U.S. congressman Brian Baird (D-Washington) told a group of Palestinian schoolchildren in Gaza on Sunday that the United States should unilaterally send supplies through the Israeli blockade, according to the Associated Press.
"We ought to bring roll-on, roll-off ships and roll them right to the beach and bring the relief supplies in, in our version of the Berlin airlift," Baird said.
Baird has announced that he will not seek reelection this year.
Egypt's ultra-rural and often aggrieved Sinai Peninsula Bedouin population has long been one of the country's major unreported stories, so it's nice to see Time magazine reporter Abigail Hauslohner making the trek into the sand dunes to cover Bedouin life.
But Hauslohner's story, posted on the Time's Web site today, paints an unnerving picture of a people on the edge of violent revolt. The Bedouins have long been ignored or scorned by the authoritarian central government in Cairo. Lately, according to Hauslohner, they've been raking in cash by controlling the Egyptian side of smuggling tunnels that snake into the Gaza Strip. But with President Hosni Mubarak moving to shut down those tunnels, Hauslohner theorizes, the Bedouin might now get the spark that finally sets them off.
At first glimpse, the story posted on the Jerusalem Post's Web site yesterday looked like a blockbuster: "Hamas accepts Israel's right to exist."
"Hamas has accepted Israel's right to exist and would be prepared to nullify its charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel," wrote reporter Khaled Abu Toameh. Toameh attributed the declaration, a landmark change in Hamas' decades-old philosophy, to Aziz Dwaik, the elected speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council and the highest ranking member of Hamas in the West Bank.
Sounds legitimate, but some things are just too good to be true. Dwaik repudiated the Post's report within 24 hours, telling the Ma'an News Agency that the story was "inaccurate," and a Hamas representative in Gaza denied Dwaik's statement in an interview (عربي) with Al-Sharq Al-Awset.
Fatah operatives "hired a house and cars in the eastern part of Gaza City" as part of a plan to kidnap a "senior" Hamas military official and turn him over to Israel in order to provide intelligence on the location of captured soldier Gilad Shalit, a Hamas security official told Haaretz on Thursday.
But Hamas foiled the plan, hatched by the Israeli intelligence service Shin Bet, according to Abu Abdullah, the head of Hamas internal security.
It makes sense that Israel wants to explore all its options, and there's certainly leverage to be had in knowing as much as possible about Shalit's whereabouts and welfare, but this story begs the question: Would it be worth it for Israel to stage a snatch-and-grab?
Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni reversed plans to attend yesterday's annual conference of the Jewish National Fund's United Kingdom branch because a warrant had been issued for her arrest in connection with the 2008 Israeli offensive into Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead, Al-Quds Al-Arabi has reported.
Sources close to Livni, the leader of Kadima, the largest parliamentary party, told the Jerusalem Post that she decided not to attend because she wouldn't get a meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who was traveling. Livni's office first told Haaretz that she had canceled the London event two weeks ago due to a "scheduling conflict."
The Jerusalem Post reports that Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas' leader in the Gaza Strip, has canceled his trip to Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage, raising hopes that a prisoner swap deal for captured Israel Defense Forces Corporal Gilad Shalit is going to happen soon.
Anticipation that hundreds of Palestinian prisoners might soon be released in a deal with Israel was so high in Gaza that Haniyeh had been asked to remain in the Gaza Strip to greet the prisoners, said a Hamas legislator in Gaza City.
"We have proven to Hamas that we have changed the equation ... [Operation Cast Lead] has restored Israel's deterrence ... Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild - and this is a good thing." - Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Jan. 12, 2009
"I began to see Gaza as, I suspect, many Gazans do: a floating island, a dystopian Atlantis, drifting farther away from contact with any other society." - Lawrence Wright
I finally got around to reading Wright's big New Yorker take out on the situation in the Gaza Strip and highly recommend it. Though Wright's story is subtitled "What really happened during the Israeli attacks?", the piece is more of a tour de misère of what ails Gaza than an investigation into the veracity of the Goldstone report. The unavoidable conclusion one draws is that Israel is building its own worst enemy.
