Jerusalem (AFP) - The UN's Palestinian refugee agency on Sunday urged the international community to oppose Israeli plans to relocate thousands of Palestinian Bedouin from the central West Bank.

"If such a plan were implemented this would ... give rise to concerns that it amounts to a 'forcible transfer' in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention," banning involuntary population relocation in occupied territory, UNRWA Commissioner General Pierre Krahenbuhl said.

"It might also make way for further Israeli illegal settlement expansion, further compromising the viability of a two-state solution," he said in a statement.

"I urge the Israeli authorities not to proceed with the transfer ...and I also urge the donor and state community to take a firm stand against it."

A meeting on international aid to the Palestinians is to be held in New York on Monday.

UNRWA added that most of those slated for resettlement to Jericho, in the east of the Palestinian territory, were registered Palestinian refugees.

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Pierre Krahenbuhl, the commissioner general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees speaks during …

The Israeli military's department responsible for civil affairs in the occupied West Bank said there were various plans to rehouse Bedouin and they were being conducted in consultation with community leaders.

"As part of the effort to draft master plans for the benefit of the area's Bedouin population, whose purpose is to enable the Bedouin to live in places with suitable infrastructure, dozens of meetings were held with Bedouin leaders," it said in a written response to AFP.

"Several plans to prepare such places have been advanced, partly through such meetings."

But Haaretz newspaper said an original scheme to relocate one tribe had grown to a plan to move about 12,500 Bedouin from the Jahalin, Kaabneh and Rashaida tribes, without the level of dialogue recommended by the Israeli Supreme Court.

"The plans were drafted without consulting the Bedouin slated to live there," the paper said.

UNRWA said that among those slated for resettlement were people residing "in the E1 and Maale Adumim areas near Jerusalem, which have been slated for new Israeli settlement development."

Israel has been planning construction in the highly contentious area of the West Bank, east of Jerusalem, since the early 1990s.

Plans for building 1,200 settler homes unveiled in December 2012 were quickly put on the back burner after the announcement triggered a major diplomatic backlash.

The Palestinians say construction in E1 would effectively cut the West Bank in two and prevent the creation of any contiguous Palestinian state.

By Parisa Hafezi and Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iran is ready to work with the United States and its allies to stop Islamic State militants, but would like more flexibility on Iran's uranium enrichment program in exchange, senior Iranian officials told Reuters.

The comments from the officials, who asked not to be named, highlight how difficult it may be for the Western powers to keep the nuclear negotiations separate from other regional conflicts. Iran wields influence in the Syrian civil war and on the Iraqi government, which is fighting the advance of Islamic State fighters.

Iran has sent mixed signals about its willingness to cooperate on defeating Islamic State (IS), a hard-line Sunni Islamist group that has seized large swaths of territory across Syria and Iraq and is blamed for a wave of sectarian violence, beheadings and massacres of civilians.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said recently that he vetoed a U.S. overture to the Islamic Republic to work together on defeating IS, but U.S. officials said there was no such offer. In public, both Washington and Tehran have ruled out cooperating militarily in tackling the IS threat.

But in private, Iranian officials have voiced a willingness to work with the United States on IS, though not necessarily on the battlefield. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday that Iran has a role to play in defeating Islamic State, indicating the U.S. position may also be shifting.

"Iran is a very influential country in the region and can help in the fight against the ISIL (IS) terrorists ... but it is a two-way street. You give something, you take something," said a senior Iranian official on condition of anonymity.

"ISIL is a threat to world security, not our (nuclear) program, which is a peaceful program," the official added.

Tehran rejects Western allegations that it is amassing the capability to produce atomic weapons under cover of a civilian nuclear energy program.

Another Iranian official echoed the remarks. Both officials said they would like the United States and its Western allies to show flexibility on the number of atomic centrifuges Tehran could keep under any long-term deal that would lift sanctions in exchange for curbs on Tehran's nuclear program.

"Both sides can show flexibility that will lead to an acceptable number for everyone," another Iranian official said.

WEST WANTS TO KEEP ATOMIC TALKS SEPARATE

Kerry held bilateral talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in New York for more than an hour on Sunday, a senior State Department official said. The meeting focused on the need to make progress in this week's nuclear talks and the threat of Islamic State.

The official did not provide details on the discussions between Kerry and Zarif, who met for the first time a year ago on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly when Iran and six world powers reopened negotiations with Tehran.

Western officials told Reuters that Iran has not raised this idea in nuclear negotiations with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China that resumed in New York on Friday. Diplomats close to the talks say they are unlikely to settle in New York on a long-term accord that would lift sanctions in exchange for curbs on Iranian nuclear work.

The Western officials said it would be difficult for them to even discuss the point in the atomic negotiations as the United States and its allies are determined to keep the nuclear negotiations focused exclusively on atomic issues as the Nov. 24 deadline for a deal nears.

"We are seeing as we get closer to the end of the talks that the Iranians are tempted to bring other dossiers to the table," a senior Western diplomat said.

"They sometimes indicate that if there were to not be a (nuclear) deal, the other dossiers in region would be more complicated," he added. "The six are determined not to bring the other subjects to the nuclear negotiations table."

The New York talks among senior foreign ministry officials from the six powers and Iran are taking place on the sidelines of this week's annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly.

The number of nuclear centrifuges has emerged as the principal sticking point in negotiations, which are expected to continue in New York until at least Sept. 26.

Centrifuges are machines that spin at supersonic speed to increase the ratio of the fissile isotope in uranium. Low-enriched uranium is used to fuel nuclear power plants, Iran's stated goal, but can also provide material for bombs if refined much further, which the West fears may be Iran's latent goal.

Iran currently has over 19,000 centrifuges, though only around 10,000 of those are operational. The six powers want Iran to reduce the number of operational centrifuges to the low thousands, to ensure it cannot quickly produce enough bomb-grade uranium for a weapon, should it choose to do so.

Iranians are keen to keep as many of their centrifuges as possible, and have also suggested that they could keep all 19,000 installed while maintaining a much smaller number in an operational state. Western officials say they dislike that idea.

U.S. officials have made clear for months that the number of centrifuges they are willing to tolerate operating in Iran over the medium term would be in the low thousands to ensure that Tehran's ability to produce a usable amount of bomb-grade uranium, should it go down that road, is severely limited.

Iran says such draconian limitations would be a violation of its right to enrich. Supreme Leader Khamenei has called that issue a "red line" for Tehran.

Centrifuges are not the only sticking point in the talks. Others include the duration of any nuclear deal, the timetable for ending the sanctions, and the fate of a research reactor that could yield significant quantities of bomb-grade plutonium.

Under a November 2013 interim deal, Iran froze some parts of its atomic program in exchange for limited sanctions relief. That agreement was intended to buy time for negotiations on a comprehensive deal that end the decade-long standoff with Iran and remove the risk of yet another war in the Middle East.

(Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton in New York, John Irish in Paris and Arshad Mohammed in Washington; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Officials: Iran ready to join fight against extremists

Tehran is willing to work with the U.S. and its allies to stop the Islamic State, but wants something in return.
'A two-way street'

Washington (AFP) - The rise of the brutal Islamic State group can partly be blamed on President Barack Obama's failure to arm moderate Syrian rebels far earlier, said former US defense secretary Leon Panetta.

It comes after the United States Congress on Thursday passed Obama's plan to train and arm moderate Syrian rebels to battle Islamic State jihadists, a key plank of his strategy to smash the militants who have overrun vast areas of Iraq and Syria.

Panetta told CBS's "60 Minutes" news program in an interview aired Sunday that he and then secretary of state Hillary Clinton had urged Obama in 2012 to arm moderate Syrian rebels against President Bashar al-Assad.

"I think the president's concern, and I understand it, was that he had a fear that if we started providing weapons, we wouldn't know where those weapons would wind up," said Panetta, defense secretary when the US pulled out of Iraq in 2011.

"My view was: you have to begin somewhere," added Panetta, also a former CIA director.

Asked if not arming them had been a mistake, he replied: "I think that would've helped. And I think in part, we pay the price for not doing that in what we see happening with ISIS."

Panetta cautioned that it would take "a long time" to defeat the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS.

"And I think the American people need to know it's going to take a long time," he added, describing Iraq's failure to stem the militant tide "a tragic story."

Panetta admitted that he had not been confident that pulling US forces out of Iraq in 2011 was the right thing to do.

"No, I wasn't. I really thought that it was important for us to maintain a presence in Iraq," he said.

Ex-Pentagon chief: U.S. too late on Syria plan

Leon Panetta partly blames Obama’s failure to arm Syrian rebels sooner for the rise of the Islamic State.
President’s initial concern

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — The number of Syrian refugees who have reached Turkey in the past four days after fleeing the advance of Islamic State militants now totals 130,000, Turkey's deputy prime minister said Monday.

Numan Kurtulmus warned that the number could rise further but insisted that Turkey was ready to react to "the worst case scenario."

"I hope that we are not faced with a more populous refugee wave, but if we are, we have taken our precautions," Kurtulmus said. "A refugee wave that can be expressed by hundreds of thousands is a possibility."

The refugees have been flooding into Turkey since Thursday, escaping an Islamic State offensive that has pushed the conflict nearly within eyeshot of the Turkish border. The conflict in Syria has pushed more than a million people over the border in the past 3½ years.

The al-Qaida breakaway group, which has established an Islamic state, or caliphate, ruled by its harsh version of Islamic law in territory it captured straddling the Syria-Iraq border, has in recent days advanced into Kurdish regions of Syria that border Turkey, where fleeing refugees on Sunday reported atrocities that included stonings, beheadings and the torching of homes.

"This is not a natural disaster... What we are faced with is a man-made disaster," Kurtulmus said. We don't know how many more villages may be raided, how many more people may be forced to seek refuge. We don't know.

"An uncontrollable force at the other side of the border is attacking civilians. The extent of the disaster is worse than a natural disaster," he said.

As refugees flooded in, Turkey on Sunday closed the border crossing at Kucuk Kendirciler to Turkish Kurds in a move aimed at preventing them from joining the fight in Syria. A day earlier, hundreds of Kurdish fighters had poured into Syria through the small Turkish village, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

130,000 Syrians reach Turkey, fleeing IS

Syrian refugees continue to flood across the border, escaping an advance by Islamic State militants.
Number could rise further