The U.N.'s top peacekeeper, Herve Ladous, said today that Syrian authorities are shelling the town where 21 Filipino peacekeepers continued to be held by anti-government insurgents.

Ladous said he remains confident that the blue helmets will be released, but he voiced concern that the Syrian government might retaliate against local villagers after the U.N. leaves.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is in touch with the rebels, announced that 8 U.N. vehicles had entered the town, indicating a pull out may be imminent. But the rebels have previously insisted that Syrian forces withdraw from the town before the peacekeepers are released.

The disclosure comes one day after an armed group, calling itself the Martyrs of Yarmouk, had pledged to release the 21 peacekeepers. Ladsous's remarks suggested that the effort to extract them had grown increasingly more complicated.

During a briefing to the U.N. Security Council on the crisis, Ladsous said that U.N. officials in Syria had been seeking to negotiate a temporary ceasefire between Syrian armed forces and the insurgents to allow the peacekeepers to be released, a council diplomat told Turtle Bay. The U.N. had expected to secure the blue helmets release this morning, but they were still being held by the time he briefed the Security Council.

"We are hopeful that their release can be accomplished very quickly and we are keeping our fingers crossed," Ladsous  told reporters after briefing the 15-nation body. "The situation is as follows: our peacekeepers are detained in the village of al Jamlah. Apparently they are safe; they have been spread into five or four locations within the villages, in basements of various houses. That part of the village is subject to intense shelling by the Syrian armed forces."

The episode highlighted the risk of the Syrian civil war spreading beyond the theater of conflict inside the country. The captured U.N. peacekeepers are serving as part of a U.N. Disengagement and Observation Force, which is monitoring a 1974 ceasefire between Israel and Syria along the Golan Heights.  The fighting erupted in the town of al Jamlah, less than a mile from the Golan, and it has drawn the U.N. peacekeeping mission into the fray.

It was the second time in a week that U.N. blue helmets had been caught in the middle of fighting between the army and the insurgents around the town of al Jamlah, according to U.N. sources. Last weekend, three unarmed U.N. observers at the nearby U.N. Observation Post 58 got trapped between the warring combatants, forcing them to ultimately evacuate the post. Ladsous said the U.N. had since decided to evacuate another U.N. post because it was exposed to fire.

Ladsous voiced concern about the fate of the al Jamlah's villagers in the event that the U.N. blue helmets leave. "We all hope ... that there would not be retaliatory action by the Syrian armed forces over the village and its civilian population after our people have left."

Syria's U.N. ambassador Bashar al-Jaafari denied Ladsous's account of events, telling reporters outside the U.N. Security Council that "the Syrian government is not shelling the village. "We know for sure what we are doing and we know where the peacekeepers are." Jaafari said Syria is "sacrificing the lives of our soldiers in order to bring these peacekeepers [to safety]. We are paying a huge price for their safety."

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Today's U.N. General Assembly vote elevating Palestine to a "non-member observer state" will do little to confer Palestinians the trappings of a truly independent state.

But what it will do is provide the Palestinians with a ticket to the International Criminal Court (ICC), where membership is available to all states, not just full-fledged members of the United Nations. It will also provide the Palestinians with a new lever to pressure Israel from continuing its expansion of Israeli settlements.

The prospects of Palestinian membership in the ICC, which could place Palestinian territories under the court's jurisdiction for the first time, has alarmed Israel and the United States, who fear it may lead to the prosecution of Israeli soldiers.

It has also rattled Europeans, who support the ICC but fret that Palestinian membership in the tribunal would complicate efforts to restart peace talks.

President Barack Obama has leaned heavily on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to put off his U.N. statehood bid. In a sign of the importance, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns promised Wednesday that if Abbas backed away, Obama would re-engage as a mediator in 2013, the Associated Press reported.

"This resolution is not going to take them closer to statehood," Victoria Nuland told reporters on Wednesday. "It does nothing to get them closer to statehood, and it may actually make the environment more difficult."

Britain has led diplomatic efforts to persuade Abbas to offer assurances that he will not join the Hague-based court until the Middle East Peace Process is concluded. Britain has also pressed Abbas to agree to resume negotiations with Israel after today's vote without preconditions."

The Palestinians' U.N. envoy Riyad Mansour, told reporters this week that his government had no intention of immediately joining the ICC but that it intended to keep the option on the table. He also hinted that the Palestinians would consider going to the court if Israel continues its settlement policy.

"I don't believe that we are going to be rushing the second day to join everything related to the United Nations, including the ICC," he told reporters this week. "But, at the same time, it is not fair for us to tie our own hands [against] all the possibilities that could be available to us." Characterizing Israeli's settlement policy as war crime, Mansour raised the possibility of going to the court if Israel continues to expand settlements.

There is a provision in the Rome Statue, the treaty establishing the international tribunal, that could apply to Israel's settlement policy. It defines, as a war crime, the "transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory."

Christian Wenewaser, Liechtenstein's U.N. ambassador and the former president of the ICC's assembly of states parties, said that the Palestinians cannot dictate which specific crimes the ICC's prosecutor might choose to examine, and that it could only invite the prosecutor to investigate a general situation where large-scale crimes have been committed.

That, he noted, raises the prospects that the prosecutor could turn her sights on Palestinian extremists who have been firing rockets into Israel. Wenewaser said he believes that the Palestinians will not immediately approach the court. "I think they will let this sit for a while," said "They will just use the threat of resubmitting [a claim] as leverage to stop the settlement policy."

In January 2009, the Palestinians appealed to the Hague-based criminal court to open an investigation into Israeli conduct during a three-week operation in the Gaza Strip that began in December 2008. Earlier this year, the court's then-prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said he lacked the authority to rule on the decision.

Today's votes leave the Palestinians two main options: they can either resubmit their request to the new prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, as a U.N.-recognized observer state, potentially providing the court with jurisdiction on past crimes. They can also become a member of the International Criminal Court, and pursue a prosecution there.

Jim Goldston, the executive director of Justice Initiative at the Open Society Foundations, said that there are a number legal hurdles that must be crossed before the court could decide whether to take on an investigation in Israel. For one, it remains unclear how the prosecutor could determine the territory under which it can exercise jurisdiction.

It also remains unclear whether the prosecutor will have jurisdiction over alleged crimes dating back to 2002, when the ICC treaty came into force, or only those committed after Palestine becomes a member of the court. Also, the International Criminal Court's treaty grants preference to national prosecutors to carry out prosecutions, if they can demonstrate the have the means and will to do it. Israel would likely to argue that its court's are capable and willing to conduct credible investigations into alleged war crimes in Palestinian lands.

Meanwhile, Goldston said that placing Israel within the court's possible jurisdiction would help address complaints, particularly within Africa, that the court only pursues war criminals that lack powerful patrons."The ICC has been plagued by question of selectivity and alleged double standard, the idea that certain states are subject to the law, and others have political protection, and are not subject to the law. This would open up the possibility of more equitable administration of justice. I think this would be a positive thing."

But that could come at the cost of the ICC's improving relationship with the United States.

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For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu it wasn't enough just to reiterate an impassioned call for the United States and other U.N. governments to impose a red line on Iran's nuclear program.

He literally drew it -- right before the assembled world leaders -- on a crude bomb chart that looked like it came directly out Wile E. Coyote's comic book arsenal.

In a speech that briefly glossed over the Middle East process, Netanyahu made his most detailed and impassioned case for confronting Iran, clarifying that the threshold for a military strike should be set at the point Iran produces enough highly enriched uranium to produce a nuclear weapon.

"Nothing could imperil our future more than the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons," Netanyahu told the gathering of foreign leaders. "At this late hour, the only way to peacefully prevent Iran from getting an atomic bomb is by placing a clear red line on Iran's nuclear weapons programs.

"Red lines don't lead to war; red lines prevent war," he added. "I believe faced with clear red line Iran will back down."

The Israeli prime minister has been pressing President Barack Obama for weeks to specify a precise stage in Iran's enrichment of uranium that would trigger a military reaction. Obama has repeatedly said that the United States would not permit Iran to possess nuclear weapons, but he has refused to commit to a specific red line in order to preserve response flexibility.

In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, Obama said that while it remains committed to resolving the nuclear dispute with Iran "through diplomacy and we believe that there is still time and space to do so. But that time is not unlimited."

"Make no mistake: A nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained." Obama said. "It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations, and the stability of the global economy. It risks triggering a nuclear arms race in the region, and the unraveling of the Non-Proliferation Treaty."

Netanyahu thanked Obama for his statement acknowledging an Iranian nuclear weapons program could not be contained, and he said he recognized that international sanctions were inflicting serious pain on the regime.

But he said that more than a decade of sanctions and diplomacy have failed to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions, and that it would be irresponsible to place one's faith in cautious estimates from Western intelligence agencies that there is sufficient time to stop the Iranians from acquiring the bomb. "Our intelligence agents are not fool-proof," he said.

Netanyahu, who spoke shortly after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, devoted little attention to the peace process, simply saying the "libelous speeches" or "unilateral declarations of statehood" before the U.N. General Assembly would not further the cause of peace.

The Palestinian leader was the clear favorite in the General Assembly, receiving a standing ovation for a speech that denounced a wave of anti-Palestinian attacks by Jewish settlers, and claimed that Israeli policies were undermining the ability of the Palestinian National Authority to function -- threatening its ultimate collapse.

But his bid for international recognition of statehood was scaled back from a year ago.

"We will continue our efforts to obtain full membership for Palestine at the United Nations," he said. But for now, he said his government has "begun intensive consultations with various regional organizations and member states aimed at having

the General Assembly adopt a resolution considering the State of Palestine as a non-member state of the United Nations during this session."

"We do not seek to delegitimize an existing state -- that is Israel; but rather

to assert the state that must be realized -- that is Palestine."

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Last week, Khulood Badawi, a U.N. relief worker in Jerusalem, tweeted a photograph of an injured Palestinian girl, saying "Palestine is bleeding. Another child killed by Israel. Another father carrying a child into a grave in Gaza."

The photograph, it turned out, was more than six years old -- captured by a Reuters photographer, and depicting a child who had been injured in a swing accident.

"She was not killed by Israeli forces," Ron Prosor, Israel's U.N. ambassador, wrote in a letter to the U.N. emergency coordinator, Valerie Amos, in which he demanded the woman be fired "Although Ms. Badawi's portrayal of this photo was clearly a blatant falsehood, her post became the top tweet for anything related to Gaza on Twitter."

The U.N.'s chief spokesman, Martin Nesirky, today confirmed that the tweet was not true, adding that "it is regrettable that an OCHA [Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] staff member had posted information on her personal Twitter profile which was both false and which reflected on issues that are related to her work."

"The opinions expressed in her Twitter profile in no way reflect the views of OCHA, nor were they sanctions by OCHA," Nesirky said. "OCHA strives to ensure its neutrality and impartiality in all aspects of its work and it is important that the private actions of our staff do not undermine these principles in countries in which we work."

The controversy comes as Israel is engaged in a series of violent exchanges with the Palestinians, with Palestinian militants firing more than 100 rockets at Israeli civilians, wounding several civilians. Israel has retaliated with a series of air strikes that have killed 25 Palestinians, according to the Associated Press.

Badawi, an Israeli citizen and long time Palestinian activist before she was hired by the United Nations, did not respond to a request for comment left on her Twitter account, which she stopped using on the day her employers learned about the erroneous tweet.

But her Twitter feed links to a story by another woman, Diana Alzeer, who claimed she posted the photo on her own site, mistakenly thinking that the photograph was recent. Alzeer ran a correction after learning that the photo was old. Badawi subsequently deleted the entry on her Twitter feed.

Israel's U.N. ambassador has cited the erroneous tweet as cause for Badawi's dismissal, saying that she "not only failed to remain impartial; she actively engaged in the demonization of Israel."

But Israel apparently got questioned by some of its Twitter followers for posting an old photograph to illustrate the current violence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, posted a photograph showing "an Israeli woman lying on the ground with her two children, their hands over their heads, their faces squashed into the pavement," according to the Associated Press.

Gendelman wrote that the picture captures the moment "when a rocket fired by terrorists from Gaza is about to hit their home." The photo, AP reported, was from 2009. "I never stated that the photo was current," Gendelman told followers who pointed out that the photograph was old. It illustrates the fear that people in southern Israel live in."

U.N. officials, meanwhile, would not say whether Badawi would keep her job.

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Ed.: this post has been modified to correct an error. Badawi is an Israeli citizen, posted by OCHA in Jerusalem, not Gaza.

On Monday, Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters in New York that a U.N. report detailing atrocities by Syrian security forces underscored the need for the U.N. Security Council to take action to stop a campaign of repression that has left more than 4,000 dead, most of them peaceful protesters.

But over the following days, U.S. diplomats in Geneva worked behind the scenes to eliminate a European Union proposal to have the U.N. Human Rights Council recommend that the Security Council consider the U.N. report on Syrian abuses and to "take appropriate action" to stop it, according to senior Western diplomats and human rights advocates.

Western diplomats said that U.S. officials had informed them this week that they are reluctant to see the Human Rights Council resolution refer the matter to the Security Council -- because it would reinforce a precedent that could be used in the future against Israel.

In Oct. 2009, the rights council called on the U.N. Security Council to consider the Goldstone Report, which sharply criticized Israel's conduct during the 2008-2009 Gaza offensive, called Operation Cast Lead. The resolution was adopted over the objections of the United States, but the Security Council's membership showed little interest in taking up the matter.

European diplomats were hoping to use the rights council this week as a political lever to ratchet up pressure on President Bashar Al-Assad with the one threat they believe he fears: a deeper Security Council role in addressing the crisis. "It would be disappointing but not surprising if United States policy on Israel was skewing their policy towards the strongest possible action on Syria," said a Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But U.S. officials challenged that account, saying that while they don't believe it's appropriate for the Human Rights Council to tell the Security Council what to do, Washington does favor the toughest possible action against Syria. They also maintain that the United States has lead international efforts at the United Nations to ensure that Syrian officials are ultimately held accountable for their crimes.

They cited U.S. support for a Security Council statement in August demanding that Syrian perpetrators of violence face justice for their crimes, the move to rally support to prevent Syria from getting elected to the Human Rights Council, and the convening of a series of three special sessions there to condemn and investigate Syria's crimes.

"For months now, the United States has been at the forefront pressing for Security Council action against the Syrian regime, as well as action and condemnation through other U.N. bodies like the Human Rights Council," Mark Kornblau, a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, told Turtle Bay. "However, the Human Rights Council simply cannot refer matters to the Security Council because it's a subsidiary of the General Assembly ... the Security Council decides which issues of international peace and security it will take up."

The debate follows the publication on Monday of a damning account by a U.N. commission of inquiry into Syria's conduct. It is playing out as the U.N. Human Rights Council prepares to vote on a resolution condemning Syria's action.

A confidential draft, which was obtained by Turtle Bay,  "strongly condemns the continued widespread, systematic and gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms by the Syrian authorities." It accuses the government of committing "arbitrary executions, excessive use of force and the killing and persecution of protesters, human rights defenders and journalists."

The draft also calls on Syria to immediately halt its security crackdown, investigate rights abusers in the police and army, allow U.N. human rights monitors into Syria, and urges the Arab League and other U.N. members to support international efforts to "protect the population of the Syrian Arab Republic."

An earlier draft statement included a reference to the International Criminal Court. ( A preambular paragraph reiterated "the importance of accountability and the need to end impunity and hold to account those responsible for human rights, violations, including those that may amount to crimes against humanity [that may warrant the attention of the ICC]."

While the call for accountability remains in the latest draft, the bracketed reference to the ICC  has been dropped at the insistence of the United States, which is not a member of the Hague-based court. The U.S. spokesman, Mark Kornblau, did not confirm the United States had blocked the language, but he said that "we continue to press for accountability -- and again this is not the in the purview of the Human Rights Council, it's the responsibility of the Security Council."

Human Rights advocates criticized the U.S. approach to the negotiations. "The U.S. should be leading the charge to include this kind of language rather than trying to block it," said Peggy Hicks, who is monitoring the negotiations in Geneva for Human Rights Watch.

"We think it's very important that the current draft resolution recommends that the General Assembly and the Security Council consider the report of the Commission of Inquiry, which found that crimes against humanity have been committed in Syria," said Jose Luis Diaz, Amnesty International's U.N. representative. "The members of the [Human Rights Council] that believe in international justice should stick up for this."

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The Obama administration has been pressing U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to appoint Ertharin Cousin, the U.S. representative to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome, as the new head of the World Food Program (WFP), the premier international agency responsible for feeding the world's poor and distressed.

Cousin, formerly president of the Polk Street Group, a Chicago-based public relations firm, has served in various corporate and non-profit jobs, including a stint at Albertsons, the food giant, and served as chief operating officer for America's Second Harvest, a national anti-hunger organization.

The Obama administration wants her to replace Josette Sheeran, the Bush administration choice for the job, when her five-year term expires in April 2012.

Officials say the administration had expected a decision to have been made by now and have grown concerned that Ban may not select their favored candidate. Dan Glickman, a former Democratic lawmaker from Kansas and Secretary of Agricultural under former President Bill Clinton, is also said to be on the U.N.'s short list of candidates. Sheeran is said to be pursuing a second term.

The United States is the world's largest financial contributor to the World Food Program, providing more than $1.5 billion worth of assistance and food in 2010, which accounts for more than 36 percent of all international giving to the U.N. food agency.  The World Food Program's executive director has been an American since 1992, when Catherine Bertini was appointed to the post. The WPF director is selected by the U.N. secretary general and the director general of the FAO, generally on the basis of a recommendation from the United States.

The Rome-based FAO is responsible for feeding more than 105 million people in 75 countries, and employs about 10,000 people.

The eventual winner of the WFP job, though, could potentially be forced to grapple with a Palestinian bid to join the organization's executive board, which is composed of 18 U.N. members and 18 members of FAO. The Palestinians can join FAO if they can get a two-third vote of the membership, which would allow them to mount a bid for membership on WFP's executive board.

So far, the Palestinians -- which have already been admitted as UNESCO members -- have said they are exploring membership bids in some 16 additional U.N. agencies, at some point in the future. They have not yet said, however, whether they would mount a campaign for membership in the U.N.'s food agencies at the next major membership meeting in June, 2013.

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Update: This post has been corrected to reflect an error regarding the nationality of WFP executive directors. The director has been from the United States since 1992, not throughout the entirety of the organization's history.

As the Israeli-Palestinian prisoner swap got under way this week, the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) appealed late last night to the Israel military to ensure the release of 164 Palestinian prisoners detained as minors, mostly on charges of throwing stones at Israeli authorities.

The minors were not included in a list of the first round 477 Palestinian prisoners who were released in exchange for one Israel soldier, Gilad Shalit, freed by Hamas after five years of captivity through a prison swap brokered by the Egyptian government. It remains unclear whether the minors will be included in a second round of an additional 550 Palestinian prisoners due to be released in the coming months, according to UNICEF officials.

"As stated in the convention on the rights of the child, the detention of children should be used only as a measure of last resort for the shortest appropriate period of time," said Jean Gough, UNICEF's Special Representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. "UNICEF calls on the Israeli government to release Palestinian child detainees so that they can be reunited with their families."

Israel's U.N. ambassador, Ron Prosor, reacted sharply to the U.N. agencies appeal, telling Turtle Bay in a statement that "this press release demonstrates UNICEF's clear bias and double-standards when it comes to Israel. Its timing is mind-boggling."

Prosor said that while Israel is willing to discuss the concerns of any humanitarian agency UNICEF "should use its time and resource to focus on real violators of children's rights in the Middle East."

‘Gilad Shalit just lost more than five years of his youth as a hostage. Why hasn't UNICEF condemned Hamas?" Prosor continued. "Where is its condemnation of the missiles that continue to rain down on Israeli kindergartens and school buses? Where is its outrage at Hamas' cynical use of children as suicide bombers and human shields? Where is its condemnation of the hate that continues to be spread in Palestinian classrooms and textbooks?"

Israel's detention of minors has been a sore point for the U.N. children's agencies and other children's rights groups, who maintain that children should not be tried by military courts and that governments should only jail minors under the most extreme circumstances. "Military tribunals are not required to treat children's best interests as their primary concern, and, therefore, are not an appropriate forum for hearing cases against children," according to a September report by the U.N. secretary general special representative for children and armed conflict, Radikha Coomaraswamy.

"Seven thousand Palestinian children have been detained, interrogated and prosecuted and imprisoned in the Israeli military system over the past ten years," Catherine Weibel, a spokeswoman for UNICEF said in a phone interview today.

Weibel said that 35 of the detained minors are between the ages of 12 and 15 but that most are 16 or 17 years of age. Under Israeli law, minors over the age of 14 can be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison for throwing a stone at an individual, and up to 20 years for hurling it at a moving vehicle. In practice, Israeli military courts rarely sentence minors to more than 2 months, and typically hold them for a period of a couple of weeks to about 3 months. Children under the age of 12 are released from custody without being charged.

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The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's 58 member executive board voted on Wednesday to recommend the Palestinians as a new member, setting the stage for a high-stakes vote on the Palestinians admission later this month.

But U.S. law prohibits funding for U.N. bodies that grant membership to entities without "internationally recognized attributes of statehood."

It remains unclear whether the law would apply to admission of a Palestinian state. The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States sets out four criteria for a new state -- a defined territory, a permanent population, a functioning government, and the wherewithal to "enter into relations with other states."

But Israel's backers in Congress warned that UNESCO's recognition of a Palestinian state could cost the Paris-based agency tens of millions of dollars in U.S. financial assistance. The United States gives UNESCO about $80 million dollars in funding, accounting for 22 percent of the organization's budget.

On Tuesday, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), pressed the Obama administration to inform the Palestinians that "any decision to upgrade the Palestinian mission's status by UNESCO or any other U.N. entity will let to a cutoff of U.S. funds to that entity."

The United States, along with Germany, Latvia, and Romania, voted against Wednesday's recommendation by UNESCO's board. France, which has not recognized a Palestinian state, abstained on the grounds that UNESCO is not the right place to determine the question of Palestinian statehood.

The Obama administration argued that any Palestinian drive for statehood that didn't result from direct talks with Israel could undermine the peace process. Speaking to reporters in the Dominican Republic on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, called the UNESCO board action "inexplicable" and counseled them to "think again" about the measure.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters in Washington on Wednesday that government lawyers are studying what impact the Palestinian's admission would have on U.S. funding for UNESCO. The United States, she said,would use its diplomatic influence to seek to prevent the matter from coming to a vote.

"This is not the way to establish a Palestinian state," she said. "Once we've had a negotiated solution, once we have two states living in peace, with mutually agreed borders, then the Palestinian state will be in all of these organizations."

The United States and Israel both faulted the Palestinians for jeopardizing the outcome of an intiative by the Middle East Quartet, which includes representatives from the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations, to persuade the Palestinians and Israelis to restart political talks in the coming weeks.

But the Palestinians have asserted that their drive for statehood could run on a parrallel track to any possible resumption of peace talks. At this stage, it remains unclear whether those talks will in fact resume.

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Less than 24 hours after the Middle East Quartet issued a statement calling for a resumption of peace talks between Israel and Palestine, the new Egyptian government, speaking on behalf of the nonaligned movement, doused it with cold water.

Mohamed Kamel Amr, Egypt's foreign minister, said in a speech before the U.N. General Assembly on Saturday that "we have witnessed yesterday another failure by the Quartet to come up with a balanced vision to achieve the goal that we all know and approve of yet differ on how to realize it."

It remained unclear whether the Egyptian statement represented the start of a major move by Palestine supporters to undercut the peace talks, or was simply pre-negotiation posturing designed to bolster the Palestinians' quest for a better deal.

But the Quartet statement's failure to include a clear framework -- or parameters -- for talks, and the absence of a call for an end to settlements has infuriated key powers, including Russia, which is a member of the Quartet, and France, which is represented by the European Union envoy, Catherine Ashton. Some diplomats said that Russia had at one point during the talks threatened to pull out of the discussions.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy meanwhile was said to be furious that Ashton had refused to fully brief the French in the midst of the high-pressure talks and that she had failed to add stronger reference to the parameters to the statement. Last week, he pre-empted Ashton by presenting her proposal as his own. But after the deal was struck, France's foreign minister issued a statement saying they were pleased with the direction the Quartet was pursuing.

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This afternoon, I conferred the award for the longest U.N. General Assembly speech to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who spent 39 minutes, 23 seconds, beating up on Israel, Syria, and the Greek Cypriots.

Then the Palestinians and Israelis hit the podium.

Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas breezed easily past the Turkish leader, announcing the Palestinian intention to pursue membership at the U.N. in a speech that lasted 41 minutes, 11 seconds.

Not to be outdone, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hit back with a defiant rebuke of his Palestinian counterpart that went on for a whopping 48 minutes, 30 seconds, more than triple the time allotted for General Assembly speeches.

Lost in the struggle for words was the Southern Sudanese leader, Salva Kiir, who delivered the brand new country's first speech before the U.N. General Assembly. He knocked it off in all of 14 minutes, 40 seconds -- a mere 20 seconds short of the allotted time. Who knows, maybe the new guy on the block has something to teach the old timers.

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The Middle East Quartet, which includes representatives from the United States, Russia, the European Union, and United Nations, has reached agreement on a statement calling for the resumption of negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians within one month. Both sides would present detailed proposals within three months, and negotiations would be completed by end of 2012, according to U.N.-based sources.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced plans to hold a Quartet session this afternoon, followed by a public statement at about 3:45 p.m. by Catherine Ashton, the European Union's chief foreign affairs official. Ashton has led talks with the Palestinians and Israelis about a return to talk.

But it remains unclear whether the final statement would spell out the basis for such talks, which officials said would initially focus on borders and security. The U.N. secretary general's office, meanwhile, announced the U.N. chief had transmitted the Palestinian application for U.N. membership to the Security Council, where it faces almost certain defeat.

But Ashton and other European officials have been pressing the Palestinians to back down and not force the matter for a vote. Instead, the Europeans would support a bid by the Palestinians to secure a General Assembly decision recognizing the Palestinians as an non-member observer state, a status similar to the Vatican, but not a full-fledged member.

Update: excerpts from the Quartet statement below.

"The Quartet reiterated its urgent appeal to the parties to overcome the current obstacles and resume direct bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations without delay or preconditions," reads the Quartet statement. "But it accepts that meeting, in itself, will not reestablish  the trust necessary for such a negotiation to succeed."

The statement details a specific proposal for a timeline for direct talks, beginning with a "preparatory meeting" in the next month to "agree an agenda and method" for the talks. "At that meeting there will be a commitment by both sides that the objective of any negotiation is to reach an agreement within a timeframe agreed to by the parties but not longer than the end of 2012."

The Quartet "expects the parties to come forward with comprehensive proposals within three months on territory and security, and to have made substantial progress within six months. To that end, the Quartet will convene an international conference in Moscow, in consultation with the parties, at the appropriate time."

The Quartet "recognizes the achievements of the Palestinian Authority in preparing institutions for statehood," the statement said. It also calls on the two parties "to refrain from provocative actions if negotiations are to be effective."

President Barack Obama and his top diplomat, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, pleaded this week with Turkey to turn down the volume in its public statements on Israel. Not that long ago, it seemed that Jerusalem and Ankara were getting along rather well, but the two regional powers have had a bitter falling out of late.

Today, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave his answer, delivering a sharply worded rebuke of Israeli policies before the U.N. General Assembly, and suggesting it was unfair that Israel is not sanctioned for its violation of U.N. resolutions while other countries -- including Sudan -- without powerful patrons, must endure them.

Turkey's relationship with Israel has deteriorated since May 2010, when Israeli commandos raided an aid flotilla seeking to deliver supplies to the Gaza Strip in violation of an Israeli naval blockade. Nine people were killed.

In recent weeks, Turkey has downgraded its diplomatic relationship with Israel. Erodgan reiterated his demand that "Israel must apologize, pay compensation to the families of our martyrs and lift the...blockade on Gaza. Until Israel meets these demands and takes steps in this direction our position will not change."

Israel has maintained that it has the right to control international ships entering waters near Gaza on the grounds that its rival, Hamas, has imported illegal arms through the area. A U.N. panel, established by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, found that Israel was within its right to enforce the naval blockade, but that it had used excessive force in the raid.

The United States has sought to ease diplomatic tensions between Israel, its closest ally in the Middle East, and Turkey, one of Washington's most important Muslim allies.

It has had little success.

And judging by Erdogan's performance today, the relationship may be long in repairing. Erdogan portrayed the Israeli government as the source of paralysis in the Middle East peace process, saying that they have failed to emulate the spirit of change sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa.

"This country takes steps every day, which instead of paving the way for peace, build new barriers preventing peace," he said. "It is Israel that uses disproportionate force to solve its problems."

Erdogan also blasted Israel's rival, Syria, saying its brutal crackdown on protesters was "unacceptable."

"One cannot prosper through persecution," he said. "It is important to listen to the demands of the people and not direct or point the gun at the people. Unfortunately, the Syrian leadership has persisted in not listening to our warnings."

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First the good news: U.S. President Barack Obama is more than twice as popular in Egypt as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad.

Now, the bad news: the American president's standing has never been worse in Egypt, plummeting since 2008, when he received a 25 percent favorability rating, to 12 percent in 2011.  Even Osama Bin Laden, the late al Qaeda leader, was more popular this year, with a 21 percent favorability ranking. The Iranian leader fared worse, dropping from 21 percent favorability rating in 2008 to a miserable 5 percent.

The findings are drawn from a public poll of Egyptian views in the aftermath of the public uprising that brought about the resignation of Egypt's fallen leader Hosni Mubarak. The poll was commissioned by the International Peace Institute, a New York-based think tank with close ties to the United Nations and Arab governments.

The poll seeks to capture the mood of the country in the lead up to the Egypt's first post-Mubarak election, and to handicap the presidential campaign. It shows that Egyptians currently fret over issues like the economy, stability, and government corruption more than they  worry about the course of the country's democratic transition.

According to the poll, conducted by Charney Research and based on interviews with 800 Egyptians, Amr Moussa, the outgoing Arab League chief, has emerged as an early frontrunner. Thirty-two percent of respondents say they would vote for Moussa, who once served as Mubarak's foreign minister.

Essam Sharraf, an engineering professor who is serving as the country's interim prime minister, finished second with 16 percent of votes ( though his favorability ranking is higher than Moussa's). And Mohammed Tantawi, the army chief, finished third with 8 percent of those questioned saying they would vote for him. Mohammed El Baradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency who emerged from retirement to serve as Egypt's best known pro-democracy advocate, finished seventh, with only 2 percent of respondents pledging to vote for him.

The poll shows that the Egyptian army, which refused orders to fire on public demonstrators during the country's popular uprising, remains "extremely popular" with 90 percent of Egyptian respondents expressing a favorable view. Egypt's various secular parties also did well, garning 25 precent of respondents' votes, while Islamist parties gained 19 percent. The best-known political parties, the New Wafd Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, received respectively 40 percent and 31 percent favorability ratings.  The Brotherhood's unfavorability rating, at 29 percent, was 10 points higher.

"The military right now is riding a wave of popularity because it is seen as playing two key roles [in Egypt's popular revolution]," Craig Charney, the pollster, told Turtle Bay. "It delivered the coup de grace to Mubarak and did it in a way that maintained a substantial degree of stability."

Charney said that the findings also demonstrated that fears of a religious take over by Islamists are overblown. "The much feared green-tide just isn't there, with the Muslim Brotherhood receiving 12 percent while the Salafists for all their sound and fury came away with only 4 percent," Charney said.

While an exiled Egyptian national, Ayman al Zawahiri, has been selected as the new leader of Al Qaeda, the poll suggested that the terror organization would have been better at influencing events in Egypt under the leadership of their late Saudi leader, Osama Bin laden, who was killed by elite U.S. commandos in Pakistan.

According to the poll, bin Laden's favorability ratings rose from 18 percent of those questioned in 2008 to 21 percent in 2011. In contrast, Zawahiri scored a favorability rating of only 11 percent this year.

Charney said that while other polls have found somewhat higher support for President Obama's response to the Egyptian uprising, he has suffered from a generally dim view of American policy throughout the region.

"Despite President Obama's words and measures in support of Egypt's revolution, he only narrowly edges out the leaders of al Qaeda and Iran in popular regard there," Charney said in a statement. "But our findings do clearly show that Egyptians have little regard for the likes of al-Zawahiri and Ahmadinejad."

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The Israeli government and the American Jewish Committee clashed this week with Hollywood filmmakers and the United Nations over Monday evening's premier of a new film, Miral, at the U.N. General Assembly hall. The movie provides a sympathetic portrayal of a young Palestinian girl coming of age in the era of the first Palestinian Intifida (1987-1993).

Israel's deputy U.N. ambassador, Haim Waxman, wrote a formal protest on Friday to the U.N. General Assembly president, Joseph Deiss of Switzerland, for agreeing to host what he characterized as a "politicized" film, directed by the artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel and distributed by Harvey Weinstein. But Deiss rejected the Israeli request to cancel the event, according to U.N. officials, who said he defended the film as a "love story." He sent invitations to all the U.N.'s 192 member states, including Israel.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declined the invitation to attend the viewing, according to a U.N. official.

"We find it very troubling that the U.N. has chosen to feature this film in the GA Hall," Waxman wrote. The U.N., he said, has a "clear duty to carefully select all programs that are hosted on its premises in order to maintain a spirit of impartiality. The screening of Miral constitutes an inappropriate use of the hall of the GA, which already deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict excessively and obsessively."

The U.N. General Assembly was established to provide a forum for the world's government to debate and adopt resolutions on the most pressing issues of the day. But it occasionally lends its space out for special events, including concerts and observances. The GA hall recently hosted a memorial for the United States' former U.N. ambassador, Richard C. Holbrooke.

But for Israel, the U.N. General Assembly has been a symbol of its marginalization on the world stage, a forum that manufactures numerous resolutions criticizing Israel, including the notorious 1975 resolution that "determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." The resolution was rescinded in 1991.

Starring Freida Pinto of Slumdog Millionaire, Miral is based loosely on the life story of the Palestinian-born Italian journalist, Rula Jebreal, who wrote the film's screenplay. It is based on Jebreal's 2004 novel of the same name.

Miral tracks the history of the Dar Al-Tifel orphanage, which was established in 1948, the year of the partition of Palestine and the birth of Israel, to educate Palestinian orphans. It portrays the struggle of Miral, a 7-year-old girl who is sent to the orphanage in 1978, between the values of the orphanage's founder, Hind Husseini, who sees education as the key to a better life, and those of the young Palestinians who battled Israeli forces on the streets. She also falls in love with a young Palestinian militant who ultimately becomes a peace proponent. The book received cool reviews at the time of its publication.

Schnabel, the Brooklyn-born director of the film, has directed several acclaimed films, including Basquiat, about the late painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; Before Night Falls, an account of a gay Cuban novelist suffering discrimination under Castro's reign; and the Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the story of a French magazine editor paralyzed by a stroke. But none have generated the degree of controversy as this film.

"Miral is a story about human beings, Palestinian, Israeli, Muslim, Jewish and Christian, and it explores how we all react differently to the violence around us, whether physical, emotional, political or otherwise," Jebreal said in a statement. "It is a film about love, education, understanding and peace. That seems like a good thing to show at the United Nations."

In a letter to Deiss, David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, said the movie was political propaganda. "The film has a clear political message, which portrays Israel in a highly negative light," Harris. Showing the film in the U.N. General Assembly hall "will only serve to reinforce the already widespread view that Israel simply cannot expect fair treatment in the U.N."

In response to Harris on the controversy, Schnabel said in a statement that he had made the film as a friend of Israel. Schnabel, an American Jew, has noted that his mother, Esther Greenberg, was the president of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization in America. "I love the state of Israel," he said in the statement.

"I believe in it, and my film is about preserving it, not hurting it," Schnabel said. "Understanding is part of the Jewish way and Jewish people are supposed to be good listeners. But, if we don't listen to the other side, we can never have peace. Instead of saying 'no,' I ask the AJC to say, 'yes,' see Miral and join the discussion."

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