PA Collaborating With Obama Administration
The Palestinian Authority has been in contact with the Obama administration and European countries about the possibility of taking more UN action on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before President Obama leaves office next month, a senior PA official told Breitbart Jerusalem.
The official said the UN action could come in the form of declarations by UN bodies, including the General Assembly; UN sessions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or even another United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution. He said any further UNSC resolution would depend on the support of the U.S. and European countries after the upcoming Paris Mideast summit slated for January 15.
He said the UN action would seek to set the parameters of a future Palestinian state with a clear timeline for negotiations. If the action comes in the form of a resolution at a UN body, it could call for an infrastructure to establish mechanisms to enforce last week’s UNSC resolution, which demanded a complete halt to Israeli construction in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem and declared those territories occupied Palestinian lands.
The PA official said the proposals set forth at the Paris Mideast conference will likely serve as the basis for upcoming UN action.
An Israeli official told Breitbart Jerusalem that the Israeli government is aware of the possibility of more UN action in the coming weeks, although the official did not have information about a new UNSC resolution.
The State Department would not provide comment to Breitbart Jerusalem when asked whether the Obama administration had been in contact with the Palestinian Authority about further UN action.
Instead, a spokesperson for the State Department pointed to Tuesday’s press briefing with Deputy Spokesperson Mark C. Toner at which Toner was asked about future action on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and replied that the Obama administration will continue to “work until January 20th.”
Meanwhile, the PA official speaking to Breitbart Jerusalem said that any upcoming UN action would be geared toward bypassing the Mideast policies of the incoming Donald Trump administration by establishing binding guidelines for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and a halt to settlement activity.
“The new motion will seek to set up a clear timeline for negotiations resulting in the establishment of a Palestinian state and stipulate a procedure for overseeing the implementation of Resolution 2334, including posting inspectors to the Palestinian territories,” said the PA official, who requested anonymity.
He said the “inspectors” are expected to be civilians with a background in security, and would function like the Temporary International Presence mission in Hebron. That mission consists of civilian observers who monitor the so-called Hebron Agreement, which saw the partial redeployment of Israeli forces to sections of Hebron while about 80 percent of the territory remained under Palestinian control.
The PA official added that the Paris conference is expected to call on all sides to establish a Palestinian state within the so-called 1967 borders in a relatively short period of time, perhaps by the beginning of 2019.
Report Contains Key Disclaimer
Amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and Russia, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Thursday released a joint report accusing Russian civilian and military intelligence services of compromising networks and infrastructure associated with the 2016 presidential election.
Much of the news media coverage of the joint report failed to mention that the 13-page document, which is short on specifics, starts off with a glaring disclaimer that the DHS does not “provide any warranties” about the information contained inside the report.
The report was produced by the U.S. Computer Readiness Team (US-CERT), a cybersecurity and information-sharing service of the DHS.
A spokesperson for DHS told this reporter on Monday that the disclaimer is “standard” for “previous JARs (Joint Analysis Reports), though most cannot be shared publicly.”
Of the 48 documents currently posted on the US-CERT website’s main “publications” page, only six could be found with a similar disclaimer, including a June 2012 report on technical methods to defend networks and a similar report from October 2012. The other reports with similar disclaimers include a May 2014 report on combatting “insider” technical threats, a July 2014 report warning of breaches into hospitality industry computers, a report from that same month in 2014 warning that “malicious actors are using publicly available tools to locate businesses that use remote desktop applications,” and a report from 2014 warning about the possibility of electronic U.S. highway signs being exploited.
Former Hamas Prime Minister Fears Returning To Gaza
Ismail Haniyeh, former Prime Minister of the Hamas government, is “in no hurry” to return to the Gaza Strip for fear that the Islamic State’s Sinai offshoot will try to assassinate him, a senior Hamas operative told Breitbart Jerusalem.
According to the Hamas official, Haniyeh’s return to Gaza has been postponed for the second time in the last several weeks as tensions between Hamas and ISIS in the coastal enclave reached a boiling point following a major Hamas crackdown on ISIS-affiliated jihadists.
The source told Breitbart Jerusalem that Hamas received a concrete threat from Sinai-based Islamic State jihadists, who said they would assassinate Haniyeh should Hamas not accede to their demand to release their operatives and supporters arrested in recent months.
Haniyeh, who has been residing in Qatar for the last few months while preparing to succeed Khaled Meshaal at the helm of the Islamist movement, was supposed to return to Gaza in late November, but his arrival was pushed back for fear of assassination.
He was set to visit Egypt this week with fellow top Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzook and travel from there to the neighboring Gaza Strip, but that plan was also called off due to threats from ISIS jihadists.