NATO's secretary general said Thursday that the alliance could expand its support for the US-led fight against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria with the deployment of sophisticated surveillance aircraft.

Jens Stoltenberg told a press conference at NATO's Brussels headquarters that the alliance's AWACS monitoring aircraft could be flown over "NATO territory and international airspace" to help the fight against the jihadist group.

AWACS are aircraft with powerful radars that allow them to monitor airspace for hundreds of kilometres around. They can also be converted into command posts for bombing raids and other air operations.

In February the alliance agreed "in principle" to a US request to deploy its AWACS air surveillance aircraft to help in the fight against IS.

The agreement stated that NATO planes would not be directly involved in monitoring jihadists, but would instead fill in for US and allied aircraft that would be re-tasked to gather intelligence over IS hotspots.

Several European NATO members have been wary of becoming too involved in the bloody fight against the Islamic State group.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Thursday that "explicit and formal involvement of NATO in the fight against IS is certainly not the answer".

NATO decided not to act on a US request to fully join the anti-IS alliance, instead pledging to provide non-frontline support.

"On Iraq, we discussed the request by Prime Minister (Haider) Al-Abadi to expand our training and capacity-building into Iraq itself," said Stoltenberg.

"We agreed to send an assessment team to Iraq as soon as possible to explore the possibility of NATO training inside Iraq, and how to ensure that any such efforts would be complementary to what the global coalition is doing."

NATO is already involved in training Iraqi officers in Jordan.

France calls Middle East peace conference for June 3
Brussels (AFP) May 19, 2016 - French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Thursday he had called for a long-delayed Middle East peace conference to be held in Paris on June 3.

"I have suggested that the conference initially planned for May 30 be held on June 3," Ayrault said after talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry on the sidelines of a NATO foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels.

"We reviewed again the position concerning France's initiative to hold a ministerial-level meeting in Paris to relaunch the Middle East peace process," Ayrault told reporters.

This would also provide the opportunity "for Israel and the Palestinians to resume on the basis of a two-state solution," he said.

"We are in a crisis situation and every day the situation on the ground gets worse," he added. Kerry confirmed he will attend the Paris talks.

Supporters of the peace process have been dismayed in recent months by Israel's ongoing construction of settlements on Palestinian land and by Palestinian knife and gun attacks on Israelis.

Ayrault said in a separate statement that the June 3 conference would help identify "ways to help Israel and the Palestinians return to the path to peace."