Al Jazeera's latest leak of hundreds of secret Palestinian negotiating papers is providing the kind of fly-on-the-wall insights to Mideast peace talks that usually only emerge many years later in the autobiographies of politicians and diplomats.

Though some of the initial coverage and spin by Al Jazeera and other organizations has been inaccurate or out of context, the documents themselves offer a treasure trove of detailed information about Palestinians' internal strategy and tactics. Most of the documents were produced by the Palestinian Authority's own attorneys, advisors and negotiators and include transcripts of private strategy sessions and internal talking points. It's a bonanza for Israel, which can get a peek into the Palestinian thought process as recently as last year.

One December 2009 document discusses "Palestinian Messaging and Implementation." Another lays out the legal risks of a premature declaration of statehood. An internal summary of where peace talks last broke down reveals that Palestinians were prepared in 2008 to limit the number of returning refugees to 15,000 a year for 10 years, or 150,000.

If there’s a lesson from Sunday's leak of alleged meeting minutes from 2008 Mideast peace talks involving Palestinian, Israeli and U.S. officials and from the previous WikiLeaks dump of U.S. diplomatic cables, perhaps it's this: Governments needn't be so afraid of having their private business aired in public.

After the initial U.S. embarrassment from the WikiLeaks disclosures, many came to believe that the cables actually showed U.S. diplomats to be rather astute and well-informed. In the same way, Palestinians so far don't really seem to have anything to be ashamed of in the leaks from the 2008 talks. Despite the spin by Al-Jazeera and critics of the Palestinian Authority, the documents released don't show Palestinian negotiators giving away the store.

To the contrary, they're depicted as taking a surprisingly hard-line stance against giving up massive West Bank settlements such as Maale Adumim, Givat Zeev, Har Homa and Ariel, which most experts have long presumed would be retained by Israel with little fuss or cost.

Former Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, once a confidant and close ally of Palestinian President and Fatah chairman Mahmoud Abbas, recently found himself in deep trouble when he apparently had decided to test Abbas’ muscle. In the end, he found himself ostracized and then kicked out of a movement in which it was believed he was the strongest man, after its founder, the late Yasser Arafat.

The Fatah Central Committee on Tuesday suspended Dahlan’s membership in the highest ruling body of the mainstream movement and stripped him of his duties as its spokesman pending the findings of an internal investigating commission.

Dahlan, who has kept away from Abbas and the West Bank after his dismissal from the movement, decided Wednesday to return to the West Bank city of Ramallah from his new home in Cairo to face the  inquiry into allegations that he went too far in bad-mouthing Abbas and of even plotting to overthrow him.

“I will appear in front of the commission and answer all its questions in spite of my reservations from the nature and course of this made-up crisis,” Dahlan, 49, said in statements from Cairo.

The Gaza-Israel border has been heating up in recent weeks, with an increasing number of incidents on the fence, and rocket and mortar fire from the strip into Israel sharply on the rise.

Alongside calculated retaliation including airstrikes on tunnels, militants and -- for the first time since the military operation known as Cast Lead nearly two years ago -- hitting Hamas targets, Israel is keeping a close eye on things and assessing the rationale for the recent escalation.

Most rocket fire is carried out not by Hamas but by smaller, more radical organizations in Gaza, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said this week, estimating that the smaller, more radical organizations opposing Hamas are trying to drag it into renewed conflict with Israel.

A Palestinian public opinion poll published Monday in the West Bank city of Ramallah found out that only a quarter of the Palestinians in the West Bank believe they can criticize the Palestinian Authority. In the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, the record was even worse as less than a fifth of the Palestinians there believed it is possible to criticize Hamas rule of the coastal enclave.

The poll, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), said the percentage of Palestinians who believe it is possible to criticize their authority has dropped over the years, from more than half in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in September 2007 to the current figures.

What apparently has prompted this gradual, yet sharp decline is the general feeling of the Palestinian public, whether in the West Bank, ruled by the liberal and Western-backed Palestinian Authority, or in the Gaza Strip, ruled by the fundamentalist and traditional Hamas, of becoming increasingly ruled by a police state.

Israeli police Wednesday expelled Hamas lawmaker and East Jerusalem resident Muhammad Abu Tir to the West Bank city of Ramallah after an Israeli district court upheld a 4-year-old decision by the Israeli minister of interior declaring that Abu Tir's presence in Jerusalem was "illegal."

Palestinians fear the expulsion may set a precedent in which Israel will expel political activists not only from the Islamist Hamas, but from any political faction, including the mainstream Fatah, which has a number of ministers and lawmakers from Jerusalem.

Hatem Abdul Qadder, a former Fatah lawmaker from Jerusalem and former minister in Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's government, expressed concern that Israel may apply the same law to any political activist in the city in an attempt to quell resistance to the Israeli occupation.

A majority of Muslims around the world welcome a significant role for Islam in their countries' political life, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, but have mixed feelings toward militant religious groups such as  Hamas and Hezbollah.

According to the survey, majorities in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Nigeria would favor changing the current laws to allow stoning as a punishment for adultery, hand amputation for theft and death for those who convert from Islam to another religion. About 85% of Pakistani Muslims said they would support a law segregating men and women in the workplace.

Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and Jordan were among the most enthusiastic, with more than three-quarters of Muslims polled in those countries reporting positive views of Islam's influence in politics: either that Islam had a large role in politics, and that was a good thing, or that it played a small role, and that was bad.

The morning after the first disclosures of WikiLeaks' trove of diplomatic cables, buzz in Israel was somewhere between relief and vindication, and officials were being thankful by keeping quiet. Relations between Israel and the U.S. are based on a tight weave of shared interests, not local incidents, said deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon.

Gradually, more official voices were heard. The revelations show what some of us knew, said President Shimon Peres -- that the Arab countries know they have an enemy, "and it's not Israel."

A headline in Haaretz was more direct: "Everybody hates Iran."

If WikiLeaks didn't exist, Israel would have had to invent it, wrote Sever Plocker, noting the big leak backed Israel's foreign and defense policy and revealed "the shame" that many agree with Israel but "won't admit it openly."

"Sorry we were right," wrote columnist Dan Margalit.

Israel wasn't embarrassed "one bit" by the fiasco, writes Aluf Benn.  

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini toured the Gaza Strip on Wednesday and called on Israel to facilitate more movement of goods and people between the seaside enclave and the West Bank.

During a visit to a U.N. school in northern Gaza Strip, Frattini said Israel must do more to open the crossings.

"It is true that there have been improvements on the situation, but this is not enough."

Joy, sadness, dreams and politics are among the emotions and messages expressed in graffiti paintings and murals on the concrete walls of Gaza, captured in a recently published book on graffiti art in the strip.

"A thousand congratulations to the two bridegrooms," reads one graffiti painting in Arabic. Another hails the enclave's resistance fighters. "The martyr's stronghold" is written in broad Arabic letters on a wall in a similar black-and-white pattern as that of the Palestinian scarf, the Kuffiyeh. A third message written on a wall near a demolished building asks "Why??!!" in English.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday called on Israelis to choose peace over settlements, urging them not to waste this opportunity.

“To the Israeli people I say: Making peace is more important than settlements,” said Abbas as tens of thousands of Palestinians from all over the West Bank rallied at his headquarters to mark the sixth anniversary of the death of his predecessor Yasser Arafat, founder of Fatah movement.

“Let us make peace before this opportunity is lost,” he urged the Israelis. “We pray to God that they would take this opportunity, but hopefully not too late.”

Enough with the pressure on the Palestinians to make concessions in peace talks, says Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal.

It's time for Israel to feel the heat.

"The pressure should now be redirected towards Israel," Mashaal said in an interview with Romanian researcher Manuela Paraipan last week. "It is immoral to keep pressuring the Palestinians simply because the Americans and the international community are failing in the face of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu."