Category: News

GENEVA – The international Red Cross yesterday deplored the killing by the Israel Defense Forces of two "clearly marked" ambulance workers removing a Palestinian body from an earlier Israeli attack in the Gaza Strip.

The paramedics of the Palestine Red Crescent Society were wearing clearly marked fluorescent jackets and the flashing lights of their ambulance were visible from a great distance when they were hit by Israeli fire after dark on Friday evening, said the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

"The International Committee of the Red Cross is appalled by this failure to protect personnel engaged in emergency medical duties," a statement said.
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IN ITS original German form – Lieberman – the name means “lovable man”. It is hard to imagine a name less appropriate for the new Deputy Prime Minister of Israel.

He is not lovable, neither in his personality nor in his views – and that is the understatement of the year.

His personal lovability can be judged by the fact that he was once arrested for beating up a boy who had quarrelled with his son.

This week, the arrival of Lieberman at the center of the political system marks the start of a new chapter in the annals of the State of Israel.
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“Bein Hanoun, with 30,000 inhabitants, has been the target of daily aggressions and air strikes since June 25. It is now besieged by Israeli troops. We have seen the tanks advance and take up their positions. We are now encircled by about 70 tanks and at least 450 soldiers who announce that the city is a “closed military zone”. That means that no one can leave. No one can flee. It is an offensive based on those carried out in the West Bank in 2002.
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PCHR strongly condemns IOF piracy against financial institutions in the West Bank , and stresses that this raid is a form of collective punishment and economic sanctions imposed by IOF against Palestinians. The Centre points to the fact that Israel imposes restrictions and supervision on all financial transactions from abroad, refuting the claim made regarding the latest raid.
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The Palestinian NGOs Network (PNGO) calls on the United Nations and the International Community to immediately intervene to stop the war crimes committed by the Israeli occupational forces (IOF) on Palestinian civilians and their properties in the Gaza Strip, mainly in the northern town of Beit Hanoun, which for the fourth day is under Israeli siege and attacks from tanks and air strikes. As of last Wednesday morning at least 42 people have been killed and another 175 injured, most of these were children, women, journalists and medical aid workers. Israeli occupational forces have destroyed many houses and bulldozed a wide track of cultivated land.

Tens of thousands of people living in Beit Hanoun town suffering from lack food and medical services due to the siege and curfew imposed by the IOF on the town. In addition, the IOF are denying the sick and injured access to medical treatment.
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A bloodbath is taking place in Beit Hanun, the Israel Defense Forces runs rampant and kills at least 37 people in four days – and Israeli public opinion yawns with indifference. A brigade commander tells his soldiers, who killed 12 people in one day: “You’ve won 12:0,” and the soldiers grin broadly. This is the moral nadir we have reached, following a long slide down a slippery slope: Human life has become cheap.
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GENEVA (AP) – Nearly 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing each month to Syria and Jordan, forcing the United Nations to set aside its goal of helping refugees return home after the U.S.-led invasion, officials said Friday.

Instead, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has drawn up plans to deal with the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who are desperate to escape the violence, chief spokesman Ron Redmond said.

“Much of our work in the three years since the fall of the previous regime was based on the assumption that the domestic situation would stabilize and hundreds of thousands of previously displaced Iraqis would be able to go home,” Redmond said. “Now, however, we’re seeing more and more displacement linked to the continuing violence.”

It has been impossible to obtain accurate totals on the numbers of refugees because few Iraqis are registering with UNHCR, and most are being cared for by host families or charitable organizations, he said.
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The terrible imbalance of power between the Israelis and Palestinians makes it impossible for Israel, regardless of which government is in power, to deal with the Palestinians in any way except through a lens of assumed moral, cultural, and racial superiority, as though military prowess equates with civilization and home-made rockets equate with savagery and a sub-human status.

The savagery, though, belongs to Israel and to anyone who has the power to stop a bully in his bloody pummeling of a much weaker opponent but instead stands aside, watching under the cover of the manufactured excuse that the bully is defending himself against his hapless victim.
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Palestinians like to compare themselves to the olive tree. You can chop it down, they say, you can burn it, but it still grows back.

As the harvesting of the West Bank’s most profitable cash crop gets under way, the resilience of both is paying off. Thousands of trees in the rocky hills around Tulkarm are cascading with the ripe green fruit.

Despite a campaign of intimidation by militant Jewish settlers, confiscations of land for Israel’s security barrier, and travel restrictions that make it difficult for farmers to tend their trees and move their crops, 2006 promises a bumper harvest – if only the Palestinians can market it.

They certainly need to. Abdullah Abdel-Khader, a 70-year-old farmer from the border village of Deir al-Ghusoun, said his 950 olive trees were now his family’s only source of income. His six sons lost their jobs in Israel after the army withdrew their permits. “We’ve hit rock bottom,” he lamented. “We eat chicken once or twice a month, mutton three times a year on Muslim festivals.”

A razor-wire stretch of the Israeli barrier cuts him off from 300 of his trees. Sometimes soldiers let workers through a gate, sometimes they don’t. Only Palestinians with security clearance are allowed to cross. At the moment, Mr Abdel-Khader said he was managing.
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[Photo: The scene near a mosque in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun after Israeli troops opened fire on a group of Palestinian women, killing one of them and injuring 10 others. The mosque had been the scene of an Israeli siege after a group of men, presumed to be armed, took refuge there. Photograph: Suhaib Salem/Reuters]

Two Palestinian women were killed and another 10 were reported wounded when Israeli forces today opened fire on a group preparing to act as a human shield for militants in a Gaza mosque.

Dozens of women were gathering outside the mosque in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip this morning after an appeal on a local radio station. More than 30 gunmen had taken refuge in the building after the Israeli army began its largest Gaza offensive in months in an attempt to stop militants launching rocket attacks on nearby Jewish settlements over the border.
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