clocker bob wrote:You'll soon be reading in the American press that Hamas has 'broken the cease fire in Gaza'...

Cease-fire shaken after Israel-Palestinian clashes kill 6
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Ali Daraghmeh
Associated Press

Nablus, West Bank - Israeli troops killed six Palestinians, including a 17-year-old girl, in the bloodiest day of fighting this year across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials said Saturday.

The dead included three militants in a car in the northern West Bank and a man in Gaza killed in an Israeli airstrike in response to a Palestinian rocket attack.

Israeli officials defended the operations as the latest steps in their war against Palestinian militants. But Palestinian officials said the bloodshed only hurt efforts to expand a cease-fire in Gaza to the West Bank.

srael and Palestinian militants have been observing a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip since November. The truce has largely held, though Gaza militants have fired rockets into Israel.

Late Saturday, Palestinian militants in Gaza fired three homemade rockets into southern Israel.

One of the rockets made a direct hit on a house in the Israeli border town of Sderot, causing no injuries, police said.

Minutes later, an Israeli aircraft fired a missile at a Palestinian car near the rocket launch site, Palestinian officials said.

A 37-year-old man in the car was killed and a second occupant was wounded, medical officials said.

The death toll Saturday was the highest in the West Banksince four people were killed during an Israeli raid in a vegetable market Jan. 4.

defense industry daily 4-24-07 wrote:The US Defense Security Cooperation Agency has notified Congress of Israel's request for 3,500 MK-84 general purpose bomb units, which are 2,000 pound bomb bodies.

Israel has pounded more Gaza targets after an Israeli woman was killed by a rocket in Sderot - the first Israeli fatality from a Palestinian missile in six months.

In an isolated barley field, located just few hundred meters away from the Israel-Gaza border line in eastern Rafah city, a heap of barley lies in the middle of the field. The field is now abandoned -- why? Not because there are no farmers in the area, but rather because the Loulahi family, who had been harvesting barley, were hit by Israeli missiles.

Samah, the daughter, was killed, and Ahmad, the son, killed as well. The father Sulieman was wounded, while A'isha, 19, is being treated at the nearby European Hospital after sustaining shrapnel wounds to her leg.

With her pale and yellow face, while surrounded by relatives and friends, the simple Rafah farmer spoke out with a sadness and bitterness which she would have never felt unless the Israeli missiles hadn't killed her "soul."

Despite her pain, A'isha spoke out: "It was 6:30 pm. We were harvesting the barely near the Sufa crossing, the sun was setting, while myself, my father and my brothers and sisters were all bending down in our field.

"My father asked us to leave our brother Mohammad in the car. We left the field, then the Zannana [unmanned drone plane] fired a missile that hit us directly," Aisha says.

"My father rushed to us and called for the ambulance, then another missile was fired. I kept dragging my body until I arrived at our house and asked help from the neighbors, then a third missile was hit. By then, I heard people saying, 'the car was went off' and I learned that my sister Samah and my brother Ahmad were killed, while my father was injured," A'isha recalls.

"There were no gunmen near us, it's our field, we come here everyday to harvest the barely. Why did they hit us? What is our fault?" A'isha wonders, while sighing bitterly at the loss of her family.

A'isha's family is not to the first and, unfortunately, probably not the last civilian causality as a result of the current Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. Just upon writing this piece, an Israeli tank fire killed three Palestinian shepherds while they were tending to their livestock in the northern Gaza Strip city of Beit Hanoun.

On Thursday, Israeli air forces involving F-16 jetfighters, Apache helicopters and unmanned drones as well as artillery fire, have been hitting several targets across the Gaza Strip, under what Israel termed to be a response to the Palestinian homemade shells being fired by Palestinian resistance groups into nearby Israeli towns.

The attacks have so far killed 36 Palestinians and wounded scores of others, including bystanders, and caused severe damages to civilian infrastructure.

Washington : The US has urged Israel to avoid harming civilians as it conducts military attacks against Hamas in the Gaza Strip but stood behind the Jewish state's right to defend itself.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack Monday said Israel should "take all possible actions" to prevent civilian casualties and damage to Palestinian infrastructure and to ensure the Israeli-Palestinian peace process stays on track.

In the wake of the Majd incident and the publication of the "Benchmarks" document in Haaretz, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice abruptly canceled her trip to Israel, citing "political turmoil" in the Israeli government. In truth, the real turmoil is in Washington, where successive attempts to jump-start a peace process have in effect been short-circuited by Rice's diplomatic fecklessness ("We just don't think she has the president's mandate," an Israeli official notes), or by the White House's willful disregard of Rice's efforts to show America's allies that the US will move to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Condi is just not in charge of your Middle East policy," one Israeli official commented. "Every time she turns around, Elliott Abrams is slapping her down. It's embarrassing." The embarrassment has now become public.

In a breakfast meeting at the White House last Thursday, Abrams told a group of Jewish Republicans that they should not put too much stock in efforts to pressure Israel to reach an agreement with the Palestinians. "He said that pressure on Israel was all for show," a congressional staffer familiar with the meeting said, "and that it was being done just to satisfy the Europeans and Arabs.

"He said, 'You know, we have to show that we're doing something. You really shouldn't worry about it.'"

AlBStern wrote:Israel just pulled out of Gaza and is in the process of doing the same in the West Bank. I realize they aren't going all the way back to '67 borders but they are moving in the right direction.

sonja karkar, global research 6-10-07 wrote:A drive through the West Bank quickly dispels any notions one might have of Israel’s beneficent intentions. There are none. The first ugly blight on the horizon are gleaming white structures clumped together on hilltops. They jut out treeless, naked and unashamed as below them the green valleys continue to gently undulate in their menacing shadows. A shimmering sliver cuts through the land or over it, every now and then brought to life by cars that speed along these highways towards Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Haifa: and below them, life barely moves at all. A looming watchtower confirms the feeling of something very wrong. Grey and threatening with cavernous windows, behind which shadows watch and aim at things that move, this is one of hundreds of such towers overseeing the mass of humanity waiting endlessly at yet another checkpoint that makes every journey torture for every Palestinian.

Soldiers, machine guns, tanks make up the rest of the set pieces as does the razor wire which coils around the kilometres of fencing before it comes up against the Wall – mammoth in size and structure and even more monstrous in the reason for its existence.

Closing in

The Wall is Israel’s provocative solution to the Palestinian problem in the West Bank. It is a wall ostensibly built for Israel’s security, yet its path does not follow the borders between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Instead, at many points it goes deep into the heart of Palestinian territory. The Wall is being built, despite an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice that condemned it. It is being built despite a similar wall coming down almost two decades ago between East and West Berlin. Then, the whole world breathed a sigh of relief that such barbarity had finally come to an end – in the West at least. Israel’s Prison Wall - much higher and longer and begun only 4 years ago – hardly raises a whimper of protest where it counts, despite it being built contrary to the Court’s ruling.

It is a wall, the like of which most people cannot imagine – 8 metres high in places and up to 100 metres wide in others and running 720 kilometres the length and breadth of the West Bank – a wall in some places and electrified razor fencing with ditches and a no-man’s land in others. Already 180 kilometres of wall run right through thousands upon thousands of acres of private land – Palestinian land. Half of that wall encircles East Jerusalem, isolating the city from the rest of the occupied West Bank and separating it from its Palestinian neighbourhoods which are dependent on Jerusalem for their survival. In the process, the Wall has skirted around three of the largest illegal Jewish settlement blocs –aggressively staking out more territory – and connected them to Israel, wiping out all the areas needed for Palestinian natural growth and economic development.

The Wall is the most dangerous phase of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land because it allows for the continual expansion of illegal Israeli settlements deep inside the West Bank. The end result for the Palestinians will be three miserable truncated enclaves without access to valuable water resources or the fertile agricultural land on which they have depended for centuries. Certainly, there will be no contiguity between them or the walled-in Gaza Strip on the coast. It also means that Palestinian movement will have to be severely curtailed within the West Bank in order to protect these implanted illegal settlements. And these illegal activities are still going on while everyone continues to talk in absolute terms about a two-state solution and totally ignoring the realities on the ground. The wall has relegated Palestinian self-determination in their own sovereign state to the bulldozed, treeless dust heap of a prison that Israel has deliberately and systematically succeeded in diminishing. This is the land that Israel wants and is taking, while herding Palestinians into ever smaller disconnected Bantustans, in order to establish an exclusively Jewish state.

AP 6-6-07 wrote:GAZA CITY • Israeli tanks and troops pushed deep into the southern Gaza Strip yesterday targetting Palestinian militant infrastructure in the first such ground operation into the area in months.

Soldiers took over two buildings and military bulldozers ripped up roads during the incursion around the town of Rafah, about two kilometres inside Palestinian territory, witnesses said.

Rick Reuben wrote:Israel threatens to blow Iran off map. Buried somewhere under your round-the-clock Britney Spears/OJ coverage.

Israel tested a missile on Thursday and urged the West to work harder to prevent "the appearance of a nuclear Iran."

Israel Radio said the missile tested was capable of carrying an "unconventional payload" -- an apparent reference to the nuclear warheads Israel is assumed to possess, though it has never publicly confirmed their existence.

All right then... the country that everyone knows has nukes except for some reason they are allowed to have them go uninspected is experimenting with attaching them to missiles. This lawless act in complete defiance of all treaties can only mean one thing: the threat assessment of Iran has to be raised, immediately!

There's only one thing standing in the way of Iran starting WWIII: Zionist maniacs beating them to it.

Rick Reuben wrote:Israeli cabinet minister threatens to blow Gaza off the map:

"”We must take a neighborhood in Gaza and wipe it off the map”- Cabinet Minister Meir Sheetrit, New York Times, 10th Feb 2008

And you know what is wild?? They can!