JERUSALEM, Feb 19 (Reuters) – Britain has offered new passports to six citizens whose identities were used by suspects in a Dubai assassination, to spare the Britons from inadvertent arrest under an Interpol alert, an official said on Friday. Consular staff at the British embassy in Tel Aviv tracked down the six, all of whom live in Israel, after Dubai police said an alleged hit squad had used their identities when entering the emirate to kill a top Hamas commander. "We have invited the nationals to come to the consular section in Tel Aviv to get new passports in place of the ones that Dubai police publicised with their identities," embassy spokesman Raffi Shamir said. "This step will reduce the risk that these people might be inadvertently detained," he added. Dubai police have released the identities of 11 people carrying European passports, including those of the six Britons, which they said were used in the killing of Palestinian Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a luxury hotel last month. The international criminal police organisation Interpol said on Thursday it had issued "red notices" for the 11 suspects to help find and arrest them anywhere in its 188 member countries. Dubai’s police chief said on Thursday he believed Israeli agents were responsible for killing al-Mabhouh, a senior member of the Islamist group, and called for the Mossad spy agency’s boss to be arrested if its responsibility was proved. Israel has refused to comment on the Jan. 19 killing. The names and numbers on the original passports are the same as those used by the alleged agents, but the photographs and signatures are different, Shamir said. Consular staff managed to contact all the British nationals in Israel whose identities were used, including Melvyn Adam Mildiner, to whom Reuters spoke by phone on Tuesday, a day after his stolen identity was publicised with the others. Six other suspects identified by Dubai used cloned passports from Ireland, France and Germany. Britain called in Israel’s ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, on Thursday to seek an explanation of how the passports of British citizens came to be used by the alleged killers.Foreign Secretary David Miliband said a top British diplomat had made clear to Prosor "how seriously we take any suggestion of fraudulent use of British passports" and sought Israeli assistance. Prosor said he was "unable to assist" the British with more information. France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the incident underscored the need for peace in the Middle East. "(The case) shows the need for peace and a Palestinian state, immediately," Kouchner said in an interview with Journal du Dimanche weekend paper, to be published on Saturday. (Editing by Michael Roddy) (For blogs and links on Israeli politics and other Israeli and Palestinian news, go to blogs.reuters.com/axismundi)

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Britain has offered new passports to six citizens whose identities were used by suspects in a Dubai assassination, hoping to save the Britons from inadvertent arrest under an Interpol alert, an official said on Friday.

Consular staff at the British embassy in Tel Aviv have tracked down the six, all of whom live in Israel, after Dubai police said an alleged hit squad had used their identities when entering the emirate to kill a top Hamas commander.

“We have invited the nationals to come to the consular section in Tel Aviv to get new passports in place of the ones that Dubai police publicized with their identities,” embassy spokesman Raffi Shamir said.

“This step will reduce the risk that these people might be inadvertently detained,” he added.

Dubai police have released the identities of 11 people carrying European passports, including those of the six Britons, which they said were used in the killing of Palestinian Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a luxury hotel last month.

The international criminal police organization Interpol said on Thursday it had issued “red notices” for the 11 suspects to help find and arrest them anywhere in its 188 member countries.

Dubai’s police chief said on Thursday he believed Israeli agents were responsible for the killing al-Mabhouh, a senior member of the Islamist group, and called for the Mossad spy agency’s boss to be arrested if its responsibility was proved.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Sunday canceled a conscription agreement with a Jewish seminary because its principal rabbi refused to condemn acts of mutiny by some of its pro-settler soldiers.

Last month pro-settler soldiers raised fears of rebellion in the ranks of the Israeli military in any future land-for-peace moves with the Palestinians after some of them protested the partial removal of a settler outpost in the occupied West Bank.

A Defense Ministry statement said that Barak canceled the agreement with the Har Bracha Yeshiva situated in the West Bank because of the refusal of principal Rabbi Eliezer Melamed to speak out against acts of mutiny.

“The Defense minister has determined that the actions and words of Rabbi Melamed have undermined the basis of Israeli democracy and they promoted and incited some of his pupils to protest, mutiny and to harming the spirit of the Israel Defense Forces,” the statement said.

Ideological divides run deep in Israel, especially over the future of some 500,000 Jews who live among 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas captured in a 1967 war which Palestinians want for a viable future state.

But the military, to which Jewish men and women are conscripted at the age of 18, has long been seen as off-limits to political debate.

The Israeli military and some Jewish seminaries have instituted a decades-old arrangement known in Hebrew as “Hesder” allowing some observant Jewish men to share time between military service and religious studies.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel triggered a fresh rift with Washington over settlement building on Tuesday by approving the building of 900 homes for Jews on West Bank land it occupied in a 1967 war and annexed to its Jerusalem municipality.

The Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth said U.S. President Barack Obama’s envoy, George Mitchell, had asked an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at a meeting in London on Monday, to block the proposed construction at the settlement of Gilo.

But a government planning commission approved the addition of 900 housing units at Gilo, where 40,000 Israelis already live.

The Israeli decision drew an unusually sharply worded rebuke from the White House, which said it was “dismayed” and accused Israel of undermining Obama’s efforts to resume peace talks with Palestinians stalled since December.

“At a time when we are working to relaunch negotiations, these actions make it more difficult for our efforts to succeed,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.

In his statement, Gibbs also said the United States objected to continued evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also deplored the Israeli move, spokesman Farhan Haq said. Ban “believes that such actions undermine efforts for peace and cast doubt on the viability of the two-state solution” for Israelis and Palestinians, he said.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel warned the Palestinians Monday that declaring a state without concluding a peace agreement would lead to Israeli counter-measures that could include annexation of more of the occupied West Bank.

“If the Palestinians take such a unilateral line, Israel should also consider … passing a law to annex some of the settlements,” Environment Minister Gilad Erdan, a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel Radio.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, speaking to reporters, declined to specify what action Israel might take.

But he said: “It is clear any such step by the Palestinians would not pass without an Israeli response.”

Without setting a timeframe, Palestinian officials said on Sunday the Palestinians planned to go to the U.N. Security Council in an effort to secure international support for an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Palestinians attributed the move to frustration at the lack of progress in peace talks, which have been stalled for a year. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said negotiations cannot resume until Israel halts settlement expansion.

U.S. senators visiting the Middle East said Washington would veto a Palestinian declaration of statehood in the United Nations Security Council. They said it would go nowhere and urged Arab states to stop it. “It would be D.O.A. – dead on arrival,” said Democratic Party Senator Ted Kaufman (DE) “It’s a waste of time.”

JERUSALEM, Nov 3 (Reuters) – A self-confessed killer dubbed "The Jewish Terrorist" has shown how far settlers may go to stop Israel trading land for peace with Palestinians and the risks even lone attackers can pose to stability in a tinderbox region. So concluded many Israelis as media devoted much of their newsprint and airtime this week to the arrest of Yaakov "Jack" Tytell, an American immigrant to a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. Police said he had admitted killing two Arabs a decade ago and more recent attacks on Israeli leftists. Analysts were quick to compare him to the right-wing Jew, angry at peace deals with the Palestinians, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 14 years ago this week. The jailed killer Yigal Amir remains a hero to thousands on the Israeli right. Many on the left believe hopes of peace died with Rabin. Newspapers, most of which devoted numerous pages to Tytell, also recalled Baruch Goldstein, the settler physician from New York who shot nearly 200 Arab worshippers at a Hebron mosque in 1995, killing 29 of them — an act swiftly followed by Palestinian suicide bombings and other attacks in Israel. Former Israeli secret service agents warned of a "Jewish Underground", dormant and ready, out in the wilder edges of the West Bank hilltops, that has the weaponry to make good on hardliners’ threats to resist with violence any move by Israel’s government to end its 41 years of military occupation, or even to evict settlers from some of their fringe "outposts". And Menachem Landow, a former head of the Shin Bet security service’s Jewish Division which combatted underground settler cells behind bombings in the 1980s, said even loners threatened national security, either by posing a risk to leaders like Rabin or by provoking Arab attacks, like Goldstein and others. "The Shin Bet gets involved the moment the threat is to national security," Landow said. "The priority is to prevent murders, but clearly there is a secondary drive — to prevent escalation … It can trigger a revolution." SETTLERS’ DEFENCE Leaders of the half-million settlers, who are at the heart of arguments among Israel, the Palestinians and Washington that have held up peace talks, distanced themselves from Tytell, a 37-year-old father-of-four. His lawyer was quoted saying he was not responsible for actions he saw as a "mission from God". Police were forced to explain why it took them 12 years to find the alleged killer of a Palestinian shepherd and of an Arab Jerusalem taxi driver but only months to arrest the same man after he wounded an Israeli professor with a pipe bomb — the hunt was complicated because Tytell was a loner, police said. But a former head of the Shin Bet, whose agents helped police arrest Tytell last month, said that while Tytell may have acted alone he was far from unique among settlers: "This is the soil where this grows," Ami Ayalon said. Several unsolved murders of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have led Shin Bet officers to assume the existence of Jewish killers, security sources say. But they are unsure how far they are connected or politically driven. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, elected this year, includes a foreign minister who is himself a settler and another senior cabinet member lately caught on camera calling Israel’s main anti-settlement group a "virus". Yet even Netanyahu has faced virulent criticism from some settlers, who account for about 8 percent of Israeli Jews, for even modest gestures of "restraint" on settlement expansion he has offered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — gestures that U.S. President Barack Obama says do not go far enough. Netanyahu, however, highlights the strength of opinion among settlers as a limit on what concessions he can offer — even when many among the majority of Israelis who do not live on occupied land express little sympathy for hardline colonists. Aware of the potential backlash, settler leader Danny Dayan said: "Any person of conscience … must rise up in indignation against such acts — and against any despicable attempt to use them to gain political capital by blaming an entire community." Aside from the 1990s murders of Arabs committed when he was a tourist, Tytell is also accused of injuring a leading Israeli left-winger, Zeev Sternhell, an outspoken critic of settlers last year by planting a pipe bomb at his Jerusalem home. (Additional reporting by Dan Williams; Editing by Dominic Evans)

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A senior Israeli cabinet minister Tuesday blamed local human rights groups for hindering travel abroad by some leading officials concerned that they might faces war crimes charges.

Moshe Yaalon, one of four deputies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said he specifically would not travel to England for fear of prosecution over war crimes allegations made by human rights and pro-Palestinian groups.

“As a former officer … I cannot travel because of a campaign that has been initiated here by (rights groups) who were not happy with my performance,” Yaalon told Israel Radio.

“There is one place in the world to which I don’t travel at the moment and that is England, unless it’s an official visit because on an official visit I am supposed to have immunity.”

Yaalon was summoned by Netanyahu in August for calling anti-settler group Peace Now a “virus.”

Last week pro-Palestinian groups failed to persuade a London court to issue an arrest warrant against Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak, whom they accused of war crimes in his conduct of Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip this year.

Barak attended the British Labor Party’s annual conference in Brighton and met Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The London magistrates court said Barak had diplomatic immunity.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Chicago’s anemic presentation at Friday’s vote to choose the host for the 2016 Olympics was partly to blame for the U.S. city’s humiliating first-round elimination, a voting delegate said on Sunday.

Israel’s International Olympic Committee (IOC) member Alex Gilady said Chicago’s dismal showing at the Copenhagen congress that chose Rio de Janeiro to stage the Games was enhanced only by U.S. President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle.

“Chicago’s presentation without (the Obamas) was very, very anemic and Rio’s presentation was excellent,” Gilady told Israel Radio in a telephone interview from Copenhagen.

Chicago’s shock exit came after it received only 18 votes from the more than 100 IOC members despite the presence for the first time of a sitting U.S. president and an eloquent speech from the first lady.

Obama paid a flying visit of only a few hours to Copenhagen to bolster the Chicago bid team’s effort but Gilady did not think this had an adverse effect on the voting.

“This really, really was not against Obama, on the contrary. His wife, who spent three days here, did excellent work and he took the time to come here especially for a 45 minute presentation,” Gilady said.

He added that tactical voting by IOC members from Asian countries to ensure Tokyo — the other candidate city alongside eventual runner-up Madrid — stayed in the race could also have been a factor in Chicago’s early exit.