Israel is redrawing the route of a barrier going up in the West Bank to cut out most of its controversial loops around Jewish settlements on occupied land, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said yesterday.
It said the new route would be presented to US officials due in Israel this week to hear a plan by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to separate from the Palestinians. Sharon is widely expected to cement the plan in an upcoming trip to Washington.
Haaretz did not specify how the West Bank barrier would be revised, but quoted Sharon's chief of staff Dov Weisglass saying he believed the final route would be 600km long, 100km less than the version proposed in 2002.
That route approximated Israel's 1967 boundary with the West Bank but also cut deep into occupied land to enclose settlement blocs, drawing land-grab charges from the Palestinians. Israel calls the barrier a security precaution against suicide bombers.
Sharon, long the settlers' champion, shocked Israel by proposing last week to dismantle 17 of 21 Gaza settlements and several in the West Bank in a unilateral plan to separate from the Palestinians should a US-backed peace "road map" fail.
Sharon proposed to move some of the 7,500 Gaza settlers to Jewish enclaves remaining in the West Bank. A Sharon adviser said visiting US deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and National Security Council senior director Elliott Abrams were expected to study the proposal this week.
Sharon's go-it-alone plan would leave Palestinians with less land than they want for a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured in the 1967 Middle East War. Most of the international community sees the settlements as illegal. Israel disputes this.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing