No image available
/ 29 November 2007
Israeli police said on Thursday there was insufficient evidence to indict Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in a graft case, a major boost for the premier as he returned home from a United Sates peace conference. ”There is insufficient evidence to indict Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in the Bank Leumi case,” police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld said.
No image available
/ 23 November 2007
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned on Friday that the failure of new peace efforts would be ”deadly” as new polls showed Israelis and Palestinians equally pessimistic about its chances of success. Most Israelis and Palestinians do not think the meeting, opening on Tuesday in the United States, will succeed, according to separate opinion polls.
No image available
/ 21 November 2007
Israeli Yfat Alon and Palestinian Radi Abu Eisha both view themselves as victims of hatred. And both scoff at talk of peace. Alon’s mother and niece were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. Abu Eisha watched his sick brother die when an ambulance was blocked by Israeli soldiers running just the sort of security controls Alon says are vital to prevent more attackers reaching Israel.
No image available
/ 19 November 2007
The Israeli Cabinet on Monday approved the release of nearly 450 Palestinian prisoners as a goodwill gesture to president Mahmoud Abbas ahead of a United States-sponsored peace meet, a senior official said. "The government approved the proposal by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to release up to 500 Palestinian prisoners," the official said on condition of anonymity.
No image available
/ 19 November 2007
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed on Monday ahead of a United States-sponsored peace meeting that Israel would freeze construction of new settlements and dismantle unauthorised ones in the occupied West Bank. ”We have committed ourselves under the road map not to build new settlements in the West Bank,” a senior government official quoted Olmert as saying.
No image available
/ 16 November 2007
One posed for a photo as she scrubbed a Palestinian corpse. Another stripped a man to his underwear and then beat him. A third helped cover up the abuse of a young boy. The six Israeli women who feature in the documentary To See If I’m Smiling each wrestle with memories of their compulsory military service that they would rather erase.
No image available
/ 15 November 2007
Israel is quietly preparing for the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran despite public pledges to deny its arch-foe the means to pose an ”existential threat”, Israeli political and defence sources said on Thursday. Israel predicts that Iran’s nuclear programme could produce warheads by 2009.
No image available
/ 30 October 2007
Israel’s attorney general (AG) told the government on Monday it could not cut electrical power to the Gaza Strip as part of its sanctions against the Hamas controlled territory, although he did approve other measures. Israel began implementing economic sanctions on Sunday in what it said was a response to Palestinian rocket fire on Israeli towns.
No image available
/ 29 October 2007
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced on Monday he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer requiring surgery but vowed to stay in office, confident of a full recovery. ”Following the results of a regular check-up, I was diagnosed with initial signs of prostate cancer,” the 62-year-old prime minister told a packed news conference in Jerusalem.
No image available
/ 26 October 2007
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pledged on Friday to work towards a meaningful agreement for a United States conference following major disagreement on how to proceed. The two leaders met for two-and-a-half hours with their chief negotiators.
No image available
/ 25 October 2007
Israeli officials prepared a plan on Wednesday to cut power supplies to the Gaza Strip amid violence that killed two Palestinian boys after a rocket salvo damaged an apartment building in the Jewish state. The United Nations has told Israel it must not inflict collective punishment by cutting vital supplies and services.
No image available
/ 19 October 2007
The battle over the agenda of a conference on Palestinian statehood offers United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a glimpse of the gruelling process that awaits if and when the two sides enter formal negotiations. Four days of shuttle diplomacy by Rice this week were not enough to close the gaps.
Israeli and Palestinian leaders held a new round of talks on Wednesday, meeting for the first time with their negotiating teams to try to bridge gaping differences ahead of a United States-sponsored peace summit. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas met one-on-one for the fourth time in less than two months.
After nearly a month of official silence, Israel confirmed on Tuesday that its air force carried out a strike inside Syrian territory on September 6. Israel had until now refused to confirm or deny that any air strike had taken place, though the incident was publicly confirmed by Syrian and Western officials.
No image available
/ 19 September 2007
Israel declared the Gaza Strip an ”enemy entity” on Wednesday and said it would reduce its fuel and power supplies to the Hamas-run territory in response to rocket attacks by Palestinian militants. Hamas described the move as a declaration of war.
The Israeli military said on Friday that three Gaza children killed this week were playing next to a rocket launcher when the army mistook them for militants and opened fire. The three young cousins were killed on Wednesday when Israeli troops combating Palestinian rocket squads spotted figures moving near rocket launchers in northern Gaza.
Israeli police arrested a woman who stole a pair of Crocs shoes when she returned to the store hours later to exchange them because they did not fit her son, a police spokesperson said on Friday. ”The store clerk identified her from security camera footage and called us,” said Amos Shimoni, police spokesperson in the northern town of Safed.
Thousands of offspring of Nazi Holocaust survivors in Israel are seeking reparations from Germany to pay for psychiatric treatment they say they require as a result of trauma suffered by their parents. The lawsuit was seen as the first ever filed by representatives of the so-called ”second generation”.
Elder statesman Shimon Peres took office as Israel’s ninth president on Sunday at the age of 83, pledging to devote the full seven-year term to realising his lifelong dream of bringing peace to the Middle East, despite the limitations of the largely ceremonial post. He entered Parliament to military fanfares.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his visiting Italian counterpart, Romano Prodi, on Monday reiterated their countries’ determination to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. ”Iran cannot and should not have a military nuclear capacity,” said Prodi on his first visit to the Middle East since taking office in May last year.
Disgraced Israeli President Moshe Katsav on Friday submitted his resignation, one day after he signed a controversial plea bargain that will see him convicted of sexual offences, an adviser said. Katsav temporarily suspended himself from duty in January in the wake of the investigation.
Israeli President Moshe Katsav pleaded guilty on Thursday to committing sexual crimes against women employees in a plea bargain that will keep him out of jail, Israel’s Attorney General said. Under the deal, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz retreated from his stated intention to charge Katsav with rape.
Veteran statesman Shimon Peres was elected president of Israel on Wednesday, finally winning his first vote for top office and crowning a record-breaking career spanning more than half a century. Peres’s victory was a triumph that laid to rest the ghosts of seven years past when he famously lost the same ballot.
An Israeli was charged with burglary after laundry left in a washing machine he was trying to sell showed it had been stolen. The man raised the suspicions of detectives who spotted him attempting to peddle the appliance on a street in the southern city of Beersheba. They found he was not a resident and discovered clothes inside the machine.
Israel said on Tuesday it could target Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and that a Gaza ground offensive was an option unless world pressure was brought on the Islamist group to halt rocket fire. Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh said: ”I’ll put it like this — there is no one who is in the circle of commanders in Hamas who is immune from a strike.”
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday threatened stronger Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip unless Hamas ceased its rocket attacks on southern Israel. ”If the measured steps we are taking, in the political and military sphere, do not bring about the desired calm, we will be forced to intensify our response,” Olmert told his Cabinet.
Israel launched an air raid on an uninhabited area of Gaza on Wednesday after warning that it would respond ”in a measured fashion” to continuing rocket fire from the lawless territory. But Israel has for the moment ruled out a wide-scale incursion into the Gaza Strip, where escalating violence between rival groups has killed 30 people in four days.
An Israeli archaeologist said on Tuesday that the tomb of King Herod, famed for expanding the Jewish second temple during his reign in the first century BC, had been discovered in the occupied West Bank. Pieces of an elaborate sarcophagus believed to contain Herod’s remains were found three weeks ago, Ehud Netzer told a news conference.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert fended off a public call to resign from his foreign minister by winning critical support from party loyalists on Wednesday amid a crisis over his handling of the Lebanon war. ”The parliamentary bloc stands behind the government and the prime minister,” lawmakers from Olmert’s Kadima party said in a statement.
Many have tried. All have failed. But with a new computer game, you can make peace in the Middle East. The game, called PeaceMaker and manufactured by Israeli and United States programmers in the US, allows you to play the part of the Israeli prime minister or the Palestinian president and make diplomatic, security and economic decisions.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert brushed aside calls to resign from his foreign minister and other leading figures on Wednesday, acknowledging he was in a difficult position but vowing to fix all mistakes. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said the centrist Kadima party needed new leadership to restore the nation’s confidence.
Lawyers for Israeli President Moshe Katsav met the Attorney General on Wednesday to make a last-ditch appeal to him to drop rape proceedings against the ceremonial head of state, officials said. Katsav took leave of absence after Attorney General Menachem Mazuz announced in January he had evidence that could warrant charging the president with rape.