An Israeli settlement. Photo: AJN file
JERUSALEM – Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has pledged that Israel will continue to build in Jerusalem.
“Construction in Jerusalem – and anywhere else – will continue in the same way that has been customary during the past 42 years,” Netanyahu said on March 15 during a Likud party meeting, according to reports.
“The Cabinet’s decision to end the construction freeze after 10 months remains standing.”
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US special Middle East envoy George Mitchell. Photo: AJN file
WASHINGTON — US special Middle East envoy George Mitchell has announced the start of proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
Mitchell will broker the indirect talks, which over the next few weeks will have him shuttling between the Palestinian territories and Israel.
“We’ve begun to discuss the structure and scope of these talks, and I will return to the region next week to continue our discussions,” Mitchell, who has been in the area since March 6, said in a statement released Monday afternoon (March 8).
“As we’ve said many times, we hope that these will lead to direct negotiations as soon as possible.”
The Palestinians have refused to engage in direct talks until Israel places a freeze on all settlement construction, including eastern Jerusalem. Israel has only partially frozen settlement expansion.
On March 8 Israel announced approval for the construction of 112 new apartments in a West Bank settlement, a move that angered Palestinians who had just agreed to the new round of indirect talks.
Mitchell addressed the concerns in his statement. Read the full story
The charred remains of an Israeli bus blown up in a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2003. Photo: JTA
JERUSALEM — A Hamas leader has disowned his son after learning that he spied on the terrorist group for Israel.
Sheik Hassan Yousef, who has been held in an Israeli prison since 2005, said in a statement released on March 1 that he, his wife and other children disown his oldest son. The statement was reportedly smuggled out of the prison.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, 32, served for more than a decade as the Shin Bet’s most valuable source on Hamas. He converted to Christianity 10 years ago and left the West Bank in 2007 for California, where he now lives.
His spying was reported last week by the Israeli daily Haaretz in advance of this week’s release of Son Of Hamas, a book written by Yousef and Rob Brackin.
Yousef reportedly was codenamed “The Green Prince” by the Mossad. His intervention reportedly led to the prevention of dozens of suicide bombing attacks and assassination attempts on Israeli officials, and the exposing of several terrorist cells.
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Dubai. Photo: AJN file
TEL AVIV — Israelis will not be allowed into the United Arab Emirates even if they carry foreign passports, according to Dubai’s police chief.
The ban comes in the wake of the killing of a senior Hamas man in Dubai, blamed by the Emirates authorities on Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Dubai’s police chief, Lieut. General Dahi Khalfan Tamim, said travellers suspected of being Israeli will not be allowed into the UAE even if they arrive with alternative passports.
Tamim said a team of at least 26 people used European and Australian passports to enter the country in January and kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in his hotel room, before fleeing the country.
The UAE will now “deny entry to anyone suspected of having Israeli citizenship,” Tamim said at a security conference in Abu Dhabi on March 1.
It was unclear if the measure would also apply to Israeli athletes competing in international sports events being held there.
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A Palestinian militant clashes with an Israeli policeman in Jerusalem's Old City on February 28. Photo: Isranet
JERUSALEM — Israeli police have entered the Temple Mount compound after Palestinians began throwing stones during rioting in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Police entered the Temple Mount compound on Sunday morning (February 28) to remove Palestinians youths who had barricaded themselves in the Al-Aksa Mosque on Saturday night and on Sunday began throwing rocks at police and non-Muslim visitors to the site.
The police reportedly surrounded the mosque but did not enter it. At least eight Palestinians in the mosque reportedly were hurt by tear gas.
Two police and two border guards were injured in the streets of the Old City by stones thrown by Palestinian youth. Seven protesters were arrested.
Since Saturday night, police have restricted entry to the mosque to men with Israeli identity cards over the age of 50 and to women of all ages. Visits to the Temple Mount by Jews and non-Jews continued on Sunday.
The Wakf and Islamic organizations called on Muslims to gather at the Temple Mount, saying that “radical Jewish organizations” have called on followers to lay a cornerstone for a temple on the site.
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Beirut, Lebanon.
BEIRUT — Three Lebanese have been indicted on charges of spying for Israel.
The indictment, the result of a year-long investigation and the arrest of at least 27 suspects, was handed down on February 24.
The three are charged with giving Israel information on important civil and military sites and on political officials, Reuters reported.
One of the alleged spies was indicted in absentia. The accused could face the death penalty.
Arrests in the investigation began last April 2009 and included former military officers.
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French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Photo: AJN file
PARIS — France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has distanced himself from earlier comments calling for international recognition of a Palestinian state before final peace negotiations.
On February 21, Kouchner and his Spanish counterpart Miguel Angel Moratinos called on the European Union to speed up Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations by amplifying their investment in the process.
In a joint-written column in the French daily Le Monde, they called on the EU to “take responsibility” for the region, since current efforts at a political accord “remain out of sync” with greater EU financial aid investment in the Palestinian Authority.
European sponsors for the Palestinian Authority have not been sufficiently “compensated by the opening of a real political perspective” of peace, said the foreign ministers, who outlined the need for a European-led “limited calendar of negotiations” toward a peace accord.
In a change of tone on February 22, Kouchner said a Palestinian state should be recognized following what he hopes will be greater European-led investment in the economy and security of the region, plus a proposal to have an EU-hosted conference on peace with Israel, Syria and Lebanon.
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JERUSALEM — A suitcase containing a homemade bomb was thrown at Cairo’s central synagogue on the weekend.
A man threw the suitcase, containing gasoline and an igniter, at the synagogue early on Sunday morning. The bomb exploded on the sidewalk outside the synagogue but no one was injured and the synagogue was undamaged.
The man, who reportedly had checked into a hotel across the street from the synagogue, fled the scene.
The Shaar Hashamayim synagogue is the only one in Egypt that still holds services, on the high holy days. It was built in 1899.
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Israeli high-tech laboratory. Photo: AJN file
JERUSALEM — International calls to boycott Israeli goods have not posed a real threat to the country’s economy, according to Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer.
Fischer told the annual leadership conference of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations on February 17 that Israel’s economy has weathered the global recession well.
Fischer told the American Jewish leaders that by international standards, Israel’s economy is relatively advanced.
He outlined challenges to the economy, including an inefficient government bureaucracy, demographic challenges such as the overwhelming poverty rates within the Orthodox Jewish and Arab populations, and the decline of educational standards.
“The Israeli economy, currently emerging out of the recession, will remain relatively safe, mainly owing to its entrepreneurial nature as a start-up nation,” said Fischer.
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US President Barack Obama. Photo: AJN file
WASHINGTON – US President Barack Obama has nominated an ambassador to Syria.
The nomination of Robert Stephen Ford, currently the deputy ambassador to Iraq, comes on the eve of a visit to Damascus by William Burns, an undersecretary of state and the most senior Obama administration official to visit Syria.
President George W Bush withdrew the US ambassador to Syria in early 2005, after Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister and democratic reformer, was assassinated. Syria was widely blamed for the murder.
Until this week’s nomination, Obama had extended the Bush administration sanctions and snubs aimed at getting Syria to stop meddling in Lebanon and Iraq, to end its backing for anti-Israel terrors groups and to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.
Just last week, the White House denied that it had “formally” nominated an ambassador.
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