Jerusalem  - Israel will set its peace agenda in the next few weeks, new Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday as he opened the first cabinet meeting of his government.

"In the coming weeks we will complete the formulation of our policy to advance peace and security," he told the ministers at the weekly cabinet session in Jerusalem.

The cabinet, sworn in last Tuesday night, also appointed a 12-man inner cabinet, which will take decisions on political and security matters.

In addition to Netanyahu himself, the forum includes Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Defence Minister Ehud Barak, Regional Development Minister Silvan Shalom, Intelligence Affairs Minister Dan Meridor and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon, and six other ministers.

The approach the Netanyahu government will take toward peace with the Palestinians is being eagerly awaited, since the premier, while saying that Israel wanted a "comprehensive peace" with the Arab and Muslim world, has refused to explicitly endorse a Palestinian state being set up alongside Israel.

In addition Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has openly rejected the so-called "Annapolis process," named after a peace conference which laid the groundwork for ongoing Israeli-Palestinian talks to settle the conflict between the sides.

The peace talks, which continued throughout 2008, entered a hiatus late last year when Israel began its election campaign which culminated in the February 10 poll.

However, Lieberman, in a speech when he assumed his duties as foreign minister Wednesday, did say Israel would adhere to the road map peace plan of the quartet of the US, EU, Russia and United Nations, which, like the Annapolis process, has as its final aim the establishment of Palestinian statehood.

But the road map is a performance-based initiative and the new foreign minister made it clear that Israel would not skip over any of the stages to arrive quickly at the end of the process.

Launched amid much fanfare in 2003, the road map quickly ran into a quagmire afterwards, as Israelis and Palestinians accused each other, and the international community accused them both, of not complying with its clauses.

As a first stage, the plan calls on the Palestinians to combat militants and on Israel to freeze all settlement activity and to uproot dozens of settlers' outposts erected without formal government approval throughout the West Bank over the past eight years.

Lieberman gave as his reasoning for his rejection of Annapolis the fact that the process was never formally ratified by the Israeli government or parliament, whereas the roadmap was. dpa