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.

As the Israeli bulldozers began to demolish Shepherd Hotel in the Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Sunday in order to build a new Jewish settlement in its place, Palestinians warned that not only the hotel has fallen, but also the entire peace process and U.S. efforts to revive it.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, strongly reacted to the hotel demolition. Its fall, he said, “has brought down with it all U.S. efforts (to revive the peace process) and ended any possibility to return to negotiations.”

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat added, “East Jerusalem and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in particular have been targeted by Israel in a campaign to forcibly remove Palestinians and supplant them with Jewish settlers. Such actions are unlawful and undermine the two-state solution and the negotiations process.”

After visiting the site of a Palestinian home that Jerusalem municipal workers demolished on Tuesday, a United Nations official said that such demolitions "have a severe social and economic impact on the lives and welfare of Palestinians.”

Maxwell Gaylard, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, Wednesday called on Israel to cease demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Mousa Subuh put together three shipping containers on his property to make a modest home for his and his son’s families -- a total of 13 people -- in the Ras el-Amoud neighborhood of East Jerusalem after the municipality refused to give him a permit to build a regular home.

He thought that living in shipping containers on his land would not violate building codes in Jerusalem since they are not permanent structures. Subuh must have learned this tactic from Jewish settlers who, when they want to start a new settlement on some West Bank land, put a couple of containers on that land and a couple of families in them to create a de-facto home.

If the government does not remove them, the containers eventually become a full fledged settlement with permanent stone homes. The only difference between Subuh and the Jewish settlers is that Subuh put the shipping container on his land while the settlers put theirs on someone else’s land. But Subuh is not allowed to keep the containers as a home, while no one attempts to remove the settlers.

Israeli authorities are investigating a strange and violent incident that left one woman dead and another injured this weekend. Many people are convinced this was a terrorist attack; other people say things don't add up. Police are investigating all options.

Normally, the Beit Shemesh countryside is a good choice for weekend picnics and hiking, offering visitors its woods, nature trails and other attractions. But this Saturday, something was wrong in the scenic landscape.

Picnicking weekenders were surprised Saturday afternoon when a woman staggered up to them suffering from multiple stab wounds, her hands tied behind her back, and pleaded for help. She and a friend had been stabbed, she said. She managed to escape but her friend was missing.

 When Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat invited people to participate in the Jerusalem Marathon, he called it a "challenging sporting event." Still 100 days away, the city's first full marathon is already giving the mayor -- a five-time marathoner himself -- a run for his money.

After someone pointed out to three city council members that the course ran through parts of East Jerusalem,  they sent a letter of protest to Adidas, one of the international event's main sponsors.

The officials, Meretz members Pepe Alalu, Laura Wharton and Meir Margalit, said they felt it was their duty to inform Adidas that the marathon was "to run through parts of East Jerusalem that are considered occupied territories by the international community and by us."

"The overwhelming majority of the general population abroad will doubtless express their opposition once details of the marathon are made public," the letter said.

That's all it took. Adidas asked for "clarifications" about the course, and, according to the Hebrew daily Maariv, was considering removing its sponsorship for fear of a consumer boycott.

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.

Officially, diplomatic relations between Morocco and Israel are "suspended," according to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This is the way things have been since 2000, when Morocco (along with Tunisia and Oman) closed "interest offices" opened only six years earlier, in better days.

Still, relations continue, quiet and generally fair. Besides the several thousand tourists every year and warm sentiments Israel's Moroccan Jews maintain still today, Israeli academics, journalists and sometimes politicians travel frequently enough to Morocco.

But this month, the Marrakech express was a pretty bumpy ride for Israeli officials.

President Obama's call Thursday in an address before the U.N. General Assembly for Israel to extend its West Bank construction moratorium got little reaction from the Israeli delegation. That's because they weren't there.

As Obama spoke about the importance of supporting U.S.-brokered peace talks, television cameras panned to empty chairs at Israel's U.N. desk.

Speculation immediately spread across Internet sites and among arm-chair analysts about whether Israel was snubbing Obama and boycotting his speech. Israel has been resisting mounting international pressure to extend the partial moratorium, which is set to expire Sunday. Palestinians have threatened to quit peace talks if construction resumes, though they've also hinted in recent days that they are open to a compromise.

Israeli officials have denied their absence was an intentional slight, saying they were observing the Jewish holiday of Sukkot and had informed the U.S. in advance that they would not be present.

Nevertheless, American officials expressed some disappointment that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to skip the U.N. meeting, sending other Israeli leaders to represent the country. Obama had hoped to use the forum to continue efforts to prevent peace talks from collapsing.

And some of Netanyahu's right-wing colleagues condemned Obama's speech, accusing the U.S. president of "inappropriate interference."

-- Edmund Sanders in Jerusalem

The clock is ticking away on the freeze. The 10-month moratorium on Jewish settlement construction expires Sept.  26, presenting the most immediate obstacle to the newly resumed directIsraeli-Palestinian talks, already teetering.  

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated repeatedly that the freeze will not be extended. Between his right-wing coalition demanding renewed construction and massive pressure to extend the freeze for the sake of the talks, something will have to give. But maybe the U.S. can give something too that will help Netanyahu sell a compromise.

That "something" is someone, Jonathan Pollard.

Jerusalem is said to be mulling an extension of the freeze in return for the release of Jonathan Pollard, a former civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy. Pollard provided Israel with thousands of secret documents and has been serving a life sentence since 1987. 

When Middle East peace talks began this month in Washington, there were glimmers of optimism and excitement over the renewed discourse between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which hadn't engaged in direct talks in almost two years. 

But since then, Arab opinion makers have spoken. And the outlook is grim. 

Between the likely resumption of Jewish settlement expansion, a lack of popular Palestinian approval for peace talks and the looming possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran, most in the region believe that all the hope and fanfare surrounding the round of talks will be in vain. 

Jamal Majdalawi, a leader in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, voiced his pessimism about the talks in a Sept. 2 article in the United Arab Emirates-based Gulf News.

"The direct negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian authority won't work; the Israelis have not given any indications that they will. These negotiations are a way for the Israelis to stall, so they can continue building the settlements, until eventually we find ourselves living on small pieces of land, totally controlled by the occupation and with our dreams of an independent Palestinian state shattered."

One night before the Arab League met in Cairo on Thursday, where Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said he could not return to direct negotiations with Israel because of continuing Jewish settlement activities in Jerusalem, Jewish settlers seized a building in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City.

While most of the 40 Palestinian residents of the building were attending a wedding celebration, a group of settlers guarded by Israeli police broke down doors inside the two-floor building and moved into the fully furnished rooms.

Only one member of the Qirrish family, longtime inhabitants of the site, was in his room and was not evicted. The elderly man telephoned the rest of his family and told them what had occurred. The family rushed back to find the police blocking the entrance. Family members spent the night sitting on chairs outside the building, waiting to seek legal help in the morning.

The building had been purchased by the Jewish settler group Ateret Cohanim, a religious organization whose agenda is settling Jews inside the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, from its original Palestinian owners, who moved to the U.S. in the late 1970s. The new owners soon attempted to evict the Qirrish family, who contested the eviction in court and won an order allowing them to remain while paying rent to Ateret Cohanim.

The settler group attempted a second time, in 2000, to get a court eviction order after older members of the Qirrish family had died.

The Qirrish descendants who continued to live in the same building again contested the eviction; the court ruled in their favor. Since then, the family had been residing in the house, said Munnawar Qirrish. “I have been living in this house for 42 years,” she said while waiting for the police to allow her to reenter the building.

The day after the home was seized, a magistrate court ordered that residents be allowed to return to the building. But that did not occur immediately, and family members continued to wait outside the building Thursday.

“My husband is 67 years old, and he needs his medicine, which is inside the house," Munnawar Qirrish said. "I cannot even enter the house to get the medicine. All my personal belongings are inside and I do not know what the settlers are doing to them. I do not know if they are sleeping in my bed or what they are doing inside.”

-- Maher Abukhater in Jerusalem