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Last update - 11:58 02/08/2008

Five Palestinians suffocate to death after Egypt blows up tunnel

By News Agencies

Five Palestinians were killed and 18 wounded in a smuggling tunnel under the Gaza-Egypt border after Egyptian troops blew up the entrance, an Egyptian security official and Gaza hospital doctors said Saturday.

"The destruction of the entrance deprived those inside the tunnel of oxygen," said the Egyptian official, who is stationed at the border and spoke on customary condition of anonymity. Gaza hospital officials said the five died from lack of oxygen.

The tunnel entrance was destroyed late Friday, near the Gaza border town of Rafah.

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Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:49:36

Egypt has refused to allow entry to an Israeli truck carrying 3.5 ton of ceramics after high radiation levels were detected in the shipment.

Egyptian officials seized the goods at the Al-Oja border crossing after radiation detection equipment showed a high presence of radioactive material in the cargo, a security official told AFP.

A special team from the Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority (EAEA) was expected to inspect the shipment immediately, he added.

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Independent.co.uk

By Donald Macintyre

Saturday, 26 May 2007

A senior legal official who secretly warned the government of Israel after the Six Day War of 1967 that it would be illegal to build Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories has said, for the first time, that he still believes that he was right.

The declaration by Theodor Meron, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's legal adviser at the time and today one of the world's leading international jurists, is a serious blow to Israel's persistent argument that the settlements do not violate international law, particularly as Israel prepares to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the war in June 1967.

The legal opinion, a copy of which has been obtained by The Independent, was marked "Top Secret" and "Extremely Urgent" and reached the unequivocal conclusion, in the words of its author's summary, "that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

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Hundreds of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have stormed the Egyptian gate at the Rafah crossing, clashing with security forces.

Palestinian youth on Wednesday threw rocks at Egyptian soldiers, who responded in kind, keeping the crowd at bay with water cannons.

Television footage showed some people were wounded in the clash.

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Agha: Closure of crossings a message to Egypt

Khudari: The closure of Gaza crossings is a flagrant violation of the truce

[ 25/06/2008 - 07:43 PM ]

GAZA, (PIC)-- MP Jamal Al-Khudari, the head of the popular committee against the siege, stated that the Israeli decision to close the Gaza crossings is a flagrant violation of the truce and its items, and a step backwards, adding that the closure of crossings raised big question marks about the nature of the coming days.

MP Khudari deplored the Israeli occupation for assassinating two young men in cold blood in Nablus, calling on the Palestinian factions to seek a national consensus before taking any step to retaliate against Israeli violations in order to strengthen the internal front through taking a unified vision serving the higher national interests.

The lawmaker also called on the Palestinian factions to exercise prudence and restraint in order to suspend the aggression and break the siege on one and a half million people. 

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Rethinking Israel's David-and-Goliath past

Little-noticed details in declassified U.S. documents indicate that Israel's Six-Day War may not have been a war of necessity.

By Sandy Tolan

Jun. 04, 2007 | At a little after 7 on the morning of June 5, 1967, as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's commanders were finishing their breakfasts and driving to work, French-built Israeli fighter jets roared out of their bases and flew low, below radar, into Egyptian airspace. Within three hours, 500 Israeli sorties had destroyed Nasser's entire air force. Just after midday, the air forces of Jordan and Syria also lay in smoking ruins, and Israel had essentially won the Six-Day War -- in six hours.

Israeli and U.S. historians and commentators describe the surprise attack as necessary, and the war as inevitable, the result of Nasser's fearsome war machine that had closed the Straits of Tiran, evicted United Nations peacekeeping troops, taunted the traumatized Israeli public, and churned toward the Jewish state's border with 100,000 troops. "The morning of 5 June 1967," wrote Israel's warrior-turned-historian, Chaim Herzog, "found Israel's armed forces facing the massed Arab armies around her frontiers." Attack or be annihilated: The choice was clear.

Or was it? Little-noticed details in declassified documents from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, indicate that top officials in the Johnson administration -- including Johnson's most pro-Israeli Cabinet members -- did not believe war between Israel and its neighbors was necessary or inevitable, at least until the final hour. In these documents, Israel emerges as a vastly superior military power, its opponents far weaker than the menacing threat Israel portrayed, and war itself something that Nasser, for all his saber-rattling, tried to avoid until the moment his air force went up in smoke. In particular, the diplomatic role of Nasser's vice president, who was poised to travel to Washington in an effort to resolve the crisis, has received little attention from historians. The documents sharpen a recurring theme in the history of the Israeli-Arab wars, and especially of their telling in the West: From the war of 1948 to the 2007 conflict in Gaza, Israel is often miscast as the vulnerable David in a hostile sea of Arab Goliaths.

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Charles Glass

Published 15 May 2008

Publicly, Israel will not do business with those who do not recognise it. But behind the scenes is a complex web of international contacts

The seven-and-a-half-year vacuum in Arab- Israeli peacemaking under George W Bush ends next January. Bush refused to play ball, but he wouldn't let anyone else on the field: not the UN, not Russia, not the European Union. The only legacies he leaves his successor to build upon are secret, deniable talks among intelligence agencies and the familiar engagement of violence.

Israel's public posture has always been that it would never speak with those who did not recognise its "right to exist". Putting aside the obvious fact that "right to exist" is meaningless in international law, Israel has talked for years with those who did not recognise it. It had contacts with King Hussein of Jordan, and it warned the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Sudan of plots in 1977 to overthrow their regimes. It sold arms to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and it talked to the PLO for years before Yitzhak Rabin met Yasser Arafat at the White House. It has spoken through mediators to Hamas and Hezbollah. It is now talking to Syria, through Turkey and various independent peacemakers, though Syria assists Hezbollah and Hamas. Nothing will come of this, as the Syrian president now admits, without US involvement. And Washington does not want to get involved.

In Gaza, Israel and Hamas are setting the terms of discussion. "What kind of dialogue is being established?" asks Geoffrey Aronson, an American working to bridge differences between Syria and Israel through Swiss mediation. "The parties are engaged by fighting in Gaza. They learn from each other. They establish their limits and red lines. It's a sophisticated process. Both sides learn what will produce an explosion." Behind the scenes, Egyptian intelligence officers speak to Hamas and Israel about Hamas activists in Israeli prisons, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas, and the opening of a door to Gaza, through Egypt or Israel, that would permit the people of Gaza to receive food, medicine and other necessities.

The discussions are on two levels: exchanges of prisoners and, since the Gazans opened the wall to Egypt at Rafah last June, on a ceasefire and border agreements. For Hamas, as one Pal estinian put it: "A ceasefire must include new border arrangements." A fortnight ago, Hamas and 11 small resistance groups met in Cairo to discuss what the Palestinians would accept on the border. The Egyptian intelligence chief, General Omar Suleiman, presented proposals he had reason to believe Israel could accept. Hamas responded with a few minor amendments, which Suleiman was due to take to the Israelis for their response. Most observers believe that, if Israel rejects the plan, Egypt will have no choice - out of concern for the opinions of its own domestic Islamists - but to open the border with Gaza.

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UN team 'devastated' by Gaza stories: Tutu

Tutu circumvents Israeli ban

Denied visa by Israel, Archbishop Desmond Tutu to enter Gaza through Egypt as head of UN delegation investigating death of Palestinian family in 2006 despite fact IDF has already accepted responsibility for erroneous shell

Ynet

Published: 05.27.08, 10:23 / Israel News

For 18 months Israel has refused to grant visas to a UN team seeking to investigate the deaths of 19 Palestinian civilians from an Israeli artillery attack in the Gaza Strip. Now the team, led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has decided to enter the Strip through Egypt via the Rafah crossing, the Daily Telegraph reported on Tuesday.

In November 2006 an IDF artillery battery targeting Qassam launching cells in Gaza accidently hit a residential neighborhood, killing 19 civilians, most of them members of the same family.

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Yesterday afternoon we were hearing rumors that Mubarak hadn't attended Bush's keynote to the World Economic Forum..., but there was nothing in the news... except on the crawl on 2 stations which later disappeared.  In the evening however, it was clear that Arab programs were given the green light to say whatever they wanted to say about Dubya... and boy oh boy..., Dubya was cut into pieces yesterday on TV by our main anchors!!  Nothing was left unsaid!  We knew then that something had gone wrong.

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CAIRO, Egypt, May 17, 2008(CBS/AP) Egypt's state-owned press opened fire Saturday on U.S. President George W. Bush as he arrived for talks with regional leaders at the conclusion of a five-day Mideast tour.

The newspapers, whose management are all appointed by the government, criticized Mr. Bush's speech Thursday in front of the Israeli Knesset for being overly supportive of the Israelis and not mentioning the Palestinians' plight.

"The Torah-inspired speech of Bush raised question marks over the credibility of the U.S. role in the Middle East," wrote Mursi Atallah, the publisher of Al-Ahram, the flagship daily of the state-owned press. "Bush aims to do nothing but appeasing Israel."

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D.Eyad El Sarraj

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Added: May 10, 2008

Al Jazeera's Mark Seddon reports on the Palestinian rally held in central London.

Thousands of people marched through the streets of London, to show their support for the Palestinian cause.

The demonstrators were calling for an end to the siege on Gaza, the right of return for Palestinians, and an end to Israeli occupation.