Arafat aide ends trial with demand

SPEAKING in near-perfect Hebrew, Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouthi closed his trial in Israel on murder charges yesterday with a demand for independence for his people as the price of peace.

“We are a people like all other people. We want freedom and a state just like the Israelis,” said Barghouthi, a senior figure in Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction accused of orchestrating gun ambushes and suicide bombings that killed 26 people.

“Israel must decide: either it allows for a (Palestinian) state alongside it, or it becomes a state for two peoples,” he said in an hour-long closing argument in the language he learned in jail.