We'd like to blog about Joe Biden's Tel Aviv speech, but the White House still hasn't e-mailed a transcript to reporters (perhaps because it was undergoing some last-minute revisions?).
News reports say Biden urged Israel and the Palestinians to begin proximity talks without delay. But they're already in doubt: The Arab League held an emergency meeting in Cairo last night (عربي), and decided to withdraw its support for the talks because of the new construction in Ramot Shlomo.
President Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, arrived in Ramallah last night to begin "pre-talks" to the "proximity talks" the United States hopes will occur between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the National reports. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone who has much faith in their ultimate success.
Forensic tests on the body of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, the assassinated founder of the Qassam Brigades and a former high-ranking Hamas official, revealed traces of the drug succinylcholine, a muscle relaxant, that had apparently been injected into Mabhouh's thigh, according to Dubai authorities.
The new information on Mabhouh's killing was released today in a statement by deputy Dubai police chief Maj. Gen. Khamis Mattar al-Mazeina, who also said that Mabhouh had been suffocated by a pillow "so that it would seem that his death was natural."
James Rainey, the Los Angeles Times' media critic, waded into the month-old controversy over New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner yesterday, concluding that Bronner should be allowed to remain in his post, despite his son volunteering to join Israel's army, the Israel Defense Forces.
In his piece, Rainey argues that Bronner is a skilled reporter who should be judged on the content of his journalism, not on potential biases and internal thought processes that nobody besides Bronner himself can fully understand.
Rainey makes a good case for judging journalists by their work, but he also sidesteps the most powerful arguments against Bronner's remaining.
Dubai police now say 26 people, not the original 11, were involved in assassinating Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
The updated list includes six new British passport holders, and three people each with Irish, French and Australian passports. Two of the names are women; the original list of 11 included just one woman, Gail Folliard.
Police also released two somewhat complicated graphics showing the movements of the alleged hit squad. We've posted them both after the jump. The first one shows nine members of the team traveling to Dubai in November 2009 -- reportedly to plot the assassination; the second shows their movements in the days before and after Mabhouh's murder. The group traveled through more than a half-dozen countries en route to Dubai.
I've only been to Hebron once. It was one of the stranger experiences in my travels in the Middle East -- the overwhelming military presence to protect a few hundred settlers, the settler-only road, the grave of Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein. The tension is palpable.
The city is a flashpoint again this week, after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to add two West Bank religious sites -- the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem -- to a national heritage plan. The list includes other religious sites and "historic sites in Zionist history"; the Israeli government has earmarked NIS400 million (US$106 million) to refurbish the sites.
Nearly half of Palestinians would vote for Fatah if presidential elections were held next week, while only around 11 percent would vote for Hamas, according to a survey conducted recently in the West Bank and Gaza.
The poll, which queried 880 Palestinian men and women, found that nearly one third were undecided or would not vote.
The survey was conducted between Feb. 13 - 15. So far, it appears, only Benjamin Joffe-Walt of the Media Line has reported on the results. Our efforts to reach the polling group, Near East Consulting, by e-mail were unsuccessful.
Dubai police chief Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim says he has proof -- credit card receipts and phone records -- that Mossad was involved in killing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
"Among the new evidence available to Dubai police which incriminates the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, and confirms its involvement in the murder ... are telephone communications between the culprits who have been detected," Tamim said in the newspaper Al-Bayan.
"Dubai police also have reliable information that some perpetrators bought their tickets in other countries using credit cards bearing the same identity revealed" previously by the emirate, he added.
Tamim doesn't really elaborate, though, on how either of these link Mossad to the assassination. A credit card receipt by itself is not incriminating -- unless the billing address on the card is "Mossad HQ, Jerusalem, Israel."
In the department of "things that should have been done a long time ago," the U.S. State Department has finally lifted its Syria travel warning.
I was never entirely clear on why Syria fell under a travel warning in the first place: The State Department's warning (which has since been removed from the Internet) never referenced any specific threats -- just some ominous language about "large-scale demonstrations" in Damascus, and the fact that Hamas and Hizballah have offices in the country. It always struck me as a product of politics, not legitimate security concerns.
In any event, glad to see it has been lifted. The State Department's full announcement is after the jump.
As we said on Wednesday, British officials haven't officially blamed Israel for Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's assassination -- but they clearly suspect Mossad, and they're angry that the killers used fake British (plus Irish, French and German) passports. The Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ron Prosor, was summoned to Whitehall yesterday to discuss the case.
But now a British tabloid, the Daily Mail, claims a Mossad agent tipped off the British government shortly before the hit.
I'm not even really sure where to begin writing about the latest on the Mahmoud al-Mabhouh assassination. The story really jumped into the spotlight today, largely because of the revelation that more than half of the 11 people wanted for Mabhouh's murder used real identities -- but fake passports.
Dubai police identified six of Mabhouh's killers as British passport holders Michael Lawrence Barney, James Leonard Clarke, Jonathan Louis Graham, Paul John Keeley, Stephen Daniel Hodes, and Melvyn Adam Mildiner.
And it turns out that all six are real people -- British citizens living in Israel. The killers used their identities on forged passports; the names, birthdays and other biographical information were accurate, but the signatures and photographs were not, according to British authorities. Mildiner actually appeared on Israel's Channel 10 news today, and said he hasn't left the country in two years.
The Dubai police department today released photos of the 11 people allegedly responsible for assassinating Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last month -- and the chief of police says he's close to issuing arrest warrants for the group.
Everyone in the group held European passports, according to police: six British, three Irish, one French and one German. The lone woman in the group had an Irish passport. The Ma'an News Agency (عربي) and Al-Jazeera (عربي) both report that the group included two Palestinians; one of them reportedly met with the group's leader, a Frenchman named Peter.
Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, Dubai's police chief, says both Palestinians were arrested in the UAE as they were leaving for trips to China and the Sudan. Tamim said one of them acted as a "spotter" for the assassination.
Well -- not exactly. The Palestinian Authority announced today (عربي) that it arrested six "al-Qaeda sympathizers"; the men reportedly had a cache of explosives and were planning to attack targets in the West Bank.
But Brig. Gen. Ibrahim Ramadan, the head of preventive security in Jenin, said that men have no known connections to al-Qaeda. They're allegedly inspired by Osama bin Laden -- but they were operating autonomously.
United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon can't say whether Israel and the Palestinian Authority are on the right track when it comes to investigating the Goldstone Report's conclusions.
Israel and Hamas, you'll remember, last month released preliminary results of their investigations. Neither was particularly convincing: Hamas absolved itself of any wrongdoing, and Israel rejected most of Goldstone's findings.
The Pew Global Attitudes Project has some new polling data out from a survey of the Muslim world -- except it's not really new: These are the previously-unreleased results of a survey conducted in May and June of last year.
Remember that nine-month lag as you read the poll. It's great to have public opinion data on Hizballah and Hassan Nasrallah, but the polling in Lebanon ended on June 3 -- before the Lebanese election! So it doesn't account for March 14's victory, the months-long cabinet-making process that followed, Hizballah's new manifesto, the Syrian-Saudi reconciliation, etc.
And some of the poll's findings are just downright unbelievable. So let's take a look, shall we?
The Mahmoud al-Mabhouh case has dropped out of the headlines for a few days, but it popped up this morning in The National, which interviewed Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the chief of the Dubai police department. Tamim still won't name the suspects -- but says he will issue an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli Mossad is implicated.
Depending on your perspective, Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad this week reaffirmed either that he's the best hope to build a future Palestinian state, or that he'll never win enough popular support to be an effective leader. (Or maybe both?)
Fayyad traveled to Herzliya, a coastal town north of Tel Aviv, to take part in the annual Herzliya Conference. He delivered a 30-minute address to an audience of mostly Israeli leaders; he sat next to Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak; and he was lauded by Israeli president Shimon Peres as "the Israeli Ben-Gurion."
Hamas is now walking back claims that its initial investigation into Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's killing exonerated Mossad and placed the blame on unnamed Arab governments.
"The Israeli press is disseminating dozens of stories and versions about the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, some of the unfortunately are quoted by Arab and international newspapers, but all of these stories are far from the truth," Moussa Abu Marzouk said.
An Abu Dhabi police commander said the investigation is going well, though he still hasn't identified the killers (عربي).
Hamas apparently tried to retaliate by floating barrels filled with explosives towards beaches in southern Israel. A bomb squad defused one barrel; the other blew up while a police robot was inspecting it. Israeli F-16s launched airstrikes in Gaza within the last few minutes -- likely a response to the failed Hamas attack. The jets targeted an abandoned building and several smuggling tunnels under the Egyptian border.
Ha'aretz says a preliminary inquiry -- conducted by Hamas -- concluded that Arab governments, and not the Mossad, are behind the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month.
... details of a Hamas inquiry passed to Haaretz reveal that Arab states, not Israel, now top the suspect list. Both Hamas and Dubai police say that Mabhouh had enemies across the Middle East, any of whom may have had a motive for his murder.
Obligatory caveat: The paper doesn't say how it obtained the inquiry report. But I've heard several variations of this theory in the last few days -- either that Mabhouh, a weapons smuggler, was killed in an arms deal gone bad; or that one of his many enemies knocked him off.
No arrests yet, nor claims of responsibility, in the assassination of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh -- but officals in Dubai say they've got a lead.
Police said yesterday that the killers hold European passports. And today they told Ha'aretz the killers "left behind evidence" that could lead to their arrest; officials in Dubai have reportedly contacted Interpol for help with the investigation.
