Gaza Strip - Tag Search

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.

"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.

Lots of nuclear weapons news today. Muammar Qadhafi thinks everyone in the Arab world -- Egyptians, Syrians, Saudis, even the Palestinians -- has a right to nuclear weapons, unless Israel gives up its own arsenal.

He doesn't mention his own country -- perhaps a good idea, given Libya's history with nukes.

Richard Goldstone, despite recent claims to the contrary, is not the rabidly anti-Semitic author of a modern-day Protocols of the Elders of Zion, nor is he a one-man wrecking crew, out to destroy the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Nope. In person, at least, he's a soft-spoken, reasonable-seeming, slightly balding South African man. He spoke for about an hour at the National Press Club in downtown Washington. The audience was surprisingly small -- roughly 40 people -- considering the magnitude of the controversy around Goldstone's report.

Then again, it was a late-afternoon speech on a busy news day; alternatively, as one audience member said to me, "maybe everyone is just Israel-d out."

Goldstone spent most of the hour fielding questions from the audience, which was largely Jewish and politically diverse. One person thanked him for shining a light on the brutal blockade of Gaza (which Goldstone said creates a "tremendous amount of misery" for Palestinians). Another asked why his report didn't pay more attention to Hamas' years-long campaign of terror against southern Israel (which Goldstone called deplorable).

We'll tackle a short section today, mostly because I had a long day at work and I'm exhausted, but also because tomorrow's section -- which focuses on Israeli attacks on Palestinian police -- is an important one. I'd like to devote a lengthy post to it.

So today we'll look at p. 95-109. This section begins with a history of the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which began in February 2006 after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary election. Israel would periodically cut off the flow of goods into Gaza, depending on the political climate and the level of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Western countries also imposed a sort of blockade of their own, cutting off aid to Hamas and redirecting it to NGOs and other organizations.

Yesterday's reading covered the 40 years of history between the Six-Day War and Operation Cast Lead. Today's reading (p. 71-95) focuses specifically on the six months of calm -- the tahdiyah -- that preceded Israel's winter war in Gaza.

The tahdiyah was a six-month truce agreed to by both Israel and the Palestinians, though the Goldstone Report notes that both sides had interpretations of the deal that "differed substantially." It was supposed to end terrorist attacks by Palestinian groups against Israel and stop Israeli military offensives in Gaza. It did neither.

Three weeks after it started, both sides were also supposed to meet to discuss a prisoner exchange and the re-opening of the Israel-Gaza border crossings. By the end of the tahdiyah, Israel had taken more Palestinian prisoners, and the border crossings were sealed tight.

Gregg mentioned in his roundup this morning that George Mitchell, the United States' special envoy to the Middle East, is meeting with high-level Israeli officials in Tel Aviv today. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, won't be there.

But don't fret: Netanyahu, much as he might like to, isn't ducking Mitchell. He's in Egypt, discussing regional peace and the fate of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

The Jerusalem Post, reporting on Netanyahu's visit, says Israel isn't pleased with the state of peace negotiations:

Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu was supposed to visit Israel today to meet with Israeli officials, but he canceled the trip at the last minute -- because Israel wouldn't allow him to travel to Jerusalem from Gaza.

"If they go directly from Gaza and meetings with Hamas to Jerusalem and meetings with Israeli leaders, it creates the impression that we are legitimizing those visits," said the [senior diplomatic] official. "We have no intention of doing that."

No, definitely not. Far better to create tension with Turkey, an important regional power that has played a constructive role in negotiations between Israel and Syria!

Israel has really been ramping up the rhetoric against NGOs lately. Today we read about the latest installment in the anti-Human Rights Watch jihad: NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based group, says HRW's latest report (on human rights abuses committed by the IDF) has "a very serious bias and lack of credibility."

And the IDF blasted a report by B'Tselem, the leftist Israeli group, on the number of civilian deaths in last winter's war in Gaza. The report found that half of the 1,328 Palestinians killed during the war were civilians.

Happy Labor Day to all our U.S. readers, and to those of you abroad who'd like to have a Labor Day of your own. The Majlis will be taking it pretty easy today and resting our weary fingers. For now, here's your dose of timely news.

Iraq experienced its worst month of violence in more than a year in August, BBC News reports. The Iraqi government estimates that 393 people were killed, including 60 police officers and soldiers. You can view our map tracking the recent violence here. The death toll in August was far below the violence seen in 2006 and 2007, when more than 2,000 civilians were killed every month, but the rising disorder makes posts like these seem somewhat incoherent.

I'm three weeks late on catching this Christian Science Monitor story, but I thought I'd post it next to the Khaled Meshal item below. It seems that Hamas is reaping a pretty sweet profit - though how sweet is hard to tell - from Israel's ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Hamas officials and their allies are buying up (relatively) expensive Gaza property, and Hamas is reportedly charging a 14.5 percent tax of items smuggled through Gaza's elaborate tunnel system. A Hamas spokesman says the government spends $30 million every month; a former economic adviser to Fatah estimates Hamas pulls in more than three times that much in monthly revenue.

Local businessmen say the new Islamic National Bank is a Hamas front. A manager there says the bank is not affiliated with Hamas. But shortly after it opened, Hamas started paying all its employees' salaries through its branches.

The pre-vacation edition:

The National says Afghan women are questioning the value of their vote. Anecdotal reports suggest female voting was very low -- in part because women seem pretty disillusioned about the candidates.

Gaza is pumping millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Mediterranean every single day. The reason? Gaza can't import spare parts to repair its sewer systems because of Israel's inhumane and illegal blockade.

The latest Egyptian conspiracy theory: An Israeli campaign to control the Nile River.

The Azerbaijani government is threatening five years in prison for two bloggers who posted a video of a donkey giving a news conference. This might be part of the reason why the Azerbaijani ambassador got snubbed at Obama's iftar.

Like grass growing through cracks in a city sidewalk, the sport (art?) of surfing is maintaining a tentative toehold in Gaza, reports Brian Calvert of the National.

Iran has not added any new centrifuges to its nuclear facility at Natanz, after expanding capacity steadily for the last three years, according to IAEA inspectors.

The last IAEA report on Iran said the country had more than 5,000 operating centrifuges, with another 2,000 ready to go online. The Natanz facility has produced more than 3,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium so far.

Diplomats told Reuters they aren't sure why Iran has stopped adding centrifuges.

The IAEA's latest report on Iran is due out this week.

Hamas will expel any female students not wearing hijabs and full-length robes at schools in the Gaza Strip, according to Ha'aretz. It will also prohibit men from teaching at girls' schools, and vice versa.

Glad to see they're tackling the good governance/quality-of-life issues that propelled them to victory over Fatah in 2006. What will they think of next? A campaign to brand blue jeans as satanic dress?

Al-Jazeera English has a new report on prisoner abuse in Gaza, carried out by Hamas. Most of Gaza's prisons were destroyed by Israeli bombings during Operation Cast Lead last winter, and prisoners were transferred to "undisclosed locations" run by Hamas' internal security forces.

Iraqi insurgents will probably increase their attacks ahead of January's national election, according to prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.

"Terrorists are increasing their attacks here and there because they recognize that we are about to have a political breakthrough," Maliki told Shi'a tribal leaders during a meeting in Baghdad.

Violence in Iraq has increased in recent days, much of it directed against the country's Shi'a majority. Voters will select 275 members of parliament and a new prime minister during the election; Maliki, who is running for re-election, has campaigned largely on a platform of increased security.

Did Hamas hijack three ambulances that belong to UNRWA? The IDF made that claim last week. Hamas confirmed it yesterday, claiming the ambulances were "confiscated" because they lacked "proper documentation." Those Hamas bureaucrats are sticklers for paperwork, apparently.

But then a spokesman for UNRWA sent a photo to the Jerusalem Post showing a staffer from their Gaza office standing next to three ambulances.

Hamas has hijacked ambulances before: During the Gaza war last winter, for example, Hamas used them to transport fighters. Regardless of whether these ambulances were stolen, the IDF now has even more reason to believe that Gaza's ambulances are being used for illicit purposes -- so it's even more likely to attack them (again, there's precedent). As always, civilians will suffer.

Good Monday morning to you. We'll be following a series of deadly bombings in Iraq today that killed more than 40 people -- details on that in a subsequent post.

Israeli fighter jets bombed an alleged arms smuggling tunnel in the Gaza Strip last night. The IDF told Yedioth Ahronoth that the bombs destroyed the tunnel; Reuters quoted a Hamas spokesman who said there were no injuries in the bombing.

The bombing came a day after Palestinian terrorists launched a Qassam rocket into Israel from Gaza. The rocket landed near a kibbutz, causing no casualties or damage.

66 percent of Israelis support illegal construction in east Jerusalem, according to a new poll published by Tel Aviv University. Just 27 percent of Israelis oppose it.

The poll found modest support for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who received a 53 percent approval rating. U.S. president Barack Obama received lower marks: 46 percent said he is "more sympathetic" to the Palestinians, with just 7 percent describing him as "pro-Israeli." Those numbers have shifted since Obama's Cairo speech two months ago, though, when 55 percent of Israelis said he was "pro-Palestinian."

38 percent of Israelis said they trust Obama to "maintain Israeli interests," up from 26 percent two months ago.