Hamas’s exiled political chief, Khaled Meshaal, said his Palestinian Islamist movement was ready for dialogue with its rivals in Fatah during a meeting on Monday with Syria’s foreign minister.
Tony Blair has ruled out talks with Hamas until it recognises Israel and stops firing rockets.
An Israeli air strike killed a young Palestinian girl in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Thursday after an Israeli died in a militant cross-border mortar attack on a kibbutz.
Osama bin Laden has plenty on his mind but he managed to pay close attention this month to the events surrounding Israel’s 60th anniversary and the parallel commemoration of the ”nakba” — the catastrophe — that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 meant for the Palestinians.
United Nations envoy Archbishop Desmond Tutu, concluding a fact-finding mission to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Thursday, condemned as a ”massacre” the killing of 18 members of a Palestinian family by Israeli shelling in 2006. Tutu planned to present a report about the incident to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva at a session in September.
Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu on Wednesday plunged into the harsh reality of the conflict in Gaza, where a tearful Palestinian family recounted losing loved ones in an Israeli attack and the ruling Hamas movement expounded its hard-line stance. The South African cleric is heading a team of United Nations human rights observers.
Desmond Tutu, the South African archbishop, met the former Palestinian prime minister and Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Gaza at the start of a much-delayed United Nations investigation into the shelling by the Israeli military of a Palestinian house which killed 18 members of a single family in Beit Hanoun.
Former United States president Jimmy Carter has said Israel holds at least 150 nuclear weapons, the first time a US president has publicly acknowledged the state’s atomic arsenal. Asked how a future US president should deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, Carter put the risk in context by listing atomic weapons held globally.
Britain and other European governments should break from the United States over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter said on Sunday. Carter described the current European Union position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as ”supine” and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as ”embarrassing”.
Israel and Syria said in surprise announcements on Wednesday they were conducting indirect peace talks with Turkish mediation. Senior officials from both sides were currently in Turkey, an Israeli government official said. He would not confirm there had been direct contacts between the two delegations.
A Democratic win in the solidly conservative Mississippi capped a week in which Senator Barack Obama finally turned his eyes to the coming November election and his opponent, John McCain. Now many Democrats believe the signs are good that the tide of American public opinion is firmly swinging their way.
The United States agreed on Friday to help Saudi Arabia protect its oil industry from terrorist attack, while offering to back conservative Arab countries resisting Iranian influence spreading across the Middle East — but King Abdullah was not persuaded to boost Saudi oil production to ease the effect of the -a-barrel price on the US.
The lesson was coming to an end, the last for this class of 15-year-olds before their annual exams in a few days’ time. The girls are keen students and answered correctly nearly all of the questions put to them by their teacher, Nahida al-Katib, even though the subject this time was the intricate grammar of classical, Qu’ranic Arabic
United States President George Bush used a visit to Israel on Thursday to denounce Democratic party offers to negotiate with America’s enemies in the Middle East as comparable to appeasement of Hitler. Although Bush did not name any Democratic politician, the party’s presidential contender Barack Obama has offered to open negotiations with the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
United States President George Bush offered a peace prophecy for the Middle East on Thursday in which the enemies of the United States faced a future of defeat. ”This is a bold vision, and some will say it can never be achieved,” Bush told Israel’s Parliament.
United States President George Bush arrived in the Middle East on Wednesday to celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday and try to energise peace efforts complicated by a corruption scandal that could topple Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. A smiling Olmert and his wife, Aliza, greeted the president and First Lady Laura Bush at a red-carpet ceremony at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport.
Her bed is on the third floor of Gaza’s Shifa hospital, where shafts of warm afternoon sunshine reach in from the window. The ward is crowded, and the bed on which Asma’a Abu Me’tiq lay is curtained off from the rest and surrounded by the blankets her sister-in-law uses when she sleeps on the floor next to her at night.
The field is planted with shoulder-high rows of corn and is so close to Israel that the tall concrete boundary wall is well within sight, along with the Israeli military jeeps on their regular patrols into northern Gaza. For Abid Razzaq Ouda (40), who farms this land, this brings its own complications.
The sun had not long set into the Mediterranean and the fishing launch was motoring out into the rolling sea, only an hour into what was to be a long night spent in search of shoals of sardine. Without warning, a sudden burst of machine gun fire came rattling a few metres overhead, the red tracer bullets arcing into the night sky above the fishermen.
Gaza’s population has been reduced to a ”subhuman existence” where basic humanitarian needs are going unmet in the face of rapidly deteriorating conditions, according to a senior United Nations official. An Israeli economic blockade on the Gaza Strip has produced shortages of fuel and basic supplies and has closed most private businesses and pushed up poverty rates.
A senior Egyptian mediator will on Monday present to the Israeli government a new ceasefire proposal agreed with the Hamas Islamist movement that could halt the conflict in Gaza and begin to resolve the mounting economic crisis that has engulfed the strip.
As the Democratic primary contest heads to its climax, the Republicans are firing the opening shots of an election barrage to come against their probable White House opponent, Barack Obama. Republican John McCain and his colleagues already see Hillary Clinton’s campaign as mortally wounded.
Israel on Thursday threw a huge birthday bash to celebrate 60 tumultuous years during which the Jewish state made great strides forward but failed to achieve peace with its neighbours. Military air shows topped the programme with war planes being put through their paces even as a dark cloud hung over the political future of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Like the state of Israel, Akram al-Shamali and Moshe Feist both turn 60 this year. But that’s about where the similarities end. For Feist, an Israeli, the anniversary is a chance to celebrate the Jewish state’s hard-fought achievements and swap stories of survival and patriotism over a glass of local wine.
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday pressed Israel to ease travel restrictions on Palestinians and called Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank ”particularly problematic”. But she said Washington believed an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal was still possible before US President George Bush leaves office in January.
Israel will be urged on Friday to ease its blockade of the Gaza Strip to avert a humanitarian disaster as the Middle East ”quartet” meets to consider the state of the faltering peace process. Oxfam and five other United Kingdom aid agencies are calling for the quartet to end its ”complacency” by putting the ”highest diplomatic pressure” on Israel.
Israel on Friday dismissed a Hamas proposal for a six-month Gaza Strip truce during which an embargo on the territory would be lifted, saying the Palestinian Islamists wanted to prepare for more fighting rather than peace. The Hamas offer, issued on Thursday following talks with Egyptian mediators, departed from previous demands by the group.
Hamas plans to give Egyptian mediators its final response on Thursday to a proposed truce with Israel, a Hamas official said on Tuesday. Egypt’s state newspaper, al-Ahram, reported a preliminary agreement had been reached on ”achieving a period of calm with the Israelis”.
Hamas is ready to accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders but ”it will not recognise Israel”, the Islamist movement’s exiled chief Khaled Meshaal told a news conference on Monday. ”We accept a Palestinian state within the June 4 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital … but without recognition of Israel,” he said.
Former United States president Jimmy Carter said on Monday Hamas leaders told him they would accept a peace agreement negotiated by their rival, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, if Palestinians approved the deal in a vote. In a speech, Carter said Hamas ”said they would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders if approved by Palestinians.”
Former United States president Jimmy Carter met Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus on Friday for talks expected to focus on ways to include the Islamist group in efforts to achieve Palestinian-Israeli peace. High-level Hamas members also attended the meeting, at which Carter would also raise with Meshaal the fate of an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas.
A Palestinian journalist who died in Gaza on Wednesday was killed by metal darts from a shell fired by an Israeli tank, doctors said on Thursday. Thousands gathered for the funeral of Fadel Shana (23), a Reuters cameraman. His body was carried through the streets of Gaza City, draped in a Palestinian flag.