It is the handwritten last testament of Ziad Jarrah, the lighter-haired and better-looking of the two young men. A well educated, middle-class Lebanese, he has been studying in Germany. So has his dark-haired companion, Mohammed Atta, also middle class and university educated, but born in Egypt. Atta has his will, too. Unsmiling, both men read them to camera.

These images are part of a videotape, nearly an hour long, that was filmed at Osama Bin Laden's lair in Afghanistan 6½ years ago. They are revealed today for the first time, and they are a missing chapter in the searing story of the attacks on America on September 11, 2001.

Atta led the team of 19 suicide attackers and flew American Airlines flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Jarrah piloted United Airlines flight 93. His assigned target was Capitol Hill, but the plane crashed.

ATTA and Jarrah have never been pictured together before. Indeed, a key element of their tradecraft was that they steered clear of each other. They were leading figures in the September 11 story, not only because they flew the planes but also because they apparently had everything to live for. Unlike most of the other hijackers, who were mainly provincial Saudi fundamentalists, Atta and Jarrah fitted easily into western society.

To the Germans who knew them in Hamburg they seemed entirely normal. The tape explains this mistake. It would be hard to look less homicidal - until the camera pulls back and reveals that Atta is sitting next to an AK-47.

So the tape not only fills a gap in the story of September 11 but also provides chilling proof of the difficulty of fighting Islamic terrorism: these two "normal", happy, unthreatening individuals turned out to have an explosive effect on the history of the 21st century.

The unedited video was passed to The Sunday Times through a previously tested channel. On condition of anonymity, sources from both Al-Qaeda and the United States have confirmed its authenticity. It has no sound - and lip-readers have failed to decipher it, according to a US source - but the images speak loudly for themselves.

The tape not only features Atta and Jarrah. It also gives a rare and intriguing sight of Bin Laden with his inner court.

It opens with 100 or so Al-Qaeda hardcore members sitting on the ground in the open air, obviously expecting something to happen. Among them are several children.

A very tall man surrounded by three armed bodyguards arrives in a sedate, presidential manner. It is Bin Laden, dressed in white from head to toe with an all-enveloping, light brown robe. He looks serene as he makes his way to a makeshift podium and beings to speak into a microphone.

The date recorded on this section of the video is January 8, 2000. That makes the occasion Eid al Fitr, the end of Ramadan.

There are a few recognisable faces among the audience, including Ramzi Binalshibh, Atta's Hamburg flatmate who was later to become the co-ordinator of the September 11 attacks. And among the bodyguards is Abu Jandal, who was the only one with the authority to put two bullets in Bin Laden's head if he was about to fall into enemy hands.

In the background are the tall mud-red walls of an impressive compound. It is clear that the location is part of a complex of about 80 buildings called Tarnak Farm in the desert near Kandahar airport. It was Bin Laden's clan base during his Afghan sojourn - where he lived with his family and the inner core of Al-Qaeda.

American intelligence knew all about Tarnak Farm. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, "CIA officers were able to map the entire site, identifying the houses that belonged to Bin Laden's wives and the one where he himself was most likely to sleep".

Less than two years before the video was recorded, the CIA had a plan to work closely with some of the local tribes to grab Bin Laden as he slept. It was a clear-cut, well rehearsed "perfect operation", according to Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA Bin Laden unit at the time. But it was never executed and there is still controversy in America about who cancelled it.

TEN days after Bin Laden's Eid speech, according to the date on the film, Atta and Jarrah read their martyrdom wills to the camera. This proof of their presence in Afghanistan at that time is just about the final main piece of the jigsaw: Atta, the man who decided zero hour on September 11 is for the first time on video, getting ready to record his "martyrdom" will.

Investigators have pieced together most of Atta's life from his childhood as the son of a lawyer in Giza, northern Egypt, to the moment he boarded flight 11 - except for an unexplained absence from Hamburg in early 2000. The date on the tape perfectly corresponds with this.

Those who have been closely following the story had little doubt where Atta had been. Binalshibh told me, "Afghanistan, what else?" when I asked him during a secret meeting four years ago. But in their painstaking efforts to find the proof that connected the dots, US investigators and, especially, their German counterparts, have struggled with little more than circumstantial evidence and presumed facts.

This played nicely into the hands of conspiracy theorists, both in the Muslim world and in the West. Now the investigators have the proof, and only the flakiest of anti-American fantasists can go on claiming that Bin Laden, Atta, Jarrah and co had no hand in September 11.

We can now even reveal Atta's itinerary. On November 29, 1999 he boarded Turkish Airlines flight TK1662 from Hamburg to Istanbul, Turkey, where he changed to flight TK1056 bound for Karachi, Pakistan. From there he would have crossed into Afghanistan by road, most probably through Quetta. On the return journey, he left Karachi on February 24, 2000 by flight TK1057 to Istanbul where he changed to flight TK1661 to Hamburg. Five months later he entered the United States to start flight training.

Unedited, the extraordinary footage also gives us a glimpse into the superficially ordinary character of the man who would later spearhead the devastating terrorist attack.

Wearing western clothes - black trousers and a dark brown, zip-collared sweater with zigzag stripes - Atta appears uncomfortable putting on a typical Pashtun hat.

He gives a how-do-I-look glance at the camera. The hat goes off, on, off and he throws it away with wry smile. Ready now. He crosses his legs and picks up his handwritten will.

Cool, gathered and deliberate, Atta reads to camera for 10 minutes before the tape cuts to a collector's item: Atta and Jarrah together for the first time on camera.

With his stylish glasses, the handsome Lebanese is wearing a white, Saudi-style robe but appears to have western clothes on underneath.


Smiling, laughing and exchanging remarks, they discuss Jarrah's will as he holds it - a superb set-up shot. Jarrah then gets his seven-minute exclusive appearance to tell the camera his last words.

THE significance of even a single frame of any of the September 11 pilots in Afghanistan could not be overestimated, let alone the sudden appearance of nearly 6,000 frames of the two most important and most puzzling hijackers.

Distinctively the black sheep of the whole lot - plotters and hijackers - Atta and Jarrah came from the two most liberal Arab countries, both from the heart of their respective communities, both from middle-class families, both intelligent, pleasant and trusted wherever they went, and both with impressive educational track records. Jarrah went to a Christian school in Beirut; Atta advanced his English at The American University in Cairo.

Then they both had ambitions beyond what they thought their countries could offer. They both went to Germany; Atta in 1992 to end up preparing a masters degree in city planning; and Jarrah in 1996 to end up preparing his in aeronautical engineering.

Again, they both could not cease to impress. So much so that Professor Dittmar Machule, who taught Atta at the Technical University in Harburg, a quiet suburb of Hamburg, still cannot understand what happened to the brilliant student he used to pick to fill in for him in seminars whenever he was busy.

While they lived in Hamburg, Atta and Jarrah were never meant to be seen together in one place at the same time, almost certainly on instructions.

Atta lived with other members of the Hamburg cell in a small flat while Jarrah was kept apart in a nicer part of Hamburg, living with a girlfriend and drinking alcohol. Yet in Afghanistan they appear at ease in each other's company.

When in mid-2000 they travelled to Florida, they were separate once again - even though they enrolled at flying schools that stood virtually next to each other.

If the appearance of this video solves one mystery, the big question about both Atta and Jarrah is still with us: how on earth did such impressive young men with everything to live for develop such a mindset? Neither was mad and neither was brainwashed. If anything at all they were both the antithesis of such naive and easy explanations.

One would confidently argue that someone of the calibre of Mohammed Atta would have been incapable of being brainwashed.

When Atta taped his will, he was not yet the leader of the hijackers. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the organiser of the plot, had earmarked two other men - Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar - as his spearhead and had sent them to flight school in California. But he quickly changed his mind.

His protégés failed to live up to his expectations. One flight instructor actually called them "dumb and dumber".

Much more importantly, Atta's exceptional abilities had just been discovered.

The perfect soldier was here and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could not have asked for more. I would even argue that had not Atta accidentally appeared on Khalid's radar, the "aeroplanes operation", as it is known to Al-Qaeda, may never have stood a chance of success.

Yosri Fouda is the chief investigative reporter for Al-Jazeera Television Pictures: The Sunday Times Tarnak Farm, near Kandahar, where Mohammed Atta's video was shot, has a special place in the history of Al-Qaeda: it was once Osama Bin Laden's personal kingdom within Afghanistan.
Exclusively Arab, it was home for Bin Laden's wives and children, as well as for the elite fighters being trained for special operations. And, as we now know, for a few weeks in early 2000 it was home to Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers.

The farm, which covered about 100 acres, lay on a patch of desert about three miles south of Kandahar airport. It had originally been constructed by the Afghan government as an agricultural co-operative.

A mud-brick wall was built 10ft high to create a compound; inside there were about 80 one and two-storey buildings, including dormitories, storehouses, a small mosque and a building that Bin Laden converted into a medical clinic for his family and followers.

US intelligence knew Bin Laden, already a wanted terrorist, used Tarnak as his base, and in spring 1998 the CIA's Counterterrorist Center began working on a plan to capture him at the compound, partly with the help of Afghan tribal fighters.

Afghans scouted and mapped the farm, and the CIA photographed it from space. The plan called for about 30 fighters to assemble at a staging post before driving to a second position a few miles from Tarnak.

From there the main raiding party would walk to the farm, arriving at 2am and avoiding minefields by crawling through drainage ditches. A second group would make its way towards the front gate, taking out the two guards as the main party attacked the group of huts where Bin Laden's wives slept.

The plan was to bundle Bin Laden into a Toyota Land Cruiser and drive him to to a cave complex 30 miles away already stocked with food and water.

However, getting the plan accepted at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, was not straightforward. It was known that dozens of women and children lived in the compound, and security chiefs feared there would be many casualties.

By June 1998, much to the disappointment of the field officers responsible for devising the plan, nobody at a senior level within the CIA seemed willing to support it. Nor was there any support within the White House.

The plan was called off shortly afterwards. CIA abandoned plan to snatch Bin Laden from Afghan farm

Atta's journey to mass murder

September 1, 1968 Born in Kafr el-Sheikh in the Nile delta, Egypt

October 1986 Joined Cairo University to study town planning; graduated in 1990

July 24, 1992 Arrived in Germany on a cultural exchange programme

November 23, 1992 Registered for a master's degree in urban planning at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg

End 1997 Thought to have travelled to Afghanistan for the first time, staying close to the compound of Osama Bin Laden near Kandahar

November 1, 1998 Moved into an apartment in Germany with other members of what later became known as the Hamburg cell. Many Al-Qaeda members lived in this apartment at various times; the September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed visited repeatedly. Ziad Jarrah, the flight 93 pilot with whom Atta is pictured above, moved close by at about the same time

November 29, 1999 Atta flew from Istanbul to Pakistan. From there he travelled to Afghanistan

January 2000 At Bin Laden's Tarnak Farm he is filmed laughing and joking with Jarrah while filming his last will and testament

March 2000 From Germany, Atta contacted 31 US flight schools to discuss pilot training

June 3, 2000 Entered US for the first time

July 2000 Atta enrolled at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida. Jarrah trains at a flight school nearby

November 2000 Both earned their instrument certificates from the FAA

December 29, 2000 Atta practised on a Boeing 727 simulator in Miami

January 4, 2001 Atta flew to Spain to co-ordinate with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key Al-Qaeda planner, returning to America a week later

April 11 2001 Atta rented an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida, and assisted with the arrival of other hijackers

July-September 2001 Atta made eight or nine flights around America, some to meet other hijackers, some to carry out reconnaissance

August 28, 2001 Atta and other hijackers buy flight tickets for September 11

The other hijackers

Nineteen men hijacked four planes. They acted in teams of five, except on United Airlines 93, which had four hijackers led by Jarrah

Fifteen of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates. Atta came from Egypt, while Jarrah came from Lebanon. Only Atta and Jarrah were highly educated

Four weeks before the attacks Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, had been arrested, ostensibly on immigration charges, after the FBI became suspicious about his pilot training

He later denied knowing about the September 11 attacks, but did plead guilty to conspiring to hijack planes. He is serving life in a US prison

It is thought that 18 of the 19 terrorists recorded video wills. Before this weekend only five had come to light and none from the four pilots
The attacks and the toll

United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center towers on the morning of September 11, 2001. A total of 2,602 people died in the towers and on the ground

American Airlines flight 77, carrying 64 people, crashed into the Pentagon shortly afterwards: 125 people died on the ground

United Airlines flight 93 is thought to have been heading for Capitol Hill. But it crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Forty crew and passengers died

There were no survivors from any of the planes, which were carrying 265 people. In total, the September 11 attacks are thought to have killed 2,973 people, although some others are still listed as missing

Rice arrives today in Saudi Arabia for talks with King Abdullah, then flies to Egypt for a day of meetings before heading to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The US came under strong pressure to take a more active role in trying to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks after being seen to favor Israel too heavily in its devastating response to attacks by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah in July.

European and moderate Arab allies, whose support is key to US plans for Iraq, Lebanon and Iran, see the festering Israeli-Palestinian stalemate as feeding instability and radicalism across the region.

But Washington's main allies in relaunching the process, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, are seen as too politically weak at home to guarantee the concessions both sides need to make to reach their goal of creating a stable Palestinian state.

Abbas, a soft-spoken businessman who has never achieved the authority of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, has been undermined by the victory in Palestinian elections early this year of the radical Islamic movement Hamas.

The group, which still officially seeks Israel's destruction, took control of the Palestinian legislature in March, prompting Israel, the US and Europeans to cut essential financial aid to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Abbas has been trying to draw Hamas into a unity government that would meet international conditions of recognizing Israel's right to exist, rejecting violence and accepting past peace agreements.

But so far the Islamic group has balked.

Olmert has also been unable to fill the shoes left empty when his predecessor,
Ariel Sharon, was felled by a massive stroke in January.

His political standing plummeted following the war in Lebanon, in which Israel's once all-powerful military was unable to inflict a clear defeat on Hezbollah guerrillas despite a destructive month-long air and ground offensive.

Under attack for his conduct of the war, Olmert has shelved a plan to move ahead with the Palestinians by withdrawing from parts of the West Bank following a similar pullout from Gaza last year.

"There's pressure on the US administration to at least go through the motions of trying to revive the peace proccess," said Haim Malka, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"But fundamentally the gaps between the Israelis and Palestinians are so far apart at this point that there's really very little chance of any meaningful process," he said.

Washington is well aware of the obstacles, and State Department spokesman Sean McCormack stressed that the Israeli-Palestinian issue "is not the sole focus of (Rice's) trip".

"She's going into this trip with the idea that she's going to talk about the full agenda of issues that are before leaders in the region" including Lebanon, Syria's destabilizing role, Iraq and Iran, he said.

President George W. Bush's focus on the war in Iraq and on confronting Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program is likely to keep the Israeli-Palestinian track on a diplomatic back burner, said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution.

"I don't think the administration can have Iran and Iraq as priorities and at the same time be effective on the Arab-Israeli peace process," Telhami said.

"The view at the White House is that that Arab-Israeli effort is needed in part to solidify an anti-Iran coalition," he said.

The US plan to impose sanctions on Iran for ignoring an August 31 UN deadline to halt its uranium enrichment activities has stalled due to strong opposition from Russia and China and unease among key European allies.

As European-led negotiations with Iran drag on with little sign of concessions from Tehran, Washington needs the backing of its few Arab allies to step up the pressure.

"What they will try to do is strengthen the Israeli front with moderate Arab states -- Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan -- in terms of Iran, which is of grave concern to the Gulf states," Malka said.

For this, the highlight of Rice's trip will be a meeting with foreign ministers from the six-state Gulf Cooperation Council plus Egypt and Jordan, reportedly planned during her stop in Cairo.

As I went downtown on the subway Thursday I wondered whether I wasn't going to seem a fool for how excited I'd been in the days leading up to the debate. Then when I got there that selfconsciousness vanished, because the excitement was so palpable. The lines snaked all around Cooper Union. This had to do in part with the security measures to prevent anyone from blowing the place up, but more to do with the stormsurge of interest. All the tickets had been sold, and there were a couple hundred people on a line just to get extra seats. I had bought an extra ticket, and impetuously gave it to a girl on the line.

The hall was subterranean. You went down into one of the great spaces of New York, with arched wings of dressed brownstone going off the columns to the walls, and then the pleasure was the pleasure of intellectual seriousness. Later I learned that the Great Hall was the place where the NAACP and the women's suffragists' movement was born. I saw a great number of people I half-know, and it was evident that the ideas that Walt and Mearsheimer put forward are of tremendous interest to many serious people. Lewis Lapham was sitting behind me, Ham Fish was a row away. I saw Adam Shatz of the Nation, Michael Massing of NYRB, Mary Kay Wilmers, the editor of the LRB, and so on. Even my wife had come. It's hard to get her out.

Today I wonder how much of this debate I will remember years from now, and wonder if it won't be the moment in which Rashid Khalidi gave Dennis Ross his microphone because Ross's had failed, and then Ross said a little too smoothly he always tried to empower Palestinians, and Khalidi said, with a kind of ingenuousness, "I would give you the shirt off my back, but it's too small." LRB had, smartly, interspersed the two sides at the two tables; despite all the fighting, there was a feeling of community, sustained when Shlomo Ben-Ami stayed after the debate with his three "adversaries" to answer the unending questions from the hardcore.

The first half hour was spent attacking the scholarship of the LRB paper, then the next hour and a half was spent arguing about the dimensions of the lobby.

The waterboarding administered to Mearsheimer over "shoddy scholarship" seemed to me further proof of the existence of the "lobby." The shortcomings in Mearsheimer and Walt's paper are that they drew broad conclusions on the basis of scarce press reports about this or that scarcely-seen event, and so there was an element of supposition about their conclusions. But since when is reliance on published reports rather than on "original" research and interviews a disqualifier for publication? With some passion, and the feeling of being marginalized, Shlomo Ben-Ami attacked Mearsheimer for leaving Israel out of the paper as a living entity. He's right. But 1, the paper's not about Israel. And 2, more to the point, why does this work have to attain such a high bar, in terms of breadth-the quality Ben-Ami saw as lacking-in order to broach the issue? I guess the paper had to be perfect to be published. And that's the problem. Nothing is perfect, so nothing can be published. When in reality, democratic debates are filled with speculation and interpretation. In a word, intellectual freedom. The discourse has none of that here.

Two friends of mine faulted Mearsheimer for reading from testimonies about the lobby rather than offering a synthesis. Having seen him a few times, I thought he was back on his heels, yet it is understandable to me. He was under attack from the first second, in Yankee Stadium no less, in the first open debate of his ideas. He was without his co-author, Steve Walt (who had important family obligations in Boston), and Walt, of Harvard, knows the court of the east coast in ways that Mearsheimer, who is more of a tough outsider, does not. The most vicious charges were leveled at Mearsheimer--you are alleging a "cabal," Martin Indyk kept saying--and yet the author wasn't given any more time than anyone else in which to respond.

After the debate a friend of mine confronted Indyk in the hallway outside. "I was leaving and couldn't resist giving him a piece of my mind," my friend reports. "I've never laid eyes on the guy before, except on television occasionally. I told him that his vicious and snide remarks had backfired with the audience and that if he had treated his adversaries with respect, he would have fared better. He looked rather taken aback and vanished into an elevator."

Let's dwell on the "cabal" charge. Indyk was saying that Mearsheimer was guilty of anti-Semitic stereotype. Tony Judt blasted Indyk when he said that social scientists are called upon to observe reality, not decide whether what they're observing fills some bigot's ideas or not. Both Khalidi and Judt would say that the paper did not go far enough. Again I'll refer to Judt's bold statement about the NYT Op-Ed page requiring him to state he was Jewish when he wrote in support of Walt and Mearsheimer last April. This is tragic. If you think that only 1.3 percent of Americans are allowed to speak out on this issue&#%151;the lobby, whatever it is-we're in bad shape. I know: the Holocaust; if non-Jews express themselves, the next thing you know the Jews will be kicked out of Century and Cosmos Club and the U.S. Senate and there will be camps. Our discourse is being held hostage by these old ways of thinking.

Khalidi made a similar contribution, saying how rare it was for Palestinian voices to be included in public debate. And if Walt had been there, I imagine this confessional spirit might have freed him to tell of the special pressures that have come to bear on him at Harvard, the financial blackmails to the institution that have arisen from his speaking his mind (I mentioned these threats in the Nation last spring), and the ways in which his own burgeoning career, at 51, has been potentially punctured by his stance.

We're not talking about a cabal. We're talking about a thousand acts of devotion by American Jews who care about Israel and have most of them not been there. This simply cannot be divorced from an understanding of the culture of power, and the role of Jews in the establishment. Ross and Indyk were two of several Jews on the Clinton team negotiating at Camp David. (According to Clayton Swisher's book, The Truth About Camp David, there was only one Arab-American in the big team.) This morning on Meet the Press, the two Ohio Senate contenders, Mike DeWine and Sherrod Brown, argued all about terrorism, and the word Israel came up once, as a source of grievance, but there was no mention of the Occupied Territories, let alone the denial of democracy to over 1 million Palestinians there. As for my commenters who talk about the clash of civilizations, I agree with you, Islam needs to break on through to modernity; but if you think we can ignore these questions, you're nuts. But as Meet the Press demonstrates, our leadership cannot discuss them openly. American presidents have been against the settlements but done nothing really to stop them. And Congress is bought and paid for by AIPAC, a point that even Indyk and Ross seemed to concede, even as they claimed that an American President could act with complete freedom.

I repeat a metaphor from my last blog. It's the elephant in the room, and here are 6 blind men coming out of the room, and telling you what they know about it....

That would be my takeaway from the debate: Our journalism is broken. There are 100 books about Iraq out now, from people who have been there. There is not 1 book out about the Israel lobby. Walt and Mearsheimer essentially performed a journalistic function, and did what journalists would call a clip job-assembling previously-published reports before making large conclusions. A basic function of democratic society is completely kaput here. I did a front page magazine story for the NYT on the gun lobby. Never has there been one on the Israel lobby. There aren't TV documentaries on it; 60 Minutes and Ted Koppel are not trying to pin down Abe Foxman about his mission or Malcolm Hoenlein about whether he called Clinton during Camp David, let alone going near AIPAC. Our society's lens is simply not turned on these institutions in anything like the way it ought to be.

Four Palestinians were killed on Sunday in armed clashes between Hamas militants and members of security services who took to the streets demanding for delayed salaries.

Al-Sha'er called on the protesters not to resort to weapons or violence and keep their strike peaceful. Hamas says it would stop the strike by force, accusing security forces of attacking "public and private priorities."

Al-Sha'er, who was released last week from Israel, stressed that forming a national unity government would be the only way to end the crisis.

However, al-Sha'er admitted it was difficult for the Hamas-led government to secure salaries, saying the problem of salaries was "economic and political."

The government faces economic sanctions and western aid cutoff for its political platform based on Hamas charter that calls for removing Israel from the map.

Meanwhile, al-Sha'er appealed for all factions to work hard and save the situation by stopping provocative statements.

The mayor of Tubas, where a small Greek Orthodox Church was attacked, accused "suspicious elements," a reference to Israeli Shin Bet (Israel's chief domestic intelligence agency) agents of " having embarked on this ugly act and criminal act."

"It is either Israeli collaborators or some overzealous fools upset by the remarks of the Pope," said Iqab Darghmeh (Abu Ahmed), in a telephone interview.

Darghmeh and Muslim notables, including representatives of Fatah, Hamas and civic leaders visited the church Sunday morning to show solidarity with the small Christian community in the town.

"Christians here are not a separate sect. They are our flesh and blood. They are our brothers. An attack on their churches is an attack on Islam and the Palestinian people."

The fire-bombings have been widely condemned by religious and political leaders throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Sheikh Muhammed Hussein, the highest-ranking Muslim clergyman in East Jerusalem described the bombing as "immoral, unethical and injurious to Palestinian unity."

"Those who perpetrated these acts don't represent the Palestinian people. They are a gang of ignoramuses and fanatics, or suspicious elements." In the Palestinian political lexicon, "suspicious elements" is an allusion to Israeli collaborators and informers.

Earlier, the Mufti of Ramallah, Jamal Bawatneh, called on all Palestinians to inform on any person seen attacking or vandalizing Christian churches and property.

"I urge our people to inform on any person carrying out a crime against people and property. Failing to do so amounts to treason and complicity, " read a statement issued by the Palestinian Interior Ministry in Gaza.

Hamas condemns vandalism

Meanwhile, the Islamic Resistance group, Hamas, strongly condemned attacks on churches in parts of the West Bank, calling such attacks "criminal and harmful to the Palestinian cause."

"I am sure that Israel is enjoying this. Israel always wants to create problems and divisions between Muslims and Christians. And those who committed these acts are only serving Zionist propaganda and goals," said Yousuf Ibrahim, a Hamas spokesperson in the Bethlehem region.

"I am nearly certain that at least some of the perpetrators are Israeli agents."

On Sunday, the Palestinian Authority (PA) Interior Minister, Sa'eed Siyam, ordered the security apparatus to step up security measures around churches in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Pope's remarks condemned

Muslim and most Christian religious and secular leaders did condemn anti-Islam remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI in Germany on 14 September.

The Pope, quoting a medieval Byzantine emperor as saying that "Show me just what Muhammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

The remarks drew angry but mostly non-violent reactions from across the Muslim world, with Muslim leaders calling on the Pope to apologize for offending Muslim sensibilities.

Some Muslim scholars interpreted the remarks as "a declaration of war on Islam."

"When you say that Islam is evil, you are not only de-legitimizing it, but encouraging open war on its followers," said the Supreme Sharia Judge in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Sheikh Taysir Tamimi.

The pope more or less apologized during a Sunday mass.

"I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims.

"These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought."

The violence dampened already fading hopes of a national unity government being formed by the two groups that could end crippling economic sanctions.

The trouble flared as Israel withdrew the bulk of its remaining troops from Lebanon after its war with Hezbollah.

The pull-out, which did not include part of the eastern village of Rajar, for which security arrangements have still to be negotiated, was confirmed by United Nations' troops, who have been taking up positions in southern Lebanon in support of the country's army, in accordance with UN Security Council resolution 1701. But Dan Halutz, the Israeli army's chief of staff, warned his forces would strike again if Hezbollah sought to rebuild its positions near the border.

General Halutz also raised the prospect of a broad ground offensive in Gaza to try to stop Palestinian militants from firing homemade rockets into Israel.

However, the ordinary people of Gaza were yesterday trying to avoid getting caught in the crossfire of fighting between Hamas and Fatah that continued for most of the day.

"This is forbidden in Islam - we are in the holy month of Ramadan," said Majed Badawi, 33, who managed to escape uninjured after his car was hit by gunfire.

"It's a shame on Hamas, who call themselves real Muslims, and a shame on Fatah as well. Why are they fighting and over what? We are victims because of both of them."

The fighting started yesterday morning in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, where dozens of police gathered outside the Bank of Palestine to demand back-wages.

The clashes later spilled over to an area near the president's residence. Hamas militiamen scrambled up to the rooftop of the nearby agriculture ministry and began firing rocket-propelled grenades and rifles at the Fatah presidential guard.

In response to the violence, Fatah protesters marched to the cabinet building in Ramallah pelted it with stones, broke in and set the second floor on fire.

Fatah and Hamas officials blamed each other.

"Nothing can justify this violence," said Tawfik Abu Khoussa, a Fatah spokesman.

Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the Hamas government, said the violence was "regrettable" but insisted the Hamas force had been acting with restraint when it was attacked. "The protest today was beyond acceptable legal norms and turned truly into lawlessness," he said.

Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian prime minister and a member of Hamas, later spoke by telephone to Mahmoud Abbas, the president and a Fatah member, and called for joint action to end the violence and return to talks over the national unity government.

In Lebanon, meanwhile, people celebrated the withdrawal of the Israelis.

"This is a great victory for the Lebanese in the south and for Hezbollah; we will organise a great party," said Hamed Faris, a farmer from Marun ar-Ras, just north of the border with Israel.

More than 1,200 Lebanese people, mostly civilians, and 162 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed during the 34-day war in the summer.

We allowed the settlers to make a living by providing them with huge amounts of money (more than 5 times per capita compared to residents of southern development towns.)

We paved roads for Jews only, a case of blatant apartheid, while defending it using witty Jewish self-righteousness in the absence of fair and public reporting of the budgets involved, deeds committed, expropriation of land, and disregard for vandalism.

Morality, justice, law and order stopped at the Green Line. Lawlessness prevailed right under the noses and protective and soothing hand of the IDF and police, as lawbreaking settlers made their own laws undisturbed, and at times with the kind help of authorities.

Every illegal settlement enjoys water, hydro, and a paved road. The permanent residents, the natives, which the Israeli regime had to take care of, became seemingly non-existent. As if they are there but not there at the same time. The government only notices them if they bother it by filing complaints.

It's no wonder that the leader of a political movement in Israel and a Knesset member can declare that we should expel the Palestinians (and also Israel's Arab citizens) in order to take over what is still left to them.

But as we usually present it - we're the victim while they're the murderers with blood on their hands. We never report the number of Palestinians we murdered from the sky and killed by fire - women, children, the elderly, whole families, thousands of them.

No wonder they hate us

Aerial bombings kill wanted suspects, while eliminating many civilians - yet the hands of the pilot are "clean" of any blood. After all, the victims were killed at the press of a button while their killers returned home safely. None of them committed suicide to kill wanted suspects, who by the way are not a "ticking bomb" and no evidence exists against them.

At times it appears that the IDF, particularly during the last, needless Lebanon war, turns the Gaza Strip into live-fire training grounds for all army branches. Is it a wonder they hate us, and is it a wonder they elected Hamas in free elections, the same Hamas whose establishment we encouraged in order to undermine the PLO?

Many peace-making windows were opened over the years. We hindered all of them, because we coveted the whole of the Territories. We had the Oslo agreements. Twenty countries, which in the past had no ties with us, recognized Israel. We had welfare, international ties were blossoming, peace was at our gates - but we didn't want to make concessions.

Rabin was murdered for the sake of the settlers, and the job of burying peace-making attempts was completed by Ehud Barak with his "There's nobody to talk to!" spin. In order to establish himself in power, Barak also allowed Arik Sharon to visit Temple Mount with armed escorts, even though he was asked by Arafat the night before not to allow this due to the frustration and fury among Palestinians.

Now, another possibility for dialogue has opened. Yet our government is again turning its back on it. They don't know how to and don't want to talk. Just now we brutally destroyed half of Lebanon at an immense cost and turned a million civilians into refugees in their own country.

Another superb achievement by the IDF and government of Israel. We're willing to resort to any provocation and blow any incident out of proportion, just to hold on to the regular pretext that "There's nobody to talk to", and that we don't talk to terrorists.

Kahane won

Yet the acts we undertake by starving, curfews, deportations, the theft of water and land, false arrests, and targeted killings - all those are, of course, not terror, because the acts are undertaken by a national army through the power of a decision made by legitimate government.

Wonderful, it turns out we forget the fascist states (including Stalin's USSR) that were very legitimate according to their own logic, while committing a plethora of terror acts.

The time has come for the government of Israel to start talking peace, and end the excuses for disqualifying and boycotting Palestinian representatives. The use of arms does not have to be the first reaction. Starvation, imprisonment, and expropriation by an occupying force attest to an unwillingness to reach an agreement and an addiction to greed.

This is reminiscent of Benny Elon comments: "We'll embitter their lives so that they transfer themselves elsewhere."

One cannot escape the impression that the racist and brutal declarations by Effie Eitam gave public expression to government policy over the years. We must note that the courts - the defenders of law and order, including the High Court of Justice - were partners to the developments that led to the legitimization of parties and Knesset members reminiscent of the racist, crude words uttered by MK Eitam.

In fact, it appears that Meir Kahane won, and we continue in his path - we don't talk, but rather, only kill, raze homes and roads and bridges, cut off electricity, fill prisons with women and children and elected officials, because all of them are the "terrorists" while we, the Jewish state, need to be defended from them. We're always the ultimate victim.

As Golda Meir said: "I don't forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill them." There you go, she's the killer, yet she's the victim.

For our sake, the citizens of Israel, and for the sake of brining peace and quiet - government leaders, start talking and keep doing it until you reach an agreement.

Unruly sons will be brought back into the country, we'll be respecting UN decisions and international conventions, we'll earnestly memorize the universal human rights declaration and our own declaration of independence, we'll rehabilitate our soul, and we'll attempt to establish a democratic country governed by the law and justice. Shana Tova.