Al Jazeera's latest leak of hundreds of secret Palestinian negotiating papers is providing the kind of fly-on-the-wall insights to Mideast peace talks that usually only emerge many years later in the autobiographies of politicians and diplomats.

Though some of the initial coverage and spin by Al Jazeera and other organizations has been inaccurate or out of context, the documents themselves offer a treasure trove of detailed information about Palestinians' internal strategy and tactics. Most of the documents were produced by the Palestinian Authority's own attorneys, advisors and negotiators and include transcripts of private strategy sessions and internal talking points. It's a bonanza for Israel, which can get a peek into the Palestinian thought process as recently as last year.

One December 2009 document discusses "Palestinian Messaging and Implementation." Another lays out the legal risks of a premature declaration of statehood. An internal summary of where peace talks last broke down reveals that Palestinians were prepared in 2008 to limit the number of returning refugees to 15,000 a year for 10 years, or 150,000.

The Palestinian Authority has mobilized its forces, hidden and otherwise, to head off serious fallout from the publication of secret negotiation documents leaked to Qatar's Al Jazeera. The satellite TV station has been broadcasting rigorous coverage and analysis of the leaked documents.

The intensity of the coverage by the widely watched Al Jazeera and claims that the documents show the Palestinian Authority made serious concessions to Israel -- on issues including Jerusalem and refugees --  and had collaborated with Israel to get rid of Palestinian fighters even by killing them have seriously alarmed Palestinian officials as high up as the president.

The Palestinian Authority was caught off-guard by the Al Jazeera revelations but quickly rebounded from the initial shock and went on the offensive, accusing Al Jazeera -- as well as the emir of Qatar -- of plotting to undermine the Palestinian struggle for independence.

For the Arab world, working against the Palestinian struggle is taboo, and targeting the movement's leaders at what is considered a critical time in the fight for independence is also taboo.

The Palestinian public in general is divided over what Al Jazeera has revealed. Although the majority of Palestinians respect the TV station and its coverage of their cause, many say it has exaggerated its coverage of the documents, known as the Palestine Papers.

Discussions back and forth on the social networks show Palestinians divided between supporters of Al Jazeera and supporters of the Palestinian Authority.

“This is not the time to have internal fighting,” said Ahmad Saleem, a university student majoring in business who came to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ headquarters in Ramallah on Tuesday, along with thousands of other people, to show support for Abbas following the Al Jazeera reports.

“Our leadership made mistakes," he said, "but we can see it did not compromise on anything; otherwise, why isn’t there an agreement signed with Israel yet?”

Saleem believes Al Jazeera did not report on the documents in an objective way.

He said he did not see of himself as a strong supporter of Abbas but that Al Jazeera had made it a personal issue with Abbas and Palestinians in general. Therefore, he said, he decided to join the thousands who had come to show support for the Palestinian leader.

-- Maher Abukhater in Ramallah, West Bank

If there’s a lesson from Sunday's leak of alleged meeting minutes from 2008 Mideast peace talks involving Palestinian, Israeli and U.S. officials and from the previous WikiLeaks dump of U.S. diplomatic cables, perhaps it's this: Governments needn't be so afraid of having their private business aired in public.

After the initial U.S. embarrassment from the WikiLeaks disclosures, many came to believe that the cables actually showed U.S. diplomats to be rather astute and well-informed. In the same way, Palestinians so far don't really seem to have anything to be ashamed of in the leaks from the 2008 talks. Despite the spin by Al-Jazeera and critics of the Palestinian Authority, the documents released don't show Palestinian negotiators giving away the store.

To the contrary, they're depicted as taking a surprisingly hard-line stance against giving up massive West Bank settlements such as Maale Adumim, Givat Zeev, Har Homa and Ariel, which most experts have long presumed would be retained by Israel with little fuss or cost.

Following a week of twists and turns in Lebanon's unfolding political crisis over a United Nations-backed tribunal, feuding Lebanese parties are heading for a showdown as scheduled talks to pick a new prime minister threaten to stall once again.

On Sunday night, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah took to the airwaves to say that his group and its political allies would decide "in the coming hours" whether talks could take place on Monday as scheduled.

According to Lebanon's confessional political system, the prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, but Hezbollah and its main Christian ally have flat-out rejected the reelection of current caretaker Prime Minister Saad Hariri.

Hariri is a Washington favorite and leader of the movement championing the tribunal, which is currently reviewing indictments thought to implicate Hezbollah members in the assassination of Saad Hariri's father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

“Our initial response was to topple the government, which was unable to protect Lebanon and face the repercussions of the [tribunal]," said Nasrallah, referring to the mass walkout of opposition lawmakers last week that led to the collapse of the government.

"If [Hariri and his allies] want to use this stage to pressure us, my response is that after the release of the indictment, we will not yield to anything that has been imposed on us," he said without elaborating.

The security guard downstairs noticed she hadn't come down to pick up the newspapers Thursday morning, but didn't want to violate her privacy by going up.

A grandson who stopped by to visit later learned why. Sonia Peres, 87, had died in her sleep, as privately as she had lived her life despite decades of sharing it with one of the nation's most public figures, President Shimon Peres.

That morning, Peres was meeting with French Foreign Minister Michel Alliot-Marie to discuss strategic bilateral relations and the peace process, the usual big things on the elder statesman's mind.

An Israeli citizen was arrested Tuesday in connection with a 1995 massacre in Bosnia,  and Israel’s Justice Ministry launched extradition proceedings against him.

A Sarajevo court issued a warrant for Alexandar Cvetkovic's arrest in April, stating that he was wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity. In August, Bosnia-Herzegovina filed a formal request to Israel for his  extradition to stand trial at a war-crimes tribunal.

The extradition request was supported by extensive documentation of Cvetkovic's alleged involvement in the Srebrenica massacres, including a deposition of the chief prosecutor of the war-crimes tribunal in Sarajevo, a photo of Cvetkovic's military ID, survivors' testimony  and affidavits of soldiers of the  unit he served in, and the suspect's own testimony at the  International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or ICTY.

According to the documents, Cvetkovic was a soldier in the 10th Sabotage Unit belonging to the Vojska Republike Srpske, the Bosnian Serb Army that seized control of the Srebrenica enclave in 1995. The unit of trained commandos and snipers participated in the "systematic, wide and planned campaign against the Bosnian-Muslim population with the intent of exterminating them," the Israeli Justice Ministry says in a petition to declare the man extraditable. 

The material provided by authorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina to the ministry's reveal the "chilling facts" of the massacre of Muslim civilians at the Branjevo Farm on July 16, 1995, the petition says. 

For 10 hours that day, busloads of civilians -- many blindfolded and bound -- were driven to the farm. The people were removed from the bus, lined up around 10 at a time, and shot from behind by a firing squad of eight. Some witnesses testified that approximately 700 people had been killed that day. But Bosnian authorities, relying on United Nations experts and mass graves discovered around the farm, believe the number of victims was 1,000 to 1,200. 

Cvetkovic allegedly was a member of that firing squad and actively participated in the Branjevo massacre, one of several in which about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered in the bloodiest atrocities on European soil since World War II.

Palestinians received a badly needed morale boost on Tuesday from the leader of a superpower, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

At a time when Palestinian morale was very low with the stalemate in the peace process and a feeling of abandonment from the Obama administration, Medvedev came to the rescue.

First, Medvedev made a special visit to the Palestinian territories, coming this time from Jordan, not Israel. Previously, visitors coming to Israel spend two or three days in the county meeting all kinds of officials and visiting all kinds of places. And while they are in Israel, visiting officials usually pay a complimentary and very short visit to the Palestinian areas meeting only with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at his office for two or three hours.

Like the rest of the region, Israel is keeping a keen eye on developments in Tunisia even as it  waits to see what tomorrow (or the next day) brings in Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to convene an intelligence assessment meeting to study the situation, Israel Radio reported, but has already drawn one conclusion.

"The region in which we live is unstable ... we see this at several points throughout the Middle East," Netanyahu said at Sunday's weekly Cabinet meeting. And the one clear lesson arising from the surrounding situation is that "we need to lay the foundations of security in any agreement we make," he said. Peace can unravel, regime and other changes can occur; therefore, the government's policy is to "bind peace and security together," Netanyahu said.

The peace and security chicken-and-egg conundrum presents a stumbling block that is more than just a procedural dispute of what gets discussed first. Security is the key to keeping the peace, Netanyahu said last week in his annual meeting with the foreign media.

"This may not be obvious to some of you, because you hear all the time a contrary statement that says 'well, what will keep the peace is the peace,'" said Netanyahu. The formal conclusion of peace doesn't guarantee the continuation of peace, but the security arrangements will "buttress" it and "protect us in case peace unravels ... or Iran tries to walk in," the prime minister said. 

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah gave an address on TV on Sunday night to lay out Hezbollah's rationale for orchestrating the collapse of the government last week.

On Wednesday, Hezbollah and its allies withdrew from the cabinet, dissolving the government and throwing Lebanon into a new phase of tense uncertainty.

Nasrallah explained in the clearest terms yet Hezbollah's demands of the Lebanese state regarding the U.N.-backed tribunal that is expected soon to indict members of Hezbollah accused of involvement in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005.

A group of five Israelis aboard a private plane to Los Angeles could have been a high-flying business delegation. The group, which left Israel on Wednesday, is indeed alleged to have been involved in business -- but not exactly the kind that goes through the Southern California-Israel Chamber of Commerce.

Brothers Meir and Itzhak Abergil (sometimes spelled Abargil) -- along with three associates -- were extradited to the U.S., where they are wanted for a list of crimes in the Los Angeles area, including the murder of an Israeli drug dealer in town. They are also suspected of drug trafficking, organized crime activity and money laundering linked to a huge embezzlement case that collapsed the Israeli Trade Bank almost a decade ago.

The Abergil brothers headed what is believed to be one of Israel's most powerful and dangerous crime families -- "the lords of organized crime" by Israeli standards, Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said Wednesday. In a recent phone conversation broadcast on Israel's Channel 10 television Wednesday evening, Meir Abergil is alleged to say they were "peanuts compared to the mafias they have in America."

Israel's foreign relations are suffering these days from an outbreak of poor diplomacy. Not necessarily bad; just poor.

Foreign Ministry employees say they are just that, poor. Their basic salaries have been devalued by about 40% since last being updated in the early 1990s, and many of them rely on help from welfare services, say activists from the ministry workers' union.

The diplomats have years of experience, a stack of academic degrees and high motivation to serve. They also have families to feed and pensions to fund, and say neither is doable on their paychecks, which some revealed on a popular news site. Only an idealist or a fool would join the foreign service under these conditions, they said. Finance Ministry officials said the paychecks didn't reflect considerable extras.

As the Israeli bulldozers began to demolish Shepherd Hotel in the Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Sunday in order to build a new Jewish settlement in its place, Palestinians warned that not only the hotel has fallen, but also the entire peace process and U.S. efforts to revive it.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, strongly reacted to the hotel demolition. Its fall, he said, “has brought down with it all U.S. efforts (to revive the peace process) and ended any possibility to return to negotiations.”

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat added, “East Jerusalem and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in particular have been targeted by Israel in a campaign to forcibly remove Palestinians and supplant them with Jewish settlers. Such actions are unlawful and undermine the two-state solution and the negotiations process.”