RAMALLAH, October 10, 2011 (WAFA) – The demonstrations in Cairo that led to clashes between Egyptian Copts and police dominated Monday’s front page headlines in the three Palestinian Arabic dailies.

The papers agreed that 23 people were killed in the protests while the number of injured varied from one newspaper to another, but all agreed it was over 170.

The news from Cairo put local news at second and third place on the front pages, particularly news about the prisoners’ hunger strike and President Mahmoud Abbas’ tour of Latin American countries to garner support for Palestine’s United Nations membership bid.

Other front page stories covered the Quartet meeting in Brussels where it called on the Palestinians and Israelis to resume negotiations, settlers' attacks against Palestinian farmers in the West Bank as they harvest their olives, the tension in Jaffa following desecration of Muslim and Christian graves in the mixed Arab-Jewish city, and the arrival of the remains of Hafez Abu Zant, a Palestinian fighter killed in a gun battle with Israeli soldiers in 1976 in the Jordan Valley, to his hometown for burial by his family 35 years after his death. Israel had kept the body in what is referred to as the numbers cemeteries, where it keeps bodies of some 350 Palestinian fighters it had killed over the years and refuses to return them to their families for proper burial.

The editorials and columns in the three papers also focused on the problems in Cairo as well as the prisoners and the bodies of Palestinians that Israel has kept all these years.

M.S./F.J.