The Palestinians’ top negotiator said he was ”encouraged” following President Mahmoud Abbas’s White House meeting with Barack Obama.
Amending a proposed Arab peace initiative to win Israeli support for the plan is not a viable option, said Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak.
Firms run by sons of President Mahmoud Abbas won United States government aid contracts to repair roads in the Palestinian territories.
Benjamin Netanyahu began his second term as Israeli prime minister on Wednesday at the helm of a right-wing government.
Rival Palestinian factions have so far failed to overcome obstacles in reconciliation talks which they hope will lead to a unified governing body.
Salam Fayyad announced on Saturday he would resign in a move to bolster unity talks between Fatah and Hamas, but Mahmoud Abbas has asked him to stay.
Palestinian leaders were urging US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday to push Israel to freeze construction in West Bank settlements.
Hillary Clinton pledged on Tuesday to press for Palestinian statehood, putting Washington on a possible collision course with Benjamin Netanyahu.
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/ 26 February 2009
The rival Palestinian movements are holding reconciliation talks on Thursday aimed at paving the way for the creation of a unity government.
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/ 13 February 2009
Gaza militants fired two rockets into southern Israel on Friday, only hours after a senior Hamas member said the Islamists had accepted a truce deal.
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/ 29 January 2009
An Israeli warplane on Thursday bombed an area of the Gaza Strip border known to contain smuggling tunnels to Egypt, the military said.
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/ 21 January 2009
The war in Gaza may have ended but the territory remains under Hamas rule and Israeli sanctions, which could hinder efforts to rebuild the enclave.
Israel pounded Gaza with bombs and shells on Friday, vowing to pursue its war on Hamas despite a truce order from the UN Security Council.
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/ 29 December 2008
”I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing.” Those chilling words were spoken on al-Jazeera on Saturday by Ofer Shmerling.
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/ 29 December 2008
Even as Israel’s F16s were aiming their first salvoes at Hamas positions in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, questions were being asked at home and abroad.
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/ 17 November 2008
Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday that 250 Palestinian prisoners would be freed in a goodwill gesture.
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/ 7 November 2008
Hamas has threatened to boycott next week’s Palestinian reconciliation talks, accusing president Mahmoud Abbas of arresting hundreds of its members.
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/ 3 November 2008
Israel and the Palestinians will not be able to reach a peace agreement before Washington’s target date of the end of this year.
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/ 18 October 2008
If moribund Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are to be kept alive for the next US president, promoting a neglected Arab peace initiative could help.
Palestinians are not free. They suffer under an Israeli occupation that is sustained by a regime of violence, surveillance and control.
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/ 16 September 2008
Israel’s embattled Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, still believes a peace deal with the Palestinians is possible by year-end.
Israel released 198 Palestinian prisoners on Monday, including the longest-serving inmate, in a ”goodwill gesture” to encourage negotiations.
Israeli forces killed a nine-year-old Palestinian girl and a militant in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Wednesday.
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.
Barely a year passes without a senior minister begging Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, to go. Last year the Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, called on Olmert to step down after the interim report of the Winograd commission on the Lebanese War. On Wednesday it was the turn of Defence Minister Ehud Barak.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.