Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday urged US president-elect Barack Obama to get involved in Middle East peacemaking immediately after becoming US president, and to endorse a pan-Arab plan that offers Israel recognition in return for a withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.
The “Arab Peace Initiative” was first proposed in 2002 by dozens of Arab countries that didn’t have ties with Israel. It requires Israel to leave the lands it occupied in the 1967 Middle East War.
“We ask Obama to become immediately involved in the peace process, and to adopt the Arab initiative,” Abbas said at a conference in the West Bank city of Nablus.
Palestinians fired three rockets from Gaza at Israel after dark on Saturday, but one fell back on the Palestinian side of the border and the other two landed in open ground, causing no casualties, the military said.
Hamas security officials said an Israeli surface-to-surface missile struck waste ground in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun shortly afterward, but caused no injuries. The military said troops fired at, and hit, a squad of Palestinians that had already fired at least one rocket and was preparing to launch more. The army did not divulge the type of fire it used.
There has been a spate of Palestinian rocket fire and Israeli airstrikes since a truce between the sides started unraveling on Nov. 4.
Since then Israel has shut its crossings with Gaza, causing shortages of basic goods and fuel for Gaza’s 1.4 million Palestinians. It says the closure will continue until the militants halt their fire.
Abbas’ appeal to Obama came after he took his case for a peace deal directly to the Israeli public. On Thursday, he ran full-page Hebrew-language newspaper ads telling readers the Arab plan would bring peace to the region.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the chief negotiator with the Palestinians over the past year, has welcomed the plan as a positive gesture but says its positions on key issues such as final borders, the status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees are unacceptable.
Of the Arab countries that border Israel, only Egypt and Jordan have so far recognized Israel. Accepting the Arab plan, Abbas said, would give Israel full recognition by 57 Arab and Islamic states.
“Instead of living in an island of peace it will live in an ocean of peace,” he said.
However, a year of negotiations between Palestinians and Israel has not brought tangible results.
Abbas appeared unusually bitter on Saturday, saying that Israel’s actions, such as continued construction of settlements and the West Bank separation barrier, contradict Israel’s declared willingness to make peace.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
RSS