The Australian Financial Review reported Monday. Citing people close to the deal, the report said that the investment bank is considering several options including an offer for the whole business, parts of the business and forming a consortium to bid for the assets. First round offers are due Friday for an auction that could be highly ituation." Israel's army is training soldiers used to battling gunmen in non-lethal riot control tactics and inviting settlers to watch the drills at a military camp in a rural part of central Israel. The mass demonstrations are set for around the time of the Sept. 13-22 United Nations General Assembly session, where the Palestinians hope to be granted official endorsement as a state. Some doubt the rallies will take place at all, however, and several Palestinian activist groups say they will not take part, believing the effort would achieve little. Preparations undertaken by police are expected to cost Israel about $20 million, according to a senior police officer. Purchases include 16 long-range tear gas launchers, 15 trained Belgian horses to bolster the police's mounted forces, and a weeklong riot training course for a quarter of the nation's 28,000 police officers, he said. Police expect Israeli-controlled east Jerusalem, home to 250,000 Palestinians, to be a flash point, he added. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the precautions. Security forces are stockpiling tear gas, stun grenades, water cannons and other non-lethal weapons. At a military camp about an hour's drive from Israel's metropolitan center in Tel Aviv, troops are practicing civilian crowd control. But in the West Bank, some settlers say they do not fully trust the army to handle any unrest. The army "doesn't always know how to deal with this sort of event," said Avraham Binyamin, a spokesman for Yitzhar, a settlement considered extreme even by many settlers. Palestinians marching toward settlements are a threat even if they are not carrying firearms, he said: "You can kill with a rock or a knife, and you can burn with a match." There are 300,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, living among around 2.5 million Palestinians. Settlements are typically guarded by soldiers and by teams of local residents armed by the military. In addition, many settlers carry private firearms, and clashes between settlers and Palestinians are common. The Palestinian Authority, the Western-backed government that has partial authority in the West Bank, has released a schedule of planned September protests slated to be held in city centers and villages. The list includes no planned marches toward settlements. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said fears of Palestinian violence were "absolutely unfounded." "The real fear of the settlers and (Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu is that they know that once Palestine is admitted as a member of the U.N., their days of occupation and settlements are numbered," he said. In coordination with the military, each Israeli settlement has identified a "response line" around its perimeter, said Shlomo Vaknin, security officer for a settler umbrella group known as the Yesha Council. Should Palestinians cross that line, the military will shoot at marchers' feet or in the air. If soldiers are not on hand, responsibility to react will fall on the settlements' civilian guards, Vaknin said. In response, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel sent a complaint last week to the military's advocate general claiming the settler training amounts to inciting vigilante violence against unarmed civilians exercising their right to protest. The army did