European Union foreign ministers began Tuesday evening an emergency session to discuss the escalating conflict in the Gaza Strip.

Reports ahead of the meeting said the ministers would, among others, examine the chances for setting up a "humanitarian ceasefire" amid the rising casualty figures and ongoing attacks.

France, on its next-to-last day in its six-month term as EU president, had called the meeting after talks between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak.

Brussels/Paris  - The French government on Monday called for an emergency meeting of the European Union's foreign ministers to discuss the crisis in the Middle East, French officials confirmed.

France, which holds the EU's rotating presidency until Thursday, has called for a meeting of the top diplomats of the bloc's 27 member states in Paris on Tuesday to "discuss the EU's contribution to solving the current crisis," a statement said.

Brussels  - The European Union's top foreign-policy official on Saturday condemned as "unacceptable" the death of Palestinian civilians in Israeli air-strikes and called for an end to violence.

"The current Israeli strikes are inflicting an unacceptable toll on Palestinian civilians and will only worsen the humanitarian crisis as well as complicate the search for a peaceful solution," EU High Representative Javier Solana said in a statement.

Paris  - The European Union on Saturday called for an immediate end to hostilities in the Gaza Strip, following Israeli airstrikes on the territory which have left at least
155 people dead.

The EU also criticized what it called Israel's disproportionate use of force, in a statement from the current presidency of the union in Paris.

The French foreign ministry on behalf of the EU renewed its call for a permanent ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, and said that there could be no military solution to the conflict in the Gaza Strip.

London, Dec 26 : The European Union''s digital library, Europeana, which crashed on its opening day, is back in operation.

European Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr said the website was working after its server capacity had been quadrupled and it had been stress-tested to deal with user interest.

However, a message on the site www. europeana. eu reads, "the user experience may not be optimal in this test phase" and as a result "the number of users will be limited in peak times."

The site was launched on November 21 to great fanfare but was swamped by an unexpected 10 million user hits per hour, swiftly bringing the system to a crashing halt, reports the BBC.

Brussels - The European Union's executive on Tuesday pledged food aid totalling 12.4 million euros (17.3 million dollars) to vulnerable Iraqis and Palestinians hard hit by rising food prices.

The pledge, which comes in response to an appeal from the United Nations, is intended to support up to 1.9 million poor and needy people in the two countries, a statement from the European Commission said.