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GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said Sunday his Hamas-led government will not recognize Israel and has problems with a widely touted Arab peace plan because it does.

International assistance to the Palestinians has dried up because the militant Hamas movement will not recognize Israel and renounce violence.

But Haniyeh repeated the Islamic militant group’s hardline principle the despite the crippling Western sanctions which have bankrupted his government, led to strikes and demonstrations by public service workers and clashes between Hamas forces and police identified with the rival Fatah.

Haniyeh, addressing an "Iftar” feast at the end of a day of Ramadan fasting, said Hamas and the government "will not recognize or normalize” relations with Israel.

He also said the main problem with the Arab peace plan, presented in 2002 by Saudi Arabia and endorsed by an Arab summit, is that it recognizes Israel in exchange for an Israeli pullout from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, east Jerusalem and Golan Heights.

Haniyeh said he still hopes for a unity government with Fatah. But Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads Fatah, said last week that negotiations have broken down. Abbas was expected to travel from the West Bank to Gaza Monday and may present Hamas a deadline for agreeing to a unity government. Otherwise, aides say, Abbas might call a new election.

Haniyeh hinted that peacemaking with Israel could be left up to Abbas. Haniyeh said the unity concept "leaves a lot of room for political maneuvering” for Abbas.

Arab diplomats say Sudan rejects offer for peacekeepers

CAIRO, Egypt — Arab countries have launched a new effort to push Sudan toward a compromise over U.N. peacekeepers for Darfur, offering to dispatch a force of Arab and Muslim troops to the troubled region, diplomats said Sunday.

The Arab League diplomats said Sudan’s president rejected the initial proposal — as he has all suggestions of a U.N.-affiliated contingent, regardless of the makeup — but promised to suggest an alternative soon, in a sign that the Arab effort might show more promise than Western attempts to stop the humanitarian crisis.

"The situation is deteriorating and needs intervention,” said Hesham Youssef, a top aide to the league’s secretary-general, Amr Moussa.

But Youssef said the Arab negotiators believed the world community and the United States should also be flexible.

"The Americans should realize that there should be a compromise,” he said.

The new push could be a significant step in the stalled effort to reach a compromise over Sudan’s rejection of an August Security Council resolution that would let the United Nations to take control of and significantly expand a peacekeeping force in the western Darfur region, run so far by the African Union.

The two sides are still far apart, however. And it was unclear how much leverage the Arab countries — close neighbors and supporters of Sudan’s Arab-dominated regime — have or how strongly they intended to press.

Russia to hunt down journalist’s killers but colleagues skeptical of official probe

MOSCOW — Russia has become a deadly place for journalists who run afoul of government officials or their business and political partners.

Those behind the killings, though, are rarely brought to justice, reinforcing a sense of impunity that may have encouraged the killers of Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of the war in Chechnya.

As the European Union and the U.S. demanded a thorough probe into Saturday’s contract-style killing, there was skepticism that the authorities would ever uncover the culprits of the latest in a series of killings of journalists in Russia under President Vladimir Putin, who has been increasingly accused of rolling back post-Soviet freedoms since coming to power in 2000.

The skepticism was underlined by the $929,700 reward for information that Novaya Gazeta has offered, signaling stronger faith in their own investigative efforts than those promised by the government, which has produced so few prosecutions before.

"Russia is a uniquely hostile place for the execution of independent journalism. It is both violent and repressive,” said Joel Simon, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Politkovskaya’s editors said she had been due to publish an investigative article on Monday about torture and kidnappings in Chechnya based on witness accounts and photos of tortured bodies.

She was at least the 43rd journalist killed for her work in Russia since 1993, according to CPJ, which has ranked Russia the third most deadly country for journalists, after Iraq and Algeria. Many were killed while reporting on the two wars in Chechnya, and six were caught up in fighting between government and opposition forces in Moscow in 1993.