Israeli Forces Kill Six In Gaza Camp offensive

Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have killed six activists of the Palestinian resistance and have wounded four others and six civilians, including two children and a journalist, in the context of an offensive on al-Boreij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip that has been ongoing since Thursday morning, 5 July 2007. According to investigations conducted by PCHR, IOF have prevented Palestinian medical crews from attending the wounded.
According to investigations conducted by PCHR, at approximately 02:30 on Thursday, 5 July 2007, an IOF infantry unit moved nearly 1,000 meters into al-Boreij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. IOF troops clashed with activists of the Palestinian resistance. In these clashes, three resistance activists were killed:
1) Mohammed Nayef 'Owaidat, 24;2) Ahmed Suleiman al-Qrainawi, 23; and3) Mohammed Jawad Siam, 35.
Later, military reinforcements, including aircrafts, arrived at the area to support the infantry unit. IOF raided a number of houses and transformed them into military sites. At approximately 04:30, an ambulance of Palestine Red Crescent Society moved towards the area as it received information that people were wounded in the area. IOF fired at the ambulance and held it medical crew, consisting of 'Azmi Hisham Abu Dala, 25, and Mohammed Khamis al-Salhi, 39, inside a house for four hours. IOF then released the medical crew, but kept the ambulance in the area. At approximately 11:00, a number of activists of the Palestinian resistance clashed with IOF. Soon, IOF fired an artillery shell at them. As a result, two resistance activists were instantly killed and a third one was wounded, but died from his wound at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City:
1) Mohammed Subhi Nour, 23;2) Mohammed 'Awadh Abu Gharqoud, 22; and3) Ahmed Nabeel Abu Jild, 21.
Additionally, six civilians, including two children and a cameraman of al-Aqsa Television, and four resistance activists were wounded by the IOF gunfire. Preliminary investigation conducted by PCHR's team revealed that the cameraman, Emad Ghanem, 22, was shot deliberately. Ghanem was first shot and fell down on the ground before he was shot for the second time while laying on the ground beside his camera. He currently suffers severe wounds as his both legs were amputated. IOF have also razed areas of agricultural land and have destroyed a number of roads. The IOF military operation is still ongoing, which threatens the lives of Palestinian civilians.
PCHR is gravely concerned over this latest escalation by IOF, and:
1) Condemns these latest crimes, which are part of a series of continuous crimes committed by IOF in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians, considering them a form of collective punishment against the Palestinian civilian population in violation of Article 33 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 1949.
2) Points out that IOF do not pay attention to the principles of necessity and proportionality in using their full-fledged arsenal in civilian populated areas.
3) Calls upon the international community to immediately intervene to stop such crimes, and calls upon the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War to fulfill their obligation under Article 1 of the Convention to ensure respect for the Convention in all circumstances, and their obligation under Article 146 to search for and prosecute those who are responsible for perpetrating grave breaches of the Convention, as such breaches constitute war crimes according to Article 147 of the Convention and the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I).

By Palestinian Centre for Human Rights

Israel Targets Hamas’s Political Leadership

Israel is continuing to mount air strikes in Gaza as part of its drive to destroy Hamas as a military and political force and torpedo the Palestinian national unity government, as well as any possibility of a negotiated deal with Palestinian leaders.
Israel argues that its air strikes are aimed at halting Hamas’s ability to launch Qassem rocket attacks on its towns bordering Gaza. On Sunday, an Israeli man died as a result of a Qassem rocket in Sederot—the twelfth person to have been killed by rockets fired from Gaza at Israel in the past three years.
But the scale of deaths, injuries and damage sustained by Palestinians defies such claims. Nearly 50 people have been killed in Israeli attacks over the past fortnight. Dozens more have been injured, including women and children, and many buildings have been destroyed.
Moreover, while previously Israel’s military forces have focussed on Hamas’s armed wing, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned on Sunday: “There will be no limit in acting against the terror groups and against those who are responsible for the terror. No one is immune.”
Helicopters and fighter planes, using precision weapons, have conducted air strikes against money-changing offices and businesses in the Gaza Strip that Israel claimed had been transferring money to Hamas and other militant organisations, as well as Hamas’s arms caches, training bases and command posts for its militia, the Executive Force.
Having eschewed a major ground offensive against Gaza at this stage, Israel is extending its policy of targetted assassinations to political as well as militant leaders, including Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas’s political wing.
On Saturday, Israel’s military forces fired two missiles that landed near Haniyeh’s home in the Shati refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City. They hit trailers used by his bodyguards and cut electricity to the crowded camp.
Though the army claimed Haniyeh was not a target, the missile strike was part of a larger offensive against Hamas targets that killed five people only hours after Gaza militants had indicated they would stop their rocket attacks if Israel halted its air strikes. Following this assault, Hamas rejected any talk of a ceasefire.
Earlier in the week, Israeli missiles destroyed the home of Khalil al-Haya, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, killing eight of his relatives and neighbours.
In the West Bank, Israeli forces arrested leading members of the Palestinian government, including cabinet minister Wasfi Kabaha. Last Thursday alone, 33 Hamas politicians, legislators, the mayors of four West Bank cities, including Nablus and Qalqilya, and local council members, were detained in overnight raids. The army also seized computers and files from politicians’ offices, charities and a school in Hebron.
Palestinian information minister, Mustafa Barghouti, described the arrests as “a massacre” of Palestinian democracy and civil society. Last year, Israel arrested more than 40 Hamas politicians, including several ministers and the speaker of the parliament, Aziz Dweik, following the capture of Israeli Army corporal, Gilad Shalit. They had been elected in January 2006 on Hamas’s Change and Reform list, which won the parliamentary elections. Nearly all are still being detained without trial in Israeli jails. The charges against them include membership of Hamas, which Israel and the US have designated as a terrorist organisation.
The most senior Palestinian official arrested in the recent raids, Education Minister Nasser Eddin al-Shaer, is not even a member of Hamas. He was also detained in last year’s swoop but was released later by a military court, because no incriminating evidence was found.
Israel’s foreign ministry issued a statement saying, “a terrorist organisation remains a terrorist organisation, even if its members stand for democratic elections. Membership in such an organisation is a violation of Israeli and international law.”
Defence Minister Amir Peretz said in a radio interview that Israel would not make a distinction between the political and military wings of Hamas. “The arrest of these Hamas leaders,” he said, “sends a message to the military organisations that we demand that this firing [of Qassem rockets] stop. If the rockets do not stop, we will not stop.” He added that Israel was “biting its lip” and refraining, for now, from launching a wide-scale ground offensive in Gaza.
Peretz’s deputy, Ephraim Sneh, went even further. Having described Hamas leaders as “terrorists in suits,” he was asked if this meant the Palestinian prime minister could be targetted for assassination.
Sneh replied, “I’ll put it like this. We don’t care if he’s a ringleader, a perpetrator of rocket launching or if he is one of the political leaders. No one has immunity. There is no one who is in the circle of commanders and leaders in Hamas who is immune from a strike. For what does political Hamas do? It gives the operational approval to those who are doing the fighting.”
In other words, Israel has arrogated to itself the power to kill another country’s elected leadership so as to eliminate it as a political force. It is to this end also that Israel has intervened in support of Fatah in the factional fighting with Hamas that has killed at least 50 Palestinians this past month.
Confirmation of Israel’s success in this regard has come from Javier Solana, the European Union foreign minister. Speaking after talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli leaders on Thursday, Solana said he did not know whether the current Fatah-Hamas unity government had reached its “death,” but it was a “non-functioning government”.
The recent offensive in Gaza and the West Bank underscores Israel’s hostility to any form of Palestinian state. The logic of the demographic situation is that for Israel to survive as an explicitly Jewish state, the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories must be driven out and the Palestinians as a whole reduced to an atomised mass that is easily policed.
No Palestinian leadership, whatever its political hue, is therefore acceptable to Israel. It had previously rejected Fatah, which had recognised Israel, as a “partner for peace” under Yasser Arafat’s leadership. In so far as Israel continues to have any dealings with Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas, this is solely for the purpose of fomenting civil strife and chronic instability so that the Palestinians either leave “voluntarily” or submit to Israel’s diktats.
The right-wing Likud leader and former Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu articulated this policy most openly. Last week he proposed “a wide range of actions... to apply pressure”. This was to “begin with a general closure of Gaza,” he said, “through a controlled stoppage of services such as electricity and water, up to targetted killings and actions from the area on infrastructure targets, or limited ground incursion to the radius of the Qassam range or a larger ground incursion.”
Asked if he favoured a large-scale infantry incursion, Netanyahu said, “I think the problem here is to return to the balance of deterrence that was so very eroded in the last year. As a result of the last war, Gaza has turned into Lebanon Two with bunkers.”
In an interview published on Thursday in the Financial Times, Netanyahu reiterated Likud’s long-standing position that the Palestinians already had their own state—Jordan—and called for “some kind of federation or confederation between Jordan and the Palestinians”.
Netanyahu, who is closely aligned with Washington’s neo-conservative clique, also indicated that the offensive against the Palestinians was part of a broader objective to reorder the Middle East.
Israel was fighting a war on several fronts, he stressed. “We now have three live fronts: one Hizbullah, which has rearmed itself with more weapons than it had before the war and better kinds of weapons... Second, Gaza, which is turning itself into a second Lebanon; and, third, Syria, which is arming itself feverishly, which is something it has not done in 30 years.”
He added: “The largest issue confronting Israel is the tide of militant Islam sweeping our region and threatening the entire world. But it is centred on the Middle East and the two streams—the Shia stream in Iran and the Sunni stream in al-Qaeda—they sometimes collide with each but more often than not, as in Iraq, they collude against the common enemy.”
The greatest danger was Iran, he continued, which Israel claims is funding and training all the terrorist groups. Here, he said, there were three courses of action: “First, nothing, in which case they will get [nuclear] weapons, possibly in three or four years ... Second, you can reserve the military option, preferably by the US, which has the means to do so. But that should be a last resort.”
Finally, “you can use the economic weakness of the regime to put economic pressure upon it by a combination of actions to limit its credit lines and divestment, divesting by companies, primarily European companies that do business there”.


By Jean Shaoul
28 May, 2007
World Socialist Web

Congress Gives Iraq War Profiteers Another Hundred Billion

Congress has demonstrated its unconditional love for the Bush administration by handing the war profiteers another $100 billion worth of good reasons to keep the war in Iraq rolling along at full-throttle.
And today there was the President, whose only military experience consists of draft-dodging, going AWOL from a cushy stint in the National Guard set up by daddy, and finishing his term of duty as grounded fighter pilot, calling a press conference to inform Americans for the umpteenth time that the only way to the keep the terrorist at bay is by allowing the slaughtering in Iraq to continue; forever apparently.
Over the past month, the majority of political discussions on cable news talk shows related to Iraq funding bill were focused on how members of Congress and especially those who are presidential candidates are consumed with worry over how their votes on funding will affect the results of the next elections.
Once elected, it would be interesting to find out exactly how long it takes for politicians to lose the ability to feel and vote with their hearts when they know that a policy such as the Iraq war is terribly wrong, without thinking about how the decision will effect the vote tally in the next election.
As citizens, we have no control over our own government. Never in my 57 years on this earth have I been so ashamed to be an American knowing that every day that the war continues we are knowingly allowing our soldiers and innocent Iraqis to be killed or injured with absolutely no justification, other than because politicians believe it will be beneficial to their careers to allow Bush's failed war policies to continue.
While political commentators discuss voter odds, myself and probably most Americans are sitting at home unable to watch the news without breaking down crying as the latest pictures flash on the screen showing the happy faces of the young soldiers who are now dead, knowing full well that the next night there will be more pictures of dead soldiers because the politicians have made it clear that the citizens paying their salaries have no right to demand that their elected officials put an end to the killing in Iraq.
It would be interesting to take a poll to see how often each politician even looks at the smiling faces of the dead soldiers and the second question in the poll should be, for those who claim that they do look at these faces every day and still vote to give Bush more funding, how many had to use drugs or alcohol to get to sleep during the 7 days following the vote. For this poll, a high number of drugs and alcohol users would be viewed as positive because the reason for the question is to determine how many politicians still have the capacity to feel guilt.
Congress needs to get one thing straight, the war funding is not about politics, it is about more deaths and injuries every single day that ticks off the calendar all because Bush took this country into a senseless war based on lies. Every single day matters to the soldiers and their families, and to those of us who feel extremely guilty about not being able to find a away to get them out of Bush's war.
Why is there no in-depth discussion by any members of Congress on political talk shows about where these tax dollars are actually ending up, aside from an occasional flare-up of indignation about Halliburton?
There is nothing positive in Iraq to hold up to show Americans how Iraqis have benefited from all the tax dollars already poured into a bottomless pit.
The issue of war profiteering is like the elephant in the middle of the living room, every member of Congress knows where the funding is going but Americans don't hear them on talk shows letting people know that these kids are being killed in the name of war profits.
And the statements in speeches made by members of Congress while debating the bills don't mean anything because 95% of Americans never hear those speeches. Honest politicians should be out screaming to any reporter who will listen to educate Americans about where the hundreds of billions of tax dollars have ended up.
This war is 100 times worse than Viet Nam. A least with Viet Nam, the war profits were not being funneled over the backs of our dead soldiers in plain sight directly into the bank accounts of current and former members of the administrations in power at the time.
Nor were they being funneled to the family bank accounts of the Presidents who were in office during the Viet Nam war.Former Nixon administration official, John Dean, has said that the Bush administration is worse than the Nixon's. He’s right; the Bush gang makes the Nixon administration look saintly and gives a whole new meaning to Nixon's famous line of "I am not a crook." In comparison to the actions of the current regime, it could indeed be said that Mr Nixon was not a crook.
Its easy to understand why most Republicans are not about to tell the world that the leader of their party is a war profiteering crook but the question remains, when are Democrats going to start addressing the issue of who is benefiting from all this war funding and start publicly naming names along with the companies they are connected with.
They have the ability to draw press coverage and give the specific names of current and former administration officials and Bush family members who have set up companies to profit off the war or steered contracts to companies they now work.
Last year, most clearly in the fall elections, Americans told Bush and Congress to get our troops out of Iraq. Democrats took control of Congress at the new year, and there was Bush in a televised address on January 10, 2007, announcing that he had ordered the deployment of five more combat brigades to serve as sitting ducks in Iraq, in addition to the 15 brigades that were already there. Since then, he has extended combat tours from 12 months to 15 months and announced the deployment of still more troops.
According to an analysis by Hearst Newspapers, when support troops are added in, the total number of soldiers in Iraq is about 162,000, and could be 200,000 by Christmas.
In the years to come, the history books will describe the Bush Presidency and the details of a grand war profiteering scheme nicknamed the "war on terror," and with that in mind, members of Congress would be wise to start speaking out against the war profiteers to make damn sure that the historians will be able to report that that they were out there calling a spade a spade and trying to put an end to the death for profit disaster in Iraq.
One commentator on a recent cable talk show made the statement that when voting on the Iraq funding; politicians are not in lock step with how strongly Americans feel about ending this war. That comment was an understatement, because Americans are as fed up with politicians debating over the money as much as they are with the war itself.
Members of Congress and the Presidential candidates should quit trying to second guess how American will vote in the next election and think about how much longer they are going to be willing to sit at home in front of their television sets depressed and driven to tears by looking at flashes of the happy faces of soldiers who were killed that day.
As for presidential candidates, the name John Murtha should be added to the ballot, as he seems to be about the only member of Congress willing to go public and speak from the heart when trying to get the rest of Congress to recognize the need for an immediate plan to rescue our young men and women stranded in Iraq.
The candidates that are working hard to try to end the war get little credit or media coverage. Dennis Kucinich is rarely mentioned and he is working tirelessly to come up with ways to get our soldiers out of Iraq.
By the time the 2008 election rolls around, who knows, after weighing the few options available maybe Americans will decide that no candidate who is a current member of Congress and refused to listen to the people on such an important issue as the Iraq war can be trusted to serve as President.


By Evelyn Pringle

mailto:evelyn-pringle@sbcglobal.net(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for OpEd News and an investigative journalist focused on corruption in government and corporate America)

A Predator Becomes More Dangerous When Wounded

In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the cold war, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq - a country otherwise free from any foreign interference - on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world.

In the cold war-like mentality in Washington, Tehran is portrayed as the pinnacle in the so-called Shia crescent that stretches from Iran to Hizbullah in Lebanon, through Shia southern Iraq and Syria. And again unsurprisingly, the "surge" in Iraq and escalation of threats and accusations against Iran is accompanied by grudging willingness to attend a conference of regional powers, with the agenda limited to Iraq.

Presumably this minimal gesture toward diplomacy is intended to allay the growing fears and anger elicited by Washington's heightened aggressiveness. These concerns are given new substance in a detailed study of "the Iraq effect" by terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, revealing that the Iraq war "has increased terrorism sevenfold worldwide". An "Iran effect" could be even more severe.

For the US, the primary issue in the Middle East has been, and remains, effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in the "crescent" challenges US control. By an accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in largely Shia areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq, adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington's worst nightmare would be a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the US.

Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian Energy Security Grid based in China. Iran could be a lynchpin. If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the US position of power in the world.

To Washington, Tehran's principal offence has been its defiance, going back to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the hostage crisis at the US embassy. In retribution, Washington turned to support Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran, which left hundreds of thousands dead. Then came murderous sanctions and, under Bush, rejection of Iranian diplomatic efforts.

Last July, Israel invaded Lebanon, the fifth invasion since 1978. As before, US support was a critical factor, the pretexts quickly collapse on inspection, and the consequences for the people of Lebanon are severe. Among the reasons for the US-Israel invasion is that Hizbullah's rockets could be a deterrent to a US-Israeli attack on Iran. Despite the sabre-rattling it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. Public opinion in the US and around the world is overwhelmingly opposed. It appears that the US military and intelligence community is also opposed. Iran cannot defend itself against US attack, but it can respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave, among them the British military historian Corelli Barnett, who writes that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three".

Then again, a predator becomes even more dangerous, and less predictable, when wounded. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might risk even greater disasters. The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. It has been unable to establish a reliable client state within, and cannot withdraw without facing the possible loss of control of the Middle East's energy resources.

Meanwhile Washington may be seeking to destabilise Iran from within. The ethnic mix in Iran is complex; much of the population isn't Persian. There are secessionist tendencies and it is likely that Washington is trying to stir them up - in Khuzestan on the Gulf, for example, where Iran's oil is concentrated, a region that is largely Arab, not Persian.

Threat escalation also serves to pressure others to join US efforts to strangle Iran economically, with predictable success in Europe. Another predictable consequence, presumably intended, is to induce the Iranian leadership to be as repressive as possible, fomenting disorder while undermining reformers.

It is also necessary to demonise the leadership. In the west, any wild statement by President Ahmadinejad is circulated in headlines, dubiously translated. But Ahmadinejad has no control over foreign policy, which is in the hands of his superior, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The US media tend to ignore Khamenei's statements, especially if they are conciliatory. It's widely reported when Ahmadinejad says Israel shouldn't exist - but there is silence when Khamenei says that Iran supports the Arab League position on Israel-Palestine, calling for normalisation of relations with Israel if it accepts the international consensus of a two-state settlement.

The US invasion of Iraq virtually instructed Iran to develop a nuclear deterrent. The message was that the US attacks at will, as long as the target is defenceless. Now Iran is ringed by US forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and the Persian Gulf, and close by are nuclear-armed Pakistan and Israel, the regional superpower, thanks to US support.

In 2003, Iran offered negotiations on all outstanding issues, including nuclear policies and Israel-Palestine relations. Washington's response was to censure the Swiss diplomat who brought the offer. The following year, the EU and Iran reached an agreement that Iran would suspend enriching uranium; in return the EU would provide "firm guarantees on security issues" - code for US-Israeli threats to bomb Iran.

Apparently under US pressure, Europe did not live up to the bargain. Iran then resumed uranium enrichment. A genuine interest in preventing the development of nuclear weapons in Iran would lead Washington to implement the EU bargain, agree to meaningful negotiations and join with others to move toward integrating Iran into the international economic system.


By Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is co-author, with Gilbert Achcar, of Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy.