Palestinians

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he will deliver a major policy address next week laying out his proposed road to Mideast peace, after coming under stiff U.S. pressure to freeze West Bank settlement construction and endorse Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu offered no hint of what he might say. Bound by his hard-line coalition and his own ideology, he has resisted the U.S. demands so far, deepening an unusual faceoff with Israel's most important ally. "It must be understood, we seek peace with the Palestinians and with the states of the Arab world while trying to reach as much understanding as possible with the United States and our friends abroad," the Israeli leader said at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting.

Re "On rocky ground: Israel's settlements in occupied territory violate the rights of Palestinians, and international law says they must go," Opinion, June 28, and Yisrael Medad's article on Jewish settlements would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. Through specious logic and linguistic sleight of hand, he has attempted to make the Palestinians guilty of ethnic cleansing and denying the Jews the right of return. Does he really think we're that gullible? Paul McDermott Los Angeles -- An inspired choice to let Medad be the spokesman for the pro-settler position.

Middle-class women shop for imported furniture in a marble-and-glass emporium. A new movie house is screening "Transformers." Teens bop to a Danish hip-hop band performing on their high school basketball court. Life in the West Bank -- in sharp contrast to beaten-down, Hamas-ruled Gaza -- has taken on a semblance of normality. Exhausted after more than two decades of on-and-off conflict with Israel and deeply skeptical about the prospects of statehood, Palestinians here are increasingly trying to carve out their own little niches of happiness.

Sweden's foreign minister abruptly called off a visit to Israel this week, an Israeli spokesman said, amid a feud over a Swedish newspaper article and a growing gulf between Israel and the international community over West Bank settlement construction. Foreign Minister Carl Bildt called off the trip planned for this Friday, according to Yigal Palmor, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman. Palmor, who would not comment on a possible reason, said Sweden informed the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm of the decision Friday.

The number of Gazans living in abject poverty has tripled this year to 300,000, or one in five residents, the Gaza head of the U.N. agency helping Palestinians said. Gaza's economy has foundered under an Israeli-Egyptian border blockade imposed after the Islamic militant group Hamas seized control of the territory in 2007 from forces loyal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. John Ging, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency's top official in Gaza, called the rise in the poverty rate a "predictable consequence" of the border blockade.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he will push for a vote on a United Nations report that accuses both Israel and Hamas of war crimes during Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip last winter. Abbas' push for a vote in the U.N. Human Rights Council reverses his decision this month to delay voting for six months. Palestinian officials withdrew their support under heavy U.S. pressure. That, in turn, sparked criticism of Abbas among Palestinians. Also, Washington's special Mideast envoy, George J. Mitchell, wrapped up his latest round of shuttle diplomacy in the region, again failing to persuade Israelis and Palestinians to resume peace talks.

The U.N. General Assembly urged Israel and the Palestinians to investigate alleged war crimes during Israel's offensive last winter in Gaza and raised the possibility of Security Council action if they do not. A resolution drafted by Arab nations was approved by the 192-member world body 114-18, with 44 abstentions and 16 countries not voting. Supporters insisted that there must be accountability, especially from Israel, for the alleged violations of international law during the conflict, in which 13 Israelis and almost 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including many civilians.

Re "Armed with a belief in peace," Column One, Nov. 4 I applaud The Times for educating a poorly informed public about events in Palestine that are seldom publicized in the media. Edith Cacciatore Novato :: This article was welcome, honest reporting about a Palestinian's nonviolent protest. Unfortunately, The Times still couldn't resist editorializing, stating that Palestinians live in "a culture that enshrines the language of the gun, even if most Palestinians have never used one," while neglecting to mention that Israeli culture not only enshrines weapons -- nearly everyone serves in the military and therefore uses a gun -- but that it uses weapons far more deadly against a largely civilian population on a regular basis.

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Thursday fired a Katyusha rocket 10 1/2 miles into Israel, their deepest artillery strike yet, provoking some of the heaviest Israeli assaults in months. Nine Palestinians were killed in the day's fighting. The rocket landed harmlessly on the northern outskirts of the coastal city of Ashkelon.

As President Bush headed to the Middle East to check on their peace talks, Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed Tuesday to launch them in earnest, six weeks late. It was that long ago that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas stood beside Bush at an international conference in Annapolis, Md., and announced the start of full-scale negotiations with the aim of creating a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.