Quick Takes: News From Israel You May Have Missed

The Obama administration has decided to base its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on an Arab peace plan, according to a source in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Last week, Netayahu held a meeting with Obama’s envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, to outline the prime minister’s approach to Syria and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The source said Mitchell conveyed to Netanyahu that Obama seeks to create a Palestinian state in hopes of normalizing relations between Israel and the Arab world in line with the Arab Peace Initiative.

Critics of the plan warn that it would leave the Jewish state with truncated, difficult-to-defend borders and could threaten Israel’s Jewish character by compelling it to accept millions of foreign Arabs.

The initiative states that Israel would receive “normal relations” with the Arab world in exchange for a full withdrawal from the entire Gaza Strip, West Bank, Golan Heights and eastern Jerusalem, which includes the Temple Mount.

The plan also demands the imposition of a non-binding UN resolution that calls for all so-called Palestinian refugees who wish to move inside Israel to be permitted to do so at the “earliest practicable date.”

President Obama will move to create a Palestinian state “more quickly than anybody could imagine.” At least that’s the message the Palestinian Authority claims it received from the U.S.

A chief PA negotiator, speaking to WorldNetDaily from the West Bank city of Ramallah, said that in recent days Palestinian officials held preliminary meetings leading to an in-person confab last week between PA President Mahmoud Abbas and George Mitchell, Obama’s envoy to the Mideast.

The negotiator said the American team preparing for Mitchell’s meeting with Abbas conveyed to the Palestinians that Obama seeks to move swiftly toward a Palestinian state.

Said the PA negotiator: “They [the U.S. team] told us, ‘We don’t mind who is the government in Israel. Things will be closed [for a Palestinian state’ and more quickly than anybody could imagine.”

Iranian agents and the Iranian-backed Hizbullah militia are working with al Qaeda cells to carry out attacks in Egypt, according to a top Egyptian security official speaking to this column.

Earlier this month, Egypt’s public prosecutor announced the country had arrested 49 alleged Hizbullah agents on suspicion of planning attacks aimed at destabilizing the U.S.-backed Egyptian regime. The agents are suspected of establishing a vast terrorist network inside Egypt focusing on targets inside the country as well as attacking Israel and aiding Hamas in the neighboring Gaza Strip.

A senior Egyptian security official, speaking from Cairo, said his country has information that Hizbullah cells – working with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards – are coordinating terrorist activities inside Egypt with al Qaeda elements known to be present in the Sinai.

The accusation that Iranian-backed agents are working with al Qaeda could not be immediately verified by Israeli security officials.

Members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah organization have been arrested in Egypt for plotting attacks in conjunction with Iranian agents to destabilize the Egyptian government, this column has learned.

A top Egyptian intelligence official said his country arrested at least six members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah’s declared military wing, in conjunction with a massive alleged Iranian plot to launch attacks against both Egyptian and Israeli targets.

When asked, sources inside the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades did not deny that some members of their organization were arrested for working with Iran and Hizbullah inside Egypt.

According to the sources speaking to WND from Gaza, a cell of their group named the Ayman Juda Brigades were working with Hizbullah cells in Egypt. But the sources denied that Egypt was the intended target of their work. They claimed they were planning attacks against Israel.