Palestinians reject Israeli call to drop UN initiative

The Palestinians will press ahead with a bid to upgrade their status at the UN, a senior official said yesterday, brushing off a request by Israel to halt the initiative. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has renewed his call for an immediate resumption of peace talks and has warned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas against making any unilateral moves in the UN General Assembly. With the negotiations frozen since 2010 in a dispute over Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, Abbas plans to ask the UN General Assembly this month to upgrade the Palestinian’s diplomatic status at the world body. They are currently registered as an “observer entity,” but want to become an “observer state,” granting them access to bodies such as the International Criminal Court, where they could file complaints against Israel. Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rdainah said any direct talks must await the UN vote, which the Palestinians look certain to win in the face of Israeli and US objection to the unilateral move. “When we return from the UN General Assembly and are a nonmember state based on 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as the capital, the way to direct negotiations will be open to achieve security and stability on this basis,” Abu Rdainah said. Meanwhile, a Western diplomat says the exhumation of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s remains will take place Nov. 26. He says a Swiss team has arrived in the West Bank ahead of the exhumation. The team will assess the grave site and plan how best to dig up the remains. The Swiss team will be joined by French investigators. The two teams, who are set to conduct parallel probes into Arafat’s death, will only be allowed one chance to draw samples. In another development, Israeli prosecutors have charged two Jewish youths with vandalizing Palestinian cars and incitement to racism, a police statement said yesterday. The statement said that in June they punctured the tires of two cars in the occupied West Bank and pasted a sticker on a third car reading, “Revenge on the Arabs.” During police questioning one of the accused also confessed that in a more recent attack, he and the other also punctured car tires in the walled Old City of Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem and daubed graffiti on the walls of a bakery, reading “death to the Arabs,” the statement said. A Palestinian hospital official says Israeli forces have shot and killed a man at the border fence with the Gaza Strip. The official said the 23-year-old man died early yesterday of wounds sustained earlier. Israeli forces have detained the wife of an Islamic Jihad leader who is being held in administrative detention, Israeli and Palestinian sources said yesterday. Palestinian security sources in the northern city of Jenin said Nawal Saadi, 52, was arrested at her home in the city’s refugee camp in the early yesterday.