JERUSALEM | Thu Jan 3, 2013 8:44am EST

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli forces raided the West Bank city of Jenin on Thursday in search of a suspected Palestinian militant, touching off clashes with residents who threw rocks and petrol bombs at them, an Israeli security source said.

It was the second time this week that Israeli forces had entered the Jenin area to detain suspects.

On Tuesday, Israeli soldiers disguised as Palestinians raided the village of Tamoun, arresting a member of the Islamic Jihad group. Several dozen Palestinians were injured in ensuing clashes, medical officials said.

In the latest raid, the soldiers clashed with some 500 Palestinians, forcing them out of Jenin, the security source said. An elderly Palestinian woman was slightly injured by a dog used by Israeli forces during the operation.

The city is under the control of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank under interim peace accords with Israel.

Israel has reserved the right to carry out its own operations against militants in the West Bank.

(Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch; Editing by Louise Ireland and Jeffrey Heller)

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TEL AVIV | Wed Jan 2, 2013 7:32am EST

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Leading Chinese companies are looking for investments in Israeli technology to help boost their growth and development, similar to what U.S. companies have done in the past two decades.

A delegation of senior Chinese business leaders visited Israel last month in search of opportunities, pressing ahead with the trip despite rockets that fell in the commercial centre of the country during fighting with Gaza militants.

The delegation, led by Ronnie Chan, chairman of investment holding company Hang Lung Group, included the heads of Lenovo Group, China's top grains trader COFCO, investment banking and private equity firm Hina Group, China Merchants Bank and JP Morgan Chase in China.

Chan noted that many technologies in applications and products from companies such as Google and Intel originated in Israel, and Chinese companies would like to explore similar ventures.

"The sky is the limit," Chan told Reuters. "Some companies can set up research and development centers here, some can bring Israeli companies to China, some can open up the Chinese market for Israeli companies. I have no idea where this will lead."

Chan, a property magnate, said his family business owns technology companies around the world but has no investments in Israel.

Lenovo's operations in Israel had been limited to sales and support, but the company recently made its first technology investment, for an undisclosed amount, in venture capital firm Vertex.

"Definitely we are interested in Israel's technology, to grow our company, to grow our business," Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing said, adding that the investment in Vertex was just a first step.

Lenovo, which is on track to become the world's No. 1 PC maker, is interested in information and mobile technology.

Bilateral trade between China and Israel totaled $8 billion in 2011, according to Israel's Foreign Ministry.

Chinese have invested $3 billion in Israeli companies to date. The biggest investment was the $1.4 billion acquisition of 60 percent of MA Industries, the world's largest maker of generic crop protection chemicals, by China National Chemical Corp (ChemChina) in late 2011.

"Since 2010, we saw for the first time significant Chinese investments in the real economy in Israel - in traditional industries like MA Industries and also in the high-tech sector, in biotechnology and agrotechnology," Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told Reuters.

Edouard Cukierman, managing partner of private equity funds Catalyst Investments, which organized the delegation's trip to Israel with the Foreign Ministry, said the visit by the Chinese companies could lead to acquisitions, investments in research and development centers and even the establishment of their own local operations.

"We are following up with each one of them, preparing specific action plans for each one of them," Cukierman said. "They believe they can benefit from innovation in Israel more than the Americans did."

Catalyst Partners is establishing a $100 million China-Israel technology fund that is expected to close in the first half of 2013. Cukierman hopes to eventually reach $200 million.

(Additional reporting by Steven Scheer)

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JERUSALEM | Sun Oct 14, 2012 11:18am EDT

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A collection of yet unseen Franz Kafka writings, stashed for four decades in a Tel Aviv apartment, will be made public and transferred to Israel's national library, according to an Israeli court ruling published on Sunday.

The papers had been held by Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler, two sisters who argued in a more than four-year-long case that they legally inherited the documents from their mother, Esther Hoffe, secretary to Kafka's close friend and executor, Max Brod.

But the court ruled that Brod, had ordered in his will that the majority of the documents he had given to his secretary should go to a public archive.

Leading experts have said they did not expect material to emerge from any of Kafka's writings found in the apartment that would prompt major revisions of the works by the Jewish, German-language author who died in 1924.

But papers in the collection are believed to include manuscripts by Brod that could shed new light on Kafka's life and times in Prague.

"It is a victory for the people of Israel," the National Library's Judaica Collection curator, Aviad Stollman, told Reuters. "These materials have been locked up for more than 40 years and will finally be exposed and made accessible to all," Stollman said.

Kafka's "The Trial", "The Castle" and "Amerika" were published after his death, when Brod, who was also his biographer, ignored the Prague-born writer's dying wish to burn all unpublished work.

In 1939 Brod fled the Nazis, taking the last train out of Prague with a suitcase of Kafka papers under his arm. After Brod's death in Israel in 1968, the archive was passed to Esther Hoffe.

The secretary placed some of the writings in Tel Aviv and Zurich safe deposit boxes and the rest in her apartment in the Israeli city, fuelling a Kafkaesque mystery about their content.

Esther Hoffe died in 2007. Her gift to her daughters was challenged in court by the State of Israel, which said the writings should be in the public domain in the Jewish state.

Brod had already given much of Kafka's manuscripts to the writer's niece in 1956. They ended up in Oxford after a chance meeting between an English academic and the niece's son -- Kafka's great-nephew.

In Israel, Esther Hoffe frustrated scholars by denying them access to the papers in her possession -- though she sold Kafka's manuscript of his novel "The Trial" for a reported $2 million in the 1980s.

During the trial, the sides bickered about the dubious conditions in which some of the writings were supposedly kept, with the woman's cats cited as a concern.

Harel Ashwal, a lawyer who represented one of Hoffe's daughters, told Army Radio the legal team was likely to appeal.

"It is not the end of the story," he said.

(Writing by Maayan Lubell, editing by Diana Abdallah)

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