JERUSALEM (Reuters) – FIFA has given a Druze Arab from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights permission to play for Israel even though he is not a citizen of the country, the Israel FA said.

Maccabi Haifa’s Weaam Amasha is the leading Israeli league scorer this season with 12 goals from 13 matches and he has notched six in European club competition but he was unable to play for Israel because he does not own a passport.

JERUSALEM, Dec 1 (Reuters) – FIFA has given a Druze
Arab from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights permission to play
for Israel even though he is not a citizen of the country, the
Israel FA said.

Maccabi Haifa’s Weaam Amasha is the leading Israeli league
scorer this season with 12 goals from 13 matches and he has
notched six in European club competition but he was unable to
play for Israel because he does not own a passport.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s cabinet decided on Monday to continue to withhold tax revenues owed to the Palestinian Authority and international envoys ended talks with no sign of a breakthrough in efforts to restart peace talks.

The freeze on the transfer of funds collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinian Authority was imposed on November 1, a day after the Palestinians won full membership of the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO as part of their unilateral drive for statehood.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Former President Moshe Katsav raped a former aide and molested two other women who worked for him, Israel’s Supreme Court said on Thursday, upholding his conviction in a lower court and a seven-year jail term.

“He misused his high position and defiled the bodies and dignity of (his accusers),” the three-justice panel said in a unanimous ruling against Katsav’s appeal and ordered him to report to jail to begin serving his sentence on December 7.

ACRE, Israel (Reuters) – An Israeli mother-and-daughter play performed at a recent theater festival climaxed with the tale of the killing of a Gaza doctor’s family, a 2009 event that brought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict deep into Israeli living rooms.

“Explosive: War tourism” culminated with the sounds of an audio recording of Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish’s cries, heard live at the time on Israeli TV, as he pleaded in a phone call to an Israeli reporter friend asking him to get the army to stop shooting at his house.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was freed from five years of captivity in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday to a joyous reception, but may need time to recover from his time kept in sun-deprived isolation and other injuries, his father said.

Noam Shalit said they were reunited in Israel and that his noticeably gaunt and pale 25-year-old son would require care for improperly healed shrapnel wounds. He said his captors had also treated him “roughly” at times.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was freed from five years of isolated captivity in the Gaza Strip Tuesday to a joyous reception, but other former captives said coping with liberty again would also pose tough challenges.

Initial footage showed the 25-year-old Shalit in a daze as his former captors and Egyptian mediators, who helped facilitate his release, escorted him on his short journey to freedom.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A long-awaited prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas began before dawn on Tuesday when the first of hundreds of Palestinian inmates were bused from their jails to border crossings where they will be swapped for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

The first phase of the exchange, expected to take several hours, will end a saga that has gripped Israelis over the five years of Shalit’s captivity in Gaza.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel and the Gaza Strip’s Islamist Hamas rulers prepared to implement a prisoner swap on Tuesday in which Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit will be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinians.

The deal was given the all-clear by Israel’s highest court late on Monday after it rejected petitions to block the swap by relatives of Israelis killed by some of the Palestinians to be released.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli police Friday arrested a man suspected of defacing a memorial to assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in an apparent protest against an impending Palestinian prisoner swap.

A police spokesman said the man, whom he declined to name, was the son of a couple killed in a Jerusalem pizzeria suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2001.