- DUBAI (Reuters) - Libyan
leader Muammar Gaddafi said Israel should be replaced by a democracy called
"Isratine" where unarmed Israelis and Palestinians can live in
peace.
-
- "If the Jews want peace they should accept to live
in peace and drop arms with their Palestinian brethren," Gaddafi said
in a televised interview with al-Jazeera satellite television.
-
- Gaddafi, who has rejected a Saudi Middle East peace bid,
said it was "impossible" to create an independent Palestinian
state along with Israel because "the Israelis would not accept to
live within (the range) of Palestinian guns."
-
- Gaddafi put forward his own Middle East peace plan at
an Arab summit last year. It included demands for dismantling weapons of
mass destruction in the region and the return of 7 million Palestinian
refugees.
-
- "The initiatives that have been imposed on Arabs
... resulted in the blood that is being shed," said Gaddafi referring
to the 18-month-old Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
-
- The Saudi initiative, the top issue on the agenda of
the upcoming Arab summit, envisages Arab normalization with the Jewish
state in return for full Israeli withdrawal from Arab land occupied during
the 1967 Middle East war.
-
- Gaddafi said Israel should also dismantle its mass
destruction
weapons and withdraw from occupied Syrian land if it wanted peace with
non-Palestinian Arabs.
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