Abbas orders Hamas hunger strikers freed

MIAMI (AP) — The U.S. government has begun notifying lawyers of Guantanamo Bay prisoners if the men they represent are being force-fed to prevent them from starving to death in a hunger strike that has dragged on for more than two months, though its extent remains in dispute.

More than half of the remaining detainees at Guantánamo Bay are now on a hunger strike, US military officials confirmed Sunday. Of the 166 inmates at the controversial detention camp in Cuba, 84 are refusing all food as a protest against their indefinite confinement and conditions at the centre.

Two Hamas militants were shot dead by Israeli troops on Friday during an operation in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, officials on both sides said.The men, who were members of Hamas' armed wing the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, were shot in the southeastern part of the city, known as H2, which is under Israeli military control.Palestinian security officials named them as Maamun Natsheh, a 24-year-old militant from Hebron, and Nashat Karni, 33, who was a local leader for the group in the northern West Bank.

Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu was freed from jail on Sunday after serving 11 weeks behind bars for breaking the terms of his release and meeting a foreigner, a prison official said."Mordecai Vanunu was freed from prison on Sunday morning," a spokesman for the prisons authority told AFP.Vanunu began serving a three-month sentence at a prison in Ramle near Tel Aviv on May 23.A court had in December ordered him to do three months community service or serve three months in prison for violating the terms of his release from jail back in 2004.

Hamas prisoners being held in Israeli jails on Monday began a hunger strike to protest after seven of their number were put in solitary confinement, a minister told AFP.Issa Qaraqa, the Palestinian minister for prisoner affairs, confirmed a 24-hour hunger strike had begun during the morning but could not confirm how many of the 2,800 Hamas inmates were observing it.The strike was called a day after Israel moved seven prisoners from the Islamist movement's political leadership into solitary confinement, he said.

Fellow dissidents Sunday urged the hunger-striking wife of a political prisoner to give up her 10-day-old fast, suggesting it had become an obstacle to the release of more prisoners.The government on Friday freed one of a dozen political prisoners who had refused an offer of exile in Spain in what was seen as a break in an impasse over their fate.But a second dissident who also was supposed to be released remained in prison amid a continuing hunger strike by Alejandrina Garcia, who has been joined in a sympathy strike by her imprisoned husband and another prisoner.

Mahmud Abbas called on Thursday for concrete US efforts to deliver a Palestinian state, as crowds marked the sixth anniversary of Yasser Arafat's death.The Palestinian president said he would hold US President Barack Obama, who helped relaunch direct peace talks in early September, to his pledge to seek the creation of a Palestinian state within a year."We consider this statement to be a commitment by President Obama, not just a slogan, and we hope that next year he won't say to us 'we apologise, we can't,'" Abbas said in an address to tens of thousands.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas will make a brief visit to Lebanon next week for talks with President Michel Sleiman on relations and the plight of Palestinian refugees, officials said on Thursday.A Lebanese official who did not wish to be identified told AFP that during Monday's visit Abbas will also discuss the Middle East peace process and the rebuilding of a refugee camp in northern Lebanon destroyed in 2007.A Palestinian official in the West Bank town of Ramallah where Abbas has his headquarters confirmed the visit, speaking on condition of anonymity.