Posted: 28 December 2008 1459 hrs

GAZA CITY: Israel warned on Sunday that it could send ground troops into Gaza as its warplanes continued to pound Hamas targets in the overcrowded enclave where nearly 230 Palestinians have been killed.

"We are ready for anything. If it's necessary to deploy ground forces to defend our citizens, we will do so," a spokesman for Defence Minister Ehud Barak quoted him as saying.

Israeli television said on Sunday that the army had begun concentrating ground forces near the tiny Palestinian territory, where Israeli air strikes have killed nearly 230 people and wounded another 700 since early on Saturday.

Jets continued to pound the overcrowded territory of 1.5 million, with many people reported wounded in a fresh air strike on a Hamas police station in northern Gaza.

A military spokesman told AFP on Sunday that Israeli aircraft had staged several air raids throughout the night, including against a mosque in the Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza City "where terrorists were being sheltered." more

oh yes targeting Mosques will go over well in the Arab world

28 Dec 2008 11:15:35 GMT
Source: Reuters
(Updates with official statement)

JERUSALEM, Dec 28 (Reuters) - Israel is mobilising some military reservists to help in the attacks on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's cabinet secretary said on Sunday.

"The Israel Defence Forces will, in the coming days, call up more reservists," Oved Yehezkel told reporters after a cabinet session to discuss the offensive launched on Saturday.

Israeli defence officials said some reservists had already been mobilised to help in protecting communities on the Gaza border from retaliatory Palestinian rocket salvoes.

New reservists would help complete the armed forces' preparations for a possible escalation of the fighting, a defence official said. (Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Giles Elgood)

BBC

Egypt says the Hamas militant group, which controls Gaza, is preventing hundreds of wounded Palestinians from leaving for treatment in Egypt.

Cairo says dozens of empty ambulances are at the Rafah crossing - the only one to Gaza which avoids Israel.

Hamas said it was drawing up lists of the injured but that it was difficult getting them to the border because of the ongoing Israeli air strikes.

Egypt has summoned Israel's ambassador to demand an end to the bombardment.

Hamas officials say 271 Palestinians have been killed and 600 wounded since Israel began its aerial assault on the Gaza Strip on Saturday, but none of the injured have yet left via Rafah

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Published: December 28, 2008

BEIRUT, Lebanon: Crowds of thousands swept into the streets of cities around the Middle East on Sunday to shout down Israel's air assault on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip.

From Lebanon to Iran, Israel's adversaries used the weekend assault to marshal crowds out onto the streets for noisy demonstrations. And among regional allies there was also discontent: Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, called the air assault a "crime against humanity."

Two days of protests have been free of violence except for one in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Sunday that became a target for a suicide bomber on a bicycle.

In Lebanon, a Hamas official roused a crowd of about 1,000 people topped by fluttering Lebanese and Palestinian flags, promising victory, resistance and ruling out surrender. His speech was met with cries of "death to Israel" from the crowd.

The demonstrators gathered outside the United Nations office in downtown Beirut. After an all-night emergency session in New York, the U.N.'s Security Council expressed serious concern at the escalating situation in Gaza and called on Israel and the Palestinians to immediately halt all violence.

Hamas representative Osama Hamdan told the crowd that the militant group had no choice but to fight. Gaza militants have been lobbing dozens of rockets and mortars into southern Israel since a six-month truce expired over a week ago, prompting Israel's fierce retaliation.

"We in the Hamas group and other resistance factions in Gaza know that we don't have many alternatives. We have one alternative which is to be steadfast and resist and then we will be victorious," Hamdan said.

In the capital of neighboring Syria, more than 5,000 people marched toward the central Youssef al-Azmeh square, where they burned an Israeli and an American flag.

One demonstrator carried a banner reading, "The aggression against Gaza is an aggression against the whole Arab nation."

"Down with America, the mother of terrorism," read another.

In Amman, Jordan, about 5,000 lawyers marched toward parliament to demand the Israeli ambassador's expulsion and the closure of the embassy. "No for peace, yes to the rifle," they chanted.

In Jordan's squalid Baqaa camp for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, protester Yassin Abu Taha, 32, blamed America and Israel for the Middle East's problems.

"The Israelis kill our people in Gaza and the West Bank. The Americans kill our people in Iraq. We're refugees, kicked out of our home in Tulkarem in 1967 and we're still displaced," he said, bemoaning his family's flight in the 1967 Mideast war.

The U.S. Embassy in Jordan warned Americans to avoid areas of demonstrations.

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has said Israel should be "wiped off the map," denounced the Israeli strikes.

And in the normally politically placid streets of glitzy Dubai, hundreds of demonstrators — some draped in Palestinian flags — gathered at the Palestinian consulate.

"This is a time for the Palestinians and Arabs to unite to fight against a common enemy," said Majdei Mansour, a 30-year-old Palestinian resident of Dubai. Mansour has family still in Gaza but said he's been unable to contact them since the latest fighting.

Gaza City | December 28

AP - Israeli warplanes pressing one of Israel's deadliest assaults ever on Palestinian militants dropped bombs and missiles on a top security installation and dozens of other targets across Hamas-ruled Gaza on Sunday.

Infantry and armored units headed to the Gaza border for a possible ground invasion, as the Israeli Cabinet authorized a callup of thousands of reserve soldiers. Some 280 Palestinians died in the first 24 hours of the campaign against Gaza rocket squads -- most of them Hamas police.

Unbowed by 250 Israeli airstrikes, militants fired dozens of rockets and mortars at border communities Sunday. Two rockets struck close to the largest city in southern Israel, Ashdod, some 38 kilometers (23 miles) from Gaza, reaching deeper into Israel than ever before. The targeting of Ashdod confirmed Israel's concern that militants are capable of putting major cities within rocket range. No serious injuries were reported in any of the attacks Sunday.

The Palestinians' moderate President Mahmoud Abbas, a fierce rival of Hamas' who controls only the West Bank and has little influence in Gaza, urged the Islamic militant group to renew a truce with Israel that collapsed last week.

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“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

Robert Pear | Crawford | December 27

NYT - As world leaders called on Saturday for an end to the Middle East violence, the Bush administration issued blistering criticism of Hamas, saying the group had provoked Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza by firing rockets into southern Israel.

Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman, said that Hamas, the group that controls Gaza, was responsible for the outbreak of violence and called its rocket attacks ”completely unacceptable. These people are nothing but thugs,” he said. “Israel is going to defend its people against terrorists like Hamas.”

In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a statement that said: “The United States strongly condemns the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel and holds Hamas responsible for breaking the cease-fire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza. The cease-fire should be restored immediately. The United States calls on all concerned to address the urgent humanitarian needs of the innocent people of Gaza.”

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[Comment: Hypothetical - what level of force would Israel have had to use here for it to be identified by the USG as "disproportionate"? ~ JPD]

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

28 Dec 2008 15:03:56 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Aseel Kami and Sabah al-Bazee

BAGHDAD, Dec 28 (Reuters) - Protesters burned Israeli and American flags on Sunday in a string of Arab countries and demanded a stronger response from their leaders to Israel's attack on Gaza.

"Arab silence is behind the bombings," read a banner held by one of several thousand people who turned out in the Sunni Arab city of Samarra north of Baghdad.

The Israeli raids, some of the worst in 60 years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, incensed many in the Arab world, where many governments are seen by popular Islamist movements as collaborators with the United States or Israel.

"America and the Zionists are the leaders of world terrorism," read a placard held by protesters at the U.N. headquarters in the Lebanese capital Beirut. They demanded U.N. intervention to end the Israeli onslaught.

Similar protests were held in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, home to some 400,000 refugees displaced when Israel was established in 1948.

In the centre of the Syrian capital Damascus, thousands of people carrying Palestinian and Syrian flags filled streets around a popular square, chanted anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli slogans and burned an American flag.

"Victory belongs to heroic Gaza," one banner said. "Until when will the Arab silence continue?" read another.

In Baladiyat, a Baghdad district inhabited by many Palestinians given refuge in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, men waved banners and condemned Arab nations for not doing enough to support Palestinians.

"We have been waiting for action from Arab leaders for almost 60 years," Jaleel al-Qasus, the Palestinian envoy to Iraq, said during the protest by several hundred people.

"Our efforts have been in vain."

Scores of protesters tried to approach the Egyptian embassy in Beirut to demand Egypt open up its borders to Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians live under Israeli and Egyptian blockade. Police used tear gas to stop the demonstrators approaching.

In Egypt itself, protesters gathered in Cairo and five other towns, security sources said. They burned Israeli flags and carried placards denouncing Israel.

SUICIDE BOMBER

A teenage boy was killed in one protest in the volatile northern Iraqi city of Mosul when a suicide bomber on a bicycle detonated explosives in a crowd of around 300 protesters.

It was not clear why the bomber would have targeted an anti-Israeli rally. Police said 17 people were wounded in the attack in Mosul, a last stronghold for Sunni Islamist al Qaeda and other militants as violence subsides across Iraq. Several thousand people protested in the city of Samarra, a Sunni Arab city north of Baghdad and a few hundred took to the streets in Falluja in the mainly Sunni province of Anbar.

Iraq hosted some 30,000 Palestinian refugees before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Many of them found themselves victim of attacks or threats once the war began, partly because they were seen as clients of the deposed leader Saddam. Many have fled, and several thousand Palestinian refugees have been stranded at camps near the Iraq-Syria border waiting to find a new home abroad for more than two years.

The office of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the reclusive cleric who has peerless influence among Shi'ites in Iraq, issued a statement condemning what he called a 'savage' operation.

"The Arab and Muslim world demand, more than ever, a practical stance to stop this never-ending offensive," it said.

Iran's Supreme Leader issued a religious decree ordering Muslims around the world to defend Palestinians in Gaza against Israeli attacks "in any way possible". "Whoever is killed in this legitimate defence, is considered a martyr," he said.

© AP
2008-12-28 16:56:01 -

RAFAH, Egypt (AP) - Palestinians have breached the border fence with Egypt in several places and hundreds have crossed the frontier prompting Egyptian border guards to open fire, said officials and witnesses on both sides of the border.
An Egyptian security official said there were at least five breaches along the 9 mile (14 kilometer)border and hundreds of Palestian residents were pouring in. more

Israel tanks mass near Gaza as jets again pound Hamas

updated

GAZA CITY (AFP) — Israeli tanks massed at the Gaza border on Sunday as warplanes again pounded Hamas targets in the densely populated enclave where raids have killed nearly 290 people in less than two days.

Dozens of tanks and personnel carriers idled at several points near the border after Israel warned it could launch a ground offensive in addition to its massive air blitz, AFP photographers reported.

Hamas responded to the ongoing bombardment by firing rockets the farthest yet into Israel, with one striking not far from Ashdod, Israel's second-largest port, some 30 kilometres (18 miles) north of Gaza . It caused no casualties, medics said.

The Islamist movement accused Israel of "committing a holocaust as the whole world watches and doesn't lift a finger to stop."

"The Palestinian resistance reserves the right to hit back at this aggression with martyr operations," spokesman Fawzi Barhum told reporters, referring to suicide bombings which Hamas hasn't carried out against Israel since January 2005.

Britain and Russia joined the growing international chorus for a halt to the violence.

Pope Benedict XVI implored the international community to do "all it can to help the Israelis and Palestinians on this dead-end road... and not to give in to the perverse logic of confrontation and violence."

But Israeli Defence Minster Ehud Barak vowed to "expand and deepen" the bombing blitz, unleashed in retaliation for persistent rocket fire by militant groups.

"If it's necessary to deploy ground forces to defend our citizens, we will do so," his spokesman quoted him as saying.

The cabinet gave the green light to call up 6,500 reserve soldiers, a senior official told reporters after the meeting.

more

The Associated Press
Published: December 28, 2008

DAMASCUS, Syria: Damascus suspended its Turkish-mediated indirect peace talks with Israel because of the Jewish state's attacks against Hamas targets in Gaza, a Syrian official said Sunday.

The official's comment came a day after Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced Israel's air strikes and said he had plans to talk with the Israelis about indirect talks with the Syrians.

Israel and Syria held four rounds of indirect negotiations in Turkey after the peace talks were launched in May. The talks have not convened since Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced he would step down earlier this year.

On Saturday, Erdogan said: "Today, I was planning to call Israeli Prime Minister Olmert regarding Israel-Syria talks but I canceled it. I am not calling because it is also a disrespectful to us."

The Syrian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity for not being authorized to speak to the media, told The Associated Press that Syria's decision follows Erdogan's statements.

"After what the Turkish side said, Israel's aggression against Gaza closes all the doors in front of any move toward a settlement in the region," the Syrian official said

more

28 Dec 2008 17:11:00 GMT
Source: Reuters

AMMAN, Dec 28 (Reuters) - Jordanian deputies burnt an Israeli flag during a parliamentary session on Sunday in a rare protest against the Jewish state's raids on the Gaza Strip, parliamentary sources said.

Khalil Atiyah, a prominent independent deputy, along with several pro-government MP's and an Islamist deputy, set the flag aflame then stamped on it inside the lower house chamber during a special session to show solidarity with the Palestinians.

Several mainstream deputies also demanded the kingdom, the second Arab country to sign a peace agreement with Israel, sever diplomatic ties with its neighbour and expel its ambassador.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5407961.ece

By Tobias Buck in Jerusalem and Andrew England in Abu Dhabi

Published: December 28 2008 18:19 | Last updated: December 28 2008 18:19 Financial Times

Less than 28 months after the end of Israel’s botched war in Lebanon, the country has launched another massive assault against a militant Islamist group in the region. This time, the enemy is Hamas not Hizbollah. And this time, Israelis are hoping fervently that their political and military leaders know what they are doing.

..

But there are still nagging doubts over whether Israel can achieve even the more limited war goals it has set itself. The big uncertainty, according to Yossi Alpher, a former adviser to Mr Barak, is whether Israel is able and willing to do enough to bend Hamas’s will. “There is obviously no guarantee that Hamas will feel battered enough to sue for a ceasefire,” he said.

Judging by the group’s response to the current as well to earlier Israeli attacks, Hamas will not be in a rush to follow the Israeli playbook. All through the weekend, Hamas kept up a barrage of rocket attacks on Israel. Like other militant Islamist groups, Hamas celebrates martyrdom and has proved itself able to absorb a large number of casualties without losing the will to fight. It is, moreover, safely entrenched in its Gaza stronghold, and its small, flexible rocket units do not require complex military infrastructure to keep up the fire on Israel.

Many analysts believe air strikes alone will not be sufficient to stop the rocket fire, arguing that only a full-scale invasion of the strip can achieve this. Yet few believe Israel has the stomach for the bloody urban warfare that would accompany such a ground offensive, which would almost certainly lead to high Israeli casualties and expose the government to inter­national condemnation.

But if Israel ends the campaign without fully achieving its goals, that will almost certainly enhance Hamas’s prestige among Palestinians, at the expense of the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas, whose conciliatory line towards Israel returns to haunt him every time Israel strikes at Gaza.

Arab diplomats and analysts were yesterday also voicing concern that Israel’s actions would further strengthen extremist forces. Mustafa Alani, analyst at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Centre, said: “What are we going to see? More recruitment of fighters for Hamas, for Hizbollah, for al-Qaeda – you name it.”

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have the power to stop the carnage, but we don't; our complicity is our crime against humanity.

I suspected they would lose in Lebanon pretty rapidly, but I should have called it earlier. Of course, the Lebanon war was saddled with totally undefined Israeli objectives in the first place, making a failure a certainty.

In this case, all they have to do is somehow prevent those tiny bottle rockets from going off. Since this is basically impossible to pull off, the Israelis will 'lose' by their own criteria.

As a bonus corrolary this will make Kadima and Labor's Ehud Barak look stupid, ensuring that the dangerous psychopath Benjamin Netanyahu can trounce them in the soon upcoming elections. (and if Netanyahu gets into office we'll have to be much more vigilant about Israeli false flag operations, certainly)

Such dumb thinking. I mean, it's both violent and depressing, but it's also DUMB. I think that the Palestinians ought to try that tack for a change.

Another depressing outcome will be the emergence of AIPAC-friendly cleverness among Obama's shiny new brain trust.

Ohh Middle East/Asian warfare, do your ever inventive lose-lose-lose situations ever peter out? There's still some hours left this year for a nice collapse in Pakistan, or perhaps nebulous Erkenon conspiracies in Turkey...

I would like to apologize to everyone for being an American taxpayer. Sorry... everyone on all sides gets shafted again by these DUMB people controlling all the exploding materiél.
--
Hongpong.com

LA Times

By Borzou Daragahi
December 29, 2008

Reporting from Beirut -- Iran's highest political and religious authority made a provocative appeal Sunday to Muslims worldwide, saying "true believers" were "duty-bound to defend" Palestinians suffering under two days of Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip.

But supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's message fell short of a call to arms amid speculation about how Tehran and other allies of Hamas would respond to the attack on the Islamic militant group's facilities in the densely packed coastal enclave. It also did not meet the definition of a fatwa, or religious edict.

"All true believers in the world of Islam and Palestinian fighters are duty-bound to defend the defenseless women and children in Gaza Strip, and those giving their lives in carrying out such a divine duty are martyrs," Khamenei said in a statement, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency.

In mostly Shiite Muslim south Beirut, meanwhile, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, addressing a large crowd by videoconference, likened the offensive to the monthlong 2006 war between Israel and his group's guerrilla forces. Israel's political leaders and military were widely criticized at home after that conflict as having failed to cripple Hezbollah or improve security in northern Israel.

"The same choices are offered, the same battle and hopefully the same result," said Nasrallah, who is a spiritual disciple of Khamenei.

Still, with thousands of United Nations troops in southern Lebanon acting as a buffer between Hezbollah and Israel, his remarks were tempered. He made no commitment to intercede on behalf of Palestinians or Hamas, instead calling on Arabs to take to the streets. But he also stressed that he was not calling for popular uprisings.

The Gaza offensive continued to have consequences throughout the region, with large demonstrations staged across the Arab world. Yemen's official Saba news agency reported that nearly 1 million people turned up in the capital, Sana, for a protest. Television footage of the rally showed a huge crowd stretching deep into the horizon.

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It was Ehud Barak, the defense minister, who directed the preparations, and politically it is Mr. Barak who stands to gain or lose most. As chairman of the Labor Party, he is running for prime minister in the February elections and polls show him to be a distant third to the Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Kadima leader, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Excerpted from NY Times

29 Dec 2008 07:21:59 GMT
Source: Reuters

JAKARTA, Dec 29 (Reuters) - A militant Muslim group in Indonesia said on Monday it plans to recruit as many as 1,000 volunteers to fight in the Gaza Strip in response to Israeli air strikes that have killed more than 300 Palestinians. "Fighters should be in good physical condition, have a strong faith and be ready to die," Ahmad Soebri Lubis, secretary-general of the Islamic Defenders' Front, told Reuters by telephone.

"They will be provided with a one-way ticket until we defeat Israel."

Lubis said the group would start recruiting at its Jakarta headquarters in the next few days, and would send volunteers for training at camps in Indonesia to prepare them for the "battleground".

He said the group has in the past sent volunteers to Iraq and to Afghanistan.

Many Indonesians support the Palestinian cause and are opposed to U.S. policies in the Middle East, particularly the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The Indonesian government on Sunday joined widespread international condemnation of Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip which began with air strikes on Saturday.

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29 Dec 2008 08:48:00 GMT
Source: Reuters
JERUSALEM, Dec 29 (Reuters) - Israel declared areas around the Gaza Strip a "closed military zone" on Monday, citing the risk from retaliatory Palestinian rocket fire as an Israeli offensive in the coastal territory entered its third day.

The closure could also help Israel mount a surprise ground assault, should that be ordered. A military spokesman said the new policy meant that civilians, including journalists, may be barred from a buffer zone of 2km to 4km (1-2 miles) from Gaza.

As so often, the term 'terrorism' has proved a rhetorical smokescreen under cover of which the strong crush the weak

o Nir Rosen
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 December 2008 08.00 GMT
o Article history

I have spent most of the Bush administration's tenure reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia and other conflicts. I have been published by most major publications. I have been interviewed by most major networks and I have even testified before the senate foreign relations committee. The Bush administration began its tenure with Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel committing one of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of occupying Palestinian land. Bush's final visit to the country he chose to occupy ended with an educated secular Shiite Iraqi throwing his shoes at him, expressing the feelings of the entire Arab world save its dictators who have imprudently attached themselves to a hated American regime.

Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action. Even some Arab outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance with the might of the Israeli military machine. And none of this is a surprise. The Israelis just concluded a round-the-world public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of Arab states like Egypt.

The international community is directly guilty for this latest massacre. Will it remain immune from the wrath of a desperate people? So far, there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The people of the Arab world will not forget. The Palestinians will not forget. "All that you have done to our people is registered in our notebooks," as the poet Mahmoud Darwish said.

I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the American government could bring about the needed changes. An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.

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h/t Juan Cole
Mon, 29 Dec 2008 07:51:40 GMT

Top Iraqi cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has called for decisive action by Arab and Muslim states for an end to Israeli attacks on Gaza.

"Condemning what is going on in Gaza and supporting our brothers only with words is meaningless, considering the big tragedy they are facing,'' Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani said, in a statement released by his office in Najaf.

"Arab and Islamic nations need to take a decisive stance, now more than ever, to end these ongoing aggressions and to break the unjust siege imposed on the brave people of Gaza,'' the Ayatollah said .

Israeli air forces staged massive airstrikes against the Gaza strip on Saturday and Sunday, killing more than 300 people and injuring 1550 others.

Following the attacks, most Arab governments condemned the Israeli air raids and called for an immediate end to hostilities.

Their reaction, however, was similar to the stance they took after Israel attacked Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

Despite their condemnations, Israeli officials later revealed that some influential Arabs states had supported their attack on Lebanon as it was launched with the aim of destroying the country's resistance movement of Hezbollah.

Ayatollah Sistani's remarks came as the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei called on the Muslim world to defend the people of Gaza.

All Muslims are obliged to defend the defenseless people of Gaza in any way they can; those killed on such a sacred path are indeed martyrs.”

more at PRESS TV

War on Gaza may cripple Israel economy

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:41:09 GMT
An Israeli soldier adjusts the barrel of a tank near Kibbutz Sufa, just outside Gaza. Israel is no preparing its forces for a ground incursion into the strip.
Economists have warned that the Israeli economy would be threatened if the invasion of the Gaza Strip is prolonged or the scope widened.

Israeli began the launch of massive air strikes on Gaza on Saturday. Over 310 Gazans have so far been killed and nearly 1550 people have been wounded.

The estimated daily cost of the military operations is expected to stand at tens of millions of shekels (dollars).

According to Israeli daily Haaretz, Israeli economists have acknowledged that the costs of the attacks on the Gaza Strip would skyrocket if Tel Aviv calls up large reserve forces or launches a ground attack.

The Israeli Defense Ministry has refused to comment on the warning.

The treasury has also warned that the Israeli stock market is in a bad shape, rejecting the possibility that it may be able to deal with the army in a generous way.

One institutional investor said that the "market will fall apart" if the attacks continue.

The Israeli stock market is in a volatile situation due to the global financial meltdown. If attacks continue, foreign investments are also expected to be hit.

Israeli stocks fell on Sunday due to the continuation of Israeli air raids against Gaza.

Shares in Bank Leumi Le-Israel Ltd. plunged to their lowest in five years.

TA-25 Index decreased 1.43 percent to close at 625.84.

Tel Aviv's benchmark stock index has lost 49 percent in 2008 -- the biggest fall since 1992.

Israel is doing to Gaza what it did to Lebanon. Of course we will stand by and watch the carnage and comment and pontificate and obfuscate and bullshit and, and and, and, ad infinitum. When will we act? I think never!

what a crock of shit, they could at least call for the end of the disproportionate use of force, like the rest of the world!

29 Dec 2008 13:51:18 GMT
Source: Reuters
(Repeats story with no changes to text) (Adds analyst's comment, paragraph 5)

Dec 28 (Reuters) - Israel's attacks on Gaza three weeks before Barack Obama becomes U.S. president pose an unexpected challenge for a man who has promised to work for Middle East peace from his first day in office.

Questions have emerged over the timing of the attacks during a period of transition in the United States and over how Obama might respond as president and Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state.

Such questions often arise because Washington traditionally plays the role of broker in any Middle East peace moves.

HOW HAS THE UNITED STATES RESPONDED?

The Bush administration, due to hand over to Obama on Jan. 20, put the onus on Hamas, the Islamists in charge of Gaza, to prevent more violence. It did not demand an end to Israeli attacks but urged all concerned to protect innocent lives.

Steven Cook, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said: "There's little that the United States can do to call the Israelis off. The Bush administration and the incoming administration are going to be hard pressed to find something productive that they can do immediately."

WHAT DID THE UNITED NATIONS SAY?

The strikes against Hamas have killed hundreds of Palestinians, prompting a U.N. Security Council call for a ceasefire. But an Israeli official said Israel was feeling little international pressure to halt its attacks.

WHAT HAS OBAMA SAID?

Obama's team has avoided policy statements while George W. Bush is in power. Adviser David Axelrod said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday: "There's only one president who can speak for America at a time. And that president now is George Bush."

Bush's secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, spoke to Obama by phone. "They have a good working relationship," Axelrod told the news program. "The calls are largely in the area of fact-finding for him."

WHAT MIGHT OBAMA DO?

In the CBS interview, Axelrod recalled that when then-candidate Obama was in the southern Israeli town of Sderot in July, he voiced understanding for Israel's urge to try to put an end to attacks on Sderot from Gaza.

On the broader issue of Middle East peace, Obama promised to engage in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking from the start but has yet to propose a policy shift that might rescue a two-state solution from oblivion.

"My goal is to make sure that we work, starting from the minute I'm sworn into office, to try to find some breakthroughs," Obama said in July. But he added it was unrealistic to expect him to "suddenly snap his fingers and bring about peace."

WHAT ELSE FACTORS INTO PEACE MOVES?

Like Bush, Israel's leader Ehud Olmert is a lame duck. In October, Olmert proposed Israel withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank in return for peace with Palestinians. Israel holds a general election on Feb. 10 that will chart peace moves.

Israel's expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, along with a thickening network of settler roads, checkpoints and barriers, have complicated prospects for a two-state solution.

So have Palestinian divisions. Hamas Islamists seized the Gaza Strip in June 2007, leaving Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction in charge of the West Bank. Both would have to work with Israel for a comprehensive peace.

WHAT IS HILLARY CLINTON'S VIEW?

Clinton, a New York senator, is viewed as a favorite of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. But once she stops representing New York to become Obama's secretary of state, Clinton could push for Arab-Israeli compromise.

Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, worked up to the final hours of his presidency on an unsuccessful bid to forge a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace.

"U.S. diplomacy is critical in helping to resolve this conflict," she wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine in November-December 2007.

WHAT WAS BEHIND THE TIMING OF THE ISRAELI ATTACKS?

Senior Israeli officials insist the timing had to do with Israel's coming election rather than any perceived lost opportunity with Bush leaving office.

"Why should everything be connected to the United States? A far more important date for Israel is Feb. 10. There are elections in Israel," said one of the officials. "It wasn't politically sustainable for leaders in Israel to idly stand by and let Hamas continue shooting."

Another Israeli official said Israel could count on the Bush administration to help buy the military more time if the Gaza operation dragged on and international pressure grew for a ceasefire.

posted in full before the state dept redacts again ;)

AP, By Ibrahim Barzak & Matti Friedman, December 29

Gaza City, Gaza Strip — Israel's air force obliterated symbols of Hamas power on the third day of its overwhelming assault on Gaza on Monday, striking a house next to the Hamas prime minister's home, devastating a security compound and flattening a five-story building at a university closely linked to the Islamic group.

The three-day death toll rose to 315, including seven children under the age of 15 who were killed in two separate strikes late Sunday and Monday, medics said. Israel launched the deadliest attack against Palestinians in decades on Saturday in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at civilians in southern Israeli towns.

Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak told Israel's parliament in a special session that Israel was not fighting the residents of Gaza “but we have a war to the bitter end against Hamas and its branches.”

Mon Dec 29, 2008 12:11pm GMT

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan's Taliban guerrillas Monday called on the world's Muslims to unite and wage war against Israel in response to its air strikes that have killed more than 300 Palestinians in Gaza.

The Taliban, who lead an insurgency against the Afghan government and the Western forces backing it, also chided the United States and some European nations for not condemning the attacks, launched after a six-month cease-fire between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas expired.

"We expect that the Islamic Umah to throw aside the wings of negligence, rise up and wage ... jihad and practically help the Muslims of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan," the Taliban said in a statement on the group's website.

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Both sides are maneuvering for another ceasefire, and Israeli troops are not likely to invade the Gaza strip, say analysts.

The Christian Science Monitor, By Joshua Mitnick, December 29

Sderot, Israel - On the second day of intense Israeli airstrikes that set off street protests throughout the Middle East, Hamas responded Sunday by extending the range of its rocket attacks on southern Israeli cities.

The ferocity and precision of the Israeli blitz sent the Palestinian death toll to nearly 300, surprising the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, and sowing panic. Egyptian border police fired on Palestinians fleeing across Gaza's western border Sunday. Meanwhile, Israeli troops and tanks massed on Gaza's eastern and northern borders.

But Israel is mindful of the lessons from its war with Hezbollah in Lebanon two years ago, say analysts, and isn't likely to send in ground troops to topple Hamas.

Rather than reoccupy Gaza, a politically unpopular move, Israel may want to simply redefine the terms of engagement along the southern frontier and reach a new cease- fire. "[Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert has been chastened by the Lebanon experience," says Michael Oren, a fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem who authored a book on the 1967 war. "He talked about toppling Hezbollah and disarming Hezbollah. There are far more modest objectives for this operation – an improved status quo ante."

New York Times, By Steven Lee Myers & Helene Cooper, December 28

WASHINGTON — When President-elect Barack Obama went to Israel in July — to the very town, in fact, whose repeated shelling culminated in this weekend’s new fighting in Gaza — he all but endorsed the punishing Israeli attacks now unfolding.

“If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that,” he told reporters in Sderot, a small city on the edge of Gaza that has been hit repeatedly by rocket fire. “And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

Now, Mr. Obama’s presidency will begin facing the consequences of just such a counterattack, one of Israel’s deadliest against Palestinians in decades, presenting him with yet another foreign crisis to deal with the moment he steps into the White House on Jan. 20, even as he and his advisers have struggled mightily to focus on the country’s economic problems.

Washington Post, By Griff Witte, December 29

Israel continued pounding targets in the Gaza Strip with airstrikes on Monday, and Hamas-backed militants fired a new volley of rockets at the Israeli towns of Ashkelon and Sderot as the current round of hostilities entered a third day.

In the Israeli parliament, Defense Minister Ehud Barak referred to the situation as "all-out war" and told lawmakers the country's military was prepared for more intense action in order to repress Hamas's ability to fire rockets into Israeli territory.

The conflict will be "widened and deepened as is necessary," Barak said, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on its Web site.

The great Athenian historian Thucydides, writing almost 2500 years ago, concluded that one reason a nation goes to war is a perception of waning power: act now because the future looks worse than the present. The scale of the assault on Gaza suggests that the Olmert government is validating Thucydides' analysis: embarking on the end game to crush Hamas before it gets stronger, and Israel's position gets weaker. As Thucydides also observed, though, nations taking this gamble tend to be poor judges of what the consequences will be.

Israel's End Game

The attack on Gaza shows that the Olmert government feels it may be running out of options
By John Barry | Newsweek Web Exclusive

TEHRAN, Dec. 30 (PNA/Xinhua) -- Seven thousand university students from Iran's central city of Isfahan registered on Monday to fight Israel, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

"On the first day of registration to fight Zionist regime and to help Palestinians, 7,000 students from the universities of Isfahan have claimed readiness," Mohammad Zarifi, member of Iran's Students Islamic Association, was quoted as saying by Fars.

Also in the day, another Iranian students group, Basij Students (Volunteers) of Tehran Universities, announced it is registering volunteers to fight Israel.

The registration came a day after Iran's Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a religious decree saying whoever dies in fight with Israel and in defense of Gaza would be a martyr.

"In response to the supreme leader's decree of Jihad (holy war), Basij students from all the universities of Iran have registered and the registration will be kept tomorrow," said Alireza Zahedi, a member of Basij Students of Tehran Universities, without disclosing how many students have already registered.

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30 Dec 2008 05:58:43 GMT
Source: Reuters
JERUSALEM, Dec 30 (Reuters) - Israel on Tuesday rejected any truce with Hamas in the Gaza Strip before the threat of rocket fire from the coastal territory has been removed, and said it was ready to fight the Islamists for "weeks."

"There is no room for a ceasefire," Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit told Israel Radio as Israel's aerial offensive on Gaza entered a fourth day, with 345 Palestinians killed and four Israelis killed by rockets fired from Gaza.

"The government is determined to remove the threat of (rocket) fire on the south," he said. "Therefore the Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of Palestinians, of Hams, to continue to fire at Israel."

"That's the goal and it must be achieved," he added.

Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai said the military "has made preparations for some long weeks of action."

Olmert: Not clear when Gaza operation will end
The Ass. Press
Published: December 28, 2008

JERUSALEM: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel's military offensive against Gaza militants is "liable to take longer than we can foresee at this moment."

Israel's "bloodstained hands" stir up anger-Mubarak

30 Dec 2008 15:04:46 GMT
Source: Reuters
CAIRO, Dec 30 (Reuters) - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Tuesday slammed what he called Israel's "savage aggression" on the Gaza Strip, and said its "bloodstained hands" were stirring feelings of rage among Arabs.

But Mubarak, who had been under pressure for Egypt's role in helping enforce Israel's blockade of Gaza that led to ending a six-month truce, also said part of the blame for the violence on the Islamist Hamas group.

"We say to (Israeli) leaders: you bear the responsibility for your savage aggression against the Palestinians, regardless of what justifications you use as an excuse. And we say to them: your bloodstained hands are stirring up feelings of enormous anger," Mubarak said in a televised address.

Israel has killed more than 350 Palestinians in four days of attacks on the Gaza Strip in what it says an attempt to end Palestinian rocket attacks on its citizens and warned its military action could last weeks, while Hamas vowed to keep up rocket attacks on Israeli cities.

Many Arabs have been looking for Egypt, the most populous Arab country and the first to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state, to do more to end the assault on Gaza.

Yemeni protesters on Tuesday stormed and briefly seized the Egyptian consulate in the southern city of Aden, witnesses said. It was the latest in a series of protests against Egyptian diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

In his address, Mubarak laid part of the blame on Hamas.

"We warned you repeatedly that rejecting the truce would push Israel to aggression against Gaza," Mubarak said.

He added: "The right to resist the occupation is an immutable and legitimate right, but the resistance remains accountable to its people, which decide in favour or against it based on how much benefit it achieves for its causes or how much ruin, destruction and the waste of martyrs' lives it entails."

Mubarak said Egypt would propose a way to contain the current conflict to Arab foreign ministers meeting in an emergency session at the Cairo-based Arab League on Wednesday.

He said Egypt would seek to end the Israeli onslaught in a manner that allows for a return to an earlier truce, along with a reopening of the Gaza Strip's border--long a demand of Hamas.

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George Washington's warnings and U.S. policy towards Israel

George was way ahead of his time

Raw Story
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Tuesday December 30, 2008

An Israeli patrol boat intercepted a yacht carrying three tons of medical supplies to Gaza in international waters early on Tuesday as it attempted to run an Israeli blockade. According to those on board, the patrol boat accused the relief vessel of being involved in terrorist activity and then deliberately rammed it, forcing it to return to port in Lebanon.

Among the yacht's 16 passengers were doctors, journalists, and human rights activists, including former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA). McKinney spoke to CNN from Lebanon, telling John Roberts, "Our boat was rammed three times, twice in the front and once on the side."

McKinney described as "outright disinformation" a statement by the Israeli Foreign Ministry which called the charge that the ramming was deliberate "absurd." According to the Israeli spokesman, the boat was struck as it attempted to outmaneuver the Israeli vessel.

The Free Gaza movement, which sponsored the relief mission, explained in a press release, "This is the sixth boat that the Free Gaza movement has sent ... in a symbolic effort to end the seige of Gaza. These are small boats, and they do not cross into Israeli waters at all. This Israeli attack on the boat, which occurred in international waters, cannot be described as 'self defense' by any stretch of delusional imagination."

"Our mission was a peaceful mission to deliver medical supplies," McKinney told CNN, "and our mission was thwarted by the Israelis -- the aggressiveness of the Israeli military."

McKinney then appealed to President-elect Obama to "say something, please, about the humanitarian crisis that is being experienced right now by the people of Gaza." She referred to Martin Luther King's description of the United States as "the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet" and noted that "the weapons that are being used by Israel are weapons that are being supplied by the United States."

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List of those aboard the "Dignity" is online here

December 30, 2008 Jerusalem Post

In the midst of its Gaza operations, the IDF is entering yet another conflict zone: the Internet.

The Israeli army announced yesterday the creation of its own YouTube channel, through which it will disseminate footage of precision bombing operations in the Gaza Strip, as well as aid distribution and other footage of interest to the international community.

"The blogosphere and new media are another war zone," said Foreign Press Branch head Maj. Avital Leibovich. "We have to be relevant there," she said.

Her sentiment reflects a growing awareness in the Israeli government that part of the failure of the 2006 Lebanon campaign was Israel's lack of readiness for the intense media debate surrounding its operations. Since the beginning of the Gaza air strikes, Israeli politicians have been appearing regularly on the largest international news networks to defend the IDF.

Leibovich's YouTube initiative at (URL Omitted) is one more piece of the new media offensive.

Some of the footage might be considered disturbing, such as one video that allegedly depicts men loading rockets onto a pickup truck, to be driven to the border and launched into Israel. The grainy, silent, black-and-white video was transmitted from a plane flying overhead. Moments after the men finish loading their cargo, they are incinerated by an air strike.

Major Leibovich was not overly concerned. "The intelligent audience watching the footage will know that people killed did not have peaceful intentions toward Israel," she said. "I don't believe they'll be disturbed."

I realize I already posted the comments below in response to Sean Paul's latest diary, but I feel that what's happening in Gaza is important enough for me to repeat myself here.

Over the years I’ve read thousands of pages from as many points of view as I could find about the history of Israel going all the way back to its roots more than 100 years ago. My motivation was to understand a conflict that not only always seemed to raise a firestorm of controversy (as is the case in much of current discussion) but also had major impact on the entire world. While I don’t consider myself an expert on this subject, it’s absolutely indisputable that anyone who ventures beyond our mainstream news services and looks into the background of the conflict will find voluminous historical evidence – compiled not by conspiracy theorists or fringe leftists but highly credible historians, analysts, journalists, academics, and diplomats – that Israel has no moral high ground in this conflict whatsoever.

Now, I’m not claiming that even credible evidence is unchallengeable, and if it were put on the table, scrutinized, and refuted, I’d be the first to avoid questioning whatever Israel does. Unfortunately, the reason I see so little refuted is that for the most part it’s systematically ignored in our country except by those willing to be accused as anti-Semites.

I agree that Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorism. I agree that Hamas is guilty of terrorism as is any organization that targets civilians. I agree that the only reason the United States doesn’t have its own “Palestinian” problem is that it pretty much wiped out its earlier inhabitants. But these observations don’t tell the whole story, and, unless we step back, give the full range of historical record a fair hearing, and risk the emotional tension that it will inevitably generate, I believe this conflict will continue spiraling into a pit and suck in a good part of the rest of the world too.

Without going any further, let me just cite one piece of history that, if acted on, might have made a difference: in the spring of 2006, as reported by both the Guardian and the mainstream Israeli news service (YNet), Hamas not only offered to rescind the language in its charter calling for the destruction of Israel but also agreed to recognize Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries. That piece of history is just the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks for adding that, Tina. It's just another example of evidence that our media studiously ignores.

From The Guardian UK

* Rachel Shabi in Tel Aviv
* The Guardian, Friday 2 January 2009

Israel believes its has won broad international support in the media for its actions in Gaza thanks to its PR strategy, which through a new body has for months been concerned with formulating plans and role-playing to ensure that government officials deliver a clear, unified message to the world's press.

The body, known as the National Information Directorate, was set up eight months ago following recommendations from an Israeli inquiry into the 2006 Lebanon war. Its role is to deal with hasbara - meaning, in Hebrew, "explanation", and referring variously to information, spin, and propaganda.

The directorate's chief, Yarden Vatikai, said: "The hasbara apparatus needed a body that would co-ordinate its agencies, coordinate the messages and become a platform for co-operation between all the agencies that deal with communication relations and public diplomacy."

The directorate acts across ministries and decides key messages on a daily basis. Of its core messages for the media, there has been the advice that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements with Israel; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Hamas is a terror organisation targeting Israeli civilians. "In general, we think we are succeeding in getting the message across," said Vatikai.

Israeli officials have also enjoyed a clear edge with coverage. An Israeli foreign ministry assessment of eight hours of coverage across international broadcast media reported that Israeli representatives got 58 minutes of airtime while the Palestinians got only 19 minutes. Speaking for the Israeli military, Major Avital Leibovich said: "Quite a few outlets are very favourable to Israel, namely by showing [it] suffering ... I am sure it is a result of the new co-ordination."

Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Gillerman said: "I don't know how long it will last but at this moment Israel has no small measure of understanding and support, and even approval, from many countries."

One of the challenges of Israel's media offensive has been to counter the disturbing images of Gaza in the conflict. "In the war of the pictures we lose, so you need to correct, explain or balance it in other ways," said Aviv Shir-On, foreign ministry deputy director-general for public affairs. "Support doesn't mean the world is standing behind us, but it does mean people understand what we are doing and why."

The hasbara directive also liaises over core messages with bodies such as friendship leagues, Jewish communities, bloggers and backers using online networks.