Word: palestinians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Peace in the Middle East has proved to be unusually elusive. Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, the region has been devastated by three major wars and numerous insurgencies on what are today Palestinian territories known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The efforts of many U.S. presidents and several supposed breakthroughs have proved fruitless. This millennium, the prospects for peace have seemed unusually bleak: More than a thousand Israelis have been killed as a direct result of the terrorist tactics employed by Fatah, Hamas and other Palestinian groups since 2000, while Israeli counterattacks and military operations...
...spite of the region’s tragic history, there may yet be hope on the horizon. In the past two months Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have committed to a two-state solution where Israel and Palestine could co-exist peacefully. Since then, the pressure to engage in a new peace process has been applied by President Bush during his first visit to Israel as president. While it is all too possible that this latest process will also be unsuccessful, a continual push toward peace is necessary, and a two-state solution...
...safest way would have been for Bush to fly on one of two U.S. Chinook helicopters to cover the short distance from Jerusalem to the Palestinian headquarters of President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. But fog rolled into the Judean hills on Thursday, grounding the Chinooks. Instead, Bush set off by road in his serpentine 45-car motorcade riding in one of many identical bomb-proof limousines. The convoy sped by refugee camps and bounced over potholed roads to Abbas's compound. Meanwhile, a senior Israeli police official told TIME that Israel Special Forces and an emergency medical team were...
Working with Abbas's own security force, the American advance team cased out houses around the Muqataa compound where the two leaders would meet. Palestinian police arrested more than 300 militants belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. One Israeli police official said that the American delegation, fearing that a bomb might be hidden in the table or chairs where Bush and Abbas were talking, decided to bring their own furniture from Washington. On the day itself, Palestinian soldiers lined the roads and closed off traffic...
...including the wife of TIME correspondent Jamil Hamad, were forbidden by soldiers to glance out the window of their own homes. At Manger Square, in front of Jesus' birthplace, American security experts were spotted prying up manholes to check sewage pipes for bombs. These draconian security precautions prompted one Palestinian official, who opposes his own President's close ties with Bush, to comment: "What's all this fear? Is it because the Americans and Palestinians running this show know they're doing something wrong...