Ironically, it was Israel that helped Hamas to power. They did everything in their power to humiliate Abbas, refusing talks, giving him nothing. It was in Israel's interest to ensure that Abbas became popular, not to stymie the Fatah government at every turn.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Abbas seemed helpless, nothing was changing, life just getting harder, Israeli roadblocks, missiles fired into the streets, poverty and hunger. Hamas offered hope, fight back, some dignity. This is what happened in Germany after WW1, not only was life hard, but the "winners" had taken away Germany's dignity. Hitler offered work, Hitler offered the restoration of German dignity.

Now wouldn't you have thought that lesson would have been learnt by now?

Monday January 30, 2006

Aya al-Astal a nine-year-old Palestinian girl wandered towards the fence along the border between the Gaza strip and Israel. The Israeli army later said Aya was behaving in a suspicious manner reminiscent of a terrorist - she got too close to the border fence - and so a soldier fired several bullets into the child, hitting her in the neck and blowing open her stomach.

Aya was the second child killed by the Israeli army last week. Soldiers near Ramallah shot 13-year-old Munadel Abu Aaalia in the back as he walked along a road reserved for Jewish settlers with two friends.

The two killings went unnoticed by the outside world amid the political drama, but they made their impact among Palestinians angered by demands from western leaders for Hamas to recognise Israel and renounce its armed struggle.
Some Palestinians see the demands as a rejection of a democratic election and as siding with Israel. Others see hypocrisy. They say Israeli soldiers killed twice as many Palestinians last week alone - both of them children - as the number of Israelis killed by Hamas all last year.
Hamas is responsible for the murder of more than 400 Israelis. But since it declared a ceasefire a year ago the group has killed one Israeli, according to the Israeli government's own figures.
"Hamas has kept the calm for a year. Israel is still killing our civilians," said the Hamas leader in Gaza, Mahmoud al-Zahar. "Why is it that the Israelis can continue to kill our people, innocent people walking down the street, and there is no criticism from those who tell us we must give up our historic struggle against occupation? Why are they so afraid to criticise Israel but tell us what to do?"

ISRAELI HOSTAGE TAKING
25 June 2006

  A British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, Cook is writing regularly on events from there. A recent piece of his noted that just before the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was abducted on June 25, Israel had abducted two Palestinians. Cook wrote: "Few readers of a British newspaper would have noticed the story. In the Observer of 25 June, it merited a mere paragraph hidden in the 'World in brief' section, revealing that the previous day a team of Israeli commandos had entered the Gaza Strip to 'detain' two Palestinians Israel claims are members of Hamas. The significance of the mission was alluded to in a final phrase describing this as 'the first arrest raid in the territory since Israel pulled out of the area a year ago.'"
"Israeli commandos had entered the Gaza Strip to 'detain' two Palestinians " The original piece in the Observer is at their website. A small paragraph somewhat down the page.
The full story here.

This is an interesting point, and the double standard again. Israeli forces continually abduct Palestinians, indeed there are thousands in Israeli jails/ compounds. Nor did it stop there. Shortly afterwards half of the Hamas parliament were kidnapped and taken to Israel, to be held as hostages.

Well, surely this makes sense? Why punish people for voting for their candidate? Every time Israel or the US punishes the population, they turn towards radicals.

y LAURIE COPANS
Associated Press Writer

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) - A Palestinian suicide bomber struck a packed fast-food restaurant during Passover on Monday, killing nine other people and wounding dozens in the deadliest attack in more than a year.

In a sharp departure from the previous Palestinian government's condemnations of bombings, the Hamas-led administration said the attack resulted from Israel's "brutal aggression.'' The bloodshed and the hard-line stance could set the stage for harsh Israeli reprisals and endanger Palestinian efforts to secure desperately needed international aid.

Israel said it held Hamas responsible for the attack - even though another group claimed responsibility - and Israel's security chiefs were meeting later Monday to discuss what action to take. Security officials said a ground operation in Gaza was not being considered.

The attack occurred just two hours before Israel's newly elected parliament was sworn into office, and Prime Minister-designate Ehud Olmert said Israel would react to the bombing with appropriate means.

Islamic Jihad, which has close ties to Israel's arch enemy, Iran, claimed responsibility for the attack, the first in Israel since the Hamas Cabinet took office 2 weeks ago.

The blast came amid a sharp increase in fighting between Israel and the Palestinians across the Gaza border. Militants have fired barrages of homemade rockets at Israel, and Israel has responded with artillery fire. A 17-year-old Palestinian in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya was killed Monday in the shelling, Palestinian officials said.

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
The Guardian

A barrage of Israeli artillery shells rained down on a busy Gaza beach yesterday, killing seven Palestinians, three of them children. The attack put further strain on the 16-month truce between Israel and the governing Hamas movement.

Witnesses described several explosions that also injured dozens of other people who lay on the beach, screaming and pleading for help. Some ran into the sea for fear of more shells hitting the sands at Beit Lahia, in the north of the Gaza strip.

Among the dead were three children, aged one, three, and 10. Their sister was swimming and survived.

The beach was packed with picnicking families enjoying the Muslim day of rest, and the explosions landed among them, scattering body parts along the dunes. Television footage showed a woman and a child laying dead on the sand, and another child screaming in agony while a lifeless man was carried away by an ambulance crew.

Associated Press reported that a tearful man held the limp body of what appeared to be a girl or young woman. "Muslims, look at this," he shouted.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, called the killings a "bloody massacre" and demanded international intervention.

"No doubt what's going on in Gaza is a bloody massacre against our people, our civilians, without discrimination," he said. "I call upon the international community, the UN security council, the quartet [the EU, the US, Russia and the UN], to put an end to this Israeli killing policy."

The prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader and a political opponent of Mr Abbas, went further, calling the deaths a "war crime". He urged Jordan and Egypt, both mediators in past Israeli-Palestinian talks, to intervene.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said that the attack showed "the Zionist occupation insists on killing ... and does not distinguish between civilian children and freedom fighters".

But the most furious reaction of all came from Hamas's militant wing, which called off its 16-month ceasefire with Israel and threatened revenge attacks. "The earthquake in the Zionist towns will start again and the aggressors will have no choice but to prepare their coffins or their luggage," the military wing said in a statement. "The resistance groups ... will choose the proper place and time for the tough, strong and unique response." There was no immediate comment from the political wing of Hamas.

The Israeli army said it "regretted" the deaths and called a halt to the shelling. It offered help to get the survivors to Israeli hospitals. The shells that hit Beit Lahia beach were the latest of more than 6,000 fired into the Gaza Strip by Israel over the past two months. One possibility is that they had fallen short when being fired at areas on the outskirts of Beit Lahia used by armed Palestinian groups to launch rockets into Israel.

"The military definitely would not target a beach full of people," said an army spokesman. The military said that although many of the shells fired yesterday were from Israeli gunboats, it believed the explosives that hit the beach were from army artillery. Israel said it has fired thousands of artillery shells into the Gaza Strip in response to armed Palestinian groups such as Islamic Jihad firing hundreds of homemade rockets into Israel. Israeli shells have killed about 15 civilians this year, including five children. The Palestinian rockets have not claimed any lives but have wounded several Israelis.

Human rights groups have described the persistent Israeli shelling as a form of collective punishment, particularly after the military changed its rules to allow shells to explode within 100 metres of a built-up area.

On Thursday an Israeli air force attack killed one of the most prominent Palestinian leaders in the area - the head of the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza, Jamal Abu Samhadana.

Chris McGreal, Jerusalem
HAMAS has made a significant political climbdown by agreeing to sections of a document that recognise Israel's right to exist and call for a negotiated two-state solution.

In a bitter struggle for power, Hamas is bowing to an ultimatum from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to endorse the document drawn up by Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli jails or face a national referendum on the issue. That vote could strip the Islamist group of power if it loses.

But final agreement on the paper, designed to end international sanctions against the Hamas Government that have crippled the Palestinian economy, has been slowed by wrangling over a national unity administration and the question of who speaks for the Palestinians.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's executive committee and a lead negotiator on the prisoners' document, said Hamas had agreed to sections calling for a negotiated and final agreement with Israel to establish a Palestinian state on the territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem.

Hamas is prepared to accept those parts of the document because they think it is a way to get rid of a lot of its problems with the international community.

Israel bombarded Gaza with air strikes today in a widening military effort to secure the release of an abducted Israeli soldier amid an Egyptian report that the ruling Palestinian party has approved his freedom.

Israeli warplanes roared over Gaza striking at various targets, including the office of Palestinian Interior Minister Saeed Seyam, which caught fire after it was hit in the intensifying military operation to free 19-year-old Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit, who was abducted by gunmen on Sunday.

Reports of a gunbattle in northern Gaza trickled in as an Egyptian newspaper reported that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Hamas, the ruling Palestinian party, had told him they have given conditional approval for Shalit's release.

Three militant groups, including an armed wing of Hamas, have claimed responsibility for the attack during which Shalit was abducted.

Egypt's al-Ahram newspaper also said Mubarak told it in an interview that although Hamas has given conditional approval, a handover agreement with Israel has not yet been reached. "There were Egyptian communications which included a number of Hamas leaders and resulted in initial positive results in the form of a conditional approval by Hamas to turn over the Israeli soldier as quickly as possible to avoid escalation," the newspaper paraphrased Mubarak as saying.

Chris McGreal
The Guardian

The terminology alone reflects the gulf of views over the plight of Corporal Gilad Shalit. To Israelis, the teenage soldier was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists and is a hostage just as much as foreigners held in Iraq. To Palestinians he is a prisoner of war - a legitimate target as a soldier in the uniform of an army that has killed dozens of civilians in the Gaza Strip in recent weeks - and a bargaining chip. Then there is the difference of scale. In the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, where the Israeli military dropped leaflets on Wednesday night warning its 42,000 residents that an assault was coming and to keep out of the way, they are baffled at the lengths Israel is going to over one man. "Don't Israelis understand how many Palestinians are sitting in their prisons just for resisting the occupation?" said 60 year-old Khalil Naim, who has lost count of the number of Israeli attacks on his town in recent years. "For me, he [Cpl Shalit] is military. What was done was right. They have thousands of our prisoners in their prisons. The mistake will be if they are not behaving well with him. We want them to feed him and not hurt him." Just as Israelis feel strongly about the fate of each soldier, Palestinians identify with the mass of security prisoners in Israeli jails, in part because so many families are affected. Israel holds about 9,000 Palestinian prisoners. One thousand of them are detained without charge or trial, and often exist in a Kafkaesque world of having to prove their innocence without ever being told what it is they are accused of. Most of the remaining prisoners were tried by military courts that consider secret evidence. In the turmoil of claims, Israel describes Cpl Shalit as a hostage because his captors want to exchange him for hundreds of Palestinian women and youths held by Israel. But the Palestinians have learned to have long memories on these issues and are swift to point out that Israel's supreme court legalised hostage-taking in 1997 when it ruled that the government could hold "bargaining chips" - captured Lebanese - to swap for Israeli prisoners of war in Lebanon. The decision was reversed five years later, but many Palestinians view their own prisoners as bargaining chips. The military characterises Cpl Shalit's capture - in a raid in which Palestinian militiamen tunnelled into Israel and killed two other soldiers - as an act of war because Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip last October. But the Israelis themselves crossed the border just a couple of days before the corporal was taken to apprehend two Palestinian militiamen. In Beit Hanoun people say they would hardly notice that the military and Jewish settlers are gone. The army has dropped thousands of shells during the past two months in response to Palestinian rockets that killed fewer Israeli civilians in five years than the military killed in a single airstrike earlier this month. In the past three weeks alone Israel has killed at least 27 Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories, including nine children and a pregnant woman. Many of them died in Gaza in botched air force missile attacks against Palestinian militiamen. To Ibrahim Naim, Khalil's 70-year-old brother, who used to make uniforms for the Israeli army, it seems as if Israel is allowed to give itself great licence to kill and arrest while the rest of the world denies the right of Palestinians to defend themselves or fight back. "The whole world says what Israel is doing is for self-defence. But when the Israelis come here and kill women and children, who says anything? Which is worse? To take a soldier prisoner or to kill children?" he said.

Negotiators 'near deal' in secret talks as Israel launches helicopter strike on Palestinian leader's HQ
Conal Urquhart in Gaza City
The Observer

Palestinian militant sources claimed last night that they were close to reaching an agreement in negotiations over the release of an Israeli soldier. They want a guarantee that Israel will free prisoners at a future date in return for the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit. Palestinians say they accept that Israel will not free any prisoners immediately, but insist they will give up the 19-year-old soldier only in return for a commitment for a future release. Because they have no confidence in Israeli assurances, they stipulate that it must make a commitment to a third party such as Egypt. Israel would also be expected to end its attacks on the Gaza Strip.

The news came as an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a missile at the Gaza City office of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

Yesterday the three groups holding Shalit said they would free him if Israel released 1,000 Palestinian women, children and humanitarian cases from prison. Mark Regev, of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, rejected the demand, saying that Israel would make no deals. There has been energetic diplomacy to prevent the situation descending into a bloodbath. Ghazi Hamed, spokesman for the Hamas government, said Egypt, Turkey and other governments were mediating and making progress. 'Israel says it will not agree to a simultaneous release, but it will agree to release prisoners in the future. We are looking for a third party, possibly Egypt, to accept a guarantee from Israel that it will respect that they will release prisoners at a later date,' he said.

Conal Urquhart in Gaza City, Chris McGreal in Jerusalem and agencies
The Guardian

Israeli tanks and troops today invaded southern Lebanon after Hizbullah captured two soldiers and killed several others. The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, described the capture of the soldiers an "act of war" by Lebanon, with today's developments compounding the ongoing political crisis over an abducted Israeli soldier being held in Gaza.

Palestinian militants holding Corporal Gilad Shalit have demanded that all Palestinian women and young people held in Israeli jails be freed in exchange for his release.

The Bush administration blamed Syria and Iran for today's kidnappings and violence, calling for the immediate and unconditional release of the two soldiers.

Hizbullah said it would not release them until Israel agreed to set free all Arab prisoners.

Its capture of the soldiers is a huge political embarrassment to Mr Olmert, coming only weeks after the seizure of Cpl Shalit last month.

He will be concerned that Hamas and Hizbullah could start working together to demand the release of prisoners as a condition for freeing the missing soldiers.

Several Israeli soldiers were killed in fighting after Mr Olmert ordered his forces into Lebanon in an attempt to rescue the abducted soldiers.

"These are difficult days for the state of Israel and its citizens," he said. "There are people ... who are trying to test our resolve. They will fail, and they will pay a heavy price for their actions."

The crisis facing Israel was compounded when its air force killed a family of nine, dropping a 550lb bomb on a house in a residential area of Gaza City early today. Nabil Abu Salmiah, a lecturer at the Islamic University - who has been described by Israel as a Hamas activist - was killed, along with his wife and their five daughters and two sons.

Five of the dead children were aged between four and 11, and the other two were in their teens.

The deaths will be a severe embarrassment to Israel, which has killed around 40 civilians, many of them children, in missile and shell attacks over recent weeks.

Witnesses said the only members of the family to survive were two sons, one thrown out of the house by the explosion and another rescued from the rubble, and the eldest daughter, who was married and lived elsewhere.

The air strikes happened as the Israeli army entered new areas of the Gaza Strip.

Scores of tanks and armoured personnel carriers took up positions around Deir al Balah and Khan Yunis in central Gaza, blocking movement between the two halves of the strip.

Israeli troops killed at least 12 Palestinians, including one policemen and two militants, in four separate incidents in the central Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical officials said.

Mr Olmert has been pursuing a drawn-out strategy to win the release of Cpl Shalit - who is being held by Hamas's military wing and other groups - and to end Palestinian rocket attacks.

He has initiated a series of assaults on the Gaza Strip, put Gaza's 1.4 million residents under pressure with the destruction of the only power station and other infrastructure, and arrested members of the Hamas-controlled Palestinian government and MPs.

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel bombed and shelled southern Lebanon and sent ground troops over the border for the first time in six years Wednesday after Hezbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers. The fighting killed eight Israeli soldiers and three Lebanese.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the Hezbollah raid an "act of war'' by Lebanon and threatened "very, very, very painful'' retaliation. The Cabinet, meeting in the wake of the military's highest daily death toll in four years, decided to continue the army operation and call on the international community to disarm Hezbollah, according to participants.

That crisis began June 25 when Palestinian militants dug a tunnel out of the Gaza Strip and attacked an army position inside Israel, seizing Cpl. Gilad Shalit and demanding the release of 1,500 prisoners held by Israel. Although Israel has made prisoner exchanges in the past, Olmert ruled out any negotiations for Shalit's return, saying that would only encourage more kidnappings.

Instead, Israel unleashed an offensive against Gaza, sending in troops, firing artillery and carrying out airstrikes on militant targets in an effort to force the Palestinians to free Shalit.

In an attempt to assassinate top Hamas fugitives Wednesday, Israel dropped a quarter-ton bomb on a home in Gaza City, killing a couple and seven of their children, ages 4-18. Hamas said its leaders escaped harm, but militants took over the intensive care unit of a hospital, barring reporters.

Palestinian security officials said Mohammed Deif, leader of Hamas' military wing and No. 1 on Israel's wanted list for more than a decade, was among the wounded - suffering severe back injuries that could paralyze him. At least 14 other Palestinians were killed in separate Israeli attacks Wednesday.



Israel and Lebanon have a history of conflict, punctuated by a full-scale Israeli invasion in 1982, and its 18-year occupation of a buffer zone in southern Lebanon that was intended to prevent attacks on Israel. The United Nations certified that Israel's 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon was complete, but Lebanon laid claim to a sliver of border territory, still held by Israel, that the U.N. said was actually part of Syria.

Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria and branded a terror group by the U.S. and Israel, used the dispute to justify cross-border attacks. But the fighting Wednesday was by far the worst since Israel withdrew six years ago, and it threatened to escalate.

"This is a terrorist attack and it is clearly timed to exacerbate already high tensions in the region and sow further violence,'' U.S. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones said. "We also hold Syria and Iran - which directly support Hezbollah - responsible for this attack and for the ensuing violence.''

Syrian Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa denied his country had a role in either of the abductions and instead blamed Israel. "For sure, the occupation (of the Palestinian territories) is the cause provoking both the Lebanese and Palestinian people, and that's why there is Lebanese and Palestinian resistance,'' he said.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for restraint. "We would not want to see an expansion, an escalation, of conflict in the region,'' he said.

He also condemned ``without reservations the attack'' by Hezbollah fighters. Annan at first said he condemned the violence in southern Lebanon, but his aides later said he meant Hezbollah's cross-border attack into Israel.

Hezbollah fighters began their attack Wednesday by firing a barrage of rockets at communities in northwestern Israel. The guerrillas then crossed the border and launched a surprise attack on two Israeli Humvees, killing three soldiers, wounding two and capturing the two others, the Israeli army said.

Israel quickly sent armored vehicles over the border on a rescue mission, but one of the tanks rolled over a large mine, killing the four soldiers inside and sparking a battle that killed another soldier, the army said.

It was the single highest number of Israeli military deaths on one day since the army's offensive in the West Bank town of Jenin on April 9, 2002, which left 14 soldiers dead.

Israel also sent warplanes deep into southern Lebanon - targeting bridges, roads and Hezbollah positions. One blast hit a major junction along the main north-south coastal highway, wrecking the road and wounding two people. Two civilians were killed in the attacks, Lebanese officials said. Another airstrike targeted a Palestinian guerrilla base south of Beirut, Lebanese security officials said.

Israeli artillery and gunboats fired into the area as well. The military said it attacked 40 targets to stop Hezbollah from moving the soldiers. It did not say how many ground troops were involved, but witnesses said dozens entered southwestern Lebanon.

Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz warned that the assault would widen, Israeli TV reported. If the soldiers are not returned, he said, the military would target infrastructure and "turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years.''

Robert Blecher
(Robert Blecher is a fellow at the Center for Human Rights at the University of Iowa and an editor of Middle East Report. He contributed this article from Jerusalem.)
"WAR," proclaimed the three-inch headline in Ma‘ariv, Israel's leading daily, the day after Hizballah launched its cross-border attack on an Israeli army convoy on July 12. With the onset of Israel's massive bombing campaign in Lebanon that evening, its aerial and ground incursions into Gaza were transformed into the southern front of a two-front conflict. But are the two fronts, in Lebanon and Gaza, part of a single war? Speaking in such terms risks misidentifying what really links Israel's actions on its northern and southern borders.

For many in Israel, the two fronts are conjoined in a war against a unified "axis of terror and hate created by Iran, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas," in the words of Tzipi Livni, the Israeli vice prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, "that wants to end any hope for peace." Ben Caspit, one of Ma‘ariv's leading columnists, put it more colorfully: "Israel is dealing with radical, messianic Islam, which extends its arms like an octopus, creating an axis from Tehran to Gaza by way of Damascus and Beirut. With people like these there is nothing to talk about. The fire of a war against infidels burns in them." The only fitting response in this situation is a military one, claimed Ron Ben-Yishai in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, in order to "create a new strategic balance between us and radical Islam." This belief has wide support among Israelis: only 800 protesters showed up at a demonstration in Tel Aviv on July 16 against the escalating fighting. Such a showing pales in comparison to the 20,000 people who turned out when a similar coalition organized a protest at the outset of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

But radical Islam is not the defining or unifying factor that links the south with the north: Hamas and Hizballah have different bones to pick with Israel. Hamas' struggle is against occupation, and more specifically, about how to achieve a mutual cessation of hostilities and formalize, in one way or another, its right to govern the territories of the Palestinian Authority as the Palestinians' elected government. Hizballah's goals in the current fighting are more limited: to secure the release of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails while simultaneously flexing the movement's muscles to stave off pressure to disarm. By lumping together these different struggles, and tying them to Damascus and distant Tehran, Israel casts resolvable political disagreements as unfathomable, irrational hatred, thereby justifying its broad and violent offensive.

Hizballah, ironically, has engaged in a conflation of its own. In choosing the moment of Gaza's bombardment to launch its own attack, a cross-border raid that its leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah says was long planned, the Lebanese Shi‘i movement has subsumed the struggle against Israeli occupation within a larger regional drama. Displaying the rhetorical skills and military competence that Nasrallah and his movement are known for, Hizballah has confirmed its position as the only Arab force willing and able to stand up to Israel.

What links these conflicts, beyond Israeli fear-mongering and Hizballah's use of Palestine as a chess piece, is the future of limited withdrawals -- what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert calls "convergence" or "realignment" -- as an Israeli strategy for managing its conflict with the Palestinians. By this plan, advanced by Olmert's Kadima Party in the March election campaign, Israel would move its soldiers and settlers from much of the West Bank behind a unilaterally fixed "eastern border" for the Jewish state -- the walls and fences that Israel is building through the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Though the idea of convergence was initially popular, more and more Israelis, even some within Kadima, are growing skeptical. Public support for withdrawals in the West Bank had plummeted to just over 30 percent even before the present conflagration, and Kadima luminaries Livni, Shimon Peres and Meir Sheetrit all have expressed reservations recently. As the one-year anniversary of Gaza "disengagement" approaches, even the left-leaning Israeli press has begun to ask, as has Ha'aretz, "Was it a mistake?" The Israeli government, whose multi-partisan raison d'être is limited withdrawal, is under pressure to demonstrate the fruits of its approach. With its two-front war, the Israeli government has set out to prove emphatically that disengagement was not a mistake.

GETTING TO NO

Hamas had little to lose on the eve of June 25, when a raid by its military wing and two other armed groups captured Cpl. Gilad Shalit and killed two of his fellow soldiers at the Kerem Shalom army post on the Gaza-Israel border. Ever since the Islamist party formed a government in March, it has been systematically denied the resources necessary for domestic governance and the ability to implement a foreign policy. The Israeli-US-European squeeze on the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) limited the tools at the movement's disposal to damp down violence, and gave the movement even less incentive to use them.

Israel, the US and the European Union refused to accept the new Palestinian government as a negotiating partner, turning back the diplomatic clock to September 1, 1975, when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger committed the US not to talk to the Palestine Liberation Organization unless it renounced terrorism and accepted Israel's right to exist. This formula had been born in Israel one year earlier, when Labor Party members Aharon Yariv and Victor Shemtov put forward a formula calling for the Israeli government to negotiate with any Palestinian party that renounced violence and recognized Israel. Following the Palestinian elections, the Quartet, made up of the US, the UN, the EU and Russia, updated the Yariv-Shemtov formula for the twenty-first century. The putative international mediators added the requirement of accepting agreements previously signed by Palestinian representatives, including the 1993 and 1994 Oslo accords, and demanded that Hamas recognize Israel "as a Jewish state," a formulation absent from prior Israeli-Arab peace deals.

Frozen out of official negotiations, Hamas could only carry out public diplomacy. The movement sent up a number of trial balloons soon after its election in the form of comments to the press, op-eds in the Guardian and Washington Post, and on- and off-the-record remarks to international organizations. In February, Hamas politburo head Khalid Mashaal described the PA's foundation in the Oslo accords as "a reality," and said that "we do not oppose" the 2002 Arab League initiative offering Israel "full normalization" of relations in return for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a "just and agreed" solution to the refugee problem. Previously, Hamas had vehemently denounced both the Oslo agreements and the Arab initiative. But the US and Israel were not interested in pursuing what sort of avenues this newfound flexibility might open. Instead, the US and Israel boxed Hamas -- and themselves -- into a corner with stringent demands that were impossible for Hamas to accept.

Elements in the electorally defeated Fatah movement, as well as in the Bush administration, initially believed that stonewalling Hamas and starving the PA of funds would cause the new government to fall within three months. They were wrong, but in the meantime Hamas became as firm in its rejection of the externally imposed conditions as Israel, the US and the EU were in insisting upon them. Besieged from within and without, the movement's rate of political change, so rapid in the months leading up to and immediately following the election, grew sluggish. Pleas for Hamas to accept the 2002 Arab initiative unequivocally came to naught.

Likewise, Hamas filibustered President Mahmoud Abbas' proposal that it sign onto the "prisoners' document." Agreed upon by jailed members of all major Palestinian factions, including Hamas, this document called for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, implementation of Palestinian refugees' right of return, and the concentration of armed resistance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These ideas were quite similar to what some Hamas leaders had proposed during their public diplomacy campaign, and Hamas, like forces on the Palestinian left, originally thought the prisoners' document could serve as the basis for national dialogue. Then, in May, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas preempted dialogue, and instead tried to use the document as a tool for wresting concessions from Hamas. Abbas vowed to slate a national referendum on the document's contents unless Hamas officially accepted them. This maneuver led the Hamas signatory, Sheikh ‘Abd al-Khaliq al-Natsheh, to remove his name. The eventual Fatah-Hamas reconciliation on the matter, signed by all parties several hours after the Kerem Shalom raid, has been overtaken, at least for the time being, by events on the ground.

Much was made, especially after Shalit's capture, about the divisions within Hamas regarding the prisoners' proposals, with some analysts going so far as to suggest that the raid itself was an attempt to scuttle a deal on the final wording. Indeed, in many quarters, especially in Israel, the Kerem Shalom operation was interpreted as a virtual coup of Hamas' external leadership against the internal, but the Islamist party has always been a big tent, with decisions made by consensus through its consultative council (majlis al-shura). The protracted process followed by Hamas might not be commensurate with the expectation of expeditious decision-making by the prime minister's office, but one should not mistake a deliberative style for internal rupture.

As the Israeli government continued its policy of targeted assassinations and ramped up shelling of Gaza in response to Qassam rocket fire, there was no countervailing force to pull Hamas away from renouncing the unilateral ceasefire it had honored, more or less, for the previous 18 months. Jamal Abu Samhadana, the founder and leader of the Popular Resistance Committees and head of a new Hamas-led PA security force, was assassinated on June 8, and the next day, seven members of the Ghalia family were killed on a Gazan beach—by an Israeli artillery shell, most believe, though an Israeli army report claims otherwise.

Hamas' armed wing, the ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, called off the truce, promising "earth-shaking actions," and the rate of rocket fire increased. The denouement is well-known: Israel replied with an aggressive campaign to smother the rocket fire, including a larger than usual number of "operational failures" that elevated the death toll among Palestinian civilians. The June 25 Observer (London) reported that the preceding day Israeli commandos had infiltrated Gaza to seize two Palestinians said to be members of Hamas. Hamas found itself under pressure to uphold the banner of Palestinian resistance, and the Kerem Shalom operation was launched.

Trading rocket fire was a losing proposition for Hamas, as it was simply used by Israel to justify aggressive retaliation. Shalit's capture, by contrast, held the potential to reverse the across-the-board rejection that Hamas had faced since January. Whether the seizure was planned in advance or resulted from an unexpected opportunity, this development offered the possibility of securing the release of Palestinian prisoners and reversing the political isolation of the Hamas-led PA by creating a precedent for negotiations. The Israeli government repeatedly proclaimed its refusal to negotiate, but did so through Egyptian intermediaries and Abbas' office. As this process broke down, Hamas once again turned to the press, with Prime Minister Isma‘il Haniyya pushing, on the pages of the July 11 Washington Post, a proposal for a comprehensive approach to resolving the conflict. In response, the Israeli government the next day hit an apartment building in Gaza with a half-ton bomb that failed to kill Muhammad Deif, a top Hamas bomb-maker, but did kill a family of nine.

"WE ARE LUCKY IT HASN'T HAPPENED"

Because of the bombing of bridges and power plants, the air and ground assault in Gaza -- dubbed Operation Summer Rains -- certainly seems to aim well beyond its ostensible goals of recovering Cpl. Shalit and stopping rocket fire. The ulterior motive, some analysts say, is to destroy the PA entirely. Successive Israeli governments have eschewed this option for fear of being left responsible for administering the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel has been unsuccessful in convincing the world that Gaza disengagement has ended its "occupation of the Palestinians" -- a declaration that has no standing in international law, as only territory can be occupied, not people. As the former head of Israel's Civil Administration told me in 2004:

If the PA collapses or folds, we will be in a very bad situation. The international community will not allow the situation here to become like it is in Sudan, and neither will we. Israel will have to take responsibility for supplying food, water, electricity, education. The problem is not the cost in money; it's a matter of the cost in human terms. We would have to build up the whole [structure of the] Civil Administration in the West Bank and Gaza again. It would mean that army officers would need to get involved in education and television and agriculture. It would mean stepping back 20 years or more, to how it was at the beginning of the occupation. That is a very big threat to Israel. We are trying not to reach this point. If Arafat [then still president of the PA] would say, "You wanted Ramallah, take Ramallah. You wanted Bethlehem, take Bethlehem. You wanted Nablus, take Nablus, I am not responsible anymore." If Arafat said that, we would be in a lot of trouble. We are lucky it hasn't happened.

Today, with the PA even weaker and internationally ostracized, Hamas is in no position to push the implementation of its political agenda. Nevertheless, the Israeli government may have decided that the Qassam rocket fire is a political liability that can only be overcome by a grand political accomplishment: toppling the Hamas-led PA while leaving the government structure intact, thereby facilitating the reemergence of Fatah on top. But this strategy is risky: it is not clear that the PA could survive the fall of Hamas. If Fatah could retake control, the Israeli government would then be faced with the prospect of negotiations, which would demand compromises of the sort that unilateral action forestalls.

Some wonder if the PA has already been fatally compromised by the siege it has been put under. As a former UN official with a long experience in the West Bank and Gaza puts it, "Of all the foreign and government types I talk to here, the people who seem to best understand how grim the situation is are in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The international community is marching toward the abyss with their eyes open. I think we may well have passed the point where the PA in its current form cannot be sustained, and some of the more enlightened voices in the IDF are the only ones who seem to understand that." The "international community" -- in reality, the US and the EU -- surely has not reached this conclusion. A European official involved with the Temporary International Mechanism -- a program to prop up the most critical Palestinian social services while bypassing the Hamas-led PA government -- deprecated his government's efforts, saying they were "hopelessly inadequate, risky and don't address the real issues." "The European Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner came out and said in public that there should be such a thing," he elaborated, "so we had to scramble to put something together so she wouldn't look bad. There wasn't nearly enough planning for it. The program works around the PA, trying to identify beneficiaries to whom we pay allowances, a method that contributes toward further weakening the PA. Should the PA fall, it will be useful to have this mechanism in place to at least get some resources in, but the irony is that we ourselves will have helped create the situation."

Given today's reality in the West Bank and especially Gaza, one could argue that the PA has in fact already collapsed. With over 60 parliamentarians in Israeli jails, hardly any salaries being paid, and government services suspended owing to lack of money and the Israeli siege, there is little left of the PA beyond a national aspiration. Among Palestinians in the West Bank, the idea of simply dissolving the PA so as to force Israel to take responsibility -- or at least the blame, should Israel refuse to implement its responsibility for administering the occupation -- is growing in popularity. This idea first appeared in the wake of the Israeli incursion in the spring of 2002 and came to prominence when Mahmoud Abbas resigned as prime minister in 2003. The idea subsequently receded from the public square, an acknowledgment of how many livelihoods and services are dependent on the PA's continuation. But as the contributions of the PA to the Palestinian economy and society have dwindled over the past five months, the idea has begun to gain support among Palestinian legislators, both Hamas- and Fatah-affiliated, according to a well-informed academic source.

DETERRENCE AS STRATEGEM

The increased aggressiveness of Israeli military action over the past months, and especially the last weeks, stems from a shakeup in the balance of power within the Israeli government. Among the most influential arms of the IDF is the Operations Department, which is possessed of a long-term vision that, in accordance with institutional interests, is premised upon the use of military power to achieve political goals. Representatives of this department, even before the disengagement from Gaza in the summer of 2005, complained that unilateral concessions would erode Israel's "deterrent capacity."

Ariel Sharon, then prime minister, was unmoved by this argument, since his long military career had taught him that the invocation of the ostensibly neutral notion of "deterrence" was a stratagem to force the treatment of political problems though military means. For years, he himself had used the same technique to inveigh against initiatives of the political echelon. Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, by contast, are inexperienced in military matters, and as a result, according to a source in Israeli military intelligence, they did not fully appreciate how the demand for "deterrence" can be used to shift the internal balance of power in favor of the military. When the Operations Department harped on the need to reestablish Israeli "deterrence," especially in the wake of the soldiers' capture, the civilian leadership was convinced to hew to the IDF's line. This subtle but crucial change brewing inside Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv explains something about the enormous extent of the destruction wreaked on Lebanon in the wake of Hizballah's cross-border raid.

Hizballah's gambit could cut two ways for Hamas. One the one hand, the operation elevates Palestinian concerns to a grander stage, putting their demands front and center before the international community. Since Nasrallah seems intent on linking the Palestinian and Lebanese prisoner issues through a "grand bargain," a resolution to the much more sticky and explosive conflict in the north will necessitate a prisoner exchange in the south as well. Hizballah is in a position to spring more Palestinian prisoners than Hamas by itself could ever have hoped to free. But on the other hand, Hizballah's move made the crisis in Gaza disappear from Western newscasts, as reporters rushed to cover the "northern front." It also upstaged Hamas. Egyptian President Husni Mubarak's mediation to secure Shalit's release could have set a precedent for Israel negotiating with Hamas, however indirectly, but Hizballah pulled the rug out from under Hamas and turned the soldier snatching tactic to Hizballah's advantage. Nasrallah's own moment of glory, according to this second explanation, may come at the expense of Hamas' push to force Israel to negotiate. Both streams of thought are reflected within Hamas' leadership, although more probably tend toward the former, hopeful that the limited widening of the conflict will pry open doors that otherwise would remain closed.

The Israeli government is doing its best to keep those doors firmly shut. As Tzipi Livni told the special UN team dispatched to the region on July 18, "The diplomatic process is not intended to reduce the window of opportunity for military operations, but will take place in parallel." Her statement affirmed that Israel will continue its attacks in Lebanon and Gaza even as it works to secure international support for returning its taken soldiers and implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1559. Omitted from Israel's diplomatic agenda is any attempt to deal with the political causes of the fighting, either in Lebanon or in Gaza. Endorsing instead the Group of Eight's statement that "extremism" lies at the root of the fighting, the Israeli government is pushing the disarmament of Hizballah in Lebanon and uprooting the "terrorist infrastructure" in Gaza -- both of which objectives have scant chances of success and enormous potential for provoking further violence -- instead of launching a different kind of diplomatic initiative: one that would work to establish a peace in which independent militias in Lebanon and Gaza would not be required.

Livni's statement to the UN team is an apt description of not only the Israeli government's strategy in its two-front war but also its convergence plan. Ariel Sharon, like his successors in the Kadima Party, convinced the Israeli public that "convergence" would pay diplomatic dividends by securing international recognition that the occupation had ended, even as it accorded the Israeli military the freedom to exact an even heavier price from those who might resist Israel's unilateral designs. Sharon foresaw that the diplomatic part of the plan would require military support to be successful, while military pressure upon the Palestinians was not sustainable internationally without a diplomatic component. The Operations Department might be stepping on the gas pedal in escalating the wars in Lebanon and Gaza, but a no-holds-barred assault of this nature was a long time coming.

THE US is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, in a move likely to anger Arab governments and a sign there will be no early end to Israel's bombardment of Lebanon.

The shipment comes as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice prepares to visit Israel, which is massing troops on its border with Lebanon after the 11-day bombardment that has failed to stem waves of deadly Hezbollah missiles landing on its territory.

Although Israel said its troops were conducting only "limited thrusts" into Lebanon, the Israeli move gives rise to speculation that the war is about to enter a bloodier phase.

More Hezbollah rockets hit towns across northern Israel yesterday, injuring 10 people.

The rain of missiles and the Israeli build-up coincided with Dr Rice's new round of Middle East diplomacy that will take her to Israel but not Lebanon. And it will inject a new urgency into Canberra's evacuation of thousands of Lebanese-Australians trapped in the war zone.

Resisting international pressure for a ceasefire, Dr Rice said the conflict's root causes — in her view Hezbollah's armed presence on Israel's border and the role of its allies, Syria and Iran — had to be tackled first.

The US arms shipment was requested by Israel after it launched its air campaign in Lebanon two weeks ago. The New York Times reported that the munitions the US was sending to Israel were part of an arms sale approved last year that Israel was able to draw on as needed. It quoted US officials as saying the Israeli request indicated Israel had a long list of targets in Lebanon still to strike.

Israel is raining destruction upon Lebanon in a purely defensive operation, according to the White House and most of Congress. Even some CNN anchors, habituated to mechanical reporting of “Middle East violence,” sound slightly incredulous. With over 300 Lebanese dead and easily 500,000 displaced, with the Beirut airport, bridges and power plants disabled, the enormous assault is more than a “disproportionate response” to Hizballah’s July 12 seizure of two soldiers and killing of three others on Israeli soil. It is more than the “excessive use of force” that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan decries. The aerial assault dwarfs the damage done by Hizballah’s rocket attacks on Israeli towns. Entire villages in south Lebanon lie in ruins, unknown numbers of their inhabitants buried in the rubble and tens of others incinerated in their vehicles by Israeli missiles as they attempted to escape northward. As it awaits the promised “humanitarian corridor,” Lebanon remains almost entirely cut off from the outside world by air, sea and land. As of July 20, thousands of Israeli troops have moved across the UN-demarcated Blue Line. Yet virtually the entire American political class actively resists international calls for an immediate ceasefire, preferring to wait for an Israeli victory.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert set the tone immediately after Hizballah struck, branding the cross-border raid as “an act of war” whose consequences would be “very, very, very painful.” Moreover, Israel would hold the Lebanese government and the Lebanese nation as a whole responsible. Israel’s determination to inflict pain upon Lebanon was fanned on the fourth day of Israeli bombardment when Hizballah Secretary-General Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah likewise declared “open warfare,” and the Shiite movement’s militia stepped up rocket fire that has taken 15 Israeli civilian lives. Though the Katyushas and larger projectiles are much deadlier than the Qassams of Hamas, Israel faces no existential threat from the rockets on either front. It is in Lebanon, to paraphrase Israeli army chief of staff Gen. Dan Halutz, where the clock has been turned back 20 years.

The American broadcast media nevertheless labor to fashion symmetry where there is none. There is balanced treatment of the casualties on both sides. The Israelis forced into bomb shelters are juxtaposed with the Lebanese politely warned to flee their homes. For competing renditions of the day’s bloodletting, CNN’s avuncular Larry King turns first to nonchalantly windblown Israeli spokeswoman Miri Eisen and then to a program director from Hizballah’s al-Manar satellite channel, Ibrahim al-Musawi, who always seems to have one eye on the sky. The rock-star reporters who parachuted in to cover the story dispense dollops of confusion. CNN’s Anderson Cooper in Cyprus explained that, since Hamas members are Sunni and Hizballah members Shi‘i, they are “historic rivals.” MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson, sans bowtie to convey the seriousness of the occasion, wondered if Hizballah had rocketed Nazareth because its residents are all Christian, ignoring the images on the screen behind him from the attack victims’ funeral at a mosque.

The likes of Carlson can perhaps be forgiven for grasping at clash-of-civilizations straws. The White House’s immediate fingering of Iran and Syria as the masterminds of Hizballah’s self-described “adventure” substituted phantoms and bogeymen for real political causes. Israel was similarly quick to espy an “axis of Islamic terror” stretching to Damascus and Tehran. Former Speaker of the House and would-be presidential candidate Newt Gingrich went officialdom one better, declaring on NBC’s Meet the Press that the US and its allies are in “World War III.” A steady stream of Congressmen goes before the cameras to aver that Tehran and Damascus are pulling the strings.

No evidence, beyond leaked Israeli intelligence of secret meetings between Nasrallah and his alleged Syrian and Iranian puppeteers, has been presented for the thesis of broader conspiracy, let alone for the core proposition that Hizballah snatched the Israeli soldiers on orders from Bashar al-Asad and/or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Who else sees the hand of Iran, by the way? Saddam Hussein, admonishing Syria from his Baghdad jail cell not to “deepen its coalition with Iran, because Iranians have bad intentions toward all Arabs and they hope to do away with them.”) The fact that Hizballah’s arsenal includes missiles of Iranian and Syrian provenance is also adduced as proof. By this same logic, of course, Washington must be ordering every sortie of Israeli F-16s over Beirut and every demolition of Palestinian homes by Caterpillar bulldozers.

... But it is odd, to say the least, to hold the Lebanese government responsible for Hizballah’s initial cross-border operation. To the contrary, the evidence suggests that the Islamist party acted unilaterally, despite having representatives in the cabinet and in Parliament. This circumstance suggests that the raid should be interpreted as Hizballah muscle flexing on the domestic stage to ward off pressure to relinquish its arms to the Lebanese army, as per the requirements of UN Security Council Resolution 1559. Perhaps, having exchanged prisoners with Israel as recently as 2004, the movement miscalculated how Israel would react, and now they are getting more than they bargained for. Certainly, Lebanon is.

Whichever combination of these factors accounts for Hizballah’s action, the real question is what Israel hopes to accomplish by bombing the whole of Lebanon in reprisal. The strategy behind the assault, apart from blind retribution, is difficult to fathom. Even though Israeli jets buzzed Asad’s presidential palace after Hamas captured an Israeli soldier, and even though evidence of Syrian influence over Hamas is far wispier than its ties to Hizballah, Israel seems disinclined to draw Damascus into the fighting. “We’re not a gang that shoots in every direction,” an Israeli officer told Ha’aretz. Nor, despite bellicose talk of “root causes” and rumors of Iranian Revolutionary Guards firing from Hizballah launching pads, does Israel or the US appear prepared to do more than trade insults with Tehran. There is a risk of catastrophic escalation, but it is reasonable to hope it is not planned.

Rather, the stated objective (beyond the recovery of the captive soldiers) is the implementation of a UN resolution, an instrument of international diplomacy for which Israeli spokespeople have developed a touching new fondness. If the Lebanese government will not disarm Hizballah, then Israel will. If the Lebanese will not “exercise their sovereignty,” as Eisen demanded on CNN, then Israel will appropriate that sovereignty and exercise it in Lebanon’s stead. Perhaps because the US has its own history of invading Middle Eastern countries to “enforce UN resolutions,” the American media seem to regard Israel’s case as entirely sensible. One wonders how the media would have treated similar external intervention to impose UN Security Council Resolution 425, which called for Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 1978, and, of course, was not honored until 2000, under the pesky fire of Hizballah.

But that is what-if history. Back in the present, says the tough-talking Israeli ambassador in Washington, David Ayalon: “We’ll have to go for the kill—Hizballah neutralization.” Thus far, independent assessments of “operational success” are bleak. On July 20, the Times of London quoted “a senior British official” as saying: “Our concern is that Israeli military action is not having the desired effect…. We are concerned that continued military operations by Israel will cause further damage to infrastructure and loss of civilian life which the damage to Hizballah will not justify.” The well-connected military affairs columnist for Ha’aretz, Ze’ev Schiff, penned a similarly pessimistic appraisal.

... Many European chanceries, like Annan, evoking rules-of-war distress at Israel’s “excessive use of force,” are calling for an immediate ceasefire. These calls were faint indeed amidst a week of air raids and the Group of Eight’s toothless tut-tutting about “extremist forces.” From Washington came the bright green go-ahead to keep on bombing. Asked how long Israel’s campaign could continue, a high-ranking US official told the Washington Post: “There’s a natural dynamic to these things. When the military starts, it may be that it has to run its course.”

So we arrive at the Bush administration’s breathtakingly cavalier stance and, again, the human cost of its decision to use Lebanon’s agony to tilt at Iranian and Syrian windmills. On July 15, by several accounts, US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton blocked Security Council discussion of the ceasefire resolution for which Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora has pleaded in every available forum. Since then, despite blatant violations of principles of proportionality and growing international alarm about the internally displaced Lebanese, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pledges only to work for a ceasefire “as soon as possible when conditions are conducive to do so.” The conditions, of course, grow less “conducive” the longer Washington’s green light glares.

Such signals to Israel are not unprecedented, of course, but in this case they are completely and rather shockingly public. The secretary of state has disagreed with the Egyptian foreign minister about the urgency of a ceasefire while standing before the same bank of microphones in Foggy Bottom. Making the Sunday talk show rounds on July 16, Rice again shopped an applause line from her June 2005 American University in Cairo address: “For the last 60 years, American administrations of both stripes -- Democratic, Republican -- traded what they thought was security and stability and turned a blind eye to the absence of democratic forces, to the absence of pluralism in the region.” This policy, she still claims, has been reversed. In reality, with its unabashed approval of Israel’s pounding of Lebanon, the Bush administration has reversed 60 years of basing US policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict on the premise -- however fictional in practice -- that the US seeks peace between the parties. Meanwhile, as Rice dithers over setting a date certain for a Middle East diplomatic mission, the US green light may actually exacerbate the carnage in Lebanon, since Israeli military commanders know that they will have limited time to accomplish their goals.

On July 19, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Tony Snow if Bush’s insistence that Rice not undertake shuttle diplomacy until Israel “defangs” Hizballah made the conflagration in Lebanon a US war as well as an Israeli one. Snow dissembled: “Why would it be our war? I mean, it’s not on our territory. This is a war in which the United States -- it’s not even a war. What you have are hostilities, at this point, between Israel and Hizballah. I would not characterize it as a war.”

It is a war, an unjustified war. Israel’s legal justifications -- protecting the sanctity of its borders and enforcing UN resolutions -- are disingenuous to the point of being dishonest, after Israel’s own years of ignoring the will of the international community and crossing and erasing boundaries with impunity. The US is the only international actor with the power to stop this war, and instead has chosen to encourage the fighting. So the US, too, will be held accountable by history.

Karma Nabulsi
Wednesday August 2, 2006  The Guardian

People walk the dusty, broken roads in scorching summer heat, taking shelter in the basements of empty buildings. In Gaza and Lebanon, in the refugee camps of Khan Younis, Rafah and Jabaliya, in Tyre and Beirut, in Nabatiyeh and Sidon, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children seek refuge. As they flee, they risk the indiscriminate wrath of an enemy driven by an existential mania that can not be assuaged, only stopped. Ambulances are struck, humanitarian relief convoys are struck, UN observers are struck. Warning leaflets are dropped from the sky urging people to abandon their homes, just as they were in 1996, 1982, 1978, 1967 and 1948. The ultimately impossible decision in Gaza and Lebanon today is: where does a refugee go?

In Beirut in July 1982, after surviving a bomb that destroyed a seven-floor apartment block next door to me, burying alive more than 40 people taking refuge in its cellar, some of us began to sleep on the roof; there is no refuge from this terror, there is only resistance. Fifteen of the 37 children killed in Qana on Sunday were disabled; their families could take them no further north, according to the Lebanese MP Bahia Hariri.

From June to August 1982, Israeli aircraft flying over Lebanon dropped "smart bombs" on children's hospitals in Shatila camp, Gaza hospital, Acre hospital and 11 of the country's orphanages, killing dozens of disabled children. They had nowhere else to shelter. The roofs had been painted with huge white crosses visible from the sky.

That war did not give Israel the security it claims to seek, and nor will this one. In 1948 Palestinians fled after hearing news of the massacres in villages by Haganah forces and receiving leaflets dropped from the sky telling them to run for their lives. This week their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are being killed with impunity in the refugee camps of Gaza, where they are trapped. Last Friday alone more than 30 Palestinians were killed, with no international condemnation and barely a mention in the press. In Qana they were also trapped. "We couldn't get out of our neighbourhood because there are only two roads leading out and the Israelis bombed them both several days ago," said Mohammad Shalhoub, a disabled 41-year-old survivor.

The US and Britain are claiming that no ceasefire is possible until there is an international force that will implement United Nations resolution 1559. Yet the Lebanese prime minister issued a seven-point plan in Rome last week, consistent with international law and agreed by all elected parties in Lebanon (including Hizbullah), that had as its first requirement an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. It is implementation of the dozens of UN resolutions that Israel has flouted for more than 50 years with protection from the US - and now from Britain - that will stop this conflict.

The capture of a soldier from an occupying army in Gaza, and of two soldiers on the Lebanese border by local resistance, in an attempt to force the release of thousands of illegally detained Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, should have been dealt with by Israel in the framework of the laws of war and with a proportional response. Instead, by launching this massive attack, Israel has destroyed the social and economic infrastructure of a sovereign nation, Lebanon, just as it is destroying the infrastructure of a democratically elected administration in occupied Palestine.

It is producing generations of refugees who will also resist. Power stations, bridges, key manufacturing and food factories in Lebanon are ruined, the entire industrial estate of Gaza pulverised. The ancient city centre of Nablus has been demolished. Whole villages in south Lebanon and sections of refugee camps in Gaza have been obliterated. These too are war crimes. If Britain will not stop Israel, nor condemn it, then under the Geneva conventions it is complicit in those crimes.

Before seeking the implementation of UN resolution 1559, which calls for the disarmament of Hizbullah, Britain must seek with more sincerity the implementation of UN security council resolutions 242 and 338, which demand the immediate withdrawal of Israel from lands illegally occupied in the 1967 war, including the Golan Heights, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza. There is hardly a statesman or citizen in the world today who cannot see that it will take outside intervention to stop Israel inflicting this terror. Calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, and working towards the implementation of all UN resolutions addressing this conflict, will restore to the international community - and Britain in particular - the legitimacy it has squandered by allowing months of war crimes to go by, witnessed but uncondemned and unconstrained.

Israel has failed to understand that it cannot expel a people and call itself the victim; that it cannot conquer its neighbours and treat any and all resistance to that conquest as terrorism; that it cannot arm itself as a regional superpower and annihilate the institutional fabric of two peoples without incurring the fury of their children in the years that follow.

· Karma Nabulsi teaches politics and international relations at Oxford University. She is the author of Traditions of War: Occupation, Resistance and the Law

Prime minister says Israel is making all necessary preparations to handle with such a situation; warns that nuclear Iran also threat to Arab world and other western countries

Ronny Sofer
Latest Update: 12.01.05

VIDEO: In his first overt comment on Iran’s controversial nuclear activities, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Thursday that Israel would not tolerate a nuclear Iran, alluding to IDF preparations to deal with such a scenario.

“Israel, and other countries cannot accept a situation where Iran has nuclear arms. The issue is clear to us and we are making all the necessary preparations to handle a situation of this kind,” Sharon told journalists in Tel Aviv.