PRESS ROOM

274 Article

• Gaza flotilla attack: UN report condemns Israeli ’brutality’

  22 September 2010, by Haroon Siddique

  A UN-appointed panel said today that Israeli forces violated international law, "including international humanitarian and human rights law", during and after their lethal attack on a flotilla of ships attempting to break the blockade of Gaza in May.
  The UN Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission judged Israel’s naval blockade of the Palestinian territory to be "unlawful" because there was a humanitarian crisis in Gaza at the time.
  The panel’s report, published today, described (…)

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• An Al Quds day letter to Tony Blair. From Lauren Booth, in Iran.

  3 September 2010, by Lauren Booth

  Dear Tony,
  Congratulations on your political memoir becoming an instant bestseller. I’m in Iran and have the only copy in the country. I can tell you, it’s so fiercely fought over, it’s worth its weight in WMD’s. Note to Random House; have ’A Journey’ translated into Farsi and Arabic ASAP, it’ll fly off the shelves in this part of the world.
  Tony, yesterday I went to Al Quds day protest in Tehran . You may have heard of it? It’s the rally where Iranians gather to protest against Israel (…)

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• Damage Control

  7 September 2010, by Uri Avnery

  A DUTCH journalist asked me last Wednesday to try and divine the thoughts of Binyamin Netanyahu on his way to Washington.
  It seems that she was satisfied with the results, because she asked me to divine the thoughts of Mahmoud Abbas, too.
  She must have liked that as well, because then she asked me to do the same for Barack Obama.
  Here, then, is what I told her:
  * * *
  NETANYAHU’S THOUGHTS on the way to Washington:
  The main thing is to minimize the damage.
  Just now, someone asked (…)

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• Obama’s friend raising funds for new Gaza aid ship

  25 July 2010, by Natasha Mozgovaya

  A fundraising campaign is currently underway in the United States to finance the purchase of an American ship in an effort to break the Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip in the early autumn. The ship is to be named after U.S. President Barack Obama’s book "The Audacity of Hope."
  If that isn’t enough to stir the ghosts of the 2008 American presidential election, one of the prominent figures to support the initiative is Columbia University history professor Rashid Khalidi, a (…)

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• Fear Not

  by Israel Shamir

  1. Crying Wolf
  So many people have circulated so many warnings of the forthcoming US-Israeli attack on Iran that it is hard to ignore them. A piece written by a few ex-spooks warning of a new round of war is one of these messages. In our view, spooks, ex or not, are not the most reliable people, and the CIA is not the best reference. However, this item fits with the dire predictions and accompanying Israeli U-boats to the shores of Iran. Rumours of Israeli advance forces being placed in (…)

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• On the Flotilla Ship, the German Foreign Ministry, British Counsel, Helen Thomas and Normalization

  by Adel Samara

  The end of May and the beginning of June 2010 witnessed hot events regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Definitely those events were not deliberately planned to take place at the 43rd anniversary of the 5 June occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip, although they are related to it.
  In this context it might be useful to make a comparison between the people who stood behind those events, especially non-Arabs, i.e. Germans, Americans and British.
  History did not start in 1967!
  Before (…)

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• Israel’s Freedom Flotilla Massacre underlines the urgency of intensifying BDS

  14 June 2010,

  Occupied Palestine, 08 June 2010 — In light of Israel’s massacre of humanitarian relief workers and activists aboard the Freedom Flotilla on 31 May 2010 and its insistence to continue its illegal siege on Gaza, pressuring Israel to comply with its obligations under international law has become of undeniable urgency. Drunk with power and impunity, Israel has ignored recent appeals by the UN Secretary General as well as a near consensus among world governments to end its deadly siege, putting (…)

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• B’tselem: Gaza, 95% of factories are closed, 93% of water is polluted

  14 June 2010, by Haitham Sabbah

  Most of Gaza’s factories have closed and its water is polluted as a result of Israel’s siege policy, according to a new report being released today by the Israeli Human Rights group – B’tselem.
  The siege policy has "led to economic collapse in Gaza," B’tselem noted in a 44-page report (PDF) that looked at Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem during the period from January 2009 to the end of April 2010.
  Following is a summery of this report:
  * The prohibition on bringing in raw (…)

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• A powerful but masochistic expression of gratitude by the USA to Israel

  by Mark Glenn

  Today, while driving through town, I wound up behind a minivan that had a big sticker on the back. The sticker had an Israeli flag in the middle of it and under it the quotation from the book of Genesis that reads "I will bless those who bless thee."
  I would like to take this time to list my own reasons for thanking and blessing Israel, our lone ally in the Middle East, for everything she has done for us, since I am quite sure most Americans are unaware of just what kind of friend she has (…)

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• Israel’s Policy of Killing Civilians

  2 June 2010, by Paolo Barnard

  Translated in English from Italian by Gulagnik’s Diego Traversa for http://gulagnik.wordpress.com and www.palestinethinktank.com
  Killing civilians has been State policy in Israel since 1948 (and, prior to that, of Zionism). It’s not about “tragic mistakes”, there’s no “deep regret for the incident”. Killing civilians is what Israel has founded itself on with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and this is what allows it to live. What is to be added to this is the outright impunity Israel (…)

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