Yousef Abu Zuhri, a Hamas member and brother of the movement’s spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri, died in an Egyptian jail. Hamas is outraged, claiming he was tortured to death. (full article…)

In Gaza, posters appeared on walls on Wednesday calling Mr. Abbas a traitor and saying he should be consigned to “the trash heap of history.” Gaza is controlled by Hamas, the militant Islamic group that is the Palestinian Authority’s main rival. (full article…)

…then they would mention that resentment of the Mahmoud Abbas and the Zionist Collaboration Regime is not confined to Hamas, but most sectors of Palestinian society. Reading this in the Times, you would imagine the poster is simply political posturing by Hamas (which certainly exists), but faced with a regime that runs the Israeli occupation by proxy and crumbles to US/Zionist demands almost without exception, Palestinians of all stripes oppose this clown. Imagine that Richard Goldstone cares more about pursuing justice in Gaza than the lousy regime in Ramallah!

The Hamas government has banned motorcycle riders from carrying women on the back seat – the latest in the militants’ virtue campaign in Gaza.
The ban was posted on Hamas Interior Ministry Web site on Tuesday.
It says the ban seeks “to preserve citizen safety and the stability of Palestinian society’s customs and traditions.” (full article…)

Who made Hamas the gatekeepers of Palestinian society and tradition?

The Palestinian Authority on Saturday dissolved the Hamas-controlled municipal council in Kalkliya, in a move that has drawn strong condemnation from the Islamist movement. (more…)

And yet if [Salam Fayyad] is to retain his legitimacy for any length of time, he will eventually need some sort of mandate from ordinary Palestinians. “In the end,” Tony Blair told me, “it all has to be endorsed in an election. Ultimately, the only legitimacy can come from democracy.” (more…)

Egypt on Tuesday condemned the Hamas move to ban Fatah members from traveling to a key party convention in the West Bank, saying the decision was “unacceptable.” (more…)

“We don’t have a police state here in Palestine. We have two police states. One in Gaza and one in the West Bank,” says Rabie Latifah from the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq.

“The abuse of Palestinian civilians by both Fatah and Hamas security forces has become systematic and is no longer the exception to the rule,” Latifah told IPS. (more…)

Chief Justice of the High Court of Justice, Head of the Higher Justice Council in Gaza gas issued a new decision concerning the clothing of lawyers. PCHR believes that this decision constitutes a violation of the law and an unjustified intervention into lawyers’ affairs. It also undermines personal freedoms and women’s rights through forcing female lawyers to wear traditional robes known as “Jilbab” and veils (Hijabs). (more…)

Hamas is facing an energized Fatah in the West Bank and is increasingly unpopular in Gaza. (more…)

I know it may come as a surprise to Thomas Friedman but unpopular as Hamas may be, Abu Mazen and Fatah are even more unpopular. Friedman’s use of the word “energized” simply means “U.S./Israeli-trained proxies”. But that doesn’t fit his silly narrative of “space” opening up for democracy thanks to the United States. Doesn’t he remember the failed coup attempt aimed at undermining the Palestinian elections? Paid and sponsored by the U.S.

And why did he basically repeat everything he wrote in an op-ed a few days ago? Same op-ed, different title. Not only is he weak (for lack of a better word) on his facts, but he’s lazy…

A Hamas operative died in a Hebron prison overnight Monday after being interrogated by Palestinian Intelligence personnel. (more…)

Lt.-Col. Avinoam Stolevitch, commander of the 13th Battalion, told Army Radio that future assaults of this sort would put Hamas at risk of a second Operation Cast Lead. (more…)

Senior Hamas member Sami Abu Zuhri rushed to respond to the Qalqilya incident, referring to it as “a gift from the Palestinian Authority to Israel and to (US President Barack) Obama in honor of his visit to the region.” (more…)

The United States and European Union train and support Mr. Abbas’s troops in the hope of creating a strong enough force to prevent Hamas from challenging its West Bank rule and ultimately perhaps helping Mr. Abbas back into Gaza. (more…)

The two, Muhammad Samman and Ahmed Yassin, were killed in a pre-dawn raid carried out by Abbas’s security forces on a building where they were hiding. Three policemen and the owner of the building, Abdel Nasser Basha, were also killed in the raid, which was described as one of the bloodiest intra-Palestinian incidents in the West Bank in recent years. (more…)

Two founding members of what was once the largest U.S. Muslim charity were each sentenced to 65 years in prison Wednesday for funneling millions of dollars to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. (more…)

However, a power struggle between Fatah and Hamas over the issuance of exit permits for patients, and Israel’s reluctance to issue visas for Gazans on the basis of alleged security, means Mohammed has to now wait for a new permit to return to the Israeli hospital. (more…)

The Palestine Liberation Organization and its governmental entity cannot overturn a court judgment forcing them to pay more than $116 million for a Hamas terror attack that killed a U.S. citizen and his wife, a federal judge has ruled.

The case is among a handful in the country filed under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991, which seeks to hold terrorist organizations responsible for the killings of American citizens. (more…)

How much does the U.S. pays out in compensation for the hundreds of thousands of civilians they’ve killed…? Mostly nothing, but in a handful of cases between $500 – $7,500 has been paid. But that’s the market-value of a non-American.

From the detailed description provided by Dayton, it’s clear that the Palestinian forces he’s enabling could certainly be accused of carrying out the self-policing of the West Bank for the Israelis. Because the West Bank is, after all, occupied by Israel and riddled with illegal settlements besides — plus beset by a surrounding wall, 600-plus intrusive checkpoints, and a network of Jews-only highways — the Palestinian troops are utterly at the mercy of the Israelis. Each recruit is vetted by US security forces (i.e, the CIA), then vetted by Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence arm of Israel, and then by Jordan’s super-efficient intelligence service, before they begin their training in Jordan. Dayton made it quite clear that the Palestinian units thus trained are primarily deployed against two targets in the West Bank: against criminal gangs, and against Hamas. So far, they’ve received $161 million is US funding. (more…)

So what’s wrong with Cairo? Let me count the ways… The main problem, of course, is Mubarak’s repressive regime. It’s difficult to stomach rewarding a regime which has been systematically rolling back its limited democratic opening of a few years ago. The choice of Cairo is already being interpreted by many Arabs and Egyptians as proof that Obama has abandoned democracy and human rights promotion. A Presidential speech in Cairo will inevitably be compared to the 2005 speech by Condoleeza Rice calling for democracy in the Arab world. Never mind that the Bush administration did very little to actually advance the cause of democracy in the region, barely objected to Mubarak’s crackdown midway through the 2005 Parliamentary elections and the escalating repression which followed, and by the January 2006 Hamas electoral victory had abandoned even its democratizing pretensions. The rhetoric will be compared and contrasted. (more…)

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke of the Bush administration’s goal to promote freedom in the Middle East at the American University in Cairo in June 2005. “For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East — and we achieved neither,” Rice said. “Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.” But Washington looked the other way during abuses in Egyptian parliamentary elections held in the fall a few months later, and its appetite for democracy in the Middle East noticeably waned when the Muslim Brotherhood, and later Hamas in the Palestinian territories, did well. (more…)

Three years ago in Jerusalem, I met a very bright couple in their late 40s, who had emigrated from Russia a decade earlier. When we began to speak of the Palestinians, the husband said: “In my Russian village in 1920, there was trouble with guerrillas. Budenny’s Cossacks came. They burnt the village from which the guerrillas came. The guerrillas returned twice more. The Cossacks burned two more villages. Then there was no more trouble with guerrillas.” This was the culture from which these two highly-educated Israelis came. They asserted that the Budenny method was the only proper one by which to address Hamas, Hizbollah and Fatah. The policies of recent Israeli governments suggest that their view is widely shared. (more…)

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas plans to ask his prime minister within the coming week to form a new government without the Gaza Strip’s Hamas rulers, signaling a breakdown in unity talks with the Islamic militant group. (more…)

The Palestinian Authority has established a special counter-intelligence squad in its West Bank-based security services to uncover agents working for Hamas and Hezbollah, the daily Haaretz reported yesterday. Haaretz said that the Palestinian Authority (PA) security services have so far arrested dozens of Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the two groups. (more…)

Hamas, which the State Department considers a terrorist group, won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, but the United States has refused to deal with the group until it meets conditions, including recognition of Israel. (more…)

Israel however, is not obliged to renounce violence, recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination or to abide by former agreements. Nope. These standards are reserved solely for Hamas.

Shortly after Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory, the U.S. cooperated with Israel to arm and train Fatah elements in preparation for a violent coup against the Hamas leadership in Gaza, which then ruled Gaza jointly with Fatah. The scheme, later known as the Dayton Plan, was reportedly managed by Dahlan in coordination with U.S. Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton. (more…)

Environmental hazards in the Gaza Strip, such as sewage contamination, have intensfied since Israel’s recent war on Hamas there because even basic infrastructure repairs are stalled by an ongoing border blockade of the territory, the UN’s environment chief said Tuesday. (more…)

Repressive actions are being carried out by de facto government forces in the Gaza Strip against Fatah Youth members preparing to mark Prisoners Day in Rafah, head of the youth council in the Gaza Strip Mahmoud Qanan said Thursday. (more…)

“Even the lure of billions of dollars in aid has not brought Fatah Sunnis in Judea and Samaria, i.e., the West Bank, any closer to Shiite supporters of Hamas in Gaza. These are two parallel lines that cannot meet, and this division will persist.” (more…)

This statement just reveals the deep knowledge possessed by so many Middle East “experts”.

It is hard to think of another place in the world where life is ruled by such cruel absurdities. Hamas, Israel and Fatah are all playing with the lives and well-being of these patients, including 57 children from Gaza who need to complete complex, expensive treatments at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Their health is now hanging by a thread. The bombing of Gaza has almost stopped, but the war against the people goes on, from all sides. (more…)

My friend and former colleague, writing from Gaza.

Contrary to the views of the likely incoming right-wing government of Israel, most U.S. Jews favour peace negotiations with a Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas, according to a new poll released here Tuesday by the year-old, pro-peace Jewish lobby group, J Street. (more…)

“800 terrorists and 300 civilians, who we did not want to harm, were killed in the last operation,” Galant said. “This ratio of almost a quarter [of the individuals] uninvolved [in the fighting] is an achievement unmatched in the history of this kind of combat,” he added. (more…)

Israel includes police officers in this tally (they consider domestic police to be terrorists) and in one particularly appalling attack at the beginning of the recent assault, they killed a large number of police at their graduation ceremony in Gaza.

Remember the Palestinian attack on a couple of Israeli police officers last week? Was it not labelled senseless terrorism? Oh, Israeli police officers are not terrorists… I see.

By the way, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, published a tally of 960 civilians of the 1,434 dead? and that still assumes that we can count police officers as terrorists…

It’s quixotic, being a peace activist in Sderot, an Israeli town that has borne the brunt of rocket attacks from Gaza. When Israeli air strikes on Gaza began last month, hundreds of people from Sderot swarmed to a vantage point known as Horseman’s Hill to watch the fiery spectacle and cheer. Nomika Zion was not among them. “I listened to one of my neighbors telling Israeli TV that the sound of the bombing was like a symphony, that he’s never heard such powerful music before,” she says. “And I was thinking, How many people are dying because of that ‘music’” (more…)

Over the last four weeks the powerful Israeli propaganda machine has been churning out lie after lie about Hamas in order to excuse its own inexcusable onslaught. Israel stopped journalists going into Gaza, preventing any independent reporting on the war crimes its forces were committing. Truth is usually the first casualty in war. Gaza was not even a war in the conventional sense of the word; it was one-sided carnage. (more…)

Another aid worker put it more bluntly: “Gaza needs to be fed through its mouth, not to be fed anally.” (more…)

Israeli forces used aerial bombing, tank shelling and armoured bulldozers to eliminate the productive capacity of some of Gaza’s most important manufacturing plants during their 22 days of military action in the Gaza Strip. The attacks – like those which destroyed at least 4,000 homes, left some residential areas resembling an earthquake zone and more than 50,000 people in temporary shelters at their peak – destroyed or severely damaged 219 factories, Palestinian industrialists say. (more…)

A new book published in the United States alleges that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is an active and open supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Lebanese Shi’ite militia with training for its fighters. (more…)

Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’ (more…)

I went to the burns department in Shifa hospital. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. These phosphorus burns. Their bodies were black. One person has stitches everywhere. It’s worse than killing people. They look like the living dead. I also went to the north, to Beit Lahiya. This was one of the most beautiful areas of farmland. Now it’s gone, you can’t recognise the place. I wanted to cry. (more…)

Palestinian boy Mohammed Kutkut, 14, right, covers his face as he sits next to the name sign of his killed friend Ahed Qaddas in the Fakhoura boys school in Jebaliya, northern Gaza strip, Saturday, Jan. 24, 2009. Three friends of his class where killed when the Israeli army shelled Jebaliya in the past weeks. Tens of thousands of children have flocked back to schools throughout the Gaza Strip, days after Israel ended its fierce military operation against the territory’s rulers. (more…)

Despite constant bombardment, particularly during the early stages of the conflict, some of the smugglers’ tunnels remained open, Rafah residents and tunnel operators said. Many others have reopened since Israel and Hamas separately announced cease-fires a week ago. (more…)

“It is unbelievable that, all over the world, people were supporting Gaza,” Yazid Khader, a spokesman for the movement, said last week. “Yet here on the West Bank people were unable to do so. We ask: will the blood spilled in Gaza be enough for the Palestinian Authority to move towards reconciliation with us?” (more…)

“Everybody’s busy rebuilding now,” said a manager of one digging team. “In a month, it will be back to normal.” (more…)

Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed today with her right leg in plaster, and held together by a line of steel pins dug deep into her skin. For several days after her operation Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even now talks only in a low whisper.

In her past are bitter memories: watching her father die in the street outside their home, then hearing another shell land and kill her brother Ala’a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16, and then the three days that she spent alone, injured and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a neighbour’s abandoned house before she could be rescued last Sunday. (more…)

Schools in the Gaza Strip operated by the United Nations have reopened for the first time since the Israeli offensive against Hamas militants. (more…)

Through the hole in the wall of his house, Sadala sees a landscape in gray and brown. This is where a neighbourhood had stood, his neighbourhood. Now there is a snake of sand around the bomb crater. It is impossible to tell where the streets once stood. Family houses have turned into piles of debris. People have built refuges using cloth and rubble. They stand alongside dead donkeys and sheep, whose stomachs swell up. No one here has time to remove rotting corpses. (more…)

But the devastation of war is everywhere, the terrifying memory of it still raw. Sitting in the ruins of Zeitun, a district almost completely destroyed, Arafat Samouni painfully recounts the events that ended in the death of 30 members of his extended family in one of the war’s most publicised tragedies. Still in shock, he struggles to remember the names of all the dead and how they were related to him. Asked whom he blames, he has no doubt. “The Israelis, of course. They knew this area. They knew there were civilians here.” He refuses to blame Hamas (more…)

Whatever the damage done to Hamas, what happened in Gaza was, simply put, a civilian slaughter. (more…)

Well, it took two longs days before Obama dispelled any notions of a change in US Middle East policy. For some reasons, many Arabs and many American leftists I know (you know yourselves) have wanted to believe so bad that Obama will deviate from the Zionist path of US foreign policy. I knew that it would be a matter of weeks that he would prove me right, but I did not know that he would prove me right in a matter of hours.

His speech on the Middle East today could have easily been written by Benjamin Netanyahu. Only this morning, my mother was quizzing me again about Obama, which has been doing regularly in every conversation. She–like many Arabs and Muslims–wants to believe that he would be different than Bush. The fact that he is–unlike Bush–intelligent, competent, and articulate is irrelevant. The set of Zionist–in fact, we should say Revisionist Zionism because American establishment Zionism has been Revisionist Zionism since the Reagan administration (there was a slight deviation from Revisionist Zionism during the Bush-Baker administration, but Clinton quickly “corrected” that) dogmas that guide US foreign policy will remain in place, even if a potato or Sarah Palin is president of the US. Richard Holbrooks is his special envoy to Pakistan-Afghanistan and the man did not waste time before establishing his foreign policy credentials when he said that Afghanistan and Pakistan are “distinct” countries (that reminds me of the wisdom of Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings who yesterday told CNN–you have to monitor the insights of this dude–that we learned from our experience in Iraq that we can’t predict the future exactly in Iraq–I kid you not, he said that).

But Obama’s speech was quite something. It was like sprinkling sulfuric acid on the wounds of the children in Gaza–those who survived the Israeli terrorist festival of butchery and massacres. His remarks leave you with the impression that there are two sets of problems in the holy land: that there was terrorism against civilians in “southern Israel” and then there is some undefined civilian suffering in Gaza from some undefined natural disaster–an earthquake or hurricane. He specifically mentioned the violence against “southern Israel” left it unclear as to what happened in Gaza. He then did the typical dance: of saluting Mubarak for not only oppressing his own population but for oppressing the Palestinians and imposing the siege on them. He then followed the Zionist line that all aid should pass through the transparent gangs in Ramallah–but that is important because Fatah has a very long record of integrity, transparency, merit, and high ethical standards–along with collaboration with Israel. He also defined the requirements for implementing the “Arab peace plan”: Arab governments have to normalize relations with Israel.

All Arabs are now asked by Obama to hug the nearest Israeli: and no, shoes are not accepted as tools of affection–not in the Western culture. But you may tell me, optimistically, that he did not mention Dahlan. I say: oh, no: he did mention Dahlan, I kid you not. He made reference to the Jordanian oppressive state’s training of “Palestinian security forces.” Palestinian security forces is a mere fancy name for the Dahlan gangs (seen above). But I also noticed when he left the podium he went down to shake hands, and the first head I saw was none other than Martin Indyk. If Obama would now appoint Steven Emerson at his ambassador-at-large to the Muslims world, I would expect the Arab-Israeli conflict to end, as well as US problems with the Muslim world. (more…)

“Hamas must end its rocket fire, Israel will complete the withdrawal of its forces from Gaza. The United States and our partners will support a credible anti-smuggling and interdiction regime so that Hamas cannot rearm,” the new president said in his first major speech on the region as president. (more…)

The three week long shooting-fish-in-a-barrel exercise killed, on the Palestinian side, 280 children and minors, 111 women, and 503 male noncombatants. Gaza police accounted for 167 of the dead; can you just read off Gaza police as “Hamas militants”? Or were they traffic cops & etc.? The Palestinian Center for Human rights estimated that the Israelis killed 223 Hamas guerrillas. In other words, if this count is correct, the Israelis managed to kill more children than real militants. (more…)

The media continued to make excuses around the Israeli operations in Gaza. What was striking was the attacks on the United Nations facilities, which under other circumstances would have brought outrage in the major media in the United States; certainly if Hamas had accidentally hit a United Nations facility, there would have been charges of atrocities. But each of these attacks, on the civilian populations, on the United Nations, were treated again and again as simply collateral damage, as simply one of the unfortunate outcomes of any military conflict. There was no background on what was going on. There was very little attention to the Vanity Fair piece that described the coup that the United States, Israel, and the Fatah warlord had been planning back in 2006. (more…)

The [Israeli] drones still fly overhead, promising the possibility of further attack. If Hamas is accused of breaking the cease fire, the people will pay. (more…)

“Two soldiers were on the tank eating chips, then one man came out of the tank with a rifle and started shooting the kids,” Mr Abed Rabbo, who receives a salary as a policeman from the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in Ramallah said. (more…)

Although he backed the war with reluctance and pressed for its swift conclusion, Mr Barak, 66, is Israel’s most decorated soldier and widely credited with the success of a military operation that laid the ghost of Israel’s failed attempt to crush Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. (more…)

“Most decorated” translates: killed countless Palestinian civilians…

The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni’s father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews.

Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. (more…)

Who Will Save the Palestinians?

The Israeli bombing of Louay’s father’s car killed one of his brothers and injured others. The shocking fact is that Louay still doesn’t know is that he lost his eyesight completely. He will never be able to see the light again! His grandmother was beside him trying to make him feel better. He still doesn’t know that his brother was killed. (more…)

Fatah by now is more or less functioning as Israel’s police force in the West Bank. (more…)

A total of eight hundred and forty nine rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza during Operation Cast Lead (December 27-January 18), according to police figures. (more…)

Even before Hamas came to power, the Israelis intended to create an open-air prison for the Palestinians in Gaza and inflict great pain on them until they complied with Israel’s wishes. Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s closest adviser at the time, candidly stated that the disengagement from Gaza was aimed at halting the peace process, not encouraging it. He described the disengagement as “formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” (more…)

“People are extremely angry and the level of hate against Israel is very high. I have lived and worked in Gaza for many years and I have never seen such hatred from the population,” said Qleibo.

Gazans are not blaming Hamas, contrary to Israel’s wishes. “People laugh at Israel’s claims that this was a war against the Islamic resistance organisation and not one aimed at civilians. (more…)

‘ At least 55 Palestinians were killed on Friday, including at least 10 people who died when a tank shell slammed into their house in Gaza City during a funeral wake, according to Palestinian medics . . . In the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the territory, three daughters and a niece of a Palestinian doctor working in Israel were killed in an Israeli air strike. “They were girls, only girls. I want to know why they have they killed them. Who gave the order to fire?” the children’s sobbing father Ezzedine Abu Eish said on Israeli television. Palestinian militants meanwhile fired over 20 rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel on Friday, wounding five people, the Israeli military said. Over 700 such projectiles have been fired since the start of the war.’ (more…)

I am not sure whether the top Israeli propaganda award should go to Steven Elranger or Ethan Bronner or Isabel Kershner of the Times. I mean all three did their best to explain and justifiy Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians. Look at this article by Erlanger: “Whatever the military and political results of Israel’s 21-day war against Hamas in Gaza, Israel is again facing serious accusations and anguished questioning over the legality of its military conduct.” I always wait for the word “anguish” which is often used in Zionist propaganda to refer to “the suffering” of…the Israeli killers. So if the massacres of butchery by Israel reaches a certain point, some “liberal” Zionists express concern for the “anguish” of the Israeli killers. (more…)

Down the street I see that someone has rehung a Hamas flag. Most still support them; the feeling is that Hamas is holding its own and has not folded, and they admire it for that. (more…)

Steven Erlanger, in a particularly appalling article, excuses Israel’s grotesque behavior in Gaza. He no longer even attempts to justify his reporting of Israeli allegations as fact; he simply accepts it all verbatim:

“Hamas fighters are also putting civilians at undue risk by storing weapons among them, including in mosques, schools and allegedly hospitals, too, making them potential military targets.” (more…)

Really Mr. Erlanger? Have you seen these weapons yourself? Have you perhaps received this information from a source within the Hamas leadership?

No, of course not.

There is something called “war propaganda” and the New York Times has proven that it is more than ever an arm of the Israeli terrorist propaganda. Isabel Kershner is one of many propagandists for Israeli terrorism in the New York Times. Just look at this passage: “But Israel tightened the military pressure on Hamas on Thursday, perhaps to push it closer to a cease-fire that would meet the Israeli aim of stopping Hamas rocket fire into Israel.” So Kershner is saying that Israel continued the killing and destruction in Gaza (which she refers to as “tightening the military pressure”–and when you add the word military you immediately give murder legitimacy), was intended for good pursposes. She adds that “perhaps” it is for a cease-fire. When she adds “perhaps” she is admitting that she has no proof and not even claim by Israeli propagandists but that she is willing to invent a purpose for the killing. This brief passage should win the award for one of the most offensive justification of murder in Gaza. Isabel Kershner deserves at least a blender from the Israeli terrorist military. (more…)

Israel must lose. It is not enough to call for another ceasefire, or more humanitarian assistance. It is not enough to urge the renewal of dialogue and to acknowledge the concerns and suffering of both sides. If we believe in the principle of democratic self-determination, if we affirm the right to resist military aggression and colonial occupation, then we are obliged to take sides… against Israel, and with the people of Gaza and the West Bank. (more…)

Eighty-six percent of those killed in Gaza were civilians

A Palestinian has been shot dead and several others wounded after Israeli security forces opened fire during a protest in the West Bank against Israel’s war in Gaza. (more…)

“Last night was awful. So many explosions from the air, from tanks, from everywhere…”; “I swear, tonight I prayed for the Israelis that someone will save them from their leadership… After this, Hamas will have 50,000 suicide bombers”. (more…)

One can say Hamas hides among the civilian population, as if the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv is not located in the heart of a civilian population, as if there are places in Gaza that are not in the heart of a civilian population. One can also claim that Hamas uses children as human shields, as if in the past our own organizations fighting to establish a country did not recruit children.

A significant majority of the children killed in Gaza did not die because they were used as human shields or because they worked for Hamas. They were killed because the IDF bombed, shelled or fired at them, their families or their apartment buildings. That is why the blood of Gaza’s children is on our hands, not on Hamas’ hands, and we will never be able to escape that responsibility. (more…)

Fatah is keeping a lid on protests, not letting West Bankers draw it into Israel’s war on Hamas. Senior voices in the secular party that runs the Palestinian Authority (PA) see restraint as key to its quest for statehood. Getting entangled in Gaza, they say, would only embolden Hamas. (more…)

And, unlike Hamas, it is not deliberately targeting civilians (as evidenced by their dropping of leaflets telling civilians to evacuate certain buildings). (more…)

Is it not deliberate if I warn you that I intend to kill you before actually pulling the trigger? I’m sorry, but these leaflets are a ridiculous argument Israel is using to justify their appalling actions. I am now convinced that their ongoing massacre in Gaza will go down as one of the most abhorrent crimes in the long history of Zionist crimes.

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future. (more…)

Then Seaman lets everyone know what he expects from them: “You’re here, and you are covering our side.”

This means that — even two weeks into Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against the Palestinian organization Hamas — no independent reporters are being allowed into Gaza. Seaman has no qualms about making it clear that Israel wants to keep the international media out of the Gaza Strip. The reason is that the foreign press is biased, unprofessional, and falls too easily for the other side’s propaganda. His definition of professional, it would seem, is only putting out Israel’s version of the war. (more…)

And Hamas is not alone on the battlefront. Dozens of Fatah gunmen belonging to the faction’s armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, are reportedly participating in the fighting alongside Hamas gunmen. … Hamas is also being aided by other groups such as Islamic Jihad, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Resistance Committees. (more…)

This simply justifies my belief that Israel cannot expect to seriously halt Palestinian attacks by pounding Gaza into powder. Even if they magically kill each and every member of the Qassam brigades, armed Palestinian resistance will continue. There is no way forward but through negotiation.

Operation Cast Lead is not a reprisal raid but a defensive war meant to clip Hamas’ wings before it surprises us with a Palestinian version of the Yom Kippur War. It’s not our fault we have a strong, well-run army and state-of-the-art weaponry. (more…)

Of course, I hadn’t considered this before… The slaughter (one cannot honestly call it a war) in Gaza is all because Israel has a “strong, well-run army”. I suppose Shavit is right; for refusing to acquiesce to Israeli occupation, Israel really had to teach Gaza a lesson. How DARE they oppose their own oppression.

If anything, Shavit’s argument that Israel has a well-run army implicates them even further in the killing of hundreds of civilians because they hold themselves to some kind of higher standard—whatever a “well-run” army means.

At the first sign of movement in the dark Gaza alleyway, Alon opened fire without hesitation. Snipers liked to operate at night, he said, and the area had been cleared of Israeli troops.

“He could have been advancing to attack,” the Israeli lieutenant explained. “We are treating everything as hostile right now. We were told not to take chances — to shoot rather than ask questions.” (more…)

A Palestinian besieged in the Khuza’a area, in south-eastern Gaza, reported today that Israeli soldiers shot a woman waving a white flag and civilians who were fleeing a bombed house on army orders, killing at least three and wounding others. (more…)

I see a picture on my computer of a jovial Israeli soldier posing with two of his weapons with a toothy smile. I then read an article by a Haaretz journalist in the former Netzarim settlement quoting an Israeli tank commander saying he rather likes it in Gaza, because “it’s interesting” there, and other young soldiers saying they are anxious to get in on the action, to shell and snipe to death, this being their first war.

A one-year-old girl, Rula Salha, was shot to death. She was my daughter Noor’s age. I think of the smiley, war-hungry soldier. I wonder if he got his kick. (more…)