Gaza: Two Palestinians killed by Israeli forces

Two Palestinians have been killed in a firing attack from Israeli forces in the Gaza border area.

There is still no let up in the Israeli torture on the innocent Palestinians in the occupied parts of their homeland.

Israeli forces spokesman said an Israeli had been injured due to firing by two suspected Palestinians, whereas both Palestinians were killed in retaliation.

Indian troops killed 34 Kashmiris in October

SRINAGAR: Indian troops, in their continued acts of state terrorism, martyred 34 innocent people in October in occupied Kashmir.

According to data compiled by the Research Section of Kashmir Media Service, one civilian was killed in police custody.

These killings rendered two women widows and ten children orphans.

During the month, 324 people were critically injured when Indian police and troops used brute force, fired bullets and teargas shells against peaceful demonstrators in the occupied territory.

The troops also disgraced 18 women and destroyed 11 residential houses. Monitoring Desk

Abbas may ask US to recognise Palestinian state

SIRTE: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has told Arab powers he may seek U.S. recognition for a Palestinian state taking in all of the West Bank should peace talks with Israel stay stalled, an aide said on Saturday.

The idea, raised during close-door Arab League deliberations in Libya on Friday, could step up pressure on Israel to extend a freeze on Jewish settlement building in the occupied territory, without which Abbas has said peace negotiations cannot continue.

Arab foreign ministers endorsed that Palestinian position but, hoping to head off a collapse of the talks launched by U.S. President Barack Obama just five weeks ago, said they would reconvene in a month to discuss “alternatives” mooted by Abbas.

Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters these included “asking the United States to recognise the state of Palestine on the 1967

Israeli guard kills Palestinian in East Jerusalem

Clashes erupted between residents of Silwan district of Jerusalem and Israeli border police after an Israeli security guard killed a Palestinian on Wednesday, in an East Jerusalem district that sees frequent tensions over its Jewish settler enclave.
The guard shot 32-year-old Samer Sarhan, while driving through Silwan before dawn, a police spokesman said, adding that he told investigators he had opened fire after his car was blocked and stoned by dozens of Palestinians.
Local residents said the Israeli worked as a guard for the small Jewish settlement in Silwan, and that at least two other Palestinians were wounded in the shooting.
Israeli police fired smoke grenades and tear gas to disperse clashes with stone-throwing Palestinians in Jerusalem’s most hotly contested holy site.
Israel captured East Jerusalem along with the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war and regards all of the city as its capital, a status not recognised internationally. Many settlers claim a Jewish biblical birthright to the occupied territory.
Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of the state they intend to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a demand at the heart of U.S.-sponsored peace talks with Israel which resumed this month.

US sees progress in Mideast peace talks

JERUSALEM: The United States said on Wednesday it believed Israel and the Palestinians were making progress toward resolving a dispute over settlement building that threatens to sink their newly-launched peace talks.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to his official residence, shaking his hand as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton looked on approvingly, a day after the three met in Egypt.

Following the two-hour session, US envoy George Mitchell sounded an upbeat note the negotiations would continue despite the September 30 expiry of Israel’s partial moratorium on construction in settlements in the occupied West Bank.

“That subject was discussed this evening, we continue in our efforts to make progress in that regard and believe that we are doing so,” Mitchell told reporters.

Palestinians say they

IHK: Forces advised to shoot anyone defying curfew

At least three more people were killed in in battles between troops and protesters in the Occupied Kashmir. Indian police threatened to shoot anyone defying a round-the-clock curfew. Still, hundreds of anti-India protesters took to the streets of the region’s main city of Srinagar and more than a dozen other places in the region. All Pakistani channels have also been banned in the valley.
Earlier Indian paramilitary personnel killed at least 19 civilians and injured over 200 others when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in several parts of the held valley, demanding of India to vacate the territory without any further delay in Indian occupied Kashmir. Those killed included three teenaged boys, a woman and district president of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front-R. The killings took place in Bandipore, Tangmarg, Cherare Sherief, Budgam,Pampore, Sopore and Islamabad. Another youth who was injured on September 6 in the firing of police personnel succumbed to injuries in a Srinagar hospital on September 12.
With fresh killings the death toll of protesters in the ongoing uprising mounted to 96 since June 11. On the other hand, Indian troops during crackdown operations martyred three innocent civilians at Lashkoot in Bandipore.
Meanwhile, an indefinite curfew was imposed in Poonch town while protest demonstrations were also held in Jammu, Doda, Ramban, Banihal, Batote, Kastigar and Mandi areas.

Israel rejects Abbas terms for direct talks

JERUSALEM: Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has laid down “impossible” conditions for moving to direct peace talks, Israel”s vice prime minister charged on Wednesday.

“The Palestinians have set three impossible conditions: that the negotiations start from the point they left off at the end of 2008 when Ehud Olmert was prime minister, that they be based on a total Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and that the freeze of (settlement) construction continue,” Silvan Shalom told Israeli public radio.

His remarks came ahead of a scheduled meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo on Thursday to decide whether to endorse a move to direct negotiations after nearly three months of US-brokered indirect talks that have shown little sign of progress.

Washington has been pressing the two sides for more than a year to relaunch direct talks which were suspended after the start of the Gaza war in December 2008.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he is ready to meet with Abbas at any time but the Palestinians have demanded certain guarantees they say are necessary to ensure that these talks succeed where past rounds have failed.

Specifically, they want Israel to accept the 1967 borders, demarcating the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, as the basis for the negotiations, as well as a complete halt to all settlement activity on Palestinian land.

Israel approved a limited moratorium on the construction of settler homes in the West Bank that expires in September and which was rejected as insufficient by the Palestinians because it did not include east Jerusalem.

Israel occupied the mostly Arab half of the city in the 1967 Six Day War and annexed it in a move not recognised by the international community. It views the entire city as its “eternal, undivided” capital.

The Palestinians view east Jerusalem as the capital of their promised state, and the city”s fate has been one of the most intractable issues in past rounds of negotiations going back to the early 1990s.

Strike in H-Kashmir, curfew imposed in Sopore

SRINAGAR: A complete strike is being observed today in held Kashmir against the firings on mourners and killing of four innocent Kashmiri youth by Indian troops in Sopore town, yesterday.

According to Kashmir Media Service, call for the strike has been given by All Parties Hurriyet Conference.

The occupation authorities have imposed indefinite curfew in Sopore town to prevent people from holding demonstrations against the killings and gross human rights violations by the troops in the occupied territory.

Assad says Israeli raid raises war risk

LONDON: Syria”s President Basharal-Assad has said Israel is being run by a “pyromaniac government” and its raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla had increased the risks of war in the region.

The Israeli commando attack on a flotilla in which ninepro-Palestinian Turkish activists were killed had “destroyed any chance for peace in the near future”, Assad told the British television interview aired on Thursday.

He said this was so “mainly because it proved that this government is another pyromaniac government, and you cannot achieve peace with such a government”.

Assad said that even before the raid, he had not viewed the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “partner for peace” in the region.

“No, we definitely don”t have a partner, we know this,” he said.

Israel Okays plan to ease Gaza blockade

JERUSALEM: The Israeli security cabinet on Thursday approved a plan to ease the blockade on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, a statement from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

Under the plan, Israel would “liberalise the system by which civilian goods enter Gaza and expand the inflow of materials for civilian projects that are under international supervision,” the statement said. But it also stressed that Israel would “continue existing security procedures to prevent the inflow of weapons and war materiel.”

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