Group items tagged

Egypt has engaged in a process of reform that is succeeding in providing greater opportunities for our youth, more empowerment for women, as well as greater pluralism and internal debate. We openly acknowledge that this process still has a way to go in fulfilling our aspirations.

Among the host of challenges before us, it is the Palestinian issue that requires the greatest urgency, given the precarious state of the peace process after years of stalemate. President Obama has shown a willingness to lead to achieve peace in the Middle East; the Arab world must reciprocate with forthright leadership of its own.

Despite the setbacks of the last few years, it is important to remember that many of the elements of a solution have already been negotiated. After nearly two decades of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations since the initiation of the Oslo peace process, many of the details of a final settlement are well known. Furthermore, the Arab Peace Initiative, adopted at the Beirut summit of 2002, provides a regional framework for such a settlement. For the first time in the history of the conflict, the Arab states unanimously committed to full normalization and security for Israel in exchange for a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines and a negotiated resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue.

Barack Obama is to invite Israeli, ­Palestinian and Egyptian leaders to the White House within the next two months in a fresh push for Middle East peace.

The three leaders are being invited for separate talks rather than round-table negotiations. The aim is to complete all three visits before Obama goes to France for the D-Day anniversary on 6 June.

The chances of a deal in the short term appear slim and Obama yesterday acknowledged that circumstances in Israel and the Palestinian territories were not conducive to peace. "Unfortunately, right now what we've seen not just in Israel, but within the Palestinian territories, among the Arab states, worldwide, is a profound cynicism about the possibility of any progress being made whatsoever," he said."What we want to do is to step back from the abyss, to say, as hard as it is, as difficult as it may be, the prospect of peace still exists, but it's going to require some hard choices."

Iran is the main obstacle to peace in the Mideast, Israel's new foreign minister said in an interview published Friday.

Avigdor Lieberman told The Jerusalem Post that it will be "impossible to resolve any problem in our region" without dealing with Iran's nuclear program and its support for militant groups opposed to Israel, such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

His comments come as differences have appeared between the hard-line government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Obama administration over the peace process. President Barack Obama has said the U.S. seeks a "two-state" solution, with the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel, while Netanyahu has not publicly embraced the principle. Israelis have also expressed concern over Obama's calls for outreach to Iran, which Israel considers its top nemesis.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Friday that he believed the U.S. and Israel will resolve their differences over Jewish settlements, and accused the Palestinians of using the issue to avoid peace talks.

"The settlements are not an obstacle to advancing peace," Lieberman said on Friday. "In the 19 years before 1967, there were no settlements but there was terror. During the disengagement, Israel evacuated 24 settlements and in response got Hamas rule in Gaza and rockets on Sderot." Advertisement "It's very clear that ... the settlements ... [are] an excuse for those that tried to avoid any peace talks," he said.

Ban, meanwhile, stressed that settlement construction must end and warned of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu, the leader of the hawkish Likud Party, stopped short of endorsing a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a potential point of friction with the United States. President Obama has called the advancement of the two-state solution “critical.” Mr. Netanyahu opposes the idea of a sovereign Palestinian state, proposing a more limited form of self-rule instead.

Hours before he was sworn in, Mr. Netanyahu said his new government would “work toward peace on three tracks: economic, security and political.” “We do not want to exercise our power over the Palestinians,” he said. “Under the final settlement, the Palestinians will have all the rights to govern themselves except those that endanger the security and existence of the state of Israel.”

The biggest threat to humanity and to Israel comes from the possibility of a radical regime armed with nuclear weapons,” he said, alluding to Iran.

Netanyahu sent a similar message by appointing his longtime aid Uzi Arad to be national security advisor. Since 2007, Arad, reportedly because the Bush administration considered him a counterintelligence risk, has been denied a visa to come to the United States. You know Arad must have pushed some sensitive buttons to have ticked off an otherwise forgiving Bush administration.

The messages that Netanyahu and Lieberman have sent in the past 48 hours highlight a fast-evolving concern for the Obama administration: The new Israeli government has adopted a domestic and foreign policy almost entirely opposed to that of the United States.

And those policy differences center on three issues: Israeli domestic policy toward its Arab minority (which constitutes about 20 percent of Israel's population), Israel's intent to occupy the Palestinian West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights indefinitely, and Israel's desire for the United States to militarily degrade Iran's industrial capability, in particular its nuclear program.

The Israeli military attacked civilians and medics and delayed - sometimes for hours - the evacuation of the injured during the January war in Gaza, according to an independent fact-finding mission commissioned by Israeli and Palestinian medical human rights groups.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society yesterday said their findings showed Israel's military committed serious violations of international humanitarian law. In their 92-page report, compiled by five senior health experts from across the world, they documented several specific attacks, with interviews from 44 separate witnesses.

Human rights groups have accused Israel's military, as well as Palestinian militants in Gaza, of war crimes. "The underlying meaning of the attack on the Gaza Strip, or at least its final consequence, appears to be one of creating terror without mercy to anyone," the report said.

Egypt's intelligence chief is visiting Washington in what officials say is a push for a more flexible US stance on Hamas, to aid Palestinian unity talks.

Talks in Cairo to end the rift between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have faltered over the issue. The division between the factions is also a major barrier to reconstruction in Gaza after Israel's offensive. Cairo's influential head of intelligence, Omar Suleiman, is the chief mediator in the talks aimed at forging a Palestinian national unity government.

An unnamed US official told AFP news agency that Mr Suleiman had met US Middle East envoy George Mitchell on Tuesday and might meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday.

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.

Palestinian attack suspected after two Israeli policemen shot dead • Prisoner-swap deadline on eve of PM's departure• Gazan militants captured 22-year-old three years ago Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 March 2009 01.42 GMT Article history Two Israeli policemen were shot dead in the West Bank yesterday in what Israeli police said they suspected was a Palestinian attack.No Palestinian group claimed responsibility for the shooting, which took place near the mainly agricultural settlement of Massuah, in an area of the West Bank close to the border with Jordan that is under Israeli security control. "The main suspicion points to a nationalistic motive," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.The attack came as the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, sent two senior negotiators to Cairo yesterday in a final attempt to secure the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Gazan militants nearly three years ago.

the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, sent two senior negotiators to Cairo yesterday in a final attempt to secure the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Gazan militants nearly three years ago.

He sent Yuval Diskin, head of Israel's domestic security agency, Shin Bet, and Ofer Dekel, a long-time negotiator and former security official, with a reported offer that would have seen the release of some but not all the prisoners Hamas has demanded be freed in return for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Israeli armed forces and border police used the cover of the war against Hamas in Gaza to reintroduce the firing of .22 rifle bullets - as well as the extensive use of a new model of tear-gas canister - against unarmed demonstrators in the Occupied West Bank protesting at the building of Israel's "separation wall".

The Israeli military says stone-throwing "poses a threat to troops", and several officers have been injured by rocks.It said troops used the permitted means of riot dispersal in Friday's incident, including tear gas, rubber-coated steel pellets and stun grenades.

According to witnesses, soldiers have been firing the canisters directly at protesters, sometimes from a few dozen metres, using the hard plastic-coated metal tubes as a weapon.

The head of Israel's security service has said there is no security reason for continuing construction of Israel's barrier through the West Bank.Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told a parliamentary committee that Israel had enough capabilities to prevent attacks from the Palestinian territory.

The UN has criticised Israel, citing an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice that parts of the barrier built inside Palestinian territory in the West Bank - 90% of the route - are contrary to international law.

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.

Israel committed war crimes and carried out reckless attacks and acts of wanton destruction in its Gaza offensive, an independent human rights report says.Hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed using high-precision weapons, while others were shot at close range, the group Amnesty International says.

Its report also calls rocket attacks by Palestinian militants war crimes and accuses Hamas of endangering civilians.

Amnesty says some 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the 22-day Israeli offensive between 27 December 2008 and 17 January 2009, which agrees broadly with Palestinian figures. More than 900 of these were civilians, including 300 children and 115 women, or non-combatant police, it says. In March, Israel's military said the overall Palestinian death toll was 1,166, of whom 295 were "uninvolved" civilians.