Detailed Instructions: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Q: Netanyahu says he is ready to return to negotiations with PA "today"; Olmert says Gov’t has bolstered Hamas and weakened PA. 
  
 Photo: Wikicommons 
  
 President Shimon Peres called his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, on Sunday, as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and right-wing politicians continued to criticize Abbas’s plea for renewed negotiations based on the pre-1967 lines. 
  
 Both former prime minister Ehud Olmert and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who each negotiated with Abbas, confirmed that his comments to Channel 2 on Friday night, were consistent with what he had told them during their talks. 
  
 Abbas appeared to give up on the “right of return” to Israel for Palestinian refugees and their descendants when a final-status agreement is reached. 
  
 Olmert said Netanyahu, former US president George W. Bush and former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice all knew this. 
  
 Under Netanyahu’s government, Olmert said, negotiations had been frozen and there had been an effort to prove to the Israeli public that there was no partner for peace. 
  
 “The government has taken steps to strengthen Hamas and to weaken the PA, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, an organization which espouses nonviolence and negotiations for peace,” Olmert said. 
  
 “This kind of policy toward the only possible peace partner between us and the Palestinians is irresponsible and harms the vital interests of the State of Israel. The interviews that Abbas gave in recent days are proof to the Israeli public that we have somebody to talk to in order to end this bloody conflict between our nations, which has lasted far too long,” the former prime minister continued. 
  
 Abbas later told Egyptian television that he upheld the “right of return,” but that he was free to state his personal opinion, that he did not believe he would live in the Galilee city of Safed where he was born. 
  
 At the weekly Sunday cabinet meeting, Netanyahu dismissed the significance of Abbas’s remarks and urged him to immediately hold peace talks with Israel. 
  
 “I watched President Abbas’s interview over the weekend. I have heard that he has already managed to go back on his remarks,” the prime minister said. 
  
 “This only proves the importance of direct negotiations without preconditions. 
  
 Generally, I can say that if Abu Mazen [Abbas] is really serious and intends to advance peace, as far as I am concerned, we can sit together immediately. Jerusalem and Ramallah are only seven minutes apart; I am ready to start negotiations today,” Netanyahu said. 
  
 He also took issue with Abbas’s statement that the Palestinian Authority planned to ask the UN General Assembly this month to upgrade its status to that of a non-member state. 
  
 “Peace may be advanced only around the negotiating table and not via unilateral decisions in the UN General Assembly, which will only push peace further away and will only lead to instability,” Netanyahu said. 
  
 A Israeli official added that such a step would be a fundamental breach of the Oslo Accords, in which the Palestinians committed themselves to resolve all issues through negotiations. 
  
 If the Palestinians made good on their threat to head to the UN, Israel would be forced to respond, the official said. 
  
 It could lead to a chain of events that would create instability in the area, the official added. 
  
 Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz warned that Israel could withhold the transfer of tax funds to the PA. 
  
 Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman called Abbas a “liar” and accused him of interfering in the Israeli election. 
  
 “Abbas is interfering, to the benefit of the Left, [Labor chairwoman] Shelly Yacimovich and [Meretz chairwoman] Zehava Gal-On, who represent Palestinian interests in Israel,” Liberman told Army Radio. 
  
 “Let’s compare what he said just two months ago to the UN General Assembly, or last year to that same body. Or what he says in Arabic and not in English,” the foreign minister said. 
  
 He added that Abbas had spoken of Israeli actions as “land theft” and “crimes against humanity.” Abbas called suicide bombers who killed Israelis “heroes,” Liberman said. 
  
 Abbas had not given up on the “right of return” and had no intention to do so, he said. 
  
 A number of Likud ministers and MKs also spoke against Abbas and Olmert. 
  
 Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar accused Olmert of complicating matters for Israel by offering Abbas far-reaching concessions during his tenure as prime minister, including agreeing to an Israeli withdrawal to the June 4, 1967, lines and the partition of Jerusalem as part of a peace deal, which Abbas now considers a baseline for negotiations. 
  
 Sa’ar said it was “outrageous” that Olmert had “not leveled even one word of criticism at the Palestinian Authority despite [Abbas’s] deliberate refusal for four years to negotiate with Israel.” 
  
 Likud MK Danny Danon said Olmert had no right to criticize the government, given that he was recently convicted of breach of trust and in light of his past leadership failures. 
  
 “If Olmert wants to protect the security of Israel, then he should remain outside the political system so as not to cause any more damage,” Danon said. 
  
 Olmert is considering running in January’s election, but does not plan to decide until November 15. 
  
 Defense Minister Ehud Barak defended Abbas in an interview with Army Radio, saying the Palestinian president “is not joining ‘Likud Beytenu’ and not Zionist youth movements, because he is the Palestinian leader, but you can’t say we have no partner with [Abbas].” 
  
 In an interview on Channel 2 on Sunday night, Livni blamed Netanyahu for the lack of trust that has existed between the two sides for the past four years. 
  
 She said that one needed only to look at the sound bites of blame that had come out of his government in response to Abbas’s interview. 
  
 She charged that Liberman was leading a campaign to topple Abbas, something that would only strengthen it. 
  
 This was bad for Israel’s security, Livni said. 
  
 “Anyone who is interested in preserving a secure Jewish, democratic state, including those on the Right, must embrace what [Abbas] said in the interview, that he wants to end the conflict on the basis of the principle of two states,” Livni said. 
  
 “We have become a nation where peace has become a dirty word. Anyone who speaks of an agreement has become a delusional leftist. I represent the Israelis who want to live here with security in a Jewish nation,” Livni said. 
  
 Peace Now plans to project text from Abbas’s on the wall of the Likud Party headquarters in Tel Aviv on Monday evening. 
  
 Greer Fay Cashman and Lahav Harkov contributed to this report. ||||| The controversy could further complicate Mr. Abbas’s planned bid for nonmember statehood at the United Nations General Assembly this month, a move that has generated intense opposition from Israel and the United States but that has failed to generate much enthusiasm among his own people. His popularity had already nose-dived over the past year amid a stalemate in the peace process, severe budgetary shortfalls, a worsening rift with the rival Hamas faction that controls Gaza and growing dissent within his own party, Fatah. 
  
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 “He has been doing many mistakes, and this is one of them — his vocabulary was totally wrong,” said Mahdi Abdul Hadi, chairman of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, based in Jerusalem. “He underestimated the reaction; he underestimated the anger and the frustration in the society; he underestimated his constituency. It’s very clear that he’s not the hero, he’s not the liberator, he’s not the leader.” 
  
 There are about five million Palestinians scattered around the world who are descendants of the 750,000 who lost homes during the war that led to Israel’s establishment, many of them still clutching keys in hopes of someday returning. But Israelis see such ambitions as an existential threat to their state, and negotiators have tried to distinguish the moral question of the “right of return” from the practical one. Documents released in 2011 show that the two sides have traded numbers about how many Palestinians would be allowed into Israel, ranging from 5,000 to 100,000, and that Mr. Abbas himself said in 2009 that “it is illogical to ask Israel to take five million, or indeed one million.” 
  
 Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City, said Palestinians “are willing to make big compromises on the right of return,” but only in exchange for a state along the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital (a point that Mr. Abbas emphasized in the television interview, though it was largely lost in the frenzy over his Safed remark). 
  
 “Unless there is a final peace settlement with Israel,” said Mr. Abusada, himself the child of refugees from a village near the Gaza Strip, “they are going to keep holding onto these keys, to keep holding onto these memories.” 
  
 Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, in the West Bank, said his polls had consistently shown that a majority of Palestinians would support a deal in which only a fraction of the refugees, 100,000 or 150,000, were allowed back. But 30 percent see the right of return as their “most vital goal,” second only to the establishment of a Palestinian state, according to the most recent survey, in September. 
  
 “This is a battle over narrative,” Mr. Shikaki explained. “Normally when people say something along the lines of what he said, they would distinguish that from the right of return. He’s now essentially given Hamas an opportunity to try and use this occasion to mobilize against him.” 
  
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 Hamas seized it. The party’s prime minister, Ismail Haniya, called Mr. Abbas’s remarks “extremely dangerous,” and hundreds of Hamas’s supporters took to the streets in Gaza on Saturday evening, carrying banners reading “Abbas does not represent me,” and “Pioneer of concessions, it’s time to quit.” Some burned posters showing Mr. Abbas with Israel’s current and former prime ministers. 
  
 In Jordan, the Islamic Action Front, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, called Mr. Abbas’s statements “grave and unprecedented.” From London, Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of Al Quds Al Arabi, wrote a column under the headline “Please Do Not Speak on Our Behalf.” 
  
 “How can we expect President Abbas to defend the right to return seriously and faithfully while he himself disbelieves it and has no intention to achieve it for himself and for his children and grandchildren?” asked Mr. Atwan, who was born in a refugee camp. “This is our land and this is our right; and thus, we demand him not to speak on our behalf if he does not wish to be one of us.” 
  
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 Although Mr. Abbas may have damaged himself among his own people, he did succeed in what many believed was the goal of the interview with Channel 2 News: inserting the Palestinian question into Israel’s election campaign, which has so far been more about Iran and domestic social issues. His tone was far more conciliatory than his United Nations speech on Sept. 27, when he accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. 
  
 President Shimon Peres, who is being courted to challenge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, issued an unusual Saturday-night statement calling the comments “courageous” and Mr. Abbas “a real partner for peace.” Mr. Netanyahu, in turn, said there was “no connection” between the statements and Mr. Abbas’s “actual actions,” asserting that he had refused to negotiate. 
  
 On Sunday, Israeli leaders from the right and left rushed to radio programs to either denounce or embrace Mr. Abbas’s comments: Uzi Landau of the Yisrael Beiteinu Party, which recently struck a partnership with Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party, called Mr. Abbas “a serial trickster, an obsessive liar,” while Amir Peretz of the Labor Party said Mr. Abbas had given “some sign to the Israeli public to make it clear to them that there is a partner” for peace. 
  
 Two centrist politicians who are considering political comebacks — Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister, and Tzipi Livni, a former foreign minister — each used the remarks to contrast their productive negotiations with Mr. Abbas with Mr. Netanyahu’s stalemate. 
  
 Yossi Alpher, co-editor of a Web site on the conflict that recently shut down, bitterlemons.net, said that on a “metaphoric level” Mr. Abbas had “offered Israelis a genuine concession.” 
  
 The interview, in which Mr. Abbas also vowed that there would not be another violent Palestinian uprising, was a “fairly obvious attempt to present a more moderate point of view in hopes of strengthening the Israeli left and center,” Mr. Alpher said. “The test will be whether he is consistent and whether this is part of a more general campaign to present a softer Palestinian negotiating position.” |||||
A:
Protests broke out across the Gaza Strip this weekend, with angry Palestinians burning Mahmoud Abbas' picture in protest, as pundits and rival politicians denounced him as a traitor, all over what, to an outside observer, might sound like less-than-outrageous remarks. In a Friday interview on Israeli TV, Abbas was asked if he'd want to return to the northern Israeli city he was born in. Only to visit, Abbas replied; he wouldn't want to live in Israel. Palestinians read the remark as a concession on the emotional "right of return" issue, the New York Times explains—Palestinians want the right to return to their pre-1948 homelands. Abbas yesterday clarified that he was speaking personally, and that the rights of refugees were "a sacred matter," but the topic had already caught fire, and could complicate his bid for UN recognition. Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the remarks as unimportant, the Jerusalem Post reports. "This only proves the importance of direct negotiations without preconditions," he said. "I am ready to start negotiations today."