Jerusalem ? Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was set to give U.S. Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni a fresh hearing on Thursday after turning down a request from Secretary of State Colin Powell that Zinni be allowed through an Israeli blockade to meet besieged Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

But Sharon’s government vetoed plans by a high-level European Union delegation to meet Arafat, and a Palestinian official said no other officials would see the visitors.

The decision to send the European mission came hours after Romano Prodi, head of the EU’s executive Commission, urged Washington to stand down as primary peacemaker and make room for a broad alliance of nations _ including the EU, the Russians and moderate Arab nations _ to mediate a comprehensive peace deal for the region.

“It is clear (American) mediation efforts have failed and we need new mediation” to avoid an all-out regional war, Prodi told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported Thursday that in a recent telephone conversation with Powell, Sharon refused to ease Arafat’s weeklong isolation, even to allow Zinni to continue his attempts to broker a cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians.

An official close to the diplomatic efforts, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the report.

Haaretz added that Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer opposed Sharon’s decision.

In an indication that he could be willing to reconsider, Sharon agreed to meet Zinni later on Thursday and hear his case for seeing Arafat.

“A meeting with Zinni has been arranged,” Sharon adviser Raanan Gissin said. “If he asks (to see Arafat) it will be considered.”

But Sharon himself said his Cabinet had voted not to allow the EU delegation, consisting of EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Pique, to meet Arafat, who is pinned down in his headquarters in the West Bank town Ramallah by Israeli troops and armor.

“He will be at this stage isolated,” Sharon told reporters during a visit to the army’s Northern Command headquarters, near the border with Lebanon. “Therefore the European delegation that wanted to visit, the decision was not to allow that.”

Spain currently holds the six-month rotating EU Presidency.

At the Spanish embassy in Tel Aviv, diplomat Diego Ruiz Alonzo said that the original plan had been for Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to lead the mission and meet Sharon and Arafat.

“That was the intention,” he said, adding that following an Israeli Cabinet decision Wednesday night not to allow the Arafat meeting the EU downgraded its delegation, replacing Aznar with Pique. Alonzo said there had been tentative steps to arrange meetings with other Palestinian officials but Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat said he and his colleagues had made a collective decision that if Arafat was not allowed to meet foreign mediators then neither would any other Palestinian official.

“If this delegation fails to get permission to meet Arafat they will meet no Palestinians,” he said, adding that the same principle applied to talks with Zinni.

If a meeting between Arafat and Zinni were to go ahead, Erekat said, it would center on a resolution adopted Saturday by the United Nations Security Council, which called for an immediate truce and expressed concern both at Palestinian suicide bombings and at the Israeli military attack on Arafat’s headquarters.

“I think discussion will concentrate on resolution 1402,” he said. “This has all the elements both sides need. I believe this will constitute the road map for any consultations.”

The EU duo were scheduled to meet Sharon, Peres and Ben-Eliezer and to leave Israel Thursday evening, Alonzo said.

Powell was unenthusiastic about the European call for a multilateral approach to Middle East peacemaking.

“I am not in a position to call for a conference, unless we know what purpose that conference would serve,” he said in Washington.

“The immediate problem is to get control over the terrorism and the violence in the region,” he said. “And until that is done, conferences that lay out different kinds of political goals or new political initiatives just take us off the main point,” he said.