Cairo - Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal chaired the opening of the Arab League Council in Cairo Monday evening amid signs the 22-state body was becoming impatient with the continued political impasse between Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah.

The meeting, which continues on Tuesday, is expected to discuss the situation in the Palestinian Territories as well ongoing violence in Darfur.

"It's about time that the Arab countries take a solid and decisive stance against those who shed Palestinian blood and deepen the Palestinian division," Faisal said.

"The Palestinians have to take full responsibility. They have inflicted damage upon the Palestinian cause through their internal struggle," he said.

Gaza - A boat carrying pro-Palestinian peace activists is scheduled to arrive in Gaza later this month, one of the organizers said Thursday.

The boat will arrive in Gaza on September 22, Jamal al-Khodari, head of the Popular Committee to Challenge the [Israeli] Siege, said. The vessel will carry members of the European parliament, doctors and members of the media.

The boat is the third such boat to arrive in Gaza in recent weeks. On August 23, two boats carrying 44 foreign peace activists as well as Palestinians broke the Israeli blockage on Gaza after sailing from Cyprus.

Damascus - The Damascus-based Palestinian Islamic resistance group Hamas on Monday denied Arab media reports claiming that its leadership was moving to Sudan.

"Media reports that Hamas' politburo chief, Khaled Meshaal, and other members will move to Sudan are false," according to a Damascus- based Hamas official who spoke to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa on condition of anonymity.

Earlier, the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Rai quoted what it described as well-informed Palestinian sources as saying that exiled Hamas leader Meshaal had moved his bureau and his home from Syria to Sudan.

Jerusalem- A Jerusalem district court convicted Tuesday two Israeli border policemen of abduction and manslaughter for their role in the 2002 kidnapping and subsequent death of a Palestinian teenager in Hebron.

Shahar Botabicka and Denis Alhazov and two other border policemen kidnapped 17-year-old Amran Abu Hamadya in the southern West Bank city of Hebron in December 2002. They dragged him into their jeep, beat him and eventually threw him out of the vehicle while it was travelling at high speed.

Ramallah  - Some 2.35 million Palestinians currently live in the West Bank, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) said Monday, basing the number on a census conducted in 2007.

This represents an increase from 1.87 million ten years ago when the first census was conducted, PCBS director Loai Shabaneh said in a statement

He said annual growth rate between the two census periods was 2.6 per cent, which means the Palestinian population in the West Bank will double after 27 years and not after 23 years, as was previously predicted. This is a direct result of a decline in fertility rate and of emigration, he added.

London, Aug 28 : A Palestinian couple locked their disabled kids in two urine-stained rooms for forty years because they were afraid the children would ruin the marriage prospects of a healthy child, police has revealed.

The case has highlighted the shame felt by families who have children with disabilities in Palestinian society “made worse because of poor services and the practice of first-cousin marriages in Arab communities.”

"This is sad, shameful and awful," The Scotsman quoted Imad Abumohr, a disabled rights activist, as saying.