GAZA CITY (IPS) - Ghalia Hussein’s husband refused to evacuate their Rafah home near the Israeli border amid heavy bombardment during the recent 22-day siege. Struck by a missile at the top of their stairs, he bled to death while ambulances attempted to reach him. He left Ghalia three children, a destroyed home, and no income to speak of. “I had to flee with the children. There was nothing we could do.” Read more about Under the bombing, a girl named Hope 

In neighborhoods around New Orleans, there’s a buzz of excitement gathering among this city’s Arab population. A new wave of organizing has brought energy and inspiration to a community that is usually content to stay in the background. Jordan Flaherty reports. Read more about New Orleans intifada 

The story of Jaffa’s ongoing Nakba is the story of the transformation of a thriving modern urban center into a marginalized neighborhood suffering from poverty, discrimination, gentrification, crime and demolition since the initial wave of mass expulsion in 1948 to the present day. Sami Abu Shehadeh and Fadi Shbaytah trace Jaffa’s modern history. Read more about Jaffa: from eminence to ethnic cleansing 

A new study by Arab Media Watch demonstrates a strong tendency in the British press to represent Israel as “retaliating” in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The study, the first to investigate this aspect of British press coverage of the conflict, examined a period from January to June 2008. It found that when the British press represents a party as retaliating or responding in the conflict, that party is Israel 72 percent of the time. The tabloid press showed a particularly marked bias, representing Israel as retaliating in 100 percent of all representations of “retaliation.” Read more about Study: Israel "retaliates" to Palestinian "provocation" in UK press 

As the only facility of its kind in Gaza, al-Wafa hospital is set to receive more people who have lost limbs to begin a rehabilitation process that can take weeks, months and even years. Patients receive physical, functional, psychological and clinical support. The number and severity of injuries as a result of the Israeli attack were unprecedented and unfamiliar to Gaza’s doctors.The Electronic Intifada contributor Rami Almeghari reports from the occupied Gaza Strip. Read more about Long road to rehabilitation for Gaza's amputees 

The peace mirage, however, is all deception with no fascination. The so-called “peace process” and the resulting negotiations long ago became ends in themselves: profitable or self-serving for the participants and failure-disguising for all concerned. For Israel, it is ideal to give the impression that it is engaged in peace talks while it continues to occupy and colonize Palestinians and deny their rights, as if the situation on the ground would have no effect on any negotiations. Hasan Abu Nimah comments. Read more about Chasing mirages in the Middle East 

The export of unmanned aerial vehicles, techniques of urban warfare and other tools of Israel’s pacification industry is the occupation’s contribution to the sustaining of the global power structures. Jimmy Johnson analyzes for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about Unmanned aerial vehicles and the warfare of inequality management 

CAIRO (IPS) - Coverage of Israel’s recent war on the Gaza Strip by regional news stations has reflected longstanding political divisions within the Arab world. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera’s reporting drew a particularly angry response from Egypt. “Coverage of the Gaza conflict by certain Arab language news channels aggravated the rift between the Arab ‘moderate’ and ‘rejectionist’ camps,” Mohamed Mansour, professor of mass media at Cairo University told IPS. Read more about Egypt on offensive after critical Al-Jazeera coverage 

Since Israel’s bombing of the buildings housing scientific laboratories at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) on 28 December, the rubble that remains debunks Israeli claims that those labs were used to manufacture weapons. Of course such allegations are preposterous; indeed it would be quite foolish for IUG to even entertain the notion of producing weapons given the way in which Palestinian universities have been under constant Israeli attack since the founding of Birzeit University in the West Bank in 1975. Akram Habeeb and Marcy Newman comment for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about Rebuilding the Islamic University of Gaza 

Suppose that the US weapon makers had to use a tunnel to deliver weapons to Israel. The US would have to build a mighty big tunnel to accommodate the weapons that Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Caterpillar have supplied to Israel. The size of such a tunnel would be an eighth wonder of the world, a Grand Canyon of a tunnel, an engineering feat of the ages. Kathy Kelly writes from Chicago, the United States after returning from Gaza. Read more about If Israel's weapons came through a tunnel 

The activities of French transportation giants Veolia and Alstom in building on occupied Palestinian land clearly constitute misconduct sufficiently grave to warrant the exclusion of all its divisions from public contracts in Europe. It is difficult to imagine what misconduct could be more grave than the aiding, abetting, facilitation or exacerbation of war crimes and human rights violations. Adri Nieuwhof and Daniel Machover comment for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about Time to hold Veolia to account 

Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper’s government publicly supported Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza and voted alone at the UN Human Rights Committee in defense of Israel’s actions three weeks ago. Now Canada has taken over Israeli diplomacy. Literally. In solidarity with Gaza, Venezuela expelled Israel’s ambassador at the start of the bombardment and then broke off all diplomatic relations two weeks later. Israel need not worry since Ottawa plans to help out. On 29 January, The Jerusalem Post reported that “Israel’s interests in Caracas will now be represented by the Canadian Embassy.” This means Canada is officially Israel, at least in Venezuela. Yves Engler comments for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about Canada becomes Israel 

GAZA CITY (IRIN) - Aid agencies are becoming increasingly frustrated with the difficulties of getting humanitarian supplies into the Gaza Strip. “For us to move ahead with rehabilitation and repairs, we must get building materials into Gaza,” Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), told IRIN by telephone. “Two hundred and twenty-one schools for 200,000 children only have 40 percent of their books because we can’t get paper and glue into Gaza.” Read more about Israeli closures prevent import of aid, cement to Gaza 

Two years ago the Israeli Coalition of Women for Peace set up its project entitled, Who Profits from the Israeli occupation? In January, the Coalition officially launched its on-line database, www.whoprofits.org, listing companies directly involved in the occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights. Dalit Baum, coordinator of the project, explains to The Electronic Intifada contributor Adri Nieuwhof how the project came about. Read more about Israeli women expose companies complicit in occupation 

In spite of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, in Palestine and throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, Hamas and the resistance option it represents is immeasurably stronger. The ridiculous no-longer-president-of-anything Mahmoud Abbas, and the gangs loyal to Fatah warlord Muhammad Dahlan, are much weaker. It wasn’t Abbas but Hamas political chief in exile, Khaled Meshal who represented Palestine at the Doha emergency summit last month. While the Abbas-Dahlan traitors arrested Hamas activists, and tried (and largely failed) to suppress solidarity demonstrations on the West Bank, the resistance was standing firm against Zionist terror. Robin Yassin-Kassab comments for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about The resistance option 

“This is at the beginning, when they started digging survivors and bodies out of the rubble,” Abu Qusay said, referring to a photo of himself buried up to his shoulders in rubble, his face bloodied. Just a few weeks after being buried alive by the bombing which attacked the building he was in, only a mere scar at his left eyebrow hinted at the ordeal. Eva Bartlett writes from the occupied Gaza Strip. Read more about Buried alive 

“The BBC cannot be neutral in the struggle between truth and untruth, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, compassion and cruelty, tolerance and intolerance.” Thus read a 1972 internal document called Principles and Practice in News and Current Affairs laying out the guidelines for the BBC’s coverage of conflicts. It appears to affirm that in cases of oppression and injustice to be neutral is to be complicit, because neutrality reinforces the status quo. Muhammad Idrees Ahmad comments. Read more about BBC's "impartiality" anything but 

UNITED NATIONS (IPS) - The United Nations is urgently appealing for 613 million dollars to aid more than a million desperate civilians in the ruins of Gaza, where schools, hospitals, houses, factories and even farmland were obliterated during the three-week assault by Israeli air and ground forces. At least 1,300 Palestinians were killed and more than 5,300 injured in the war, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Some 21,000 homes were reported destroyed or badly damaged, and more than 50,000 people were displaced into temporary UN shelters. Read more about Gaza slowly reemerging from the rubble 

Piles of bricks, metal sheets and pieces of wood, are all that remains of tens of Palestinian homes in the Ezbet Abed Rabu (Abed Rabu Ranch) neighborhood, east of Jabaliya town in the northern Gaza Strip. “There is nothing left for us to live for — the house was lost and the furniture destroyed,” lamented Suad Muhammad Abed Rabu. The Electronic Intifada contributor Rami Almeghari reports from the occupied Gaza Strip. Read more about In Gaza, a "ranch" turned to rubble