Two fighters from Abbas's Fatah movement died from wounds sustained in a clash late on Tuesday that coincided with the announcement of the Egyptian-mediated truce, relatives said.

That raised to 10 the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since Abbas called on Saturday for early elections to try to break a political deadlock with the Hamas government and get crippling Western sanctions lifted.

Palestinian sources said they expected Abbas would hold a long-awaited meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in the coming days. Olmert's spokeswoman had no comment.

While such a meeting would be seen as a possible spur to reviving peace talks between Israel and the moderate Abbas, Olmert has said the Palestinians could expect little until a soldier held captive in Gaza since June was freed.

Israel refuses to deal with the Hamas Islamist movement, which formally seeks the Jewish state's destruction.

A senior aide to Abbas said the president planned to issue a decree next week to lay the legal foundations for the fresh parliamentary and presidential elections, which Hamas has described as a "coup" and unconstitutional.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, agreed yesterday evening to work on reaching a national unity government through open talks, after both Fatah and Hamas failed to conclude such a government over the previous 9 months.

Recent clashes in Gaza came after Palestinian President Abbas called for early presidential and legislative elections, while the Hamas-led government refused. The Palestinian PM announced official refusal of that call in a televised speech yesterday.

Military officers say the decision to strike is made -- sometimes in a matter of minutes -- by balancing the threat posed by the target against the potential for injuring bystanders. Many of the strikes have killed civilians in addition to targeted individuals.

Israeli military officials said they would review the court's findings in coming days. But one senior officer who specializes in matters of international law said the ruling, although vague in places, appeared to be a "validation" of existing policies regarding assassinations, and he expected few new restrictions to be implemented.

The decision states that military commanders must have "strong and convincing" information before ordering an assassination, and should not do so "if a less harmful means can be employed," namely, arrest. The ruling also says that "every effort must be made to minimize harm to innocent civilians."

"The need to balance casts a heavy load on those whose job it is to provide security," the three-judge panel wrote. "Not every efficient means is also legal. The ends do not justify the means."

The ruling has been awaited outside Israel for what it might add to the debate underway in many countries, including the United States, over how to ensure basic human rights in what the Bush administration calls the "war on terrorism." Following Israel's lead, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies have also used drones to carry out assassinations, including a November 2002 strike on a car in Yemen that killed six suspected members of al-Qaeda.

The decision, one of the last to be issued by retiring Chief Justice Aharon Barak, represented a disappointing defeat for Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations that have called the tactic, pioneered during the most recent Palestinian uprising, a war crime.

Hawkish lawmakers and officials from Israel's security establishment expressed pleasant surprise at the ruling, given that Barak, an activist judge throughout his decades-long career, has often come down against the military in cases where human rights and security measures appear to conflict. The court said the state "must balance security needs and human rights."

The ruling stemmed from a petition filed by two human rights organizations -- one Israeli, one Palestinian -- challenging the state's right to assassinate members of Hamas, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and other armed groups fighting the Jewish state. In its decision, the court said the "starting point of the legal analysis is that between Israel and the terrorist organizations active in the Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip" -- referring to the territory Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war -- "there exists a continuous situation of armed conflict."

The ruling states that international law applies to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying "it is not an internal state conflict that is subject to the rules of law enforcement."

The practice of targeted assassination began officially in November 2000, when an Israeli helicopter fired missiles at a car carrying Hussein Abayat, a senior member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, near the city of Bethlehem. The strike killed Abayat and two bystanders.

Israeli security officials have argued that targeted killings are among their most effective tools against the armed groups, which have carried out scores of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, fight from civilian areas and employ other guerrilla tactics that pose challenges to Israel's conventional army.

But many of the assassinations have been conducted by Israeli attack helicopters, drones or fighter aircraft, and civilian casualties are common.. B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, reports that in operations over the past six years Israeli security forces have assassinated 210 intended targets but also killed 129 bystanders.

"Anyone who thinks that in this kind of warfare things cannot go wrong and mistakes cannot happen does not know in what world he is living," Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel's National Security Council, told Israel's Army Radio. "Compare the terrorist attacks that were taking place only four years ago with those taking place today. In the last analysis, we are now living in an incomparably better situation now than what we lived in then. How do you think that came about? It is partly due to targeted killings."

Barak, who once ruled that Israeli officials could not use torture during interrogations even to stop imminent suicide bombings, rejected in Thursday's decision the concept of "unlawful combatants" employed by the Bush administration to justify detaining suspects without charges.

Instead, the court decided that "members of the terrorist organizations are not combatants," but civilians who relinquish certain legal protections when they participate directly in "hostilities" intended to "harm the army or civilians."

By way of offering guidelines to military commanders responsible for ordering assassinations, the decision says that "shooting at a terrorist sniper shooting at soldiers or civilians from his porch is permitted, even if an innocent passerby is harmed. Such harm conforms to the principle of proportionality.

"However, that is not the case if the building is bombed from the air and scores of its residents and passersby are harmed," it continues. "Between these two extremes are the hard cases. Thus a meticulous examination of every case is required."

In reviewing specific cases, the ruling said, "the Court will ask itself if a reasonable military commander could have made the decision which was made." Human rights lawyers criticized that advice, along with several other aspects of the decision, as overly vague.

"Here the court has done something that will create a cloud of illegality over many missions, because the officer will not know what is allowed and what is prohibited," said Michael Sfard, the attorney for the petitioners in the case. "When you go to court, at least you expect to get a clear ruling."

Sfard also represents petitioners in the case of Salah Shehada, a Hamas military commander killed in July 2002 when an Israeli F-16 dropped a one-ton bomb on his house in Gaza, killing him and 14 others, including nine children. Sfard said he will seek a new hearing "on the basis of this ruling, which obliges the court to order a criminal investigation."

Elsewhere, in the northern West Bank city of Ramallah, the Israeli army surrounded the home of Ahmad Al-Atownah, 33, deputy assistant in the local government ministry of Ramallah. Soldiers stormed Atownah's home and forced his family into one room of the house while searching the remainder of the home, then left taking Al-Atownah with them to an unknown detention camp, the family reported.

In Nablus city, also in the north of the West Bank, Israeli Army Forces invaded the city and the nearby Askar refugee camp, searched several homes, and took Wajdi Al-Affouri, 25, Mohammed Al-Mansi, 23, and Zekki Al-Tashtoush, 19, to unknown destinations, eyewitnesses reported.

Moreover, Israeli troops attacked and searched residents homes in the northern part of Tulkarem city and the village of Ateel also north of Tulkarem and abducted Tariq Zahran, 21, and Misad Abu Musah after searching both of their homes, local sources reported.

Israeli Army spokesperson stated that the army invaded several parts of the West Bank looking to abduct individuals the army states are wanted men.

Medical sources identified the two Palestinians killed as Hussam Al Aifie and Salah Fawastah, both were said to be fighters for Al-Quds Brigades which is the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad movement. During the gun fight, an additional two activists were also injured and then abducted by the invading Israeli troops.

This is the third assassination attack Israeli forces have conducted in the Northern West Bank areas in less than 24 hours. On Tuesday morning, Israeli undercover agents killed one Palestinian resistance fighter in Nablus city and another undercover force killed another resistance fighter in Tulkarem city on Tuesday afternoon.

The Israeli Army has apparently resumed the policy of extra-judicial killings aimed at Palestinian leadership and resistance fighters. This came shortly after several Israeli human rights organizations raised the case against the army's use of these types of assassination policies. That argument was rejected by the highest Israeli Supreme Court which opens the door for the army to conduct such assaults in Palestinian territories based on the decisions taken by Israeli Army Officers. This is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention governing human rights, which guarantees the rights of any person suspected of a crime to have a fair, just and legal trial.

Noting that he had recently hosted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, Putin said: "We continue in the most active way possible to participate in the Middle East peace process and continue to have contacts with all the political forces in Palestine".

Al-Assad responded by hailing Russia's efforts: "Our cooperation has become firmer recently and one of the aims of my visit is to widen that cooperation in different areas. We have a lot of areas where we can cooperate," al-Assad said. "With our efforts we play an important role in ensuring the stability of the region and we will orient others to act with the same aim," he told Putin.

Russia has been trying to restore something of its Soviet-era influence in the Middle East and the Kommersant newspaper said Putin would seek the Syrian leader's support for a long-standing Russian bid to host a Middle East conference.

News reports said earlier that Putin's talks with al-Assad would range from the situation in the Palestinian territories to Lebanon and Iraq. Russia is a member of the so-called Middle East diplomatic quartet together with the European Union, the United Nations and the United States.

But the United States and Israel have resisted the idea of Russia hosting a Middle East conference, which Moscow hopes would bring together arch foes such as Iran and Israel. Although it is relatively close to Israel, Moscow was at the forefront of objections to Israel's offensive against Lebanon's pro-Syrian Hezbollah in July-August.

Russian weapons sales to Syria were also likely to be a theme, analysts said. In an interview Monday with the official Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper, Syrian Vice President Faruq al-Shara hinted that Syria would like to buy more Russian weapons systems -- a trade that has angered Israel and raised eyebrows in Washington.

Kommersant said Damascus is considering buying MiG-29SMT fighter jets from Russia as well as possibly Amur-1650 submarines, Yak-130 planes and additional Pantsir-C1 air defence systems. Kommersant said Russia was looking at possibly expanding a supply base in the Syrian port of Tartus used by the Russian navy and previously the Soviet navy, with a view to turning it into a fully-fledged base and foothold in the Mediterranean for Russia's navy.

Despite this, Israel's Defence Ministry said that by the end of November arms firms had sealed $4.1 billion in new foreign orders for 2006, surpassing the previous peak of $4.02 billion reached in the same period in 2002.

Ministry spokeswoman Rachel Naidek-Ashkenazi said that although final 2006 figures would not be available until next year, she expected the upswing in sales to continue through December.

She acknowledged that international defence deals often take years to put together and the impact of the Lebanon war on Israeli clients might not yet have been felt.

However, she added, "We expect the pattern of increased sales to continue, unaffected by the recent campaign in Lebanon. Clients are prudent. They know they can trust battle-proven experience, and they go to the trouble of finding out the facts."

In her first interview since the incident, Shear says that on the bus three weeks ago, she was slapped, kicked, punched and pushed by a group of men who demanded that she sit in the back of the bus with the other women. The bus driver, in response to a media inquiry, denied that violence was used against her, but Shear's account has been substantiated by an unrelated eyewitness on the bus who confirmed that she sustained an unprovoked "severe beating."

Shear, an American-Israeli woman who currently lives in Canada, says that on a recent five-week vacation to Israel, she rode the bus daily to the Old City to pray at sunrise. Though not defined by Egged as a sex-segregated "mehadrin" bus, women usually sit in the back, while men sit in the front, as a matter of custom.

"Every two or three days, someone would tell me to sit in the back, sometimes politely and sometimes not," she recalled this week in a telephone interview. "I was always polite and said 'No. This is not a synagogue. I am not going to sit in the back.'"

But Shear, a 50-year-old religious woman, says that on the morning of the 24th, a man got onto the bus and demanded her seat - even though there were a number of other seats available in the front of the bus.

"I said, I'm not moving and he said, 'I'm not asking you, I'm telling you.' Then he spat in my face and at that point, I was in high adrenaline mode and called him a son-of-a-bitch, which I am not proud of. Then I spat back. At that point, he pushed me down and people on the bus were screaming that I was crazy. Four men surrounded me and slapped my face, punched me in the chest, pulled at my clothes, beat me, kicked me. My snood [hair covering] came off. I was fighting back and kicked one of the men in his privates. I will never forget the look on his face."

Shear says that when she bent down in the aisle to retrieve her hair covering, "one of the men kicked me in the face. Thank God he missed my eye. I got up and punched him. I said, 'I want my hair covering back' but he wouldn't give it to me, so I took his black hat and threw it in the aisle."

'Stupid American'

Throughout the encounter, Shear says the bus driver "did nothing." The other passengers, she says, blamed her for not moving to the back of the bus and called her a "stupid American with no sechel [common sense.] People blamed me for not knowing my place and not going to the back of the bus where I belong."

According to Yehoshua Meyer, the eyewitness to the incident, Shear's account is entirely accurate. "I saw everything," he said. "Someone got on the bus and demanded that she go to the back, but she didn't agree. She was badly beaten and her whole body sustained hits and kicks. She tried to fight back and no one would help her. I tried to help, but someone was stopping me from getting up. My phone's battery was dead, so I couldn't call the police. I yelled for the bus driver to stop. He stopped once, but he didn't do anything. When we finally got to the Kotel [Western Wall], she was beaten badly and I helped her go to the police."

Shear says that when she first started riding the No. 2 line, she did not even know that it was sometimes sex-segregated. She also says that sitting in the front is simply more comfortable. "I'm a 50-year-old woman and I don't like to sit in the back. I'm dressed appropriately and I was on a public bus."

"It is very dangerous for a group of people to take control over a public entity and enforce their will without going through due process," she said. "Even if they [Haredim who want a segregated bus] are a majority - and I don't think they are - they have options available. They can petition Egged or hire their own private line. But as long as it's a public bus, I don't care if there are 500 people telling me where to sit. I can sit wherever I want and so can anyone else."

Meyer says that throughout the incident, the other passengers blamed Shear for not sitting in the back. "They'll probably claim that she attacked them first, but that's totally untrue. She was abused terribly, and I've never seen anything like it."

Word of Shear's story traveled quickly after she forwarded an e-mail detailing her experience. She has been contacted by a number of groups, including Shatil, the New Israel Fund's Empowerment and Training Center for Social Change; Kolech, a religious women's forum; the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), the legal advocacy arm of the local Reform movement; and the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA).

In the coming month, IRAC will be submitting a petition to the High Court of Justice against the Transportation Ministry over the issue of segregated Egged buses. IRAC attorney Orly Erez-Likhovski is in touch with Shear and is considering including her in the petition.

Although the No. 2 Jerusalem bus where the incident occurred is not actually defined as a mehadrin line, Erez-Likhovski says that Shear's story is further proof that the issue requires legal clarification. About 30 Egged buses are designated as mehadrin, mostly on inter-city lines, but they are not marked to indicate this. "There's no way to identify a mehadrin bus, which in itself is a problem," she said.

"Theoretically, a person can sit wherever they want, even on a mehadrin line, but we're seeing that people are enforcing [the gender segregation] even on non-mehadrin lines and that's the part of the danger," she said.

On a mehadrin bus, women enter and exit through the rear door, and the seats from the rear door back are generally considered the "women's section." A child is usually sent forward to pay the driver.

The official responses

In a response from Egged, the bus driver denied that Shear was physically attacked in any way.

"In a thorough inquiry that we conducted, we found that the bus driver does not confirm that any violence was used against the complainant," Egged spokesman Ron Ratner wrote.

"According to the driver, once he saw that there was a crowd gathering around her, he stopped the bus and went to check what was going on. He clarified to the passengers that the bus was not a mehadrin line and that all passengers on the line are permitted to sit wherever they want on the bus. After making sure that the passengers returned to their seats, he continued driving."

The Egged response also noted that their drivers "are not able and are not authorized to supervise the behavior of the passengers in all situations."

Ministry of Transportation spokesperson Avner Ovadia said in response that the mehadrin lines are "the result of agreements reached between Egged and Haredi bodies" and are therefore unconnected to the ministry.

A spokesperson for the Jerusalem police said the case is still under investigation.

2. Superheated steels ablating (vaporizing continuously as they fall) as seen in video clips of the towers collapsing. This requires uniform temperatures roughly twice that of thermite. Conventional demolition or explosive charges (thermate, rdx, hdx etc.) cannot transfer heath so rapidly that the steel goes above it's boiling temperature.

3. 22 ton outer wall steel sections ejected 200 meters into the winter garden. Cutting charges cannot eject heavy steels and throwing charges cannot provide the energy required without heavy, solid surface mounts.

4. 330 ton section of outer wall columns ripping off side of tower. Cutting charges cannot eject heavy steels linked together and throwing charges cannot provide the energy required without very heavy, solid surfaces to mount those charges.

5. Molten ponds of steel at the bottom of elevator shafts (WTC1, WTC2, WTC7). Massive heath loads have been present at the lower parts of these high-rise buildings. As one of the witnesses after seeing the flow of metals declared: "no one will be found alive".

6. The spire behaviour (stands for 20-30 seconds, evaporates and goes down, steel dust remains in the air where the spire was). The spire did not stand because it lost its durability when the joints vaporized.

7. Sharp spikes in seismograph readings (Richter 2.1 and 2.3) occurred at the beginning of collapse for both towers. Short duration and high power indicate an explosive event.

8. A press weighting 50 tons disappeared from a basement floor of Twin Towers and was never recovered from debris. Not possible with collapses or controlled demolitions. The press was vaporized or melted totally.

9. Bone dust cloud around the WTC. This was found not until spring 2006 from the Deutsche Bank building. (In excess of 700 human remains found on the roof and from air vents). See www.911citizenswatch.org/print.php?sid=906

10. Fires took 100 days to extinguish despite continuous spraying of water. Thermate would burn out totally and then cool down much faster, just in a few days. This long cooling time means the total heath load being absorbed into the steels of the WTC was massive, far in excess anything found in collapses or typical controlled demolitions.

11. Brown shades of color in the air due nuclear radiation forming NO2, NO3 and nitric acid. TV and documentary footage changed the color balance to blue to disguise this fact indicating complicity in the coverup.

12. Elevated Tritium values measured in the WTC area but not elsewhere in New York. Official studies stated that 8 EXIT signs from two commercial Boeing jets were responsible. The tritium in those EXIT signs is insufficient to explain the measurements (very little tritium is available for measuring after evaporation into air as hydrogen and as tritiated water vapour. This can provide conclusive proof of fusion devices and therefore US/Israeli military involvement.

13. Pyroclastic flow observed in the concrete-based clouds. Only found with volcanic eruptions and nuclear detonations. The explosion squibs cool down just a few milliseconds after the explosion or after having reached some 10 meters in the air. Pyroclastic flow will not mix with other clouds meaning very serious heath in those clouds not possible with the conventional demolition or explosive charges. The pyroclastic clouds were cooling down at the WTC but this process took some 30 seconds. See http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1381525012075538113

14. Huge expanding dust clouds 5 times the volume of the building indicating extreme levels of heat generated far in excess of traditional demolition explosives.

15. Rubble height was some 10% of the original instead of 33% expected in a traditional demolition. Fusion device removal of underground central steel framework allowed upper framework to fall into this empty space and reduce the rubble height.

16. No survivors found, except some firefighters in one corner pocket in the rubble who looked up to see blue sky above them instead of being crushed by collapsing debris. Upward fusion flashlight-like beam of destruction missed this pocket but removed debris above those lucky firemen.

17. 14 rescue dogs and some rescue workers died far too soon afterward to be attributed to asbestos or dust toxins (respiratory problems due to alpha and tritium particles created by fusion are far more toxic)

18. Record concentrations of near-atomic size metal particles found in dust studies due to ablated steel. Only possible with vaporized (boiling) steels.

19. Decontamination procedure used at Ground Zero (hi-pressure water spraying) for all steel removed from site. Water spraying contains fusion radioactivity.

20. No bodies, furniture or computers found in the rubble, but intact sheets of paper covered the streets with fine dust. Items with significant mass absorbed fusion energy (neutrons, x-rays) and were vaporized while paper did not. Paper and powder theory.

21. 200 000 gallon sprinkler water tanks on the roofs of WTC1 and WTC2, but no water in the ruins. Heat of fusion devices vaporized large reservoirs of water.

22. Reports of cars exploding around the WTC and many burned out wrecks could be seen that had not been hit by debris. Fusion energy (heath radiation and the neutrons) caused cars to ignite and burn far from WTC site.

23. Wide area electrical outage, repairs took over 3 months. Fusion devices cause EM pulse with Compton scattering. See German engineers help the USA plate 5.

24. EM pulse was recorded by broadcast cameras with high quality electronic circuitry. This occurred at the same time as the seismic peaks recorded by Lamont Doherty during the beginning of the collapse. This is due to the Compton Effect and resulted in a large area power outage at the WTC.