Category: News

Six Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have been killed in heavy clashes in the northern Gaza Strip.

In one of Israel’s biggest raids into Gaza in recent months, troops carried out three air strikes and moved to encircle the town of Beit Hanoun.

More than 35 people were wounded as troops, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, carried out the raid.

An Israeli military spokesman said the operation was aimed at stopping rocket fire into Israel.

Palestinian leaders have strongly condemned it.

Both the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, have described the Israeli military action as a massacre.
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HERE in Gaza, few dream of peace. For now, most dare only to dream of a lack of war. It is for this reason that Hamas proposes a long-term truce during which the Israeli and Palestinian peoples can try to negotiate a lasting peace.

A truce is referred to in Arabic as a “hudna.” Typically covering 10 years, a hudna is recognized in Islamic jurisprudence as a legitimate and binding contract. A hudna extends beyond the Western concept of a cease-fire and obliges the parties to use the period to seek a permanent, nonviolent resolution to their differences.
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Omri Evron, a 19-year-old from Tel-Aviv, is weeks away from earning his B.A. in ethical philosophy from the Tel-Aviv University (TAU). He started studying for this degree when he was still a high-school student.

Omri is known around the campus of TAU as a leading social activist. Last month, for example, he started a petition of university and high-school students from around the country, protesting the exploitation of maintenance and cleaning workers in educational institutions.

At least once a week, Omri visits the Palestinian village of Bili'in, showing his support for the local Palestinian farmers who are campaigning against the Israeli separation wall that separates them from about 50 percent of their lands. In Bili'in, just like in Tel-Aviv, Omri has earned the reputation of a respected human rights activist.
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The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Geoff Simons. London: The Palestinian Return Center. 2006.

Reading about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine from this work is intense and relentless. Geoff Simons’ look at the problem in Palestine of the Israeli onslaught against the indigenous population keeps coming at the reader, insistently, imperatively, and almost overwhelming to the point of exhaustion. Story after story, anecdote after anecdote, irrefutable evidence ongoing with excellent source information from personal diaries of those involved on both sides, government records, and NGO records all contribute to this seemingly never-ending compendium of information. As a reader I ran through a full range of emotions: anger, frustration, hopelessness, rage, sadness, and the unsettling sense in both mind and heart that the cause of these feelings is the brutality and savageness of a society that is – that has – descended into a state of blind immorality.
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[Something completely different . . . however, events like climate change not only threaten our lives, but threaten all efforts to build a better and more stable world through peace and justice]

Climate change could devastate the global economy on a scale of the two world wars and the depression of the 1930s if left unchecked, a top economist has warned.

Introducing the report by Nicholas Stern, the British government also said Monday that former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who is now a vocal environmental advocate, is to serve as one of its advisers on the issue.

The report’s main argument is that the benefits of coordinated action around the world to tackle global warming will greatly outweigh any financial costs.
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Alarm over radioactive legacy left by attack on Lebanon . . .

Did Israel use a secret new uranium-based weapon in southern Lebanon this summer in the 34-day assault that cost more than 1,300 Lebanese lives, most of them civilians?
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The Israeli cabinet has approved the addition of an ultra-nationalist party into the governing coalition.

Israeli Arabs have also condemned the plan. Yisrael Beitenu advocates the transfer of some Arab towns out of the state of Israel.

Its leader, Mr Lieberman, has also accused some Israeli Arabs of treason for speaking to the Palestinian militant group, Hamas.

Speaking of the move last week, Azmi Bishara, an Israeli Arab member of the parliament, said: “Israel can’t pride itself for being the sole democracy in the Middle East and take in someone so radical [as Mr Lieberman].”
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In a frightening but long expected move, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has brought the Yisrael Beitenu party into his coalition government. The party’s leader, Avigdor Lieberman, is to be vice prime minister and, as “Minister for Strategic Threats,” a key member of Israel’s “security cabinet” in charge of the Iran portfolio.

Yisrael Beitenu is a dangerous extremist party with fascist tendencies that has openly advocated the “transfer” of Palestinians, including the transfer of Arab towns within Israel to a Bantustan-like future Palestinian entity. It has made clear that a Jewish supremacist state is more important than a democratic one. The party, whose strongest base is among Russian immigrants brought to Israel in the 1990s, surged at the Israeli election earlier this year, taking eleven seats in Israel’s 120 seat Knesset.

“I would not hesitate to send the Israeli army into all of Area A for 48 hours. Destroy the foundation of all the [Palestinian] authority’s military infrastructure, all of the police buildings, the arsenals, all the posts of the security forces… not leave one stone on another. Destroy everything.” -Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new “Minister for Strategic Threats”
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Israel appears sure that increasing aggression against the Palestinians will lead them to internal collapse whereas it is more certain to lead to a new national uprising, reports Khaled Amayreh

While Western and even some Arab media continue referring to the daily killing by Israel of Palestinian civilians, activists and militants as “clashes”, the Israeli occupation army has intensified its brutal onslaught against Palestinian population centres both in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
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With the world’s attention focused on the unfolding disaster in Iraq, on the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and on how to how to moderate Iran’s nuclear ambitions – three problems for which no credible solutions have yet been proposed – the Palestinians continue to bleed, starve and suffer unimaginable humiliations and hardships under Israel’s pitiless rule.
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