They told WAFA that Israeli soldiers stormed Beit Fujjar and Al-Ebeidiya towns , south and east Bethlehem and arrested eleven citizens, including three brothers and elders. They were led into an unknown location.

In Tubas, the IOF took position in the roads and entrances of the city, launched a search campaign and arrested a youth Omar Faqha 19, leading him into an unknown spot, witnesses told WAFA.

Brigadier General Baruch Spiegel, assistant to the Defense Minister, retired earlier this month. Spiegel was also in charge of the various issues relating to the territories, which Dov Weisglass, chief of staff in prime minister Ariel Sharon's office, promised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in writing that Israel would deal with. These commitments included illegal settlement building, improvements in the conditions of Palestinian civilians, and a closer oversight over the conduct of soldiers at IDF roadblocks.

One of Spiegel's tasks was to update the data base on settlement activities. During talks with American officials and non-government organizations such as Peace Now, it emerged that the defense establishment lacked up to date information on the settlements, which was mostly based on data provided by the Civil Administration in the territories.

The lack of updated information stemmed from the fact that the defense establishment preferred not to know what was going on, but was also linked to a number of key officials in the Civil Administration actively deleting information from the data base out of ideological allegiance with the settlers.

Spiegel and his team compared the data available from the Civil Administration to that of the Americans, and carried out dozens of overflights of the territories, using private aircraft at great expense, in order to complete the data base.

The findings of the study, security sources say, show an amazing discrepancy between the Civil Administration's data and the reality on the ground. The data in Spiegel's investigation served as the basis for the report on the illegal outposts prepared by attorney Talya Sasson and made public in March 2005.

"Everyone is talking about the 107 outposts," said a source familiar with the data, "but that is small change. The really big picture is the older settlements, the 'legal' ones. The construction there has been ongoing for years, in blatant violation of the law and the regulations of proper governance."

Three years ago, in talks with the Americans, Israel promised that all new construction in the older settlements would take place near existing neighborhoods. The idea was that construction would be limited to meeting the needs of the settlements' natural growth, and bringing to an end the out-of-control expansion over territory.

In practice, the data shows that Israel failed to meet its commitments: many new neighborhoods were systematically built on the edge of areas of the settlement's jurisdiction, which is a much larger territory than the actual planning charts account for.

The data also shows that in many cases the construction was carried out on private Palestinian land. In the masterplans, more often than not, Palestinian properties were included in the construction planned for the future. These included Palestinian properties to which the state had promised access.

However, exploiting the intifada and arguing that the settlers should not be exposed to security risks, Palestinian farmers were prevented access to their properties that were annexed by Israeli settlements.

In many settlements, including Ofra and Mevo Horon, homes have been constructed on private Palestinian land.

"The media is busy with the outposts, but how many of these are really large settlements like Migron? In most cases, it's a matter of a few mobile homes. Spiegel's study shows the real situation in the settlements themselves - and it is a lot more serious than what we knew to date," one of the sources said.

A senior security official expressed concern that with Spiegel's retirement, the data base will not be updated and the data will be lost.

"The [defense] establishment does not necessarily have an interest in preserving this information. It may cause diplomatic embarrassment vis-a-vis the Americans and cause a political scandal. It is not unlikely that there will be those who will seek to destroy the data," the senior officer says.

Other relevant sources said it is necessary for an objective, external source, like the State Comptroller's office, to intervene in this matter.

A statement issued by the Defense Minister's office in response said that "the matter is being examined internally and staff work will be completed soon, and the parts of the report that can be published will be made available. The Defense Minister will discuss the matter with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert."

Meanwhile, construction in the new outposts has intensified. Sources in the Yesha Council say that since the Lebanon War, "Junior officers on the ground are in our favor and in many instances turn a blind eye regarding mobile homes in place."

by Martin Patience, 24th October

Olive harvest sparks tensions

Before dawn, Kanaan al-Jamal, 38, hauls his two young children from their beds and along with his wife they set off to tend the olive groves close to their home.

In olive groves dotted across the rolling West Bank, Palestinian farmers are preparing for the harvest: pruning the trees, collecting spoilt olives, and preparing ground sheets under the trees to catch the fruit.

But the Palestinian farmers are also preparing for violent clashes.

"It's a difficult time," says Mr Jamal, referring to the harvest. "But the olive tree is part of our religion; it is part of our culture."

During the olive picking season, tensions run high between Jewish settlers and the Israeli military on the one hand, and Palestinian farmers on the other.

Access Problems

Many of the West Bank's olive groves lie close to Jewish settlements and there are frequent clashes between the two sides.

For years settlers have been attacking Palestinian farmers and chopping down their trees.

But this olive picking season is set to be different, insists the Israeli army.

The military has finally realised that it has to offer protection to Palestinian farmers.

A two-year court battle led by human rights groups now means that the Israeli army is required to beef up its protection of Palestinian olive farmers and allow them full access to their lands.

Palestinian farmers often require a permit from the army to visit their lands which lie close to Jewish settlements.

Last month, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz announced that anyone interfering or harassing the farmers during the picking season would be dealt with severely.

Israeli Human rights groups are praising the move but say more needs to be done.

"I think the military has finally realised that it will have to offer some protection for the Palestinian farmers," says Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem.

"But access often depends on commanders in local areas and on a day-to-day basis."

Mr Jamal, however, says that the Israeli army frequently prevents farmers from his town of Assera Shamiliya - located 5km north of Nablus - reaching their land.

"They say we have to co-ordinate with them," he says. "But it's impossible and it often takes days to get a permit. We don't bother. Why should we? It's our land."

Mr Jamal says that Israeli soldiers riding in military jeeps often appear in the town's groves. The soldiers fire tear gas and live bullets and bark at the villagers through loudspeakers to leave the area, he says.

Bumper Harvest

Some human rights groups accompany the Palestinian farmers to their groves to ensure they can gather their harvest.

Rabbi Ascherman, co-director of Rabbis for Human Rights, insists that the presence of his group helps the Palestinians negotiate with the army and ward off attacks by Jewish settlers.

"But the ideal situation would be if we didn't need to be there," he says. "The ideal situation would be if the farmers could just harvest in peace."

For Mr Jamal and his family the coming weeks mean earlier mornings and harder work. But this is only the start, he says.

Problems arise when Palestinian farmers try and sell their produce because transport restrictions in the West Bank.

"When we start trying to sell the olives it's a whole new battle with the Israeli authorities," says Mr Jamal.

Surrounded by sand-coloured rocky mountains, Nablus is also encircled by Israeli army checkpoints and military bases. For Palestinians, leaving means queuing for hours, unless you are a male aged 16 to 35. Then, exit is prohibited without a permit.

Palestinians brand the Israeli restrictions collective punishment. Israel calls the militant stronghold a "hotbed of terror activity".

A centre for trading olives, soap and other goods for thousands of years, Nablus should be the business hub of the West Bank. Instead, many entrepreneurs have left. Other residents say they want to leave. Depression is common.

At night, gunfire echoes from the ancient Old City: Israeli troops on a raid or rival militant factions settling scores.

"This is a story that should be written with tears," said Hasan Abu Libdeh, head of the Palestinian stock market, which was set up here a decade ago amid optimism about peace.

"Nablus, a magnificent city, is a corpse. It just breaks my heart."

Israel clamped tight restrictions on Nablus, north of Jerusalem, during a Palestinian uprising that erupted six years ago after peace talks collapsed.

The army said there were six checkpoints around Nablus and its 200,000 people, noting that curbs were also in place on young men leaving.

"In many cases, the presence of checkpoints in the area of Nablus has prevented terrorists from entering Israel and killing civilians," the army said in response to questions from Reuters.

The army referred to three recent instances where soldiers at checkpoints had arrested militants carrying explosives.

Inside Nablus, militants are not hard to find.

Standing in a shop in a narrow alleyway of the Old City, a young member of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an M-16 assault rifle slung over his shoulder, watches people passing by. He is reluctant to answer questions.

Outside, posters of gunmen killed in clashes with Israeli troops line the stone walls.

One shows Fadi Qafeesheh, 33, shot dead by Israeli soldiers on Aug. 31. In the picture, Qafeesheh strikes various poses, holding a pump-action shotgun, an assault rifle and a pistol. Some residents said he made vests for suicide bombers.

TIDE OF HISTORY

Nablus has a long biblical history and is important to Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Herbalist Abdulrahman Arafat, 49, says his family's store in the Old City dates back to 1773.

He points to a sketch on the wall of his great grandfather wearing a felt hat called a fez, which was popular under the Ottomans, among the many rulers of Nablus.

Employing a mix of science and tradition, Arafat patiently dispenses herbs, seeds, oils, chamomile lotion and ginger to customers seeking help for their ailments.

His ready smile disappears when he speaks about his city.

"Nablus is a dying city. It is a city in a jail," he said.

Conditions have worsened since Hamas Islamists, sworn to destroying Israel, took over the Palestinian government last March, prompting a U.S.-led aid embargo and a power struggle with moderate President Mahmoud Abbas.

Although there are no statistics available, residents and officials say many businessmen have left to live in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Others to go have included intellectuals and skilled workers. The poor, and young men, remain.

Unemployment is high, investment stagnant.

"Who would dare invest in Nablus? You need two hours just to get out," said Shaher Saed, secretary general of the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions, speaking on the sidelines of a recent meeting in the city.

Maher Abu Zant, a psychologist and head of the sociology and social work department at the city's An-Najah University, said he was concerned by the number of students suffering depression.

Students often came to him wanting to drop out because they were unhappy and saw no point continuing their studies, he said.

"People in Nablus feel they are isolated from the world," Abu Zant said. "Nablus should be the economic capital of Palestine. But it's a dead city. It's very sad."

The Israeli army says it tries to ease passage through checkpoints for Palestinians, especially during busy periods.

"The (army) makes great efforts to ease the daily lives of the Palestinian population but will take the necessary measures to maintain the safety and security of the citizens of Israel," the army statement said.



DECEPTIVE BEAUTY

From a distance, Nablus looks alluring.

Cream-coloured apartment buildings, eight to 10 storeys high, carpet the sides of the two steep mountains that create a valley where the Old City lies.

At night, the peaks provide a vantage point to soak up the atmosphere. Shimmering green lights in minarets show where each of the city's 41 mosques are located.

Up close, Nablus looks less appealing. Vacant lots are strewn with garbage. Many traffic lights don't work. Drivers usually ignore those that do.

"There is no life here. No money, everybody is depressed. I would like to leave," said Nashaat Humidan, 21, an economics student at An-Najah University.

Community leaders said the Israeli restrictions were having a counterproductive effect, playing into the hands of militant groups and fostering hardened attitudes toward the Jewish state.

"I meet Israelis all the time. I say you have to take the risk. By suffocating this city you are creating more fundamentalists, more terrorists," said stock market chief Abu Libdeh, also a former Palestinian government minister.

Abu Libdeh lives in Ramallah, 45 km (28 miles) to the south. He said he could not imagine living in Nablus, and uses a permit to get home via one of the checkpoints each day.

"Every night there is violence. For me, the only headache is crossing the checkpoint," Abu Libdeh said.

The attack killed seven, including a prominent official in the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), and injured over 30 others.

A spokesman for the armed resistance wing of the PRC held a press conference Monday in Gaza City to discuss the killing. He announced a declaration of alert for all armed resistance members, calling upon them to respond to this crime. He also called for Palestinian factions to renounce differences and "guide your weapons to Israel."

"UNHCR's mandate does not extend to the majority of Palestinian refugees by virtue of Paragraph 7 (c) of the organization's Statute which excludes persons who continue to receive from other organs or agencies of the United Nations protection or assistance. A similar provision excludes these refugees from the scope of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention."

The State of the World's Refugees 2006, UNHCR Chapter 5 [1]

Despite international recognition of the gravity of the problem, there remains a considerable lack of popular knowledge and/or misinformation about the world's largest refugee population. A recent study of TV news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the UK discovered that most British viewers were unaware that Palestinians were uprooted from their homes and land when Israel was established in 1948.

Many of those familiar with the Palestinian case tend, as the authors of a working paper developed by the Refugee Studies Centre for the UK Department of International Development (DFID) noted, "to see them as a case apart from other refugees in the region and, indeed, the global context generally." [2] This can be ascribed, in part, to the contentious debate that envelops this refugee question, particularly the right of return. It is also due to the unique aspects of Palestinian displacement:

- The UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 recommending the partition of Mandate Palestine into two states contributed to the initial forced displacement of Palestinians.
- The universally-accepted definition of a 'refugee' - Article 1A (2) of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees - does not apply to the majority of Palestinian refugees.
- The UN established separate international agencies (UNCCP and UNRWA - see below) to provide protection and assistance and to seek durable solutions for this refugee population based on principles elaborated in relevant UN resolutions.
- Most Palestinians today are both refugees and stateless persons.
- While voluntary repatriation remains in principle and in practice the primary durable solution for refugees worldwide, Israel - as the state of origin for the majority of the refugees - and key members of the international community, including the US and the European Union, continue to view host country integration and resettlement as the primary durable solutions for Palestinian refugees.

Palestinians and Israelis both make claims about the uniqueness of Palestinian refugees. Many Israelis, for example, claim that the separate regime established for Palestinian refugees (combined with the reluctance of Arab host states to resettle the refugees who cannot exercise their right of return) prevents a solution to the long-standing refugee problem. Palestinians argue that while the UN continues to affirm, in principle, the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes of origin, member states have failed to muster the political and material resources that have made refugee return possible in other contexts.

Root causes of displacement

Israelis and Palestinians, generally speaking, do not agree on the root causes of Palestinian displacement. Many Israelis argue that Palestinians fled during the 1948 war on orders of Arab commanders or that the mass displacement of the local Arab population was simply, in the words of Israeli historian Benny Morris, the unfortunate by-product of a war foisted upon the new Jewish state. Palestinians, on the other hand, describe 1948 as a Nakba (catastrophe) during which they were expelled by Israeli military forces and fled in fear, hoping to return to their homes once hostilities ceased.

The rival nature of Israeli and Palestinian narratives can be explained, in large part, by concerns about future refugee claims. Many Israeli Jews, for example, worry that an Israeli admission of responsibility will strengthen Palestinian demands for a right of return and for housing and property restitution. Nevertheless, archival research by Israeli historians like Morris, Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe has tended to affirm central tenets of the Palestinian narrative of the 1948 war previously documented by Palestinian researchers such as Qustantin Zurayk, 'Arif al-'Arif and Walid Khalidi and in the oral testimonies of Palestinians who lived through the war.

Historical records - corroborated by UN and Red Cross archives - paint a picture of military practices that were, at best, questionable under existing principles governing the laws of war. Just before his assassination by Jewish extremists in September 1948, Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Mediator for Palestine, reported "large-scale pillaging and plundering, and instances of destruction of villages without apparent military necessity." Even so, Pappe writes that the existence of a master plan to expel Palestinians is irrelevant: what mattered was "the formulation of an ideological community, in which every member, whether a newcomer or a veteran, knows only too well that they have to contribute to a recognised formula: the only way to fulfill the dream of Zionism is to empty the land of its indigenous population."

While the displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip during and after the 1967 war can be ascribed to a similar pattern of violations, the debate about why Palestinians fled in subsequent wars is arguably less contentious because prospective remedies - e.g. return to the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) - do not challenge the sovereignty and nature of Israel as a Jewish state. That is not to say that Israelis and Palestinians agree on remedies for refugees from the 1967 war and those displaced by nearly 40 years of military occupation. Israel's quarrel with the July 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the legal implications of the construction of the 650 km-long wall/barrier in the West Bank underscores the depth of disagreement between the two parties.

Who is a refugee?

Israelis and Palestinians also do not agree on who is a Palestinian refugee. During numerous negotiation sessions in the 1990s the parties failed to achieve consensus on a refugee definition. While Israel argued for a narrow definition restricted to first generation refugees - those actually displaced in 1948 and in 1967 - Palestinians advocated an inclusive or expanded definition that included children and spouses of refugees, and others in refugee-like conditions, including those deported from the OPT by Israel, persons who were abroad at the time of hostilities and unable to return, individuals whose residency rights Israel revoked and those who were not displaced but had lost access to their means of livelihood.

This disagreement is exacerbated by the fact that there is no comprehensive definition of a Palestinian refugee. The most commonly cited definition is that used by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN agency set up in 1949 - two years prior to the formation of UNHCR - to provide relief and assistance to the refugees in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Unlike Article 1A (2) of the 1951 Refugee Convention, however, the UNRWA definition merely establishes criteria for assistance - it does not define refugee status. A UN initiative in the 1980s to issue identity cards to all refugees, irrespective of whether or not they were recipients of international aid, failed due to the lack of cooperation among host states.

In the early 1950s, the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), which was established by General Assembly Resolution 194(III) to facilitate a solution to all aspects of the 1948 conflict, prepared a working definition of a Palestine refugee to identify those persons in need of international protection. The definition would have covered all persons displaced in Palestine during the 1948 war irrespective of ethnic, national or religious origins. In light of the intractable differences between Israel, the Arab states and the Palestinians, however, the Commission's protection mandate was greatly reduced and the definition was never adopted. The UN failed to provide the UNCCP with the machinery or resources to carry out its mandate in the context of a protracted conflict. The Commission reached the conclusion that it was unable to fulfill its mandate due to the lack of international political will. Today it has no budget and no staff.

Most Palestinian refugees fall under the scope of Article 1D of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which was inserted during the drafting process of the Convention to address the specific circumstances of Palestinian refugees. This took note of the fact that the UN had already set up specific agencies to protect and assist this refugee group. Only those Palestinians displaced for the first time after 1967 fall within the scope of Article 1A (2) of the Convention because they are not covered by the mandate of another UN agency. Nevertheless, Article 1D of the 1951 Refugee Convention is commonly misapplied in Palestinian asylum cases around the world.

How many refugees are there?

Not surprisingly, Israelis and Palestinians fail to agree on the number of Palestinian refugees. This is further complicated by lack of a universally-accepted refugee definition, a comprehensive registration system and frequent migration. But it also relates to security and political concerns in host countries like Jordan and Lebanon, fears about repatriation in the country of origin (Israel) and international concerns about capacity to deliver services and the impact on humanitarian aid budgets and to asylum claims. This explains the vast discrepancy in estimates of the Palestinian refugee population.

Israeli and Palestinian estimates of the total numbers of Palestinians displaced in 1948 range from a low of several hundred thousand upwards to nearly a million. The total numbers of Palestinians displaced for the first time from the 1967 OPT range from just over 100,000 to nearly 300,000. Demographic studies that compare the size of the pre-war Palestinian population to the number of Palestinians that remained after the end of both wars tend to confirm estimates in the higher range. Some estimate that around 20,000 Palestinians were displaced per annum after 1967.

Academic studies and popular media often cite UNRWA registration figures as the total size of the Palestinian refugee population. Latest UNRWA figures cite a total Palestinian refugee population of 4.25 million (Jordan 1.78m; Gaza 0.96m; West Bank 0.68m; Syria 0.42m and Lebanon 0.4m). [3] While UNRWA registration data provides a basic starting point, agency data excludes: 1948 refugees who did not register or meet UNRWA's eligibility requirements; 1967 refugees; those displaced after 1967 and IDPs. UNRWA registration files for IDPs inside Israel became inactive in 1952 and it is yet unclear if UNRWA will be asked to assume responsibility for new IDPs in the OPT.

Additional sources of information include UNHCR statistics for Palestinian refugees outside the five UNRWA areas of operation and in need of international protection, government statistical surveys, [4] independent demographic studies (carried out by organizations such as FAFO Institute for Applied Social Science [5] ) and civil society estimates (such as those by Civitas [6] ). Assuming a broad definition descriptive of the scope of displacement and the number of potential claimants - i.e. not necessarily all persons in need of day-to-day protection and including 1948, 1967 and post-1967 refugees - it is estimated that up to three-quarters of the Palestinian people have been displaced since 1948. The Bethlehem-based BADIL Resource Centre for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights [7] estimates the total number of displaced Palestinians to be over seven million.

Approaches to the Palestinian refugee question

There have been only two periods of official negotiations on the Palestinian refugee issue: early UN-facilitated negotiations in Lausanne (1949) and Paris (1951) and more recent talks held under the auspices of the Oslo peace process. The latter include the Quadripartite talks (1990s) to resolve the question of 1967 refugees and US-guided bilateral talks in Camp David (2000) followed by a short round in Taba (2001) addressing the question of 1948 refugees. All three sets of talks were elite-driven - with only minimal input from civil society - and ended without a solution.

Beginning in the 1990s Palestinian refugees began organising popular conferences, workshops and demonstrations demanding recognition of their rights and a more inclusive process. Recent research has begun to examine places like Bosnia for the problem of abandoned property laws, Guatemala for the experience of refugee participation, and South Africa for truth and reconciliation. Some refugees travelled to places as close as Cyprus and Bosnia and as far away as South Africa to see if anything could be learned from other refugee cases and pursuit of claims for property restitution. Official approaches to find permanent solutions nonetheless still tend to view this refugee group as unique and thus in need of a unique solution. International law and the voices of refugees themselves have been marginalised, if not excluded, by this approach.

Above all the Palestinian refugee case is contentious because of the degree to which it poses a challenge to what Barbara Harrell-Bond refers to as the "tidy system of sovereign states." She argues that refugees represent "a fundamental challenge to sovereignty, by forcing international actors to consider ethical principles and issues of fundamental human rights, which are part of their international obligations." At the heart of this challenge is the question of how to respect the individual rights of Palestinian refugees in the context of Israel's collective demand to maintain its Jewish majority.

This is not just a theoretical or legal question. It is also about fundamentally different Israeli and Palestinian conceptions of the conflict and its solution. "How to overcome this abyss," writes American Professor of International Law Richard Falk, "is a challenge that should haunt the political imagination of all those genuinely committed to finding a just and sustainable reconciliation between Israel and Palestine."

Terry Rempel was a founding member of BADIL where he was Coordinator of Information and Research between 1998 and 2004. An independent consultant, he is completing a PhD at the University of Exeter. Email: t.rempel@exeter.ac.uk . A longer version of this article, containing more detailed endnote references, is online at: http://www.fmreview.org/pdf/rempel.pdf.

More links for further information at original link.

The suspicion surrounds the government's 2005 sale of controlling interest in Bank Leumi, one of Israel's largest financial institutions.

The allegations are that Olmert, finance minister at the time, interfered on behalf of a tender from two businessmen friends, Daniel Abraham and Frank Lowy.

Lowy, an Australian billionaire, has been represented legally in Israel by a firm headed by Yossi Gross, Olmert's father-in-law.

A government official in the Prime Minister's Office told Haaretz newspaper on Tuesday they were "astonished" to hear about the prosecution's investigation.

"Olmert's involvement in the tender proceedings was apparently very ineffective if he did not manage to cause his friend to win it," the official was quoted as saying.

Abraham is regularly in Forbes magazine's list of richest Americans. The high price he paid for Olmert's Jerusalem home in 2004 has led to allegations the deal wasn't strictly financial in nature.

The attorney who brokered the deal for Olmert has said it was a standard real estate sale.

Condemned

He pointed out the UAE strongly condemned the continued unilateral policy of Israel and appealed to the international community to put pressure on the Israeli government to implement the Security Council and General Assembly resolutions which called for Israel to accede to the non-proliferation treaty as all other states in the region had done.

He also urged the UN to force Israel to cooperate with the energy agency by declaring all its nuclear facilities and accepting the principle of verification and to cease the stockpiling and production of fissile material and all nuclear testing.

He said serious efforts were needed to achieve the alleviation of tension and instability in the region, adding that it was imperative to pave the way for renewing dialogue and returning to the peaceful negotiations process, which could ultimately resolve the question of Palestine and the Middle East.

His full text concluded by saying: "Finally, we hope the working delegations in this committee will support the two draft resolutions on the establishment of a zone free from all weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East and on the risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, especially that they reflect the disturbing reality in the Middle East and are in line with the international efforts aimed at achieving comprehensive nuclear disarmament with a view to sparing our people and humanity the destructive scourge of wars."