UN: UN secretary general Kofi Annan began talks with Syrian officials yesterday to seek the country's help in bolstering a truce between Israel and Lebanon's Hizbullah.
Before arriving in the capital, Damascus, Mr Annan renewed from Jordan his calls for Israel to lift its blockade of Lebanon swiftly and to withdraw from the country as soon as 5,000 UN peacekeepers are in the south.
"I expect - and I did make this clear to the Israeli authorities - that when the international forces have reached 5,000 and are deployed to the south with the Lebanese [ army], it is time for them to withdraw and withdraw completely," he said after talks with Jordan's King Abdullah.
In a radio interview he said he hoped UN peacekeepers, part of an expanded Unifil force to be led by France, would be in place "within a week or 10 days".
Mr Annan met Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moualem in Damascus later and is due to hold talks with President Bashar al-Assad today.
Israeli troops have been gradually withdrawing for the past two weeks and the army said it now held less than a third of the land it occupied during the war. "The rest of the territory was handed over to Unifil and the Lebanese army," a spokesman said.
Picking up a proposal Mr Annan made in Beirut, a senior Israeli political source said Israel would discuss freeing Lebanese prisoners for two soldiers captured by Hizbullah, if the pair were handed over to the Beirut government. Israel has previously insisted on their unconditional release.
Israel began the war after Hizbullah captured the two soldiers and killed eight in a July 12th raid. The Shia Muslim group offered at the outset to swap them for Lebanese prisoners.
Meanwhile, an Israeli military court yesterday ordered 15 Hamas leaders, including two cabinet ministers and the speaker of Palestine's parliament, to go on trial charged with membership of an outlawed organisation.
The group, 12 of them elected members of the parliament, appeared in court at Ofer Camp on the occupied West Bank. At trial on December 12th they face a maximum jail sentence of 10 years if convicted.
They are among more than 30 Hamas political leaders detained recently after the capture by militants near Gaza of an Israeli soldier, Cpl Gilad Shalit, who is still being held.
The men, in brown prison shirts and trousers, each held a finger aloft as an act of defiance as they sat together in the dock, surrounded by armed troops. Abdul Aziz Duaik, the speaker of parliament, one of the most recently detained, was in pyjamas and chains.
Jawad Boulous, a lawyer representing Mr Duaik and some others, challenged the Israeli court's jurisdiction. "The defence does not recognise the legality of this court because it is a political trial," he said outside the hearing. "We're talking about leaders abducted by Israel. We demand the release of all of them."
Hamas won a surprise victory in January elections on the promise of an end to corruption and the hope of a stronger Palestinian authority. But since the movement is proscribed as a terror organisation in Israel and most western countries, western donors held back their usual financial support.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Israelis attended a rally yesterday to press for the release of three abducted soldiers after military campaigns in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip failed to free them.
The gathering, in a main square in Tel Aviv, was the largest public demonstration in Israel since a truce between Lebanese Hizbullah guerrillas and Israeli forces on August 14th.