“During the last six months specifically, the Israelis basically in my opinion have been spinning out of control. They have unleashed, literally daily attacks on Palestinians. Unfortunately, the world only sees every once in a while what’s happening there, when there is a camera taking a picture such as the incident when the whole family of civilians was killed on the beach. For the last six years, there’s been a non-stop onslaught in terms of not only killing Palestinians, but also raids into Palestinian cities where they’re actually arresting people on a nightly basis.” Christopher Brown talks to Sam Bahour in Palestine. Read more about A Race Against Time: An interview with Sam Bahour
In another Israeli move designed to further isolate Palestinians from the rest of the world community, it is being reported that the Israeli army will be declaring the West Bank closed to foreign nationals. The Gaza Strip has already been made virtually inaccessible to foreign nationals; those who wish to enter must apply to the Israeli authorities, weeks in advance, to receive elusive permits. The effect is that the plight of the Palestinian civilian population living under Israeli occupation becomes all the more invisible to the international community. Read more about Entry denied: Deporting witnesses of Israeli occupation and unilateralism
The plight of Palestinian children arrested by the Israeli army has long been one of the neglected aspects of Israeli occupation, involving some 600 minors a year since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000. Nearly all are held without access to legal support during questioning, often compelled to sign confessions in Hebrew, a language they don’t understand, while subjected to intimidation and mistreatment as a matter of routine course. It starts with the arrest itself, which can take place during night-time incursions or mass arrest campaigns, or at military checkpoints. Read more about A Welcome Spotlight on Palestinian Child Prisoners
The killing by Palestinian militants of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third from an army post close to the Gaza Strip set the scene for Israeli “reprisals” and “retaliation”, according to the reports of BBC correspondents in Israel and Gaza at the weekend. We can ignore the weeks of shelling by the Israeli army of Gaza, the firing of hundreds of missiles into the crowded Strip that have destroyed Palestinian lives and property, while spreading terror among the civilian population. Read more about 'Escalation', 'retaliation' and BBC double standards in Gaza
Reading Lee Kaplan’s various articles, in a variety of publications over the last several months, on the supposed links between organizations that work for Palestinian freedom, my primary reaction is how severely and routinely they are riddled with basic factual errors. He clearly knows next to nothing about what he is writing about. Where there is not error, there is speculation that bases its trajectory on error… One obvious reason that has given rise to all of this is that Kaplan has never once picked up the phone to ask myself or anyone else at EI the usual questions that journalists are supposed to ask before they put pen to paper. Read more about Lee Kaplan's distortions
“The history of occupation is not just that of Palestinian suffering and Israeli aggression; it is also the history of its ideology, the history of the fictions the Israeli society fabricates in order to justify its major colonial project which has just entered its 40th year. These fictions do have a history: one can trace their career from birth to maturity, their shifts from the margin to the center and vice versa, their rise and fall among definite segments of the Israeli society or media, sometimes their (reversible) death.” Dr. Ran HaCohen, an occasional contributor to Antiwar.com where this commentary was first published, was born in the Netherlands in 1964 and grew up in Israel. Read more about The Ideology of Occupation Revisited
On weekdays, he brings a new generation of Jewish Israelis to life. On weekends, he goes back to his Palestinian patients at the packed Jabaliya refugee camp to try and help them get appointments and transfers to the more developed Israeli hospitals. Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, 51, gynecologist and obstetrician, is the first Palestinian doctor working at the Israeli Soroka University Hospital in the city of Beersheba. He goes through security checks and a multitude of checkpoints almost every day to reach his workplace. Read more about A doctor of peace
The Israeli military’s shelling of a Gaza beach on June 9 and killing of eight Palestinian civilians focused world attention on Israel’s intensive artillery campaign against Gaza. Since then, 14 more Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli missiles. The US corporate media has highlighted dubious Israeli denials of responsibility for the Gaza beach killings, while providing much less space to Palestinian and third party assertions of Israeli responsibility. Read more about US Corporate Media Misses Target in Israel’s Aerial Assault on Gaza
It is just an old house at the northern edge of Khan Younis, in the south Gaza Strip. Its asbestos ceiling, wrinkled walls, and old wooden doors ridden with holes reflect the cruel poverty of Abdelqader Ahmed, 57. His 80-year-old mother, Fadhiyya Ahmed, spent yesterday in one of her favorite pastimes - being with her family. Sons, daughters, grandsons, and sons-in-law gathered around her, celebrating the return of her son Zakariyya from Saudi Arabia. Read more about A short trip to Gaza made them orphans
In Israeli discourse, Israel is always presented as the side exercising restraint in its conflict with the Palestinians. In the past week, it was “leaked” that the Israeli Minister of Defense had directed the army to show restraint. During the past week of Israeli restraint, the army killed a Palestinian family who went on a picnic on the Beit Lahya beach in the Gaza Strip; after that, the army killed nine people in order to liquidate a Katyusha rocket. Read more about A Week of Israeli Restraint
