BBC News with Marian Marshall.

Israel has rejected a proposal by the United Nations to set up an international investigation into Israeli commando raid on aid ships

bound for

Gaza last week. Nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed in the operation. Israel ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, said his country should be allowed to investigate itself.

“Israel’s a democracy, Israel has the ability and the right to investigate itself, not to be investigated by any international board. I don’t think the United States would want an international inquiry into its military activities in Afghanistan, for example. We are rejecting the idea of international commission.”

Israeli officials say the proposal for an international inquiry came from the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who said it should be led by a former New Zealand Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer.

Two men arrested at an airport in New York have been charged with

conspiring

to commit an act of international terrorism. American officials say they were on their way to join the jihadis group in Somalia

with the intention of

killing Americans abroad. From Washington, David Willis reports.

Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte were arrested at New York’s busy JFK Airport as they were about to board separate flights to Somalia. According to the New York Police Department, the men who are both in their 20s and American citizens are members of a violent extremist group called al-Shabab which is based in Somalia and has links to Al-Qaeda. The men have both been the subject of a four-year undercover investigation in which they were recorded talking about planning a jihad, or holy war, against American troops.