GAZA CITY, Gaza -- Half of Gazas bakeries have closed down and the other half have resorted to animal feed to produce bread as Israels complete blockade of the coastal territory enters its 19th day.

AMMAN -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has launched an unusual kind of peace campaign, by targeting the Israeli public with paid advertisements in major Hebrew-language newspapers to promote the Arab peace initiative.

The minor escalation of hostilities this past week between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip did manage to make some noise amid the epochal cacophony of the global financial crisis. The headlines in the international media, however, had less to do with the limited border skirmishes, rocket launches, air strikes, and border closures which transpired, than with the fact that the nearly five-month ceasefire between the Palestinian militant group and the Jewish state appeared to be unraveling.

JERUSALEM -- Yuval Diskin, the head of Israels domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, warned the Israeli government during an emergency cabinet meeting on Sunday that a violent uprising by extremist right-wing Israeli settlers is possible.

MOSCOW -- The election campaign began in Israel when its foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, elected the leader of the Kadima party last September, failed to form a government coalition supported by a majority of the Knesset, Israels parliament.

The raid by U.S. military helicopters on a Syrian village close to the Iraqi border that Damascus claimed killed several Syrians comes at a bad time for the U.S. administration of George W. Bush. Given the precariousness of the Middle East with the war in Iraq tying down U.S. forces, the conflict in Afghanistan gaining momentum, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks deadlocked, Iran defiantly pursuing its nuclear program, and Lebanons political situation uncertain with tens of thousands of Syrian troops camping on its border, the last thing Washington needs right now is to ignite another front.

What do Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former U.S. President Bill Clinton have in common? Not much one might guess, and this is generally true. But when one examines their careers closely one would be surprised that the two lame-duck leaders attempted in the few weeks before they left office to resolve once and for all the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Monday marks the 35th anniversary of the fourth Arab-Israeli major conflict, the 1973 October War — or, as it is known in Israel, the Yom Kippur War.

A statement by the retiring Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has provoked a shock reaction in Israel and restrained joy among Arabs. "I am saying what no previous Israeli leader has ever said: we should withdraw from almost all of the territories, including East Jerusalem and in the Golan Heights," Olmert said in an interview to the Yediot Ahronot on the eve of the Jewish New Year.

Okay. The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are getting nowhere fast. Some experts are starting to say that maybe its time to look at the future of Palestine with a completely set of new lenses. The paradox in the comatose peace negotiations is that although the details calling for a two-state solution are generally accepted by all sides, a solution is not truly desired by either the Palestinians or the Israelis for various reasons. See the Sept. 15 issue of the Middle East Times