Israel and the Palestinians are due to end a seven-year freeze in their peace process Wednesday with the formal launch of new negotiations.

A new, joint "steering committee" that will lead the negotiations, announced by President George W Bush at last month's Middle East conference in Annapolis, Maryland, is scheduled to hold its first meeting in Jerusalem in the afternoon, Israeli and Palestinian officials confirmed.

The first meeting will however focus on procedural questions, including how often the committee, headed by Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and former Palestinian premier Ahmed Qureia, is to meet, the officials said.

Actual negotiations are expected to begin only in one of the next meetings, possibly after Bush's first visit to Israel and the Palestinian areas since he took office, scheduled for mid-January.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged at the November 27 Annapolis conference to make "every effort" to reach a peace deal within one year.

But the new talks come amid pessimism among the Israeli and Palestinian public, and with the Palestinian autonomous areas split geographically as well as politically, with Abbas controlling the West Bank and the radical Islamic Hamas movement ruling Gaza.

And as the talks between Israel and the West Bank-based Palestinian leadership get underway, Israeli troops and militants in the Hamas-ruled Strip are on a worsening confrontation course.

Responding to daily rocket and mortar attacks from the Strip, Israel has in the past months launched air strikes and carried out brief ground incursions into the Strip, while threatening with a larger-scale, longer-term ground offensive if the rocket-fire does not stop.

Dozens of Israeli tanks rolled some 1.5 kilometres into the southern Gaza Strip Tuesday, reaching the eastern outskirts of the towns of Rafah and Khan Younis and sparking gunbattles with local militants.

At least three members of the radical Islamic Jihad faction were killed and three other militants of another militant faction, the Popular Resistance Committees, critically injured, hospital officials said.

A fourth Islamic Jihad militant was also killed in an Israeli airstrike on a group of militants approaching the border fence between northern Gaza and Israel shortly after midnight, the faction and the Israeli military said.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said the incursion into southern Gaza was a "routine" operation against the ongoing rocket and mortar attacks on Israel from the area.

The troops were searching for militants and rounding up local men for on-the-spot questioning, she said.

Two Israeli soldiers were lightly injured in the gunbattles, she said, when a grenade hit their tank.

Reacting to the Israeli incursion, Hamas called on the Palestinian negotiators to boycott Wednesday's scheduled talks with their Israeli counterparts.

"We call on the negotiators not to meet the attackers tomorrow because this will provide political cover for their crimes," Taher al-Nounou, a spokesman for the Islamist movement, said.

Abbas' spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, also condemned the Israeli military action in Gaza.

"The Israeli government's persistence to continue with the policy of incursions, killing and settlement raises doubt about Israeli intentions toward success of final status talks which are supposed to kick off tomorrow," he told reporters in Ramallah.

"It is difficult to continue with negotiations at the sound of cold-blooded killing, expropriation of land and other measures that do not agree with the spirit of a peace process," he said.

Palestinian officials said Qureia would raise at Wednesday's meeting Israeli plans to build 307 new houses in Har Homa, a controversial Jewish neighbourhood in the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, built on occupied West Bank land.

But he would not boycott Wednesday's talks over the issue, they said.

Israel's Housing Ministry published a tender for the 307 apartments Tuesday.

The last time Israel and the Palestinians held serious negotiations was in Taba, Egypt in January 2001. At that summit, the parties made a last-ditch effort to bridge gaps between them and curb violent confrontations that had erupted shortly after previous talks ended in deadlock at Camp David in July 2000.

But the attempt failed and no new one was made in the following years of ongoing violence.