Tag: Israel

JERUSALEM - Israel is to approve 1,400 new settler homes in east Jerusalem, media and the local council said on Sunday, defying pressure to halt settlement building that has stalled peace talks with the Palestinians.
The massive construction project will add homes to the annexed east Jerusalem settlement neighbourhood of Gilo and is expected to receive final approval from the district planning commission within days.
The project is likely to spark condemnation from the

JERUSALEM - Israel has removed scaffolding which was limiting access to the Little Western Wall, a key Jewish site in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, residents and officials said on Friday. News of the move was first revealed in the Haaretz newspaper, which said it was geared towards improving access for worshippers to the site, which is considered holy by Jews.
The site is part of the same ancient wall that used to surround the Second Temple, and lies several

RAMALLAH - Israel is destroying any chance of a return to peace talks by carrying out demolitions in annexed east Jerusalem, a spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said Sunday.
"By doing this, Israel has destroyed all the US efforts and ended any possibility of a return to negotiations," Nabil Abu Rudeina said in a statement after Israeli forces demolished part of a former hotel in east Jerusalem. The Hotel Shepherd is being partially demolished to make way for 20 new

JERUSALEM - A projectile fired from the Gaza Strip landed in an open area in southern Israel, the military said on Wednesday.
No-one was hurt and it did not cause any injuries when it landed in the Eshkol region, which flanks the northeastern sector of the Israel-Gaza border, the army said. It was not immediately clear if it was a mortar or a Qassam rocket, which takes its name from the armed wing of the Islamist movement Hamas. Gaza militants have fired dozens of rockets and

ANKARA - The United States and Israel top the list of countries that Turks see as a threat, according to an opinion poll seen by AFP on Wednesday.
The survey, conducted by the Ankara-based Metropoll research company last month, found that 42.6 percent saw the United States as "the greatest external threat," with another 23.7 percent singling out Israel.
Turkey's eastern neighbour Iran ranked third, listed by three percent of the respondants, while another neighbour and

JERUSALEM - Israel never refused to renew a freeze on settlement in the occupied West Bank but the US stopped pressuring for a new moratorium, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.
Israeli radio and news sites quoted him as telling parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee that Washington did initially ask Israel to extend a 10-month building freeze which expired in September. "The truth is that we were prepared to do this but contrary to what was reported

OSLO - Israel's army chief told a US Congress delegation in late 2009 he was preparing for a large war in the Middle East, probably against Hamas or Hezbollah, leaked US diplomatic cables showed on Sunday.
"I am preparing the Israeli army for a large scale war, since it is easier to scale down to a smaller operation than to do the opposite," Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi was quoted as saying in a cable from the US embassy in Tel Aviv.
The document, dated November 15,

JERUSALEM - Face-to-face negotiations are still the best path to peace with the Palestinians, an Israeli official said Saturday dismissing calls for a new peace plan as premature.
On Friday, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas called for the international community, spearheaded by the peacemaking Quartet of the United Nations, the United States, Russia and the European Union, to come up with a new approach.
"We demand that the Middle East Quartet and the various UN bodies,

JERUSALEM - Israel's defence ministry has accused a London-based Palestinian centre of "terror-affiliated activities" and being the organisational arm of the militant Islamic Hamas movement in Europe. Hamas,
which controls the Gaza Strip and advocates violent opposition to the Jewish state, is designated by the European Union as a terrorist organisation. An Israeli defence ministry statement issued on Tuesday said that the Palestinian Return Centre organises conferences in

GAZA CITY - The Hamas is observing a truce with Israel but is also ready for a resumption of hostilities, a spokesman for the group's armed wing warned on Saturday.
"There is a truce in effect in the field. It is real if Israel stops its aggression and ends it's siege. But if there is any Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip we will respond strongly," said a masked spokesman for Hamas' Al-Qassam Brigades who identified himself as Abu Obeideh.
Speaking at a press conference

GAZA CITY: Hamas remains committed to its truce with Israel, a senior leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement, Mahmud Zahar, said on Friday, despite the increase in rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip.
"We declare our commitment to respecting the truce between us and the occupier," Zahar told a gathering in the Gaza town of Khan Yunis. "Despite the sacrifices, we announce that we continue to respect the truce," said Zahar, who is considered the most influential Hamas leader in

DUBAI - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said his whistleblowing website plans to publish hundreds of "sensitive" US diplomatic cables on Israel, Al-Jazeera television reported on Thursday.
"Sensitive and classified documents" on Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon and January's assassination in Dubai of Hamas militant Mahmud al-Mabhuh would be released, Assange told Al-Jazeera in an interview. Assange said WikiLeaks had 3,700 US documents on Israel, including 2,700 originating from

JERUSALEM: Israel has urged the UN Security Council to issue a "clear and resolute" message to Palestinian militants against firing rockets into its territory from Gaza, in a letter made public on Wednesday.
The December 21 letter, released by the foreign ministry, comes amid rising tensions on Israel's border with the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave. On Tuesday, Israel launched a series of air strikes against what it said were tunnels, training sites and weapons facilities in Gaza

JERUSALEM: Israel and the Palestinians are sending top officials to Washington for talks, the two sides announced on Wednesday, to try to rescue a Middle East peace process in crisis.
The peace process appeared to be in tatters after Washington on Tuesday admitted defeat in its efforts to secure an Israeli freeze on settlement building, the Palestinians' condition for resuming direct peace talks.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat is to meet US Secretary of State

HAIFA: Israel does not need any more firefighting planes to tackle the deadly forest fire raging in the north of the country, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said on Sunday.
Netanyahu was following the advice of professional firefighters that "the fleet of aircraft currently deployed in Israel is sufficient for the task," his spokesman Mark Regev told AFP. As a result, Israel was cancelling its requests for more aircraft, although it "greatly appreciates the readiness

JERUSALEM: Israel on Saturday said it was disappointed by Brazil's decision to recognise a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, saying it flew in the face of efforts to negotiate a peace deal.
The decision was announced by outgoing Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in a public letter addressed to Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, which was made public by Brazil's foreign ministry on Friday. "The government of Israel expresses sadness and disappointment over the

JERUSALEM: Israel approved a plan on Sunday to hold and deport thousands of illegal migrant workers whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a "threat to the character of the country".
In remarks to the cabinet, Netanyahu said thousands of migrants who have entered Israel mainly through Egypt in past years would be housed at a special holding facility, due to built in Israel's southern Negev desert.
"We must stop the mass entry of illegal migrant workers because