News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) A senior Fatah official has urged violence against the United States, whose Bush administration has requested Congressional approval for $100 million in aid to shore up the PA government headed by Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas. Abu Ali Shahin, a senior Fatah member and former PA minister, told PA television that local Arabs hate the United States more than Al Qaeda hates it. "Do to Bush what you want, and we wish you success with Bush," he said, addressing his remarks to Al Qaeda. "We are fighting the Americans and hate the Americans more than you

--Fatah and Hamas can be compared to "two weak punch drunk boxers in a ring," Aaron David Miller, associated with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, told the American National Public Radio. "Neither can deliver anything that remotely looks like a knockout punch, but they can't stop fighting at the same time."

--Friday marked two years since former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon fell into a coma following a stroke that forced his removal from office. "The illness cruelly exposed the inadequacies of the man who would succeed him as Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert," wrote the British newspaper The Guardian one year later. "Olmert's high point was his first three months, when he kept silent," said Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "When he started to talk, he showed a lack of competence, courage and decisiveness."

The paper also quoted Uzi Arad, a former advisor to former Prime Minister Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, that Sharon may have erred in not focusing on Iran. "If Iran goes nuclear, it will imply that Sharon was terribly wrong in insisting on disengagement from Gaza, which was a non-urgent and non-relevant matter, which could have been carried out 10 years before or 10 years after," he said.