WikiLeaks: The Israel chapter

WikiLeaks plans to publish hundreds of "sensitive" US diplomatic cables on Israel, Al-Jazeera television reports.

DUBAI: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said his website plans to publish hundreds of "sensitive" US diplomatic cables on Israel, Al-Jazeera television reported on Thursday.

"Sensitive and classified documents" on Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon and January's assassination in Dubai of Hamas' Mahmud al-Mabhuh would be released, Assange told Al-Jazeera in an interview.

Assange said WikiLeaks had 3,700 US documents on Israel, including 2,700 originating from the Jewish state, but denied the website had any agreement in place to spare the country of leaks.

"We do not have any secret deals with any country," he said according to an Arabic translation of remarks he made in English which were posted on Al-Jazeera's website.

"We do not have any direct or indirect contacts with the Israelis," Assange is quoted as saying, adding no more than two per cent of available documents on Israel have been released so far.

Some of Israel's neighbours, most notably Turkey, have expressed unease at the lack of leaks the whistleblowing website has released on the Jewish state.

Israel fought a devastating one-month war with Lebanon's Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 that killed more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and 160 Israelis, mainly soldiers.

Dubai police chief Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan has linked Israel's spy agency Mossad to the January 20 Cold War-style assassination in a Dubai hotel of Mabhuh.

Syria joins 'Suspicion club'

Syria suspected Israel of carrying out the 2008 murder of a top security aide of President Bashar al-Assad, according to US diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks and published by the Guardian Tuesday.

The suspicion weakened the case for continuing indirect peace negotiations with the Jewish state that was being put forward by Assad and others within the Syrian government and played into the hands of hardliners, the cables said.

They said that Brigadier General Mohammed Sleiman, a shadowy figure whose assassination by a sniper in the coastal city of Tartus on August 1, 2008 Syria kept under wraps for days, was a top "presidential security aide."

His assassination came just 11 months after an Israeli air strike deep inside Syrian territory destroyed a still shadowy facility that may have been one of the special projects that Sleiman managed.

The US cable said that Syria went to immense lengths to keep Sleiman's killing under wraps. The leaked US cable on the killing said "the most obvious suspects are the Israelis."