Tel Aviv/Beirut - Israel has deported most of the 18 passengers on board a Lebanese aid ship which was intercepted off the coast of the Gaza Strip Friday, and plans to put the remaining three on a plane to Britain and India in the coming days, police and the military have said.

Two Indians and one British woman were in a detention facility of the Israel Immigration Police, where they would remain until flown to their home countries, Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. "They have not and will not be allowed entry into Israel," he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Gaza - An official in the Islamist movement Hamas said Thursday that the movement would give its final answer on Saturday to a possible Egyptian-brokered truce with Israel, but said that Israeli proposals for an agreement were vague.

Hamas Gaza spokesman in Gaza Fawzi Barhoum said that "a deal on a truce was not reached" because Israel had linked ending its blockade on the Gaza Strip and opening the border crossings - a key Hamas demand - with the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive in the Strip for over two-and-a-half years.

Cairo- Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak has said that Egypt is not bound by a US-Israeli deal to end weapons smuggling into the Gaza Strip, in remarks published in Egypt's leading government dailies Thursday.

"I say that the smuggling of goods is the result of the blockade, and that Egypt is not bound by the Israeli-American agreement on monitoring arms smuggling into Gaza," Mubarak said in an address televised on Wednesday night and extensively quoted in the government-owned dailies al-Ahram and al-Akhbar Thursday.

Gaza - The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) on Wednesday accused police forces from the Islamic Hamas movement of stealing humanitarian aid sent to the Gaza Strip in the wake of Israel's fierce offensive against the salient.

The aid was taken by force from an UNRWA station in the Shatti beach refugee camp, the organization said in a statement.

"Members of the Hamas police seized by force 3,500 blankets and 406 food packages ready to be delivered to hundreds of poor Gaza families," the statement said.

Strasbourg, France - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday renewed his request to the European Union to send peacekeepers to the Middle East and to help him organize elections in the Palestinian territories.

"The time has come for the international community to bear its legal, political and moral responsibilities and provide it with adequate international protection," Abbas told the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

"I would like to stress again our request to send international forces in order to protect our people," he said.

Geneva  - Hospitals in the Gaza Strip are in need of specialized foreign doctors to help cope with some of the medical cases that resulted from the recent Israeli offensive in the enclave, the Palestinian health minister said Monday.

"We need teams of war surgeons and others, like neurosurgeons, plastic surgeries, reconstruction surgeries," said Fathi Abu Moghli, the minister in the West Bank government.