UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is scheduled to meet US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana today in New York to discuss the situation in the Middle East, UN Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown announced yesterday.

"It will be a private dinner," Brown told reporters at UN headquarters in New York. "There will be a broader meeting, either before it or the following morning with the mission and others."

He stressed that "we are trying to get everybody on the same page about the facts of what's happening in this very confusing situation."

The deputy secretary-general also argued that there is a common international position because there is no doubt that the ability of the international community to influence these extremely dangerous events in the region will be enormously helped if everybody is as close to each other as possible in terms of the messages they are delivering to the leaders of the region.