Arabs Reportedly Will Postpone Mideast Talks : Diplomacy: Week’s delay would be intended to wrest concessions for Palestinians from Israel.

Arab foreign ministers are expected to decide here today to delay the next round of peace negotiations with Israel at least a week beyond the Tuesday date set by President Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, according to Arab diplomats and sources close to the deliberations in Syria.

Palestinian officials, who have been pushing for a delay in the Middle East peace talks until after Israel offers more concessions, said their Arab counterparts have agreed to a one-week delay in the resumption of the 18-month-old negotiations in Washington.

Arab diplomats, scheduled to conclude their deliberations on the issue today, confirmed that a decision for a brief delay in the talks is likely to be the central part of their official statement after three days of meetings in the Syrian capital, which are aimed at forming a unified Arab stand on the peace negotiations with Israel.

They added that Secretary of State Warren Christopher agreed to a new date of April 28 to resume talks during a telephone call to Arab officials here late Saturday.

Syria, host of the foreign ministers’ conference and the most influential of the Arab delegations to the Washington talks, offered no official statement on the delay. But Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh confirmed that Christopher had called him during the deliberations in Damascus and offered positive suggestions to remove obstacles in the way of the talks, chief among them the nearly 400 Palestinian deportees still languishing in a no-man’s-land in southern Lebanon.

“Matters discussed during this conversation were important and would help all of us to form a unified Arab stand to resume the peace process and remove the obstacles intercepting it,” Shareh said after the Arab ministers adjourned Saturday night until a final session scheduled for today.

In Jerusalem on Sunday, Rabin told the Cabinet that he will offer no further concessions to bring the Palestinians back to the negotiations, but officials saw no real crisis, only a delay of a week or so.

“Israel has declared that until the negotiations resume, it does not see a need and it will not show a readiness for further gestures to the Palestinians,” Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said. “There is, in fact, no logic in such gestures. Let everyone come back to the table, and then, as we have said, everything is negotiable.”

Rabin told the weekly Cabinet meeting that he has full U.S. understanding of his stance and that he has ordered Israeli negotiators not to leave for Washington until there is an Arab commitment on a date for resumption of the talks.

“I am sorry about this delay, but it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the negotiations,” Peres said.

At the heart of the current shuffling over a date for resumption of talks is the issue of the Palestinian deportees, most of them members of or sympathizers with the radical Palestinian group Hamas. The deportees staged a march from their camp toward the Israeli frontier on Friday to underscore their opposition to the talks.

Officials of the relatively moderate Palestine Liberation Organization are caught between their desire to continue talks that could lead to Palestinian autonomy in the Israeli-occupied territories and the possibility of a backlash within those territories. The PLO is demanding that Israel officially renounce its policy of deportations and lift a 3-week-old order sealing off the territories before the Palestinians will return to the table.

Despite their genuine sympathy for the PLO’s dilemma, however, most of the other Arab delegations are eager to return to the negotiating table as quickly as possible.

Encouraged by statements from Rabin after his meeting with Clinton in Washington last month, Syria hopes to use the forum to negotiate recovery of large parts of the Golan Heights seized by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. And Lebanon hopes to get back more than 440 square miles of its southern territory that Israel now effectively controls as a security zone north of their common frontier.

Times staff writer Michael Parks contributed to this story from Jerusalem.