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January 25, 2011

Palestinians Agreed to "Symbolic Return" of Refugees 
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Newly released documents show Palestinian negotiators have offered the
Israeli government major concessions on the rights of Palestinian
refugees. The disclosure is among the latest in the so-called "Palestine
Papers"-more than 1,700 files from inside Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations dating from 1999 to 2010. According to the news network Al
Jazeera, the Palestinian Authority has signed off on accepting the
return of a "symbolic number" of Palestinians who lost their homes in
the 1948 war around Israel's independence. Former Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert is said to have proposed that 5,000 Palestinian refugees be
allowed back into Israel, a fraction of the six million displaced around
the world. In Lebanon, a Palestinian refugee criticized the Palestinian
Authority's leadership.

Abdul Razzaq: "This latest scandal proves that we have a serious
legitimacy problem in the Palestinian context. We have a leadership
imposed from abroad that does not represent the realities of our people.
We have a situation whereby our people's reality is deteriorating day by
day; concession after concession is being made, and yet we are getting
nothing in return."



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