OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (Agencies)
Israel began releasing about 430 Palestinian prisoners on Monday in a bid to bolster President Mahmoud Abbas after a U.S.-sponsored conference last week on Palestinian statehood, Israeli officials said.
The prisoners, most of whom belong to Abbas's secular Fatah movement, were bussed from a desert prison to Israel's borders with the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, a Prisons Service spokeswoman said.
Nearly 11,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails.
But Israel delayed the delivery of 25 Russian-made armored vehicles to the Palestinian Authority, refusing a request to equip them with heavy machine-guns, an Israeli official said on Monday.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had approved the delivery as a gesture to Abbas days ahead of the Middle East peace conference.
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Clashes kill three Three members of the military wing of Hamas were killed Monday morning in an exchange of fire with Israeli troops at Beit Lahya in the north of the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian medical source said.
The three members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades were named as Islam Abed Rabbo, 23, Aziz Fahri, 22, and Mohammed Abu Mehdi, 23.
An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed the incident.
With the latest deaths some 5,956 people have been killed in Israeli-Palestinian violence since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinians, according to an AFP tally. |
