The cache of documents, the first set of which was revealed by Al-Jazeera late on Sunday night, contain potentially damning revelations on the amount of land in annexed East Jerusalem that the Palestinians were willing to cede to Israel.

And the hundreds of documents, dating from 1999 onwards, also reveal that Israel gave the Palestinian leadership advance warning before it launched a devastating 22-day invasion of Gaza in December 2008.

The revelations have infuriated the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas voiced astonishment at the leaks in talks with Egyptian journalists in Cairo, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

He said Palestinian negotiators had never sought to hide the terms of their peace talks with Israel from Arab neighbors.

"With everything we have done — in terms of activities with the Israelis or the Americans — we have given the Arabs details," Wafa quoted Abbas as saying.

"I don't know where Al-Jazeera got these secret things from, and there is nothing hidden from the Arab brothers," he added, insisting that Arab countries were constantly updated on developments through the Arab League.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat reacted furiously, accusing Al-Jazeera of a smear campaign and alleging the documents contained unspecified inaccuracies and falsehoods.

Erekat said the leaked documents were taken "out of context and contain lies."

"We don't have anything to hide, and I reiterate that Al-Jazeera's information is full of distortions and fraud," he said.

"We will examine the documents to reveal the truth and if there is a need to publish all the documents of the negotiations unit, then it will be done."

Foreign minister Riad Al-Malki and senior Abbas aide Yasser Abed Rabbo held press conferences in Ramallah on Monday to address the leaks.

Malki accused Al-Jazeera of standing "beside Israel and helping them in their attempt to finish off the Palestinian Authority (PA)."

He accused the Qatar-based station of trying to incite an uprising similar to the one that toppled Tunisia's former president.

Abed Rabbo said that Al-Jazeera was trying to systematically hurt the PA and Abbas, in the same way Israel hurt Yasser Arafat, the former Palestinian president.

Abed Rabbo said a similar campaign was waged against Abu Ammar (Arafat) before Camp David. “Everyone agrees that the hands that murdered Abu Ammar were Israeli hands. What they did to Abu Ammar, Al-Jazeera is doing to Abu Mazen (Abbas),” he said, adding: "Al-Jazeera took a lot of things out of context, including things that were said in jest. They made up things I've never heard of."

He noted that peace talks between the PA and Israel were among the most transparent in modern history and called on the establishment of a committee to check the documents’ veracity. "We understand our communication must be transparent and that we must be professional and neutral,” the PLO official said.

He stressed that the Palestinian leadership's stance had not changed. "We ceded nothing in Jerusalem. We ceded nothing more than Abu Mazen presented. Our position is that we have a right over the 1967 lands and the rest is not true."

However, Abed Rabbo admitted that the Palestinians have made mistakes when it came to talks with Israel. "We haven't hidden anything from the public eye. We've tried to be transparent and honest and operate by public opinion to fix our mistakes and learn from them," he said.

According to him, "minor employees in the Palestinian Negotiations Department leaked the documents." He said that Al-Jazeera was trying to compete with WikiLeaks.

Meanwhile, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said: "These secret documents exhibit shared culpability between the PA and Israel. This dangerous documentation proves the aggressive involvement intended to eliminate the Palestinian problem."

Abu Zuhri claimed the papers expose the PA's attempt "to destroy the Palestinian people's rights" especially when it comes to Jerusalem and refugees.

He added that the documents also expose the anti-resistance activity in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as cooperation with Israel in the beginning of the siege on Gaza and during the 2008 offensive.

The documents, released late on Sunday on the websites of Al-Jazeera and British daily the Guardian, are the first of some 1,600 secret files relating to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

— With input from agencies