RAMALLAH/GAZA CITY, 9 September 2006 — Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday slammed Israel’s arrest of Palestinian ministers and MPs from the governing Hamas, after talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “It is unacceptable for deputies and Palestinian ministers to be arrested,” he told a joint news conference with Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Israel detained more than 60 elected Hamas officials, including a third of the Cabinet and more than two dozen deputies, after militants captured an Israeli soldier and killed two others in a deadly cross-border raid on June 25. Twenty-eight MPs including parliamentary Speaker Aziz Dweik and five Cabinet ministers remain in detention.

Lavrov also urged Israel to stop building its controversial West Bank Wall, Jewish settlements and its practice of “extrajudicial” killings of militants, so that a road map for peace could be implemented. Abbas said he and Lavrov had also discussed an Arab initiative to help revive the blocked Middle East peace process, expected to be submitted to the UN General Assembly this month.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh vowed yesterday that his Hamas-led government would not resign despite a serious fiscal and political crisis, which he blamed on Israel and the US.

“The government will not resign. The government reflects the will of the people,” said the prime minister in a sermon delivered in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah to more than 1,000 Muslim worshippers. He insisted his Cabinet, which took office in March, would remain in place until the end of the four-year mandate of the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Parliament, which was elected by a landslide last January.

Meanwhile, around 500 Hamas supporters rallied in the West Bank city of Ramallah in support of the government and to demand an end to the “siege.” The Israeli Army staged an invasion into the West Bank town of Ramallah early yesterday, surrounding a building, Palestinian security officials said. An Israeli military spokesman confirmed an operation was under way.

On Thursday, six Palestinians, including two militants, were killed and 10 wounded in an exchange of gunfire with Israeli soldiers during an invasion into the northern West Bank. Israeli troops had surrounded a house in Qabatya, near Jenin, where three militants from the radical Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were hiding.