Jerusalem -Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas submitted an unprecedented written peace proposal to outgoing Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert last December, the Palestinian's chief negotiator claimed on Monday. The document, sent to Washington with chief negotiator Saeb Erekat on a previously secret mission on December 18, came to nothing when Olmert failed to respond in writing, Erekat told reporters.

Jerusalem, April 27 : Archaeologists have unearthed Roman-era catacombs in Bethlehem during construction in an empty lot beside Bethlehem University.

According to a report by the Ma'an News Agency, the small underground cave system opens facing north, and held four stone coffins with engravings on each, housed in two separate dug out burial areas.

Wael Hamamrah, Head of Antiquates department in Jericho, estimated that the artifacts, complete with skeletal remains and some pottery are between 1,800 and 1,900 years old.

Jerusalem- Israel's military investigation of its own offensive in Gaza "lacks credibility" and confirms the need for an impartial international inquiry, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Thursday.

The group said such an inquiry should investigate alleged violations of the laws of war during the December 27 - January 18 offensive by both Israel and the radical Islamist Hamas movement ruling Gaza.

It called on both to cooperate with Justice Richard Goldstone, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to head such an international inquiry.

Jerusalem - The Arab peace initiative could lead to the destruction of Israel because of a clause calling for the return to it of millions of Palestinian refugees, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was quoted Wednesday as saying.

The initiative is a "dangerous and a tested formula for the destruction of Israel," Lieberman told staffers at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem this week, according to the daily Ma'ariv newspaper.

Jerusalem - Germany has over the past year significantly improved its efforts to bring to justice the world's last living Nazi war criminals, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said Tuesday.

But others, including Austria and several Eastern European and South American states, are still failing to do so, the organization said in its annual report evaluating countries for their efforts to track down, prosecute and try ex-Nazis residing within their borders.

Jerusalem  - Sixty four years after the defeat of the Nazi regime and the end of World War II, anti-Semitism is still flourishing, Israeli President Shimon Peres warned Monday as he opened the country's annual commemoration of the Nazi's attempted genocide of the Jews of Europe.

"The gas has dissipated, but the poison remains. There are still Holocaust deniers and hot-headed skinheads in the world, those who bear the sort of visceral hatred that leads to racist murder," Peres said at the official ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem.