(Adds Welch, Blair visits)

By Wafa Amr

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Sept 2 (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas wants a planned Middle East conference to result in a framework agreement for peace with Israel and set a timeline for implementation, a senior aide said on Sunday.

Eager to narrow differences between Israel and the Palestinians ahead of the conference, Washington plans to dispatch Assistant Secretary of State David Welch to Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank later this week, diplomats said.

"We are concerned that November 15 will come -- if this will indeed be the date for this international conference -- without arriving at a specific agreement on all the issues, and that this meeting will be described as a failure," Abbas said.

Abbas has been pressing a reluctant Israel to discuss in depth matters at the core of any future agreement on Palestinian statehood -- the shape of final borders and the fate of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees.

"We need a framework agreement with a timeline for implementation," a senior Abbas aide said, describing the Palestinian leader's position.

At a news conference with Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, Abbas said: "We do not want a meeting that results in merely a statement. We do not want a meeting that will end up a failure for everybody."

The senior aide said Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert failed to bridge their differences on the issue at their last meeting, on Aug. 28.

Abbas said last week the conference proposed by U.S. President George W. Bush would be a waste of time if Israel continued to seek only a broadbrush "declaration of principles".

Israeli officials have used that phrase to describe what Olmert might offer in answer to calls for rapid, final talks in details on establishing a Palestinian state.

Raising the bar too high, the officials have said, could lead to disappointment and crush renewed efforts to revive peacemaking stalled by seven years of violence.

Welch is expected to arrive in Israel on Tuesday -- the same day as international Middle East envoy Tony Blair. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to return to the region mid-September.

POLITICAL WEAKNESS

In the southern Gaza Strip, an Israeli aircraft attacked a car in the town of Khan Younis, wounding three Islamic Jihad militants, hospital officials said.

Abbas's Fatah faction lost control of the Gaza Strip in June to Hamas Islamists shunned by the West. Olmert also has been weakened politically in recent months, raising doubts among Israelis and Palestinians over the two leaders' ability to deliver on any peace promises.

In the run-up to the Middle East conference, Israel reopened on Sunday a government debate on the fate of unauthorised Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, but gave no sign their promised removal was imminent.

Under a U.S.-backed peace "road map", the Israeli government pledged to remove dozens of "settlement outposts" erected since March 2001 without its permission.

Israel's left-wing Peace Now group says settlers built 104 such outposts in the West Bank, 52 of them after March 2001. The removal of such sites, some of them vacant, before the Middle East conference could help bolster Abbas but fan right-wing anger against Olmert. (Additional reporting by Adam Entous and Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem)

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