Israel and the Palestinians can wrap up a final peace deal within two years, Israel’s deputy defence minister Ephraim Sneh said today, becoming the first senior Israeli official to propose a timeline for long-stalled peace talks

The government of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi today announced a three-day official mourning period and cancelled all celebrations of Eid.

In an effort to shore up a shaky truce in the Gaza Strip, Israeli military officials today said they were reducing their operations in the West Bank and had made it more difficult for field commanders to order arrest raids there.

Israel’s deputy defence minister today suggested Israel might be forced to launch a military strike against Iran’s nuclear programme – the clearest statement yet of this possibility from a high-ranking Israeli official.

The Israeli army will move deeper into southern Lebanon and hold on to that territory for several weeks, until a multinational force can deploy there, senior Israeli officials said today.

FORMER Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who almost reached a peace deal with Yasser Arafat, announced yesterday he will seek the leadership of the opposition Labour Party.

Senior Israeli and Palestinian officials, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s son and Yasser Arafat’s security adviser, were meeting in London today at the start of a two-day conference on implementation of a US-backed peace plan.

ISRAELI troops demolished the homes of four Palestinian terror suspects and raided a Gaza Strip town yesterday, as negotiators failed to reach agreement, but scheduled more talks on a gradual Israeli troop pullback from some Palestinian areas.

A chartered Russian airliner heading from Israel to Siberia exploded at 36,000 feet today and plummeted into the Black Sea coast with 78 people on board.

Israeli tanks rolled into a Palestinian village on the southern fringes of Jerusalem today, killing a Palestinian, in an effort to halt persistent gunfire raining on a nearby Jewish neighbourhood.

Palestinians fired mortars at a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip and a farming village in Israel overnight, drawing Israeli return fire that seriously wounded a supporter of the Islamic militant group Hamas.

Israeli helicopter gunships unleashed a fatal pinpoint strike on a car carrying a Palestinian security agent as the man drove on the outskirts of a refugee camp today.