Israel’s government had its first discussion on Sunday of a plan to offer West Bank settlers cash to leave their homes, a largely symbolic step taken as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government approaches the premature end of its term.
The plan would pave the way for a large-scale pullback after a peace agreement with the Palestinians. But both sides say such a peace accord, or even a partial agreement, are far from completion.
Israel is pushing for adjustments in the line between the West Bank and Israel, allowing it to keep main settlement blocs where most of the nearly 300,000 Jewish settlers live, offering to trade Israeli land for the blocs. The Palestinians have not accepted the idea.
The politician behind offering compensation to the settlers, Israeli Vice Premier Haim Ramon, believes that only about 62,000 would have to move from 72 locations deep in the West Bank that would be turned over to the Palestinians as part of their state.
The average payment under the plan would be 1.1 million shekels (US$300,000) to every family that leaves the West Bank, with bonuses for moving away from the heavily populated center of the country.
Tomorrow Olmert and Ramon’s Kadima Party is set to elect a new leader, after which Olmert — who has been plagued by corruption allegations — says he will step down. If Olmert’s replacement cannot put together a new coalition government, Israel will hold elections.
Both of the leading candidates to replace Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, have said they oppose Ramon’s idea because it compromises negotiations with the Palestinians by giving up too much too early.
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
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