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

Israel on high alert as Palestinians petition UN

JERUSALEM: Some 22,000 Israeli police and border police were on high alert across the country on Friday, poised to respond to any unrest resulting from a Palestinian bid to seek UN membership in New York.

“We have deployed 22,000 police and border police officers who will be on duty until at least Saturday night in order to maintain order across the country,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP.

The forces were deployed along the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, in annexed east Jerusalem, and around Arab Israeli towns, he said.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas will present a formal request for UN membership for a Palestine state later on Friday in a move which has sparked anger in Israel and opposition from Washington which has vowed to block the move at the UN Security Council.

Israel’s defence establishment has been preparing for months for the eventuality of rioting and mass unrest should the membership bid be scuttled, with the army, police and emergency services all on high alert on Friday.

In Jerusalem, police barred entry to the city’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound to men under 50 and anyone not holding a blue east Jerusalem ID card.

The army also boosted numbers in the West Bank, deploying an extra 1,500 reservists across the territory, media reports said. A military spokesman on Thursday said troops would show “restraint” in dealing with any disturbances, “using riot dispersal means” in accordance with the level of unrest.

Earlier this week, tens of thousands of Palestinians rallied across the West Bank in a massive show of support for the UN campaign, but there was little sign of any unrest and only isolated incidents of stone throwing.

More gatherings are planned for Friday evening when Palestinians are expected to turn out en masse to watch Abbas’s speech to the UN General Assembly on large screens in towns and cities across the West Bank.

Palestinian officials have repeatedly pledged that the marches and demonstrations will be peaceful and stay within Palestinian-controlled areas. 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.

Israel arrests 120 Hamas members

The move came just hours after the faction s Gaza branch fired rockets into Israel, Palestinian police said.

Police sources said troops fanned out across the area in an overnight operation which kicked off just hours after Hamas s armed wing in Gaza fired rockets into southern Israel, lightly wounding two children.

Among those arrested early on Sunday was Hamas MP Mohammed Motlaq Abu J heisha, the sources said.

“Between 100 and 120 people have been arrested,” Samira Halaika, a Hamas MP from Hebron said. “In terms of size, there has never been such an arrest operation on this scale in the Hebron area before.”

Mushir al-Masri, another Hamas MP who lives in Gaza, said initial information showed at least 80 of the group s members had been arrested in a move which he said demonstrated Israel s “criminal mentality” towards the Palestinians.

Hamas leaded for resistance forces against Jewish settlement

The statement came after the Jerusalem municipality’s recent approval for the construction of 930 new housing units in the Israeli settlement Har Homa beyond the Green Line.

The decision attests to that the Zionist mentality is to uproot the indigenous people, especially those in Jerusalem, Masri said in comments on Saturday.

Masri said that Israel is ‘’swallowing up’’ the city in stages with settlement and displacement of its residents, starting with Palestinian politicians and figures, but not ending with the removal of Jerusalem’s landmarks and names and attempts to erase the Muslim and Christian presence in the city so that the Jewish character prevails.

Masri further said he rejected Israel’s settlement policies in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and stressed that the continued ‘’intrusion’’ called for releasing the West Bank resistance forces and ending the Palestinian Authority’s security coordination with Israel and uniting in the face of the large-scale settlement plan.

He also called for resistance forces in the West Bank to aim strikes at Israel, saying that the calm is what has given the Israelis the courage to target the land.

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.

Israel imposes age restrictions for Friday prayers entry

Israeli security was tightened in and around the city of Jerusalem as tens of thousands of Palestinian worshippers tried to cross the border to take part in prayers in Jerusalem s al-Aqsa mosque.

Men under the age of 50 and women under the age of 45 were denied access to Jerusalem on the second Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

At the Israeli army s two main checkpoints, Bethlehem in the south and Qalandiya checkpoint in the north, which link the West Bank to Jerusalem, tens of thousands of Palestinians queued at the crossing points as Israeli troops checked identification cards, denying any men under 50 years of age or women under 45 access to the holy city.

For most Palestinians residing across the West Bank, access to Jerusalem — where Islam s third holiest shrine, the al-Aqsa is located — is denied due to Israeli army restrictions on access and movement imposed on Palestinians.

Syria, Iran seek local fixes to region

DAMASCUS: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iran”s interim Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi agreed on Monday that the troubles of the Middle East should be solved internally by the region”s countries, a local news agency reported.

Salehi arrived in Damascus on Sunday to discuss the Lebanese political crisis with Syrian officials.

The two men discussed “the latest regional developments” and international efforts to “find solutions to challenges facing countries of the region,” the news agency said after the meeting.

The news agency reported Assad and Salehi emphasised “the importance that solutions come from inside these countries according to their peoples” interests to help maintain their security and stability”.

External efforts to mediate Lebanon”s political quagmire have yielded little, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar all failing.

A national unity government led by Western-backed caretaker prime minister Saad Hariri collapsed on January 12 when 11 ministers from the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah and its allies resigned.

The walkout capped a long-running dispute over a UN-backed investigation into the 2005 assassination of former premier Rafiq Hariri, the incumbent”s father.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has said he expects the Netherlands-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon to implicate high-ranking members of his militant movement in the Hariri murder and has warned of grave repercussions.

Nasrallah has vowed to include all parties in a Hezbollah-led government, but both he and Hariri refuse to serve under each other.

Former prime minister Najib Mikati has put himself forward as a compromise candidate to try to form a government.

Assad and Salehi said they were “satisfied” with the formation of a unity government in Iraq, “stressing the importance of expanding the dialogue to all Iraqi” parties, the news agency reported.

The meeting also addressed “ways to strengthen scientific and technological cooperation between Syria and Iran”.

On Sunday night, Salehi held talks with his Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem.

He then met the exiled leader of Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, Palestinian sources said.

The secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), Ahmed Jibril, and a representative of Islamic Jihad, Ziad Nakhal, also attended the meeting, the sources said.

Leaks Show Palestinians Giving Much Ground to Israel

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JERUSALEM: Palestinian negotiators secretly told Israel it could keep swathes of occupied East Jerusalem, according to leaked documents that show Palestinians offering much bigger peace concessions than previously revealed.

The documents, obtained by the Al Jazeera television channel, could undermine the position of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose public declarations about Jerusalem are at odds with what his officials were promising in private.

Equally sobering for the Palestinian people, who want to create a state on land Israel seized in a 1967 war, is the fact that Israel offered nothing in return for the concessions and turned down their offer, saying it did not go far enough.

The leaked minutes of a 2008 meeting between Palestinian, U.S. and Israeli officials showed a senior Palestinian proposing that Israel annex all but one of its major Jerusalem settlements as part of a broad deal to end their decades-old conflict.

Al Jazeera said Sunday it had other documents that it would publish shortly showing the Palestinians were also ready to make other massive concessions on the hugely sensitive issue of the right to return for Palestinian refugees.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat went on the defensive, dismissing the documents as “a bunch of lies” during an appearance on Al Jazeera shortly after they were released.

In a heated exchange, Erekat was confronted by critics including Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based al -Quds al-Arabi newspaper, who asked him who had authorized him or the Palestinian leadership “to give up Islamic holy sites.”

One document quoted Erekat as telling an Israeli official: “It is no secret that …we are offering you the biggest Yerushalayim in history.” He used the Hebrew word for Jerusalem.

Ahmed Qurie, the lead Palestinian negotiator in 2008, was quoted as proposing that Israel annex all Jewish settlements in Jerusalem except Har Homa. He also said Israel could keep control of a part of the Old City of Jerusalem.

“This is the first time in history that we make such a proposition,” the document quoted Ahmed Qurie as saying.

He added that the Palestinians had refused to make such a concession during negotiations led by the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in 2000.

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.

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