Quick Takes: News From Israel You May Have Missed

Israeli security agencies that monitor Al Qaeda chatter are not aware of any credible threats indicating a radiological attack against New York or any other U.S. city, security sources told WorldNetDaily.

The sources said there has been some talk on Al Qaeda forums that have proven reliable in the past of “something spectacular” against U.S. interests, but they said the analyzed chatter did not present a timetable or any specific threats and was missing indicators normally associated with credible threats.

Arab Israeli Terror Group Strikes

A terrorist organization consisting of Arab citizens of Israel who are connected to the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the “military wing” of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah organization, has re-formed north of Jerusalem and is prepared to attack, Brigades sources told WND.

The group, calling itself the Freedom Brigades of the Galilee, took credit for a shooting attack last week in Jerusalem’s Old City that wounded nine.

The Freedom Brigades in 2003 announced its formation in the Galilee, a region north of Jerusalem that encompasses about one-third of Israel. Israeli police killed the Freedom Brigades’ leader, Mohammad Khatib, during a shootout in April 2004.

Afterwards, Israeli security officials announced that the entire group had been disbanded.

But last Friday, Khatib’s nephew, Ahmed Khatib, an Israeli Arab from the Galilee region, carried out a shooting attack. Senior sources in the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades told WND the Freedom Brigades receives direction from West Bank elements of the Al Aksa Brigades who did not receive amnesty last month in an agreement with Israel.

Peres Pushes Land Giveaway

Newly installed Israeli President Shimon Peres has quietly drafted a plan for the Jewish state to evacuate and transfer to the Palestinians nearly the entire West Bank and several Arab Israeli cities located within territory that is undisputedly Israel’s according to the international community.

Peres’s plan calls for Israel to hand 97 percent of the West Bank over to Abbas, with Israel retaining a small number of the territory’s Jewish communities.

In exchange for Israel keeping some land, the Jewish state will give the PA control of Arab Israeli cities north of Tel Aviv which, together with the evacuated West Bank territory, would amount to the equivalent of 100 percent of the West Bank.

Peres presented his initiative to European Union representatives, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and top aides to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas over the past few weeks.

The official role of president in Israel is limited largely to ceremonial matters; the president is not supposed to involve himself in foreign affairs. According to Knesset sources, Peres is contemplating asking lawmakers to officially expand the role of the president to include conducting foreign policy.

During Peres’s acceptance speech last month, he called for Israel to retreat from the West Bank. The next day, he called for direct negotiations with Syria, which hosts top Palestinian terror leaders and supports the Lebanese Hizbullah militia.

Yasir Arafat had the deadly HIV virus in his bloodstream when he died, the late PLO leader’s personal physician disclosed this week in an interview with Arab news media.

Dr. Ashraf al-Kurdi, Arafat’s personal physician, began telling Al Jazeera during a live interview that he knew that Arafat had HIV in his bloodstream at the time of his death, but the satellite Arabic network immediately cut him off when he made the accusation.

Hours later, a Jordanian news website from Amman quoted al-Kurdi as saying someone injected HIV into Arafat’s body before he died and that the real cause of the Palestinian leader’s death was poison.

Al-Kurdi was Arafat’s doctor for 18 years, up to a few months before the PLO leader died. He played no role in Arafat’s medical care during the final weeks of the Palestinian leader’s life.

Arafat died Nov. 11, 2004, at a military hospital in Paris. The official cause of death was not released because French law prohibits distribution of medical records to anyone other than immediate family. Arafat’s widow, Suha, has refused to divulge any details of his illness.

Al-Kurdi told the Jordanian news website that Arafat’s sickness and death leave open many questions that should be investigated.

“I would usually be summoned to attend to Arafat immediately, even when all he had was a simple cold. But when his medical situation was really deteriorating, they chose not to call me at all,” the doctor said.

Al-Kurdi said Suha Arafat refused to allow him to visit Arafat in the private Paris hospital where he was being treated and that he was later denied access to Arafat’s body. He demanded that the French government set up a commission of inquiry.