|PIC1|The United States brushed off on Monday former US President and prominent Baptist Jimmy Carter's report that Hamas would accept a peace deal with Israel if the Palestinians voted for it, saying the group's basic stance had not changed.

After he met Khaled Meshaal, Hamas' top official, on Friday and Saturday in Damascus, Carter said the Islamist group's leaders told him they would "accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders if approved by Palestinians."

He was referring to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East War, and to a referendum on a peace deal Washington hopes to clinch this year.

But some of Hamas' commitments to Carter were short on details and remarks by a Gaza-based Hamas official suggested the movement was not abandoning its long-held positions.

Meshaal, in an apparent softening of the group's position, said it would accept the establishment of a Palestinian state on land occupied by Israel in 1967 but it was not prepared to recognise the Jewish state.

Hamas is viewed as a terrorist organisation by the United States, the European Union and Israel and its charter calls for the destruction of Israel.

The group has refused to accept the major conditions laid down by the the quartet of Middle East peace mediators - the the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union - for dealing with it.

"What is clear to us...is that nothing has changed in terms of Hamas' basic views about Israel and about peace in the region," State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters.

"They still refuse to acknowledge or recognize any of the basic quartet principles, including recognizing Israel's right to exist; renouncing terrorism; and acknowledging all the previous agreements that have been made between the Palestinian Authority and Israel," he added.

ACTIONS AND WORDS

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: "I think you can take it with a grain of salt. We have to look at the public comments and we also have to look at actions, and actions speak louder than words."

Hamas, which won a 2006 election and briefly formed a unity government with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, seized control of Gaza from his secular Fatah faction in fighting in June.

The State Department has said US Assistant Secretary of State David Welch, the top US diplomat for the Middle East, urged Carter not to meet with Hamas.

In an interview with National Public Radio on Monday, Carter said Welch did not advise him against traveling to the region. But he did not squarely address whether Welch urged him against meeting Hamas.

"He (Welch) was quite positive. He never asked me, or even suggested, that I not come," Carter said. "Subsequently I saw all kind of statements out of the State Department that said they begged me not to come, they urged me not to come. All of that is absolutely false. They never once asked me not to come."

Casey insisted that Welch urged Carter against meeting Hamas officials. "We encouraged him, and urged him, not to in fact have such meetings. Why he understood or took that conversation differently I don't know," Casey told reporters.