Arab foreign ministers held on Friday a consultative meeting at the Cairo-based Arab League (AL) headquarters, Egypt's official MENA news agency said.
The participants exchanged views on "the serious situation in the occupied Palestinian lands due to Israel's invasion of Palestinian cities and villages," MENA said.
The meeting was held one day ahead of a planned emergency meeting of the ministers.
On Wednesday, AL chief Amr Moussa said that the emergency meeting, initiated by the Palestinians, will deal with the Arab- Israeli conflict, the serious development in the Palestinian lands and the implementation of a declaration adopted at the March 27-28 Arab summit in Beirut, Lebanon.
The Beirut summit adopted an Arab peace plan, which calls on Israel to withdraw from all the Arab territories it occupied since 1967 and recognize an independent sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
In return, Arabs states will normalize relations with Israel in the context of a comprehensive peace with the Jewish state.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has been confined by the Israeli army in his office building in the West Bank city of Ramallah since last Friday, despite a mounting call by the international community for Israel to lift the siege on Arafat and fully withdraw from the Palestinian lands.
Israeli tanks rolled into Ramallah and shelled Arafat's compound last Friday morning, marking the beginning of a sweeping military offensive in the West Bank.
(Xinhua News Agency April 6, 2002)
