2001 January
George W. Bush, Jr. is inaugurated as the 43rd President of the United States.
2001 January 8
Bill Clinton's last-ditch formula for a permanent settlement is rejected by the Palestinians. The President will leave the White House in 12 days, his dream of Middle East peace unfulfilled.
2001 January 10
The Israeli Peace Now movement accuses the government and security forces of running a policy of selective assassination of Palestinian leaders deemed to be security threats. There have been ten such killings so far.
2001 January 21
A Jewish settler who clubbed an Arab child to death with a rifle butt is sentenced to six months' community service. Human rights organisations are outraged by the sentence.
2001 January 28
Ehud Barak breaks off peace talks with the Palestinians until after the prime ministerial election on February 6. Most opinion polls show his rightwing opponent Ariel Sharon as the clear front runner.
2001 February 1
NEWSTRAN.COM - The first Multilingual International MetaNews Translator becomes operational. It begins operation providing translations of 1500 newspapers in ten different languages and over the next year expands to support 5000+ newspapers and 32 different languages. It is created and designed by Rick Perez of New orleans, Louisiana.
2001 February 6
Prime minister Ehud Barak concedes defeat after exit polls show a landslide victory for Ariel Sharon.
2001 February 9
Israeli tanks pound Palestinian gunmen in the most ferocious clashes for weeks yesterday as the new Bush administration in Washington disowns months of dogged effort by President Bill Clinton to deliver a peace deal in the Middle East.
2001 February 14
Israel reimposes a total blockade on the occupied territories, following the deaths of 14 February 2001 eight soldiers and civilians, killed when a Palestinian bus driver ploughs his vehicle into a waiting queue. President George Bush condemns the attack, but pointedly refuses to take sides.
2001 February 20
Defeated prime minister Ehud Barak executes one of his famous political u-turns, announcing that he will not after all serve as defence minister in Ariel Sharon's incoming coalition government.
2001 February 27
Veteran Labour leader Shimon Peres talks the party into joining Ariel Sharon's rightwing government of national unity. He himself will be foreign minister.
2001 March 4
A Palestinian suicide bomber blows himself up in the coastal town of Netanya, killing himself and three passers-by, and wounding more than 60 others.
2001 March 7
Ariel Sharon formally takes office as Israeli prime minister, heading a fragile seven-party coalition and a government team comprising a third of the 120-member Knesset.
2001 March 26
A Palestinian sniper shoots dead a 10-month-old Jewish baby in her father's arms, in the flashpoint West Bank town of Hebron. The town is home to 120,000 Palestinians, and 400 hardline Jewish settlers.
2001 April
US-China relations are strained during the 11-day detention of 24 crewmembers of a US surveillance plane, crippled in a collision with a Chinese fighter.
2001 April 3
Israeli helicopter gunships hunt own and rocket an Islamic Jihad commander in the Gaza Strip, the first such assassination since Ariel Sharon became prime minister.
2001 April 16
Israel launches air, sea and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip, capping a day that sees tensions climb sharply all over the Middle East.
2001 April 16
Israeli rightwingers respond angrily to news that Ariel Sharon has used his businesman son Omri, aged 36, as a secret emissary to Yasser Arafat.
2001 April 17
For the first time since the intifada erupted, Israeli troops seize back land controlled by the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and divide the territory into three parts.
2001 May 1
President Bush in a speech at the National Defense University stops just short of saying the U.S. will withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). Bush made it clear that he intends to build a network of installations that will unquestionably violate a treaty that arms-control advocates argue has been the cornerstone of nuclear deterrence since Richard M. Nixon and Leonid I. Brezhnev signed it. That pact bans the very systems Mr. Bush alluded to today. "Nuclear weapons will still have a vital role to play in our security and that of our allies," Bush said. "We can and will change the size, composition, the character of our nuclear forces in a way that reflects the reality that the cold war is over."
2001 May 5
A draft report by former US senator George Mitchell, who has been investigating the causes of Middle East violence, condemns the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
2001 May 6
The Pope, visiting Syria, becomes the first pontiff to enter a mosque. Also, he gets caught up in a row over allegedly anti-semitic remarks by Syrian president, Bashar Assad.
2001 May 8
Iman Hijjo becomes the youngest victim of the intifada, killed by shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell at the age of four months. The shelling, at Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, was in retaliation for a Palestinian mortar attack.
2001 May 9
Two 14-year-old Israeli boys are found bludgeoned to death in a cave near a Jewish West Bank settlement.
2001 May 14
Israeli troops kill five Palestinian policemen manning a checkpoint in the West Bank and launch a major bombardment of security targets in the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Palestinians gather outside a West Bank hospital chanting for revenge.
