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Hamas urges fatah to release political prisoners in wbank jails

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A senior Hamas delegation will travel to Egypt on Monday to put its view to Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who is steering Cairo’s initiative, senior Hamas official said.

Hamas wants Fatah to halt a campaign of "arrests and repression" against the Islamist group in the West Bank, a top Hamas official said on Sunday.

Egypt has invited Hamas and Fatah, President Mahmoud Abbas’s group, along with smaller Palestinian factions to a meeting in Cairo on Nov. 9 to settle the conflict between the two heavyweights, which deepened after Hamas seized control of Gaza last year and Abbas started talks with Israel.

"It is impossible for Hamas to participate in the dialogue with a single prisoner remaining in Abbas’s jails," Hamas politburo member Izzat al-Rishq told Reuters in the Syrian capital.

"The campaign of arrests and repression is expanding as the date for the Cairo dialogue nears. It is competing with the Israeli occupation in viciousness," he added.

Rishq said Fatah was holding some 400 Hamas members in West Bank jails it controls and was extending a crackdown on Hamas in Hebron, the West Bank’s biggest city, to surrounding villages.

A senior Hamas delegation will travel to Egypt on Monday to put its view to Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who is steering Cairo’s initiative, he added.

Suleiman has been holding separate talks with all the Palestinian factions. A previous attempt to bring Hamas and Fatah together in Cairo failed, Palestinian sources said.

"We have communicated with Egyptian leadership, explained how dangerous the situation is in the West Bank and asked them for quick action to make the Cairo dialogue a success," said Rishq, who lives in exile in Syria along with other high-level members of Hamas, including its leader Khaled Meshaal.

Amending paper

Hamas and Fatah disagree on how to approach talks with Israel and how to resolve the dispute which led to Hamas taking control of the tiny Gaza Strip.

Hamas routed Abbas’s forces in Gaza in June 2007. In response, Abbas dismissed the Hamas-led Palestinian government and appointed a new administration in the occupied West Bank, where Fatah holds sway.

On Saturday Abbas sent hundreds of security officers to Hebron, where a minority of Jewish settlers live, as part of an Israeli- and Western-backed strategy to strengthen his control over the occupied West Bank.

Hamas recently released around 20 members of Fatah it described as political prisoners in Gaza, in what it said was a gesture before the Palestinian unity talks, and Rishq said the group no longer holds any Fatah members in Gaza.

He said Hamas wants Egypt to amend a reconciliation paper due to be discussed at the Nov. 9 meeting.

Hamas wants the paper to leave out issues such as extending Abbas’s presidential term, which expires in January, unless this is part of a comprehensive settlement, and giving him a new mandate to negotiate with Israel.

"We have observations about the Egyptian paper and we insist on reaching a consensus on it before the talks are under way," Rishq said.

Reuters

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Libyas kadhafi touts energy ties in talks with russian leader

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Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi focused on oil and gas ties in a meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev today, starting talks which are also expected to touch on arms purchases and nuclear energy.

"Cooperation in the gas and oil sphere is extremely important now.

We have common approaches to gas and oil policies," the leader of energy-rich Libya told Medvedev, speaking through a Russian translator.

"We will discuss economic issues and coordination in the foreign-policy sphere, matters which are very important at the moment," Medvedev said.

Kadhafi arrived at the Kremlin dressed in a tan coat draped over his trademark robes and accompanied by a stern-looking female bodyguard in green uniform and red beret.

He was due to meet Prime Minister Vladimir Putin later at 1400 GMT, after arriving Friday on his first visit to Moscow since Cold War days in 1985.

Kadhafi may sign a pact on Russian-Libyan nuclear energy cooperation, the Vedomosti newspaper reported today, citing a source involved in preparations for his visit.

The source did not give details but Russia has reportedly been in talks to build a nuclear power plant in Libya, a longtime pariah that has sought to rejoin the international fold in recent years.

Other expected topics include a multi-billion-dollar deal to upgrade Libya’s Soviet-era arsenal and lucrative contracts for Russian firms.

Libya might also offer to host a Russian naval base at the Mediterranean port of Benghazi, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported Friday.

"The Russian military presence will be a guarantee of non-aggression against Libya from the United States," it said.

Kommersant added that Moscow wants Tripoli to join a "gas OPEC" with itself and Qatar. Russia, Iran and Qatar said last month they were forming a joint forum for gas projects but stopped short of advocating an OPEC-style cartel.

However, on Saturday Russian papers seemed more interested in the Libyan leader’s unusual travel arrangements, with the Izvestia daily running the headline: "Kadhafi set up his tent in the Kremlin." Kadhafi brings a traditional Bedouin tent along with him on state visits which he uses to host guests. He does not usually sleep in it.

An AFP journalist saw a small fire burning in front of the khaki-coloured tent Saturday in the Kremlin’s Tainitsky Garden, whose name derives from the Russian word for "secret."
The garden is named after the nearby Tainitsky Tower, built in 1485, which once contained a secret passage that let Kremlin residents escape in times of siege.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Kremlin source said ahead of the visit that the two would discuss "the peaceful atom" as well as "military-technical cooperation," a term that typically describes arms purchases.

Libya could buy more than two billion dollars (1.5 billion euros) of Russian arms including surface-to-air missiles, tanks and fighter planes, Interfax news agency reported Friday, citing a Russian defence industry source.

Relations have warmed this year between Russia and Libya, which began to shed its pariah status in 2003 when it renounced weapons of mass destruction and took responsibility for a 1988 airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland that killed 270 people.

In April, during a visit to Tripoli by then-president Putin, Moscow agreed to cancel billions of dollars of Libyan Soviet-era debt in exchange for big contracts with Russian companies.

According to Libyan sources in Moscow, Kadhafi is expected to visit Ukraine and Belarus after his visit to Russia.

Sapa-AFP

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Egypt calls urgent meeting to fight piracy

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A fisherman sits on the bank of the Suez Canal in Ismailia 

 REUTERS/Aladin Abdel Naby/Files (EGYPT)

A fisherman sits on the bank of the Suez Canal in Ismailia. Winding through this small Egyptian town like an artery, pumping cash into its hospitals and schools and beyond into the wider economy, the Suez Canal has flourished as a shipping shortcut. Now the faltering global economy, coupled with a rise in piracy to the canal’s south, looks set to end the high times for the waterway and the town Egyptians call its bride.

Egypt has called an urgent meeting of Arab countries bordering the Red Sea to combat rampant piracy off Somalia, the foreign ministry said today.

Egypt and Yemen will coordinate the meeting, which will be held later this month, the ministry said in a statement, without specifying a date.

Cairo has said that piracy has not harmed traffic through the Suez Canal — which is Egypt’s third largest source of revenue after tourism and remittances from expatriate workers.

Last month the British think tank Chatham House said in a report that increasingly brazen hijackings by Somali pirates, who commandeered a Ukrainian freighter carrying a shipment of tanks in September, threatened Suez traffic.

"The danger and cost of piracy (insurance premiums for the Gulf of Aden have increased tenfold) mean that shipping could be forced to avoid the Gulf of Aden/Suez Canal and divert around the Cape of Good Hope," it said.

"At a time of high inflationary pressures, this should be of grave concern," the report added.

Earlier this week pirates seized a Turkish bulk carrier carrying iron ore off the coast of Somalia, and in a separate incident opened fire at an Italian-operated cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden.

According to the International Maritime Bureau, 77 ships have been attacked off Somalia since January. Thirty-one were hijacked and 10 are still being held for ransom. Pirates are holding about 200 crew members.

Piracy is rife and well-organised in the area where Somalia’s northeastern tip juts into the Indian Ocean, preying on a key maritime route leading to the Suez Canal through which an estimated 30 percent of the world’s oil passes.

NATO has sent a number of destroyers and frigates to the region to escort civilian shipping.
Egypt says a solution must be found to the root problems that have led to piracy off Somalia, citing the chaotic political situation there.

In September, Somali pirates released an Egyptian ship with 25 crew on board after holding them for three weeks.

Egypt denies paying a ransom to the pirates, who held a record 374 hostages in September, according to the risk-assessment group Risk Intelligence.

Sapa-AFP

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Palestinian kristallnacht

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Message of Kafr Qassem massacre lives on for Palestinians

by Jonathan Cook

In a conflict that has produced more than its share of suffering and tragedy, the name of Kafr Qassem lives on in infamy more than half a century after Israeli police gunned down 47 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, in the village.

This week Kafr Qassem’s inhabitants, joined by a handful of Israeli Jewish sympathizers, commemorated the anniversary of the deaths 52 years ago by marching to the cemetery where the victims were laid to rest.

They did so as the local media revisited the events, publishing testimonies from two former senior police officers who recalled the order from their commander to shoot all civilians breaking a last-minute curfew imposed on the village, which lies just inside Israel’s borders.

The two men, who were stationed at villages close to Kafr Qassem, suggested that, had they not personally disobeyed the order when confronted with Palestinians returning from work, the death toll would have been far higher.

Taking part in the annual march was one of the few survivors of the massacre. Saleh Khalil Issa is today 71, but back in 1956 he was an 18-year-old agricultural worker.
He remembered returning to the village on his bicycle, along with a dozen other workers, just after 5pm on 29 October 1956.
 
What he and the other villagers did not know was that earlier that day the Border Police, a special paramilitary unit that operates inside both Israel and the occupied territories, had agreed to set up checkpoints unannounced at the entrance to half a dozen Palestinian villages inside Israel.
 
The villages were selected because they lie close to the Green Line, the ceasefire line between Israel and Jordan, which was then occupying the West Bank, following the 1948 war.
At a briefing the commanding officer, Major Shmuel Malinki, ordered his men to shoot any civilian arriving home after 5pm.

Asked about the fate of women or children returning late, Malinki replied: "Without sentiment, the curfew applies to everyone." Pressed on the point, he responded in Arabic: "Allah yarahmum [God have mercy on them]", adding that this was the order from the brigade commander, Colonel Issachar Shadmi.

Mr. Issa said that, when his group reached the village, they were stopped by three policemen. "They told us to get off our bikes and form a line. The commander asked where we were from. When we replied ‘Kafr Qassem’, he took three steps back and told his colleagues, ‘Cut them down!’"

Mr. Issa, who was shot in the arm and leg, pretended to be dead among the bodies. He heard villagers’ cars arriving and the policemen ask the same question. Each new arrival was executed.

"Finally, I heard a bus arrive with female passengers, including young girls. I later learnt that there were 12 of them on board. They were forced to get out and shot too, though one survived like me."

Mr. Issa said the policemen checked to see if any of the victims were moving, and then fired more bullets at them. While the police officers were not watching, he crawled away and hid behind a tree. He was found the next morning and taken to a hospital in nearby Petah Tikva, along with 12 other injured.

Of the dead, seven were children and nine women, including one who was pregnant.
Mohammed Arabi, today 84, arrived at the same checkpoint later that evening. A tailor, he had spent the day in Tel Aviv buying materials and hitched a lift home in the back of a truck with 26 other villagers.

When the driver tried to drop 11 of them off just outside the village, they came under fire. The 11 jumped back into the truck, he said, and the driver sped up the hill towards the village.

"When we reached the entrance to the village, we saw bodies everywhere. The driver panicked, frightened to go back, but forced to drive over several corpses lying in the street to get away."

A short distance ahead, however, a detachment of policemen stopped them. Mr. Arabi overheard a debate between the policemen about whether to let them go home or take them to the eastern side of the village.

"I knew what was being suggested. The eastern side was the border with the West Bank. Palestinians were regularly shot on sight by the police for trying to cross into Israel. If we were killed there, it would look like we were infiltrators."

The commander said he would follow behind the truck in his jeep and escort them to the village’s eastern entrance.

"We were saved by a shepherd who at that moment was driving a large flock of sheep into the village. The sheep separated us from the police, and the truck driver saw his chance. He drove off at top speed and escaped.

"He took us to his home and all 27 of us hid there for three days, too frightened to come out."

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