Israel to withhold tax transfers to Palestinians

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel on Sunday roundly rejected the United Nations' endorsement of an independent state of Palestine, announcing it would withhold more than $100 million collected for the Palestinian government to pay debts to Israeli companies.

It was the second act of reprisal since the U.N. General Assemblyvoted overwhelmingly on Thursday to support the Palestinians' statehood initiative. The following day, Israel announced it would start drawing up plans to build thousands of settlement homes, including the first-ever residential developments on a sensitive piece of land near Jerusalem. Actual construction would be years away.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the statehood campaign, led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, as "a gross violation of the agreements signed with the state of Israel."

"Accordingly, the government of Israel rejects the U.N General Assembly decision," he said. Israel, backed by the U.S., campaigned against the statehood measure, arguing that only negotiations can deliver a Palestinian state.

Abbas returned home Sunday to a hero's welcome in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Some 5,000 people thronged a square outside his headquarters, hoisting Palestinian flags and cheering. Large posters of the Palestinian leader, whose popularity had plummeted in recent months, adorned nearby buildings.

"We now have a state," he said to wild applause. "The world has said loudly, 'Yes to the state of Palestine.'"

Abbas warned of "creative punishments" by Israel. Referring to the latest settlement construction plans, he said, "We have to realize that your victory has provoked the powers of war, occupation and settlements because their isolation is deepened."

The U.N. resolution endorsed the Palestinian position that its state include the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza Strip, territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war.

Israel rejects a full pullback to its 1967 lines and says the resolution is a way to bypass negotiations.

In Sunday's response, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said the government would withhold taxes and customs collected from Palestinian laborers and businesses on behalf of Abbas' Palestinian Authority, which led the statehood campaign.

The money will be used to help pay off the authority's debts to Israel, including $200 million owed to the state-run Israel Electric Corp., government officials said. This month, more than $100 million was to have been transferred. Steinitz said Israel would decide later whether to withhold future transfers as well.

The General Assembly decision late Thursday to accept "Palestine" as a non-member observer state in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza did not grant actual independence to the 4.3 million Palestinians living in those areas.

Israel remains an occupying force in the first two territories and continues to severely restrict access to Gaza. The coastal strip, located on the opposite side of Israel from the West Bank, is now controlled by the militant Hamas. Israel withdrew in 2005.

Netanyahu sounded defiant on Sunday.

"Today we are building and we will continue to build in Jerusalem and in all areas that appear on Israel's map of strategic interests," he told his Cabinet.

Half a million settlers live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, the result of a decades-long strategy aimed at blurring the borders between Israel and the occupied territories.

Israel announced Friday that it would press ahead plans to build 3,000 housing units in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, the core of the Palestinians' hoped-for state.

More worrisome for the Palestinians, it vowed to dust off a master plan to build 3,600 apartments and 10 hotels on the section of territory east of Jerusalem known as E1. The Palestinians have warned that such construction would kill any hope for the creation of a viable state of Palestine.

Building there would sever the link between the West Bank and east Jerusalem, the sector of the holy city the Palestinians claim for a future capital, and cut off the northern part of the West Bank form its southern flank.

The announcement that Israel would forge ahead with construction plans came just days after the U.S. became the only world power to side with it in opposing the Palestinians' statehood bid.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said these plans "set back the cause of a negotiated peace."

Britain and France urged Israel to rescind the decision, and other European states denounced it.

The decision may be connected more to Israeli politics than an actual policy change. Netanyahu is up for re-election in Jan. 22 parliamentary elections and is eager to put on a strong face for the electorate. Actual construction could be years away, if it takes place at all.

"There is no decision to build," Housing Minister Ariel Attias told Army Radio on Sunday. "There is a decision to plan. You can't build an apartment without planning."

New figures from Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics showed that Netanyahu has actually slowed settlement construction over the past year.

The latest figures found that Israel began construction on 653 new settlement homes in the first nine months of 2012, down 26 percent from 886 housing starts during the same period a year earlier.

Netanyahu brushes off world condemnation of settlement plans

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday brushed off world condemnation of Israel's plans to expand Jewish settlements after the Palestinians won de facto U.N. recognition of statehood.

"We will carry on building in Jerusalem and in all the places that are on the map of Israel's strategic interests," a defiant Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting.

In another blow to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Israel announced it was withholding Palestinian tax revenues this month worth about $100 million.

Israel said the reason for the move was a Palestinian debt of $200 million to the Israeli Electric Corporation, an obligation that has existed for some time.

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz cautioned last month that if the Palestinians went ahead with the U.N. bid Israel would "not collect taxes for them and we will not transfer their revenues".

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior Palestinian official, said confiscation of the tax funds due the cash-strapped Authority, vital to meeting its payroll, was "piracy and theft".

Stung by the U.N. General Assembly's upgrading of the Palestinians' status from "observer entity" to "non-member state", Israel said on Friday it would build 3,000 more settler homes in the West Bank andEast Jerusalem, areas Palestinians want for a future state, along with Gaza.

An Israeli official said the government also ordered "preliminary zoning and planning work" for thousands of housing units in areas including the so-called "E1" zone near Jerusalem.

Such construction could divide the West Bank in two and further dim Palestinian hopes, backed by the United States and other international sponsors of the Middle East peace process, for a contiguous country.

But Israeli officials said it could up to two years before any building begins in E1.

At the cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said the "unilateral step the Palestinians took at the U.N. is a gross violation of previous agreements signed with Israel". The government of Israel, he added, "rejects the General Assembly's vote".

The upgrade, approved overwhelmingly, fell short of full U.N. membership, which only the Security Council can grant. But it has significant legal implications because it could allow the Palestinians access to the International Criminal Court where they could file complaints against Israel.

Israel's settlement plans, widely seen as retaliation for the Palestinians' U.N. bid, have drawn strong international condemnation from the United States, France, Britain and the European Union.

"The recognition of Palestine as a state changes a lot of the facts, and aims to establish new ones," Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told a cheering crowd in the West Bank city of Ramallah on his return from the United States.

"But we have to recognize that our victory provoked the powers of settlement, war and occupation."

INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM

Netanyahu heads a pro-settler government and opinion polls predict his Likud party will come out on top in Israel's January 22 parliamentary election, despite opponents' allegations that his policies have deepened Israeli diplomatic isolation.

"All settlement construction is illegal under international law and constitutes an obstacle to peace," the EU's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said in a statement on Sunday.

The United States said the plan was counterproductive to any resumption of direct peace talks, stalled for two years in a dispute over settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, both captured by Israel in a 1967 war.

Netanyahu says Israel, as a Jewish state, has a historic claim to land in the West Bank and to all of Jerusalem. Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. Israel considers all of the holy city as its capital, a claim that is not recognized internationally.

Israeli Housing Minister Ariel Attias said that within weeks the government would publish invitations for bids from contractors to build 1,000 homes in East Jerusalem and more than 1,000 in West Bank settlement blocs.

"E1 is in planning, which means sketches on paper," Attias told Army Radio. "No one will build until it is clear what will be done there."

The E1 zone is considered especially sensitive. Israel froze much of its activities in E1 under pressure from former U.S. President George W. Bush and the area has been under the scrutiny of his successor Barack Obama.

Benny Kashriel, mayor of the Maale Adumim settlement adjacent to E1, told Army Radio building "will take a year or two".

Yariv Oppenheimer, head of the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now said: "If we build in E1 the two-state vision will truly be history ... it is a strategic point that if built, will prevent the Palestinians from having a normal state."

Approximately 500,000 Israelis and 2.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

(Additional reporting by Jihan Abdalla and Ali Sawafta in Ramallah; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Andrew Roche)

Thousands rally against far right in Hungary

Pakistani Hindus protest destruction of temple

In this Saturday, Dec. 1, 2012 photo, members of Pakistani Hindu community react next to the rubble of a Hindu temple, which was destroyed on Saturday by a builder, in Karachi, Pakistan. Members of the Pakistan Hindu community in the southern port city of Karachi protested on Sunday over the destruction of a Hindu temple Saturday by a builder who claimed that the land is his. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan)

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani Hindus Sunday protested the destruction of a Hindu temple in the southern port city of Karachi. The temple was razed, along with some nearby homes, by a builder.

Minority Hindus have complained of increasing harassment and discrimination in Muslim-dominated Pakistan in recent years, including the destruction or desecration of their places of worship.

Residents and members of the Hindu community said Sunday a builder with a police escort razed the small temple in one of the older neighborhoods of Karachi, along with some surrounding buildings.

The outer walls and roof of the temple were demolished, and rubble was strewn about the area. Local residents told an AP reporter on the scene that authorities took statues and artifacts out of the building before it was destroyed.

One of the longtime residents, 75-year-old Kali Das, said he was born in the area and remembers when the temple, called Sri Rama Peer Naval, was built. He said more than a hundred families lived nearby and prayed at the temple.

Residents protested at the Karachi Press Club on Sunday, demanding compensation as well as the return of religious materials they said were taken during the incident.

Ramesh Kumar Vankwani from the Pakistan Hindu Council said there is a long-running legal dispute between the builder and residents over the land, but it belongs to the Hindu residents.

Zeenat Ahmad, who runs the department in charge of military land, said a court order allowed some of the buildings to be razed. A Pakistani police officer, Parvez Iqbal, denied anything was taken.

The military owns vast tracts of land in Karachi and other parts of the country.

Vankwani said the incident was another example of the problems Hindus are facing in Pakistan. Hindus complain that girls are forcibly converted to Islam, there is no legal recognition for Hindu marriages, and Hindus are discriminated against when it comes to access to government jobs or schooling.

"Every month there is an incident, like taking property of Hindu people or forced conversion of Hindu girls," he said.

During partition in 1947, the violent separation of Pakistan and India into separate countries, hundreds of thousands of Hindus decided to migrate to India, where Hinduism is the dominant religion. Those who remained and their descendants now make up a tiny fraction of Pakistan's estimated 190 million citizens. Most live in Sindh province in the southern part of the country.

___

Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana in Islamabad contributed.

Syrian warplanes strike rebels in Damascus suburbs

Associated Press/Mohammad Hannon - Syrians and Jordanians bury the body of Emara al-Zoabi, 7-months-old, who was killed from Syrian government forces shelling in Ramtha City, north Amman, Jordan, Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012. Al-Zoabi was killed in Tafas village, in the Syrian city of Daraa, on Dec. 1. (AP Photo/Mohammad Hannon)

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian warplanes and artillery blasted parts of the capital Damascus and its rebellious suburbs on Sunday, part of what activists described as intense fighting as rebels try to push their way into the center of President Bashar Assad's power base.

In central Syria, a car bomb killed at least 15 people, the official news agency reported.

The fighting over the past few weeks in Damascus is the most serious in the capital since July, when rebels captured several neighborhoods before a swift government counteroffensive swept them out.

The Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighter jets struck twice in the suburb of Daraya as regime artillery pounded other districts just south of Damascus.

The Syrian air force also launched airstrikes on the northern city of Aleppo, some cities in the northern province of Idlib and the Mediterranean city of Latakia, the Observatory said. The group relies on reports from activists on the ground.

The Damascus suburbs have been opposition strongholds since the uprising against Assad began in March 2011. In the past weeks, the army has pressed an offensive to regain lost territory near the capital, including two air bases. The Observatory said there was also ongoing fighting in towns near theDamascus International Airport on the southern edge of the city. The towns include Aqraba, Beit Saham and Yalda.

The road to the airport from Damascus was closed on Thursday because of heavy fighting, but authorities reopened it after troops secured the area, activists said. The Information Ministry said on Saturday the airport was operating normally and that the road leading to the facility is "totally secure."

On Sunday, EgyptAir Chief Executive Roshdy Zakaria said the country's national carrier will resume flights to Damascus and Aleppo after a three-day suspension because of poor security on the roads around the two airports.

In central Homs province, a car bomb exploded near Omar Bin al-Khattab mosque in the al-Hamra neighborhood of Homs, killing at least 15 people and wounding 24, state-run SANA news agency said.

Activists said seven people died in the attack. The Observatory said the death toll is likely to rise because some were critically wounded.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

In a village just outside Homs, two other people were killed by artillery shelling, including a baby girl, the Observatory said.

Homs has been a frequent battleground in the 20-month rebellion aimed at toppling Assad.

The increase in bombing attacks as part of the civil war has raised concerns that Islamist extremist groups are taking a larger role on the side of the rebels.

SANA claimed that on the outskirts of Homs, the Syrian army killed scores of rebels in an attack on their hideouts.

Activists say at least 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which began with peaceful pro-democracy protests but turned into a civil war.

While fighting has intensified nationwide in the past weeks, members of the new Syrian oppositionleadership coalition held talks in Egypt on a transitional government.

The Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces was established earlier this month in Qatar under pressure from the United States for a stronger, more united opposition body to serve as a counterweight to the more extremist forces which have joined the fight against Assad's regime — some of them foreign jihadists.

The coalition members said they have agreed on the framework of a transitional government with 10 ministers. Walid Albunni, the coalition's spokesman, said its members will speed up the decision-making process and name the prime minister in the coming days to keep up with developments on the ground.

"We have to work as fast as possible to be ready for the downfall of the regime," Albunni said Saturday at the end of a three-day meeting in Cairo, where the opposition body is based.

Albunni said the coalition could support a United Nations peacekeeping force in Syria, but only after Assad is toppled.

"Anything can happen after all those who have stained their hands with blood of people are gone," Albunni said.

_______

Associated Press writer Aya Batrawy in Cairo contributed to this report.