MIDDLE EAST: Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is on the verge of stabilising his shaky government, but in the process has made any future hopes of reviving peace talks even more remote after agreeing yesterday to bring a hardline leader, who wants to rid Israel of many of its Arab citizens, into his ruling coalition.
In northern Gaza, meanwhile, seven Palestinians, three of them civilians, were killed yesterday by Israeli forces. The army said that troops were operating against militants who have been firing rockets from the Strip into Israel. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called the killings a "heinous massacre".
"We are joining the government," Avigdor Lieberman, the head of the Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party, which draws much of its support from Israel's one million Russian immigrants, said after meeting Mr Olmert.
Parliament still has to sanction the move. Mr Lieberman (48), himself an immigrant from Moldova, will hold a ministerial portfolio responsible for "strategic threats". This includes the threat Israel believes is posed by Iran's nuclear aspirations.
"The number one threat facing the state of Israel today is the Iranian threat," he said yesterday.
With Mr Olmert's popularity at an all-time low in the aftermath of the war in Lebanon, which many Israelis believe was badly mismanaged, many politicians, including Mr Lieberman, were predicting his demise.
But the addition of Yisrael Beiteinu's 11 members will boost the prime minister's ruling coalition to 78 seats in the 120-seat parliament, ensuring a large majority.
Mr Olmert will find himself exactly where he wants to be politically - flanked by the left-wing Labour party and the right-wing Mr Lieberman. And he will have consigned his main political rival, opposition leader and head of the centre-right Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu, to an extended period on the opposition benches.
To cajole Mr Lieberman into his government, Mr Olmert on Sunday got his cabinet to endorse a proposal championed by the Yisrael Beiteinu leader that would see a presidential system of government replacing Israel's parliamentary system.
The new system would afford the president broader powers than those currently held by the prime minister and Mr Lieberman believes this would stabilise the political system in a country which has had five elections in the last 10 years. For now the proposal does not have a majority in parliament.
But most Israelis yesterday were asking themselves what Mr Lieberman's addition to the ruling coalition meant for any future peace moves with the Palestinians or the Syrians.
Mr Olmert said yesterday the inclusion of Yisrael Beiteinu in his coalition would not spur any changes in policy. But the move will almost certainly ensure that the prime minister's plan for a unilateral withdrawal in the West Bank, which he ditched after the war in Lebanon, remains in mothballs and that any talk of reviving contacts with Syria remains just that.
Mr Lieberman is not opposed to giving up some settlements and territory in the West Bank as part of an agreement with the Palestinians, but his price is that the border separating Israel and the Palestinians be redrawn so that hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arab citizens be included on the Palestinian side of the border.
Mr Lieberman has often expressed controversial views and some political leaders on the left have accused him of racism - he proposed earlier this year that Israeli Arab lawmakers who meet with Hamas leaders be executed for treason.