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Sharon to release Arafat ahead of Zinni visit By Gil Hoffman March, 11 2002 JERUSALEM (March 11) - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pledged last night to keep his promise to permit Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to leave Ramallah, in response to the PA's arrest of the final murderer involved in the assassination of tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi. Senior political sources said Arafat may be permitted to leave Ramallah even before the expected arrival of US envoy Anthony Zinni on Thursday, but he will still be barred from leaving the territories. quot;I demanded the Palestinians arrest Ze'evi's murderers and...

IF you rely on the BBC as your main source of information on Israel, you will find it hard to believe that a minister could have resigned from Ariel Sharon's government on the grounds that it is being too soft.Mr Sharon is dismissed by many in the European elites as little more than a war criminal, whose reflex instinct is to hammer artillery into Palestinian homes.This is chiefly his own fault: Mr Sharon is of the older generation of Israeli soldier-politicians, for whom public relations are of secondary importance. Israelis voted for him because they believed he would contain the...

Jerusalem, Mar 10, 2002 (EFE via COMTEX) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday announced the lifting of the confinement of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who has been restricted by Israeli troops and tanks to his offices in the West Bank city of Ramallah since early December. It remained unclear whether that meant Arafat was immediately free to go where he wished. Sharon said that, following the arrest of five men implicated in the assassination last October of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi last October, quot;it is to be presumed that the conditions that will allow Arafat to...

IT'S open season for Jew-bashing in the West at the moment. As the Middle East's only democracy is subjected to wave after wave of vicious terrorist attacks by Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers the pious West and the sanctimoniously 'liberal' Western media lay the blame firmly where it has always lain with the Jews. Yes, while every other democracy in the 'free world' claims a sovereign God-given right to extirpate terrorism and to protect their innocent citizens from the evil deeds of men and women of violence, the Jewish state of Israel is supposed to take the vicious, murderous attacks...

BRITISH security officials are looking into suspicions that a crack sniper who killed 10 Israeli soldiers and civilians on the West Bank a week ago might be an IRA gunman. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, has asked European and American security agencies if they can help to identify the killer, who shot dead seven soldiers and three civilians in 25 minutes using 25 bullets from a bolt-action rifle. The sniper was hidden in trees on a hill overlooking an army checkpoint near the Jewish settlement of Ofra. When he fled, he left behind his weapon, which is standard IRA practice....

Being rude to a guest in your own house doesn't demean your guest. It demeans you. This was true two years ago when a teacher union childishly gave the silent treatment to Ontario Education Minister Janet Ecker at its annual convention. And it was true last week when the Canada-Israel Committee jeered and attacked rookie Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham, after he delivered a luncheon speech to the CIC judged by the audience to be unsympathetic to Israel. One doesn't have to agree with the ever-ambivalent policies of the Chretien government toward Israel to show good manners. The treatment of...

A debate is raging in Israel between mainstream Zionists and the emerging quot;post-Zionistsquot; as to whether Israel should transform itself from a Jewish state to a Western-style democracy in order to achieve peaceful coexistence with the Arabs. Speaking for the establishment, Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Aaron Barak rejects the idea that Israel needs to reinvent itself. Israel, he asserts, by its very nature as a Jewish state, is committed to Western democratic values. Equal justice under the law, he explains, is a fundamental principle of Hebraic teaching, and Western democratic thinking and practice derive in large part from rabbinic...

AMMAN, March 10 (Reuters) - Jordan's King Abdullah said on Sunday that any U.S. attack against Iraq would have catastrophic repercussions on the oil-rich country and the Middle East region. The monarch held talks with a senior envoy of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Amman on the eve of a regional tour by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney that includes stops in Jordan and three other countries bordering Iraq. quot;His Majesty...stressed Jordan's rejection of using force against Iraq,quot; Jordan's state Petra news agency quoted the king as saying during his meeting with Izzat Ibrahim, vice-chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council....

SANAA, Yemen, March 10 (UPI) -- A nine-member U.S. security team arrived in Sanaa ahead of Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to Yemen next week as part of his six-country tour of the Middle East, a source at Sanaa International Airport said Friday. The source told United Press International that the team, made up of Cheney's personal bodyguards, flew in Saturday night aboard a plane from Frankfurt, Germany. He said the team's mission was to secure Cheney's safety during his visit and had nothing to do with the U.S. military experts, who were expected to arrive this week in Yemen...

A spokesperson for the Dutch Foreign Ministry said that representatives from the United States and the European Union in Tel Aviv may present Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a joint statement calling for a halt to military actions against the Palestinians as early as Sunday morning. The Dutch Foreign Ministry announced Saturday that the U.S. and EU are "preparing a diplomatic initiative that will call on Sharon to implement an immediate cease-fire, as well as request that both sides return to the negotiating table." Sharon said Friday that he was dropping his insistence on a week of calm before the ...

SHARM EL SHEIK, Egypt, Mar 10, 2002 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- Saudi Arabia's foreign minister offered Israel quot;complete peace from Arab nationsquot; in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from Arab lands and the creation of an independent Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, speaking to reporters after meeting for an hour Sunday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, offered the most detailed Saudi comments on the kingdom's overture to Israel since it was first made public last month by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah in a newspaper interview. Al-Faisal also is the highest-ranking Saudi to publicly address...

RAMALLAH: Israeli and Palestinian officials, including Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian parliament speaker Ahmad Qorei, are to meet Sunday in Jerusalem, a high-ranking Palestinian official said. The head of Shin Beth, Israel's internal security services, Avi Dichter, will also attend the meeting, as well as top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat and Gaza Strip Palestinian preventative security chief Mohammed Dahlan, the source said. The previous meeting between Qorei and Peres, who drafted a ceasefire plan together, was due to take place last week but was cancelled when an Israeli shell hit Yasser Arafat's compound in the West Bank town ...

JERUSALEM, March 10 (AFP) - Israel's newspapers Sunday described the previous night's bloody suicide bomb attack, in quot;one of the most heavily secured areasquot; in the country, as a turning point in the conflict with the Palestinians. Eleven Israelis died in the blast in a cafe near the office and official residence of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. quot;Last night ... something of substance happened,quot; said an editorial of the daily Yedioth Aharonot. The bodies, blood and destruction, were quot;the same ones that have been with us on a nearly daily basisquot;. The difference was the location, the paper said. quot;Symbolically,...

Ronit Dan was scrubbing her kitchen sink when she felt the house shake and a sudden whoosh of air. She crawled to the special 'shelter-room' in her apartment and peered through the steel shutters: in the distance, less than a mile away, the dunes of the Gaza Strip were still as the grave. She went to her neighbour's house just down the road in Sederot, a town built in the 1950s on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza. A Qassam-2 rocket fired by Hamas guerrillas from within Gaza had ploughed into the front garden and wrecked the ground-floor...

JERUSALEM, Mar 10, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- A Palestinian suicide bomber transformed a crowded cafe into a mass of maimed bodies and upturned, blood-covered furniture Saturday night, killing at least 12 people in an attack across the street from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's walled compound. By Sunday morning, Israel had destroyed Yasser Arafat's seaside office in Gaza and some ministers were calling for all-out war. The compound, where Arafat received world leaders and held many news conferences, was empty at the time of the attack. Arafat himself has been trapped in the West Bank city of Ramallah...

02:03 Mar-10-02, 26 Adar 5762 PA Residents Jubilant Following Fatal Attacks (IsraelNN.com) PA residents were out in the streets dancing after hearing of the fatal terror attacks in Netanya and Jerusalem. In the attacks perpetrated by Fatah terrorists, 13 innocent persons were murdered and over 100 wounded. Hundreds of Palestinians fill the streets of Gaza City to celebrate the latest suicide attacks in Jerusalem, early Sunday, March 10, 2002. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

CBN.com - I was interested the other day when I heard that the de facto ruler, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah, made a statement which was received by many in this country as if it were a statement of fact, as if it were something new, a concept for peace in the Middle East that no one had ever heard of before. I was kind of shocked that it was so well received by many people who had been down this road before. I suggest to you that what Crown Prince Abdullah talked about a few days ago was ...

Syria accuses U.S. of failure to act, says Zinni mission doomed By DPA DAMASCUS - Syria on Saturday sharply criticized what it saw as U.S. inaction in the Mideast conflict and the absence of almost any role to stop bloodshed in the Palestinian territories, predicting the mission of U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni will be doomed to failure. Al-Thawra government newspaper said Zinni's mission "does not bode well, especially as the American stand does not inspire a near return to peace process requirements which are destroyed by the genocide currently perpetrated by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon." "Delegating Zinni is not ...

In these most trying days for the people of Israel, in which many Palestinians have gone to the streets in Ramallah and other places to celebrate the killing of Jews, including children, babies, soldiers, policemen and women, it is important for us to remember who we are. While these people have lost all dignity and lowered themselves to a level of unprecedented cruelty and enjoyment of those acts, the Jewish people should be reminded that they are the children of Avraham, Yitschak and Yaacov, who in their wildest imagination would not even contemplate such acts of hatred, not even ...

Yasser Arafat's Gaza office 'destroyed in Israeli air strike' Missiles fired by Israeli helicopters destroyed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's seaside office building, witnesses say. At least 25 missiles fired by the Israeli attack helicopters slammed into the compound, collapsing walls. Israeli gunboats also took part in the assault, witnesses say. The Israeli military had no immediate comment. Story filed: 01:35 Sunday 10th March 2002