"The PLO executive committee has decided to call for the Security Council to convene an urgent meeting to discuss settlements," the committee said after a meeting in the West Bank political capital of Ramallah. The call came after news that a planned meeting between Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas and Israel's vice premier, Shaul Mofaz, has been called off.

"We have decided to undertake contacts with all international blocs for the Security Council to adopt a resolution against settlements and for them to be stopped," it said after the meeting in which Abbas took part.

A planned Abbas-Mofaz encounter on Sunday has been "postponed to a later date," a senior Palestinian official in Ramallah said earlier, without giving a reason or a new date.

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

The Abbas-Mofaz talks were 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.