in a bid to revive the talks later this autumn, possibly by late October. (dpa)