"If S.B. 11 becomes the law, marriage will be functionally abolished," said Randy Thomasson, a spokesman for the Campaign for Children and Families. "Awarding marriage rights to people who shack up but refuse to get married is completely ridiculous." The plan that has been endorsed by the Democrat-controlled California State Senate is one promoted by a lesbian state senator, Carole Migden, of San Francisco.

It would give an unmarried man and woman who are living together the rights of marriage, Thomasson said. It was approved by the Senate 22-13, with all Democrats in support and all Republicans opposed. The plan that gives all the rights of marriage to heterosexual "domestic partners" ages 18 and up now goes to the state Assembly, and if approved there, would go to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has not taken a position on the plan.

"Why get married if you can get all the legal rights and benefits of marriage without being committed?" Thomasson asked. "This bad bill severely weakens the institution of marriage and will motivate unwed parents to remain uncommitted. We call upon Gov. Schwarzenegger to veto this nonsensical bill that robs marriage of its uniqueness and honor.

"No one should get marriage rights unless they get married. S.B. 11 makes a mockery of this sacred institution," he said. Thomasson noted that not one Republican senator spoke against the bill during the floor session. "Once again, pro-family Californians are angry at the Democrat politicians for attacking marriage and deeply frustrated with the Republican legislators for not speaking up to defend the sacred institution of marriage," he said.

The move is seen as another step towards creating full-blown same-sex "marriage" licenses for homosexuals. That plan already has been proposed in A.B. 43 in the state Assembly. That group later voted 42-34 to pass A.B. 43, flouting the will of California voters by choosing to reject the 2000 initiative that defined marriage as between one man and one woman.

"The arrogant majority in the California legislature have decided that they know better than the people by voting to force A.B. 43 on California," declared Karen England, Executive Director of Capitol Resource Institute. "The people of California clearly decided this issue when they passed Proposition 22. It is outrageous for legislators to waste time and money debating an issue that Californians have decided."

Tropical Cyclone Gonu is continuing north-west, but winds speeds have dropped to about 100mph (175 km/h).
Thousands of residents were evacuated from coastal regions and the low-lying offshore island of Masirah.
Forecasters said the storm, the most powerful in the region for 60 years, was set to weaken further as it headed towards southern Iran.

Low-lying areas have been evacuated. In the island of Masirah, 230km off the coast (140 miles), 7,000 people have left their homes. In the coastal capital of Muscat, people have been advised to stay indoors and to switch off their power.The most powerful part of the storm was expected to hit Oman on Thursday, before moving north across the Gulf to Iran.

Reports say Cyclone Gonu is the strongest to hit the Arabian Peninsula since records started in 1945. While crossing the Indian Ocean on Monday it reached the equivalent of a Category Five hurricane - the highest category available.

"Syria is ready to talk with Israel but only if negotiations lead to a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. There may be peace; there may be war. If there is no movement, Syrian resistance will be launched and not from the government but from the people of the Golan," said the Baath party official, who spoke on condition his name be withheld.

"We [Syria] have weapons and soldiers on the border with Israel, but let's face it, it's difficult to amass tanks or launch any invasion because the U.N. mans the border. But Syrian residents of the Golan are ready to launch resistance," the official claimed.

The Golan Heights is strategic mountainous territory looking down on Israeli and Syrian population centers captured by Israel after Damascus twice used the territory to attack the Jewish state. There are U.N. posts at international buffer areas between the Israeli and Syrian sides of the territory.

The Heights has a population of about 35,000 - approximately 18,000 Jewish residents and 17,000 Arabs, mostly Druze. The Arab residents retain their Syrian citizenship but under Israeli law can also sue for Israeli citizenship.

Syria, which signed a military alliance with Iran, openly hosts Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders. The U.S. accuses Syria of fueling and aiding the insurgency in Iraq. Israel says Syria has been allowing large quantities of weapons to be transported from its borders to the Lebanese-based Hezbollah militia, which last summer engaged in a war with the Jewish state. Syria has been widely blamed for the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Syrian President Bashar Assad has made a number of statements the past few months his army is preparing for a war with Israel, claiming the Jewish state is planning to attack first.

Last weekend, Assad reportedly called for "better cooperation" between Damascus and Tehran in "the confrontation with the Zionist regime and the USA," according to a report published Sunday by Iran's official state news agency, IRNA.

"To allow the lower court's ruling to stand exposes every public employee to outright censorship by a municipal employer for merely mentioning words such as the 'natural family,' 'marriage,' 'and 'family values,' issues which are at the forefront of national debate," said the appeal prepared by the Pro-Family Law Center.

"If we fail to get U.S. Supreme Court review, however, it will be up to each individual Christian in the United States to stand up for their rights to be heard on the issues of the day. IF WE CHOOSE TO BE SILENT, SILENCED WE SHALL BE," HE SAID.

The case involves the Good News Employee Association and two women, Regina Rederford and Robin Christy, who wanted to launch the organization among co-workers. They put up an announcement on an Oakland city bulletin board asking those interested in those "family" issues to contact them.

This came after the same bulletin board - as well as the city's e-mail system - had been used to promote speech "concerning war, health-care, peace, employee outsourcing, sports, racism, slavery, spirituality, hate, God, the Gay-Straight Employee Alliance, tolerance, homosexuality, 'coming out,' diversity, Christ, the Bible, sexuality, and a host of other topics," the appeal said.

None of those topics was a problem. However, their supervisors ordered the two Christians' announcement about Good News pulled down, and issued a warning that such "homophobic" literature could lead to PENALTIES UP TO AND INCLUDING DISMISSAL, the law firm said.

The decision was affirmed by the 9th Circuit, which issued an unpublished "memorandum." in the dispute.
It found that municipalities have a right to dictate what form an employee's speech may take, even if it is in regard to controversial public issues. "THIS INCREDIBLE AND DEVASTATING RULING HAS HAD THE PRACTICAL EFFECT OF SILENCING HUNDREDS, IF NOT THOUSANDS, OF CITY OF OAKLAND EMPLOYEES WHO SIMPLY WISH TO TALK ABOUT MARRIAGE AND FAMILY VALUES.

MEANWHILE OAKLAND'S GAY-STRAIGHT EMPLOYEES ALLIANCE "WAS OPENLY ALLOWED TO ATTACK THE BIBLE IN WIDESPREAD CITY E-MAILS, TO DERIDE CHRISTIAN VALUES AS ANTIQUATED, AND TO REFER TO BIBLE-BELIEVING CHRISTIANS AS HATEFUL. When the plaintiffs attempted to refute this blatant attack on people of faith, they were threatened with immediate termination by the City of Oakland.

"THE CITY OF OAKLAND HAS INTERPRETED THIS DISTRICT COURT'S RULING TO MEAN THAT CHRISTIANITY HAS NO PLACE IN OUR SOCIETY AND SHOULD BE SUBJECT TO PUNISHMENT. I want to believe that our Supreme Court will ultimately decide this case on the values and instructions set forth in motion by the nations Founders," said Ackerman.

"This is a very positive portrayal of Mao, and we are hoping that once the script clears the approval process, China will come forward with services and support," he said. North is hoping to begin shooting after next year's Beijing Olympics. Among the kinds of support North seeks from the Chinese government are thousands of extras.Those extras are not likely to be paid scale. China is notorious for its continued use of slave labor as well as near-slave wages.

Though Mao, like fellow dictator Fidel Castro, is still romanticized to a degree in the West, most historians would agree he ranks at or very near the top of the worst mass murderers. ABOUT 70 MILLION CHINESE WERE KILLED OR DIED AS A RESULT OF HIS BRUTAL REIGN. THAT FIGURE DOES NOT INCLUDE MILLIONS OF TIBETANS, KOREANS AND MEMBERS OF OTHER ETHNIC GROUPS AND NATIONALITIES.

In 1970, 80% of primary school-age children made the journey from home to school on their own. It was what you did. Today the figure is under 9%. Escorting children is now the norm - often in the back of a 4x4. WE ARE REARING OUR CHILDREN IN CAPTIVITY - their habitat shrinking almost daily. In 1970 the average nine-year-old girl would have been free to wander 840 metres from her front door. By 1997 it was 280 metres. Now the limit appears to have come down to the front doorstep.

In a garden in Birchington, best friends Holly Prentice and Jojo Roberts, both aged eight, make daisy chains. The picket fence marks the limit of their play area. They wouldn't dare venture beyond it. "You might get kidnapped or taken by a stranger," says Jojo. "In the park you might get raped," agrees Holly. Don't they yearn to go off to the woods, to climb trees and get muddy? No, they tell me. The woods are scary. Climbing trees is dangerous. Muddy clothes get you in trouble.

One wonders what they think of Just William, Swallows And Amazons or The Famous Five - fictional tales of strange children from another time, an age of adventures where parents apparently allowed their offspring to be out all day and didn't worry about a bit of mud. THERE IS INCREASING CONCERN THAT TODAY'S "COTTON-WOOL KIDS" ARE HAVING THEIR DEVELOPMENT HAMPERED.

THEY ARE LIKELY TO BE RISK-AVERSE, STIFLED BY FEARS WHICH ARE MORE PHOBIC THAN REAL. Their lack of unsupervised play may also reduce the opportunity to form deep friendships in early years. Evidence presented to the Children's Society's Good Childhood Inquiry suggested the number of teenagers who don't have a best friend has risen from one in eight 20 years ago to one in five today.

Professor Judith Dunn, from the Institute of Psychiatry, chairs the Good Childhood Inquiry and believes that friendships are vital for a child's social and emotional development. "Children whose early friendships are full of shared imaginative play develop a sensibility by discussing moral dilemmas and learning to understand the feelings, welfare and relationships of other children," she argues.

A lack of close friendships among British children may be reflected in a recent Unicef report which revealed that the UK ranks at the bottom for peer relationships in international tables. In Birchington, the beach is busy with kids. But on closer observation they are almost all under the watchful eye of a parent or guardian.

And the horrifying story of four-year-old Madeleine McCann, apparently abducted from her bed in Portugal while her parents ate a meal in a nearby restaurant, is likely to mean British parents pull their children even closer to them.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero condemned Eta's move. "Eta's decision goes totally in the opposite direction of the path that Basque and Spanish society want, the path of peace," he said.

Eta declared a "permanent" ceasefire in March 2006, and had insisted it still held despite a bomb that killed two people at Madrid airport in December. But in a message printed by the Basque newspaper Berria on Tuesday, the banned group SAID "MINIMUM CONDITIONS FOR CONTINUING A PROCESS OF NEGOTIATIONS DO NOT EXIST". After the Madrid airport attack Spain's Socialist government broke off peace talks.

Eta said that from Wednesday it would defend the Basque country "with weapons and on all fronts". The announcement suggests that another big attack could be imminent, observers say. The group has killed more than 800 people in its four-decade campaign to set up an independent state in northern Spain and south-western France.

Prime Minister Zapatero launched exploratory peace talks with Eta last year, despite vehement opposition from conservatives, but there was little sign of any progress. The opposition Popular Party and victims' groups have organised big demonstrations against negotiations with Eta. The latest Eta statement blamed Mr Zapatero, saying the government had responded to its ceasefire last year "by pursuing detentions, torture and persecution".

The atmosphere was further soured by the authorities' exclusion of pro-independence politicians from local elections in the Basque country last month. Eta's political wing, Batasuna, remains banned. In the past few days, Eta has sent letters to Basque businesses urging them to help finance "the liberation and construction of Euskal Herria (the Greater Basque Country)", Spanish media report.

The so-called Six-Day War changed the geo-political map of the Middle East, establishing Israel as the region's dominant military force. BEFORE THE WAR, THE 19-YEAR-OLD JEWISH STATE HAD BEEN AWASH WITH FEAR, AS ARAB ARMIES MASSED ON ITS BORDERS.

UN peacekeepers had been expelled from the Sinai, and Egypt had closed the Red Sea to Israeli shipping.
In an extraordinary showdown on the eve of war, Israeli generals swore and shouted at the prime minister that Israel had to strike first to be sure of victory. The conflict began with air strikes which destroyed much of Egypt's air power on the ground.

By the end of the fighting, Israel had defeated the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. It captured territory three times the size of the country as it was on 4 June. The Golan Heights and Palestinian territory in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem remain under its control to this day.

The Israeli cabinet is to meet this week to discuss whether to restart peace talks with Syria. Israeli Pensions Minister Rafi Eitan told local radio that Israel should consider the Golan Heights as a bargaining chip, if Syria was sincere about negotiation.

The Israeli government marked the anniversary with Jerusalem Day celebrations last month according to the Hebrew calendar. But in Egypt there are no official events to mark the anniversary or the sacrifice of those who died - just the occasional newspaper article recalling what happened.

Egypt had been defeated and even if the country eventually recovered the Sinai peninsula, which it lost in 1967, many Egyptians remain reluctant to discuss the war, says the BBC's Owen Bennett Jones in Cairo. The reticence is in part a reflection of Egypt's demographics, our correspondent says. Most Egyptians had not even been born when the 1967 war took place.

FATAH - Full name: Reverse acronym of Harakat al-Tahrir al-Filistiniya (Palestinian Liberation Movement) meaning "conquest" in Arabic.

Origins and development:- Founded by Yasser Arafat in the 1950s to promote the armed struggle to liberate all Palestine from Israeli control. It developed into THE LARGEST PALESTINIAN POLITICAL FACTION AND, AFTER RECOGNISING ISRAEL'S RIGHT TO EXIST, LED EFFORTS TOWARDS A TWO-STATE SOLUTION WITH ISRAEL UNDER THE 1990S OSLO PEACE ACCORDS. Fatah members formed the backbone of the Oslo-inspired administration, the Palestinian Authority (PA), especially its bureaucrats and security forces. The party lost power in the 2006 parliamentary elections to Hamas, after Fatah officials came to be perceived as corrupt and incompetent. The shift in power heralded a period of violence on the streets of Gaza.

Attitude to Israel:- PA President Mahmoud ABBAS ADVOCATES RESTARTING THE PEACE PROCESS AND IS STRONG CRITIC OF ARMED "RESISTANCE" AND ATTACKS ON ISRAELI CIVILIANS. His goal is to establish a Palestinian state in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as capital. The Fatah-affiliated al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades has participated, along with Hamas, in an informal militant ceasefire since 2005, but conducts what it calls retaliatory attacks against Israel.

Current status:- The 2006 election defeat put Fatah on the defensive and subsequent events raised fears it would try using its political influence and military power to maintain predominance. The PA's 70,000 police and security forces are mainly Fatah loyalists. After months of factional street fighting in which hundreds of Palestinians were killed, Fatah struck a deal with Hamas to join a unity government as a junior partner.

HAMAS - Full name: Acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (Islamic Resistance Movement) and means "zeal" in Arabic.

Origins and development:- Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, COMMITTED TO ESTABLISHING AN ISLAMIC STATE IN THE WHOLE OF WHAT IT TERMS PALESTINE (POST-1948 ISRAEL, THE WEST BANK AND GAZA).
Since its formation 1987 it has pursued a dual function: social welfare and what it calls armed resistance. This earned respect and gratitude among Palestinians suffering under Israeli occupation, but a string of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians meant it was designated a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US and the European Union. ITS 2006 LANDSLIDE WIN THRUST ON HAMAS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF POWER AND INTERNATIONAL SCRUTINY FOR THE FIRST TIME, BUT THE GOVERNMENT WAS NOT RECOGNISED BY ISRAEL OR THE MAIN INTERNATIONAL MEDIATORS.

Attitude to Israel:- HAMAS'S CHARTER UNCOMPROMISINGLY SEEKS ISRAEL'S DESTRUCTION. However, Hamas's Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister, has spoken of a long-term truce with Israel if Israel withdraws from territory occupied in 1967. The Hamas armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades, has participated in an informal ceasefire since 2005, but claims the right to retaliate against what it calls Israeli attacks.

Current status: - Designated a terrorist group by PA donors, outside funds to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority have dried up. Banks refuse to handle emergency donations fearing US penalties. Hamas faces financial meltdown of the PA which could cause a major humanitarian crisis. Separately, it has deployed a 3,000-strong shadow security force including its supporters to tackle lawlessness in Gaza. The move exacerbated tensions with pro-Fatah security agencies sparking gunfights. After months of wrangling with Fatah, Hamas became the senior partner in a national unity government in March 2007.

It was the hottest night of the year so far. Cars were overheating left, right and centre, conked out on the hard shoulder of the highway running through Tel Aviv. Roads were sealed off, the police redirecting cars away from Rabin Square in the centre, as tens of thousands made their way on foot for a mass rally that was taking place. There was revolution in the air, a popular protest. It felt like the mid-1990s when thousands would come together in Rabin Square in support of the peace process. But this was May 2007, and the rally was not about pushing for peace. It was about pushing out an Israeli leadership which the public has decided failed at war. In the end - even by conservative estimates - MORE THAN 100,000 TURNED UP AT THE RALLY. THE SORT OF FIGURES PEACE RALLIES HERE COULD ONCE COUNT ON ATTRACTING.

"You used to get tens of thousands," Yehudit Elkana says. She's spent most of her adult life working for Israeli organisations which campaign for peace. "Now if you can get 1,500 people for a demonstration you say, 'Wow! It's great'."

"People are tired," says Yehudit Elkana. "THEY DON'T BELIEVE ANY MORE IN THE POSSIBILITIES OF PEACE. AND WORSE, SINCE THE TERROR ATTACKS PEOPLE BECAME AFRAID AND DISTRUSTFUL OF THE INTENTIONS OF THE PALESTINIANS." "We can't get together any more though," she says. "We can't go to their areas, they can't come here." She also says there's a financial problem. "Oslo led to an increase in funding from international groups. Now, Oslo has collapsed so the funding has collapsed."

The fact that complete, permanent borders still haven't been drawn 60 years later is testimony to the rancour of Israel's relations with neighbouring Arab states. Peace talks have taken place - Jordan and Egypt signed treaties with Israel turning 1949 ceasefire lines into state borders. But the absence of a final settlement with Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians mean Israel's borders and the state itself remain inherently unstable.

In 1948, when British rule of Palestine ended, Israeli forces managed to push most of the Arab forces that joined the war to the former Mandate boundaries, which became temporary ceasefire lines. The exceptions were what we now know as the West Bank, which remained under Jordanian control, and the Gaza Strip, which was controlled by Egypt.

Thus Israel came into being on 78% of the former Palestine, rather than the 55% allocated under the UN partition plan. Parts of Israel's central region were just 15km (9 miles) wide, and strategic Jordanian-held territory overlooked the whole coastal region. The Sinai was exchanged for peace with Egypt in the early 1980s (at about the time Israel occupied south Lebanon, where it remained until withdrawing unilaterally in May 2000).

So it was more than 30 years after the foundation of Jewish state that it acquired its first recognised international border with an Arab neighbour. Jordan became the second treaty holder with Israel, agreeing river borders in the north and a demarcated desert border south of the Dead Sea. The boundary between Jordan and the occupied West Bank was agreed, but "without prejudice to the status of the territory".

Politically, the most important of the Green Lines - as the 1949 ceasefire lines were called - is the one dividing Israel from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Occupying the West Bank in 1967 was an important strategic gain in Israeli eyes, and successive governments have ignored the Green Line and built numerous Jewish settlements on the territory.

The settlements are illegal under international law, but Israel disputes this and has pressed ahead with its activity despite signing agreements to limit settlement growth. Today, about 400,000 settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The land is strategically significant, but in Judaism is also religiously and historically so.

The first settlers were religious Jews who remained in Hebron after celebrating Passover there in 1968. The settlement movement has become closely affiliated to Jewish religious nationalism, which claims boundaries of modern Israel based on Genesis 15:18: "God made a covenant with Abram and said, 'To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates'."

On both political and religious grounds, therefore, it is extremely risky for any Israeli politician to dabble in land-for-peace deals or unilateral pullbacks from occupied territory. From the Arab viewpoint, the acceptable territorial solution for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement is withdrawal from all the 1967 land. Saudi Arabia has proposed such a formula in return for Israel gaining normal diplomatic relations with all Arab countries.

Not all Palestinians, however, want a two-state solution. Hamas, which won the 2006 PALESTINIAN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION, WANTS AT ALL COSTS TO AVOID A PEACE DEAL WITH ISRAEL THAT INVOLVES DRAWING PERMANENT BORDERS, BECAUSE ITS WIDER AIM IS TO ESTABLISH A SINGLE, ISLAMIC STATE WITHIN THE BORDERS OF PRE-1948 PALESTINE.

They argue that such a state, with the return of 1948 refugees, would have an impregnable and growing Arab, Muslim majority, spelling the end of Israel as a Jewish state. In the long term, therefore, Israel's reluctance to accept the existing Green Line in many ways plays into the hands of militant Islamist groups such as Hamas.

Forty years ago, Israel's army captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the June 1967 War. The area fell in the heat of a deadly battle, but Israel did not massacre its Palestinian inhabitants or destroy its holy shrines like the medieval Christian knights. From the Jewish perspective 1967 brought the "reunification" of the holy city, restoring a divine plan after centuries of interruption.

The victory of 1967 and the capture of East Jerusalem was an exhilarating time for Jews, both religious and secular. Battle-weary Israeli troops ran through the narrow alleys of the Old City to the Western Wall to pray and celebrate. UNDER ARAB CONTROL SINCE 1948, THE JEWISH HOLY PLACES HAD BEEN TANTALISINGLY OUT OF REACH TO ISRAELIS - IN VIOLATION OF THE ISRAEL-JORDAN ARMISTICE AGREEMENT.

Nothing was going to stop the 1967 leaders from creating facts on the ground that made it impossible for Muslim Arabs to reclaim the eastern half of the city. "We have returned to our holy places - And we shall never leave them," said Gen Moshe Dayan as he stood before the timeworn stones of the Western Wall.

The international consensus has never recognised Israeli sovereignty in East Jerusalem - the city and its surroundings were designated a corpus separatum by the UN in 1947 to be given a special international status and government. No country has its embassy in Jerusalem. Even Israel's closest ally the US has withstood pressure from Congress to move its embassy from Tel Aviv, insisting the status of Jerusalem should be decided in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations rather than unilaterally.

Palestinians from outside the city - in the West Bank and Gaza - are rigorously excluded by a ring of roadblocks and Israeli military checkpoints. They now find themselves experiencing the same sense of deprivation and longing for Jerusalem, and determination to make it theirs again, that the Diaspora Jews once did.

In recent years Israel has been building the controversial West Bank barrier around Palestinian population centres, a response to the suicide bombings of the 1990s and after 2000. Around parts of East Jerusalem it is a massive wall, separating some Palestinian suburbs from the centre of Jerusalem and others from the West Bank.

Many observers see the possibility of disaster in Israel's unyielding pursuit of its policies in Jerusalem. THEY ARGUE THAT RESOLUTION WITH THE PALESTINIANS, AND THE WIDER ARAB AND MUSLIM WORLD, WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE WITHOUT COMPROMISE ON THE HOLY CITY.

The Six-Day War in 1967 arguably had its origins in a water dispute - moves to divert the River Jordan, Israel's main source of drinking water. Years of skirmishes and sabre rattling culminated in all-out war, with Israel quadrupling the territory it controlled and gaining complete control of double the resources of fresh water. A country needs water to survive and develop.

In Israel's history, it has needed water to make feasible the influx of huge numbers of Jewish immigrants.
Therefore, on the margins of one of the most arid environments on earth, the available water system had to support not just the indigenous population, mainly Palestinian peasant farmers, but also hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

In addition to their sheer numbers, citizens of the new state were intent on conducting water-intensive commercial agricultural such as growing bananas and citrus fruits. In the 1967 war Israel gained exclusive control of the waters of the West Bank and the Sea of Galilee, although not the Litani.Those resources - the West Bank's mountain aquifer and the Sea of Galilee - give Israel about 60% of its fresh water, a billion cubic metres per year.

Heated arguments rage about the rights to the mountain aquifer. Israel, and Israeli settlements, take about 80% of the aquifer's flow, leaving the Palestinians with 20%. With water consumption outstripping supply in both Israel and the Palestinian territories, Palestinians say they are always the first community to be rationed as reserves run dry, with the health problems that entails.

Not surprisingly, during the era of Arab-Israeli peacemaking in the 1990s, water rights became one of the trickiest areas of discussion. In the 21st Century Israel has tried to solve the Palestinian problem unilaterally, pulling troops and settlers from Gaza and building a barrier around West Bank areas with the largest concentration of Palestinians.

Although Israel says this is a temporary security measure, the barrier encroaches deep onto occupied territory - especially areas of high water yield. Demand for water already outstrips supply, requirements are rising and current supply is unsustainable.

Hydrologists say joint solutions need to be found, because water requirements are interdependent and water resources cross political boundaries. That necessitates improved conservation and recycling by both sides.

Improving the political atmosphere would allow supplies to be piped from neighbouring countries. Also crucial, experts say, are investment in desalination and other technical advances. Such solutions are desperately needed in the medium to long term. In other words, Israel and the Palestinians must work together, because they cannot survive as combatants.

In the course of Israel's creation in 1948 and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, more than half the Arabs of pre-1948 Palestine are thought to have been displaced. Today there are millions of Palestinians living in exile from homes and land their families had inhabited for generations. Many still suffer the legacy of their dispossession: destitution, penury, insecurity.

Palestinian historians, and some Israelis, call 1948 a clear example of ethnic cleansing - perpetrated by the Haganah (later the Israeli Defence Forces) and armed Jewish gangs. What is undisputed is that the refugees' fate is excluded from most Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts because, given a right of return, their numbers endanger the future of the world's only Jewish state.

Four million UN-registered Palestinian refugees trace origins to the 1948 exodus; 750,000 people belong to families displaced in 1967 - many for the second time. Palestinian advocacy group Badil says another million and a half hail from pre-1948 Palestine but were not UN-registered, while an additional 274,000 were internally displaced inside Israel after 1948, and 150,000 were displaced in the occupied territories after 1967.

That makes more than six million people, one of the biggest displaced populations in the world. The 1948 war ended with Israel in control of 78% of the former Palestine, with a Jewish-Arab ratio of 6:1. The equation brought security for Jewish Israelis, but emptied hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns of 700,000 inhabitants - the kernel of the Palestinian refugee problem today.

With the justification of not wanting to jeopardise its Jewish majority, Israel has kept Palestinian refugees and their descendants out of negotiations on a settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But for most Palestinians, their fate remains an open wound, unless there is a Middle East peace deal that acknowledges what happened to the refugees.

Israel says the barrier is the only way to defend against a wave of suicide bombings by Palestinian militants which shook the country in the early years of the intifada, or uprising, which began in 2000.

Palestinians view the structure as the prelude to an annexation of the parts of the West Bank where most Jewish settlers live, in line with Israel's plan for a unilateral solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the absence of a negotiated peace deal.

In July 2004, the International Court of Justice declared that the barrier was illegal and construction should be immediately halted, but Israel said it would not abide by what was an advisory ruling by the ICJ.