Hamas rejects Arab League peace initiative


The Palestinian Hamas movement has rejected a revised Middle East peace initiative put forward by the Arab League, saying outsiders can not decide the fate of the Palestinians.
In meetings this week in Washington, Arab states appeared to soften their 2002 peace plan, acknowledging that Israelis and Palestinians may have to swap land in any eventual peace deal.
The United States and the Palestinian leadership in the occupied West Bank praised the move. But speaking to hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the Gaza Strip on Friday, senior Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh said it was a concession that other Arabs were not authorised to make.
"The so-called new Arab initiative is rejected by our people, by our nation and no one can accept it," Haniyeh, prime minister of the Hamas government in the coastal enclave, said.
"The initiative contains numerous dangers to our people in the occupied land of 1967, 1948 and to our people in exile."
He was referring to the partition of British-mandate Palestine in 1948 when the United Nations voted to divide the territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state, and to the 1967 war when Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.[aljazeera]
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US Reports: Israel Launched Airstrike into Syria

U.S. officials say Israel has launched an airstrike into Syria, while Israeli officials say they cannot comment on the report.

U.S. officials told news agencies late Friday that the strike occurred late Thursday or early Friday and likely targeted a suspected weapons site. The reports said there is no indication that Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace.

The officials spoke to reporters anonymously. The U.S. government has made no official remarks on the reports.

Online news source Politico cites U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, as telling the audience at a Republican fundraising dinner Friday that Israel had bombed Syria that day. He did not elaborate.

Israel has declined to address the reports specifically, but says it is determined to prevent the transfer of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime to terrorists.

If confirmed, this would be the second time Israel has conducted airstrikes on Syria this year. Israel recently stated that it conducted a January airstrike on a weapons convoy in Syria that was thought to be headed for Lebanon's Hezbollah rebels.
VOA
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Red lines and the problems of intervention in Syria

The civil war in Syria, one of the few lasting legacies of the Arab Spring, has been under way for more than two years. The Americans and Europeans have had no appetite for intervention after their experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. At the same time, they have not wanted to be in a position where intervention was simply ruled out. Therefore, they identified a red line that, if crossed, would force them to reconsider intervention: the use of chemical weapons.
No one thought that Syrian President Bashar Assad was reckless enough to use chemical weapons because they felt that his entire strategy depended on avoiding U.S. and European intervention, and that therefore he would never cross the red line. This was comforting to the Americans and Europeans because it allowed them to appear decisive while avoiding the risk of having to do anything.
But in recent weeks the possibility of intervention increased, as first the United Kingdom and France and then Israel and the United States asserted that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons.[statesman]
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