Turkey and Israel are to start examining the feasibility of building an undersea gas pipeline to pump Israeli gas to Turkish consumers and on to Europe, the Israeli energy minister said on Thursday.

"What we decided is to establish immediately a dialogue between our two governments... in order to examine the possibility and the feasibility of such a project," Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said after talks with Turkish counterpart Berat Albayrak in Istanbul, the first such meeting since the two countries normalized ties in June.