Palestinians

JERUSALEM - Israeli and Palestinian textbooks get failing grades when it comes to adequately and positively representing each other's people, culture and history, according to a three-year, U.S-funded study released Monday. On the bright side, researchers concluded that most schoolbooks on both sides were factually accurate, even though they usually described each other in negative, unflattering terms and typically cast one another as the “enemy.” Extremely negative material, such as demonization, incitement to violence or depicting the other side as subhuman, were rare in both Israeli and Palestinian books, the report found.

BILIN, West Bank - Like many Palestinians, West Bank farmer Emad Burnat punctuates his life story with events from the Israeli occupation of his village. His first son was born amid the optimism that followed the 1993 Oslo peace accords, and another came just as the 2000 Palestinian uprising erupted. His youngest, Gibreel, was born the same week that Israel began constructing a separation barrier through his hometown of Bilin. That's when Burnat got his first camera, initially to capture his newborn, but later to document his village's fight against the Israeli military and nearby settlers.

Israel's Shin Bet - think of it as a combination of the CIA and the FBI - prides itself on secrecy. So when documentary filmmaker Dror Moreh approached one of its past leaders some three years ago to discuss the agency's role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he expected silence. But as in so much of life, timing is everything. When Moreh contacted Ami Ayalon, who headed the domestic counterterrorism agency from 1996-2000, the left-leaning Ayalon was ready to talk - and to help Moreh secure interviews with the other five living former Shin Bet leaders.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli officials promised Wednesday to transfer one-month's worth of Palestinian tax collections to the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority. But Israel cautioned that the move does not necessarily signal the transfers will resume as usual and that the step was taken to enable the authority to handle its ongoing budgetary crisis. The money, about $100 million a month, is collected at Israeli ports from Palestinian importers and is supposed to be forwarded to the West Bank.

Said Musa Maragha, a Palestinian military commander who rose through the ranks of the Palestine Liberation Organization to become a trusted lieutenant of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, then broke away to lead Syrian-backed Palestinian rebels who besieged Arafat's forces in northern Lebanon, has died. He was 86. Maragha, known as Abu Musa, died of cancer Tuesday in Damascus, where he had lived for many years, his aides and hospital officials told the Associated Press. Born in 1927 in Silwan, a village overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, Abu Musa was a man of shifting loyalties but also one who resolutely opposed the peace process with Israel.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- An Israeli soldier driving a civilian car shot and killed a 21-year-old Palestinian woman Wednesday near a refugee camp outside the West Bank city of Hebron, according to Palestinian witnesses and medical sources. The Israeli military told media that soldiers fired after they came under attack. Palestinian witnesses told reporters that two Israeli soldiers came out of the car, apparently after it was hit by stones, and opened fire in the direction of Palestinians standing at the entrance of a college near the camp.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas have reached agreement on steps to bridge their years-long divide, including the formation of a unity government by month's end, mediators and officials with the two groups said Thursday in Cairo. The two Palestinian factions, which have been at odds since Hamas fighters drove Fatah's forces from the Gaza Strip in 2007, have been holding on-again, off-again reconciliation talks for more than a year. Their goal has been to politically reunite the West Bank, which is under Fatah control, and the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Israeli soldiers opened fire on protesters during a confrontation near a West Bank separation barrier Tuesday, killing a 17-year-old Palestinian boy, officials and witnesses said. Medics at Ramallah hospital said Samir Awad, a high school student from the West Bank village of Budrus, was brought to the hospital with bullet wounds to the head, back and leg. He was in critical condition and died shortly afterward, they said. Muhammad Murrar, head of the Budrus village council, said students were leaving school on the last day of their mid-year exams when confrontations broke out with soldiers in the area.

JERUSALEM -- Palestinian activists were evicted Sunday from a tent village they had set up Friday on a large plot of land east of Jerusalem that Israel has designated as the site of a new settlement. Israeli police raided the site known as E-1 after the Israeli government told the Supreme Court that evacuating the activists was a top national security matter. The court Friday had delayed eviction proceedings, giving the government six days to explain why it would want to remove the protesters.

JERUSALEM - About 250 Palestinian activists set up dozens of tents Friday on a large plot of land east of Jerusalem that Israel has designated as the site of a new settlement. The Palestinians hope the tent village - called Bab al-Shams, or Gate to the Sun - will prevent Israel from going forward with the E1 project, said a spokesman for the group, Abdullah abu Rahmeh. Israel plans to build thousands of housing units as part of the project, which Palestinians and much of the international community have condemned as a step that could disrupt travel between the northern and southern portions of the West Bank and make it more difficult for the Palestinians to create a cohesive state.