News stories by Pierre Klochendler, page 25

Last November, on the day marking the assassination of Israel's peace-making leader Yitzhak Rabin, the now outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Israelis something which, for decades, not even Rabin had dared say - we must end the occupation of the Palestinian territories and return to the 1967 borders.

The obvious objective of the first visit to the Middle East by the Obama administration's U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was to contain the still potentially explosive situation in Gaza following January's Israeli offensive against Hamas, and to rescue the two-state solution policy in face of the emergence of a far-right administration in Jerusalem.

'There's no doubt there's been a huge amount of damage done, including whole sectors of private sector buildings which have been razed to the ground and, in any event, given the numbers of people that have died, I find the conversation about proportionality not really a sensible conversation to have. What we've got to do is to find a way of ensuring this doesn't happen again.' The pointed comment came from former British prime minister Tony Blair, special international envoy to the Middle East, during his first visit to Gaza after Israel's offensive against Hamas.

He's yet to be installed as Israel's prime minister, let alone starting to govern through the customary 100 days of grace, and already Benjamin Netanyahu is being allowed no respite: neither by those whom he envisages as his potential coalition partners nor by the international community, most pertinently the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama.

Israel's outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rode roughshod over those who piously argue that sport and politics ought not to play in the same arena.

Israel's outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert is risking a crisis of confidence with Egypt by insisting that a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas precede any Egyptian-mediated ceasefire arrangement to end the Gaza war.

An indiscreet whisper following a hastily scribbled note around the Israeli cabinet table exposed the deepening political stand-off in the wake of last week's inconclusive elections.

Who wins a tie? That was U.S. President Barack Obama's dilemma Wednesday on whom to congratulate as the winner of Israel's general election.

Israel's foreign minister Tzipi Livni clung precariously to a narrow lead over her right-wing rival Benjamin Netanyahu as vote counting neared conclusion from Israel's Tuesday general election. Both would-be prime ministers continue to claim victory: 'I won,' read the headline of the country's biggest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronot, alongside the photos of the two.

Israeli voters went into their polling booths Tuesday uncertain about the government they wanted to lead them over the next four years, only to emerge from their vote even more uncertain about their country's future.