Palestinian woman says locked in bathroom for 10 years

RAMALLAH: A 21-year-old Palestinian woman has told authorities she was locked in a bathroom for the past decade by her father, who let her out only in the dead of night so she could clean their house.

“People are monsters,” Baraa Melhem said her father would tell her, according to a social worker dealing with the case.

Palestinian police said they freed Melhem from the small bathroom of a home in the West Bank city of Qalqilya on Saturday after an anonymous tip.

Her father, who holds Israeli citizenship, was arrested and handed over to Israeli authorities. He was presented before an Israeli court Wednesday, an Israeli police spokesman said.

Melhem told Voice of Palestine radio that when she was 11, her father confined her to the toilet and did not allow her to go to school or see her mother, whom he had divorced.

She was beaten with a baton and metal wires and given only one blanket to keep her warm, said the social worker, Hala Shreim.

“The bathroom was only 1-1/2 meters big, it was like a cell,” Shreim said.

According to a statement issued by Palestinian police, the father, citing a “family dispute,” admitted to locking up his daughter and feeding her mainly bread.

Melhem told Voice of Palestine that her father used to shave her hair and her eyebrows, and allowed her to shower only once a month. He would let her out of the bathroom every night at 1 a.m. to clean the house until 4 a.m., she added.

Melhem’s father, the social worker said, often encouraged his daughter to commit suicide.

“Her only consolation was a radio which kept her connected to the world,” Shreim said.

The young woman has now been reunited with her mother.

“She told me that she loves life and has to live,” Shreim quoted Melhem as saying. AGENCIES

Palestinians urge Israel to free jailed lawmakers

JERUSALEM: The Palestinians urged Israel to free dozens of Palestinian lawmakers during a new round of exploratory talks held in Amman, a Palestinian official said on Sunday.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met on Saturday for a fourth round of discussions sponsored by Jordan and the peacemaking Quartet, which are intended to find a way to bring both sides back to direct negotiations.

But the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the meeting produced nothing new.

He said the Palestinians used it to demand the release of imprisoned Palestinian officials, including Palestinian parliamentary speaker Aziz Dweik, a Hamas member who was arrested by Israeli forces on Thursday.

“Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat gave a letter to the head of the Israeli delegation Yitzhak Molcho calling on the Israeli government to immediately release Dweik and more than 23 other Palestinian lawmakers,” the official said.

The Palestinian delegation accused Israel of arresting Dweik to strike “a blow to internal Palestinian reconciliation” between Hamas and the rival Fatah movement.

The letter handed over Saturday also called for the release of Palestinian leader Marwan Barghuti and Ahmed Saadat, the secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the official said.

A copy of the letter, which also sought the release of prisoners detained before the 1994 Oslo peace deal, had been sent to the members of the Quartet — the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor declined to comment on the meeting.

“Our Jordanian hosts asked us to promise total discretion on the content of the discussions before we started these meetings. We are, for our part, respecting that commitment,” he said.

The meeting on Saturday was the fourth time Erakat and Molcho have held talks on the resumption of negotiations under the auspices of the Quartet, discussions that do not appear to have yielded any agreement.

The Palestinians say Israel must halt settlement activity before they will engage in direct talks, but Israel says it wants talks without preconditions.

The Quartet said on October 26 it would seek comprehensive proposals on “territory and security” from both sides within three months, and the Palestinians say they submitted their documents before the January 26 deadline.

They have warned that without an Israeli settlement freeze by January 26, they will not continue the exploratory talks.

But Israel says it considers the three-month period to have started with the beginning of the exploratory talks on January 3, putting the deadline at April 3. AGENCIES

Israeli air strikes kill Gaza militants

GAZA: Israeli air strikes killed two Gaza militants, one a local commander of the Islamic Jihad group in the Gaza Strip, and wounded four others who fired rockets at Israel, despite a two-day-old truce, Israeli and Palestinian officials said.

UN: Turkey, Israel at odd on aid flotilla

The two sides had not agreed on the document, a UN spokesman said. The report into the May 31, 2010 raid in which nine Turkish activists were killed was to have been handed over to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday.

But UN deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said Turkey and Israel “have not come to a consensus” on the report. He did not give a new date for the work to be handed over but said the United Nations was still aiming for late August. Haq added that the inquiry members were still working on a final version. “We are hopeful that these efforts will bear fruit.”

Turkey has demanded an apology for the raid. Israel has categorically refused to make such a gesture. The two sides have blamed each other for the new postponement. “The demand to postpone came from Israel, like the previous demands,” Selcuk Unal, Turkish foreign ministry spokesman told Turkey s Anatolia news agency. In Jerusalem, an Israeli official said that “the Turkish side asked for the delay.”

Diplomatic ties between Israel and Turkey have been in crisis since Israeli commandos raided the flotilla trying to reach Gaza in defiance of an Israeli blockade on the Palestinian territory.

Gaza rockets rain down after Israeli brutality

Fighters fired over 20 rockets into Israel and the air force hit targets near Gaza City, a day after a rocket killed an Israel.

In what was the first air strike since Saturday afternoon, the Israeli air force fired at a target near BeitLahiya, just north of Gaza City, seriously wounding a 12-year-old boy, medical sources said.

Gaza security sources said militants from the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) had earlier been seen firing medium-range Grad rockets into southern Israel from the same area.

Tensions in and around the Gaza Strip have soared since Thursday when militants staged a series of bloody shooting attacks in the Negev desert, killing eight Israelis and prompting a wave of bloody tit-for-tat exchanges.

It also sparked a diplomatic crisis with Egypt after Cairo said five policemen were killed by Israeli fire as soldiers pursued gunmen involved in the Negev ambushes.

Israel blamed Gaza s Popular Resistance Committees for the bloodshed and in retaliatory air strikes has killed 15 Palestinians, including seven PRC militants and two from Islamic Jihad s armed wing.

Another 48 people have been injured, half of them women and children, medics said.

In the same period, militants have fired more than 100 rockets and mortars at Israeli towns and cities in the south, killing one and injuring dozens more, one critically.

Three illegal Palestinian workers sleeping rough near Ashdod were also injured by rocket fire from Gaza on Saturday, two of them seriously.

On Saturday night, rockets ploughed into Beersheva, which lies some 40 kilometres (24 miles) from Gaza, killing a man and injuring 15, one critically, Israeli medics said.

Turkey warns of continued Jerusalem settlement

The Turkish Foreign Ministry has issued a warning to the Israeli government of the repercussions of its continued settlement activity in occupied Jerusalem, saying that settlement construction “aims at changing the demographics of this sacred city”.

In a press release issued by the Turkish Foreign Ministry, it strongly condemned Tel Aviv s continued settlement policies in East Jerusalem highlighting the Israeli government s contradictory stance on the issue of peace. “On the one hand, Israel has decided to construct 900 settlement units in Har Homa in East Jerusalem, while on the other, it calls on the Palestinian side to return to the peace negotiations table”.

The press release called on the Israeli government to listen to the calls of the international community to halt “illegal settlement activity” in East Jerusalem, and all attempts to change the demographics of the city. It warned that the settlement policy undermines trust and weakens the peace efforts between the parties of the conflict.

Swift action’ needed for peace: Jordan

AMMAN: Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Wednesday urged “swift action” to help push forward the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, warning against wasting more time, a palace statement said.

“Efforts for having serious and effective peace talks should continue, based on a two-state solution, which is the only way to achieve regional stability and security,” the statement quoted the king as telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the telephone.

“The deadlocked peace process threatens the entire region.”

The king, whose country signed a 1994 peace treaty with Israel, said “practical steps are needed to remove obstacles facing the peace process,” the statement said.

Direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians, the first for nearly two years, began in Washington on September 2 but quickly stalled when a 10-month Israeli settlements

Palestine National Orchestra makes debut in Israel

HAIFA: The Palestine National Orchestra has made its debut in the occupied West Bank, annexed east Jerusalem and the Israeli city of Haifa under the banner of “Today an orchestra, tomorrow a state.”

The 40-member orchestra launched its inaugural tour on Friday in the West Bank city of Ramallah, moved on the next day to east Jerusalem and on Sunday night to Haifa, which has a large Arab Israeli community.

“Today an orchestra, tomorrow a state,” Suhail Khoury, director of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music named after the US-Palestinian intellectual who died in 2003, wrote in the programme.

“Today we are witnessing the birth of the Palestine National Orchestra at a time when the Palestinian struggle for independence is passing through one of its most critical and difficult moments,” he wrote.

“We musicians truly believe that a state is not only about buildings and roads, but most importantly it is about its people, their values, their arts and their cumulative cultural identity.”

Khoury said that such concerts would, “for several years to come, be a one-time annual event … until this orchestra will become a full-fledged, full-time orchestra based in a free Palestine.”

Before full houses and enthusiastic audiences, the orchestra played concertos by Mozart and Gyorgy Ligeti as well as Beethoven”s Symphony No 4, after starting each concert with the Palestinian national anthem.

Court jails Israel ex-president Katsav for rape

TEL AVIV: Israeli former president Moshe Katsav faces at least eight years in prison after he was convicted Thursday of two counts of rape for assaulting a former employee, a Tel Aviv court said.

The verdict, which also found Katsav guilty of sexually harassing a second employee, caps a four-year process that saw the former president resign his post and spurn a plea deal that would have cleared him of the rape charges.

Palestinians criticise US, peace process in crisis

RAMALLAH: The Palestinians said on Wednesday “Israeli obstinacy” made Washington give up on efforts to freeze Jewish settlement and questioned whether the United States could ever help them attain independence.

Senior Palestinian official Yasser Abed Rabbo said that with its bid to revive direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations now at a dead-end, the United States was proposing a return to indirect

talks to try to unstick a peace process in deep crisis.

The Palestinians had demanded a halt to Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem before agreeing to resume direct talks in pursuit of the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Under U.S. stewardship, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders held three rounds of talks in September. But the Palestinians pulled out when Israel’s 10-month freeze on West Bank

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