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Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's next prime minister, was last night on the verge of forming a majority coalition after the Labour party agreed a last-minute deal to join his incoming government.

Netanyahu will be prime minister, with Lieberman as his foreign minister and Barak remaining as defence minister, where he was a key figure behind Israel's three-week war in Gaza.

Labour's central committee voted by 680 to 570 in favour of the deal, despite bitter divisions among the party hierarchy. Some at the meeting in Tel Aviv last night showed their frustration, shouting "disgrace" after the result was announced.Netanyahu already has Lieberman's Israel Our Home party on board, as well as the ultra-Orthodox Shas. Now with Labour he has a total of 66 seats - a majority in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel's parliament. However, it is unclear whether the seven Labour MPs who opposed Barak will accept the party's decision or rebel and refuse to support the government.

Israel to propose removing some West Bank settlements Barak hopes dismantling two dozen small outposts will win US support for more expansion in main areas Buzz up! Digg it Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 May 2009 11.52 BST Article history Israel is to propose removing two dozen Jewish settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank in the hope of winning US support for the continued expansion of its main settlements, reports said today.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, will take the proposal to senior US administration officials in Washington next week, the Associated Press said.

Netanyahu held what was apparently a tense meeting with members of his Likud party yesterday and told them that Israel needed to make some compromise over its settlement-building enterprise in order to encourage Washington to take a tougher stance on Iran and its nuclear programme.

Barak is expected to propose a temporary and partial freeze on the construction of homes for Jews in the West Bank. That falls far short of Barack Obama's demand made to the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, at a difficult meeting in Washington last month for a complete halt to building as evidence of a commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state

Tel Aviv newspapers reported Israeli officials as saying that Barak would meet Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, in New York tomorrow to propose a three-month freeze on construction in settlements outside Jerusalem.

Israel is using its rapid construction programme to surround Jerusalem with Jewish housing and separate Arab districts from the rest of the occupied territories.If construction work continues it is not only likely to surround Jerusalem with Israeli housing but result in a Jewish majority in the east of the city which Israel would use to buttress its claim over all of Jerusalem at peace talks.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be prepared to endorse a peace process leading to an independent Palestinian state, his defence minister has said.Ehud Barak, a long-time rival now part of Israel's governing coalition, spoke ahead of Mr Netanyahu's first meeting with US President Obama in Washington. He told Israeli TV a regional deal could be struck within three years.

"Netanyahu will tell Obama: We're willing to engage in a process whose end is a regional peace accord," he told Channel 2 TV.

"The Arabs say 'two states,' [and] I don't see a reason why Netanyahu would not say that at the end of an accord... there will be two peoples living side by side in peace and mutual respect," he said.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Sunday issued an order against demolishing Israeli homes built on Palestinian land in the West Bank settlement of Ofra, saying that the matter must be investigated before such action is taken.

Barak's order was made in response to a petition submitted last June by five residents of the nearby Palestinian village of Ein Yabrud and the Israeli rights group Yesh Din and B'Tselem, demanding that the High Court of Justice instruct the state to evacuate the settlement.

The petition referred to nine settlement structures built in an area apparently been constructed on private Palestinian land. The houses were built without permits and in violation of the settlement's master plan. Work continued despite injunctions to halt it that were issued almost two years ago, and demolition orders that were issued subsequently were also ignored. Advertisement In a response submitted to the court on Sunday, Barak said he recently decided to refrain from demolishing the houses "at this time," for three reasons. First, the issues raised by these houses are also relevant to other houses in Ofra aside from the nine in question. Second, people have been living in these houses for many months. Third, the houses are located deep inside the settlement, not on its outskirts. Therefore, a comprehensive policy relating to the entire settlement is needed, and it would be wrong to set a special policy that applies to these houses only, said Barak.

Israel's Labour leader Ehud Barak has reached a provisional deal with PM-designate Benjamin Netanyahu on forming a coalition, Israeli army radio says. The centre-left Labour party is divided over whether to join a government with Mr Netanyahu's Likud and will vote on the agreement shortly. The right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu and Orthodox Jewish Shas parties have already agreed to join a coalition.

Mr Barak is defence minister in the current government and would retain the post in the next government, Israeli army radio reported. Under the draft agreement, Labour would also get five cabinet posts and the government would commit to continuing negotiations with the Palestinians and to respecting previous deals made with them.

A Likud member of the Knesset, Yuli-Yoel Edelstein, said there was general agreement between Likud and Labour on the main international challenges facing the incoming government. "In terms of other issues like the peace process with the Palestinians, and probably other day-to-day issues, there will be an argument, but this is not what's going to bring the government down," he told the BBC. "Because in practical terms, I don't think that either side really believes that it's possible to reach an agreement with the present Palestinian leadership in the near future."

An Israeli military college has printed damning soldiers' accounts of the killing of civilians and vandalism during recent operations in Gaza. One account tells of a sniper killing a mother and children at close range whom troops had told to leave their home. Another speaker at the seminar described what he saw as the "cold blooded murder" of a Palestinian woman.

The testimonies were published by the military academy at Oranim College. Graduates of the academy, who had served in Gaza, were speaking to new recruits at a seminar.

"[The testimonies] conveyed an atmosphere in which one feels entitled to use unrestricted force against Palestinians," academy director Dany Zamir told public radio.

A senior U.S. official has told Reuters that Washington is asking Arab governments whether they might ease sanctions on Israel if it freezes settlement on land Palestinians want for a state. "I think the Americans are active on this issue," Barak said when asked to confirm this."While they are demanding from Israel steps and concessions in order to enable this regional peace effort to take off, they are approaching the Arabs as well and asking what they can contribute in terms of ... starting normalisation with Israel." "We are looking and trying to find a formula (which) needs to show our readiness to be sensitive to the needs of others."

The European Union Commission apologized to Israel's Ambassador to the Union, Ron Kuriel, over statements it made earlier this week claiming that the settlement policy was stifling the Palestinian economy and increasing Palestinian dependence on foreign aid – and therefore was costing European citizens in taxes.

The apology was issued after EU Ambassador to Israel Ramiro Cibrian-Uzal was reprimanded by Deputy Director of the Foreign Ministry Rafi Barak.

Ambassador Kuriel stressed the severity with which Israel sees Dickinson's statement, saying that the issue was not only the lack of diplomatic manners but also the clear deviation from the Commission's stated role, "which is to coordinate aid with the Palestinians, not arrogantly criticize Israel."   Kuriel was assured that an official communiqué had been issued to clarify that the earlier statement did not reflect the Commission's position.

Barak continued. "I'm happy these as the results [of the investigation], and that once again our claim that the IDF is the most moral army in the world ? top commanders and low-ranking soldiers alike ? has proved truthful."

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said today that his country would continue to build in Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank, despite calls from the US administration for a halt.Netanyahu's comments came less than a week after he met President Barack Obama in Washington, where he was told that the US wanted to see a stop to settlement expansion."We do not intend to build any new settlements, but it wouldn't be fair to ban construction to meet the needs of natural growth or for there to be an outright construction ban," Netanyahu said.

"Natural growth" is the term Israel uses for expansion to accommodate population growth inside the boundaries of existing settlements. However, the 2003 US road map for peace explicitly calls for a freeze to all settlement activity, including natural growth.

Ehud Barak, the defence minister, said 22 settlement outposts, out of a total of about 100, would be taken down either by dialogue or by force. However, after police tried to demolish one outpost near Ramallah last week, settlers simply returned within hours and began rebuilding.

The deal to reduce nuclear warheads and work together to limit nuclear proliferation signed in Moscow this week by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev carried all the pomp of a milestone. But the official communiqués ignored an elephant lingering at the summit: Russia has a deal, signed in 2007, with Tehran to supply a state-of-the-art S300 antimissile defense system that could make a possible strike (by the U.S. or Israel) on Iran's nuclear facilities much harder. Even more than a lucrative deal for Moscow, though, this is Russia's diplomatic ace in the hole: the $1 billion system is really a bargaining chip between the powers.

Though the Iranians insist that the deal is on track, Russia has held back on delivering key elements of the S300 system. One key reason for the delay is a full-court diplomatic press by Jerusalem and Washington. In the week before Obama's visit to Moscow, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to ask that the deal be stopped. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak also buttonholed Gen. Nikolai Makarov, chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, at the Paris Air Show late last month with the same request.

Russia has already been rewarded for its cooperation. In April, Russia's deputy defense minister, Vladimir Popovkin, confirmed that Russia had signed a deal to buy $50 million worth of Israeli-made pilotless drones to replace the Russian-made version that performed disastrously during last summer's war with Georgia. Until recently, Israel had supplied pilotless drones, night-vision and antiaircraft equipment, rockets, and various electronic systems to Tbilisi, and the Georgian military received advanced tactical training from retired Israeli generals (including one who commanded Israeli ground forces during the 2006 offensive against Hizbullah). Now, says independent Moscow-based military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, there is "a clear understanding" between Moscow and Jerusalem that the Israeli government will discourage private Israeli contractors from helping Georgia modernize its military.

He said he would negotiate with the Palestinians but made no reference to a two-state solution to the conflict.

The new cabinet is the largest in Israel's political history. It combines the centre-right, centre-left and far-right parties, with hard-liner Avigdor Lieberman confirmed as foreign minister and Labour veteran Ehud Barak as minister of defence. The cabinet is so big, the government's meeting table has had to be extended to accommodate all the members.

"I am telling the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, if you really want peace, it is possible to reach peace," he said. "We do not want to govern another people. We do not want to exercise our power over the Palestinians."

The Israeli military has concluded that no war crimes were committed during its recent offensive in the Gaza Strip, dismissing as "hearsay" the testimonies of soldiers who allegedly admitted intentionally killing Palestinian civilians.Closing an investigation into wrongful shootings, the Israeli army declared soldiers' confessions relating to two incidents were "purposely exaggerated" and not supported by facts.

One case involved the killing of an elderly woman by a rooftop sniper, and another involved a sniper fatally shooting a mother and two children who had entered a no-go zone.

After talking to soldiers who made the claims, Israeli military investigators concluded that the two incidents never took place and that the young men who made the allegations had embellished the stories during a seminar at a military preparatory school.The military police found that "crucial components of their descriptions were based on hearsay and not supported by specific personal knowledge", the army said in a statement.