From Occupied Palestine

While 'rumors kill Rafah'
AMIRA HASS
Ha'aretz, 18 May 2004

Rafah -- 04:00-04:15 - Lengthy bursts of machine gun fire wake up the neighborhood. There are explosions from the border area. Y. explains that it's routine, almost every night. IDF patrols shoot at the abandoned houses on the border.

IDF incursion into the Rafah Refugee Camp – Special Edition
B'TSELEM
18 May 2004

IDF forces launched an incursion into the Rafah Refugee Camp early this morning. Israeli officials describe the incursion as the largest military operation since Operation Defensive Shield in the Spring of 2002.

Throughout the day B'Tselem has received reports of severe harm to the civilian population, including deaths, injury to medical teams, obstruction of medical care, house demolitions, and damage to infrastructure including roads, water and electricity.

Gazans pile up their belongings and flee
AMIRA HASS
Ha'aretz, 17 May 2004

Rafah -- The streets of Rafah were filled yesterday evening with horse-drawn carts, trucks and pick-ups, all laden to the brim with any and every item that the town's residents could remove from their homes - mattresses, water tanks taken down from roofs, clothes, blankets, doors and windows removed from their hinges, dismantled beds and closets, school books, tin and asbestos sheeting, baby carriages, refrigerators, gas canisters and more.

Today Rafah, tomorrow Jenin
GIDEON LEVY
Ha'aretz, 16 May 2004

It is easy to criticize the scenes in Rafah as inhumane Palestinian cruelty. But the hard truth is even harder to digest - what we are seeing is the inevitable result of years of abuse of a helpless population.

The 13 soldiers who died in the Gaza Strip were not pointless victims because their sacrifice points the way to a withdrawal from the territory. Israel will prove yet again what it has known for a long time - the only language it really understands is the language of force. Withdrawals come only when so much blood is shed that the country's majority is persuaded that the country has no choice but to pull out.

Terrorists, seven times
AMIRA HASS
Ha'aretz, 11 May 2004

On May 2, policemen from the Nachshon unit of the Prison Services severely beat six Palestinian detainees who were brought from the Russian Compound to the military courtroom at Ofer for the commencement of their trial.

The policemen beat the men in front of their families, lawyers and a few officers of the court (including the military prosecutor and the translator). The Prison Services told Haaretz that "fighters of the Nachshon Unit [of the Prison Services, who are in charge of the terrorists, the security detainees in the military prisons] overcame six terrorists who started to riot - and who tried to make (physical) contact with members of their families, and this is contrary to the Prison Services' standing orders and regulations."

Inquiry after Israeli forces caught using boy as shield
DONALD MacINTYRE
Independent, 24 April 2004

Jerusalem -- A photograph of a Palestinian boy tied to an Israeli police jeep has been handed to justice officials charged with investigating complaints over the use of "human shields" against demonstrators.

The boy, 13-year-old Mohammed Bedwan, and three adult protesters were tied to border police vehicles last week during one of what have become almost daily demonstrations against the routing of the Israeli government's barrier through Palestinian land.

Activists say Border Police held boy, 13, as human shield
REUTERS and HA'ARETZ SERVICES
Ha'aretz, 22 April 2004

When older Palestinian boys started throwing stones at Border Police officers in the flashpoint West Bank village of Biddu last week, 13-year-old Muhammed Badwan went along to watch.

He ended up on the hood of a Border Police jeep, at least one of his arms tied to a wire mesh screen that blocks the windshield from incoming stones, according to a photograph of the purported incident distributed Thursday by local group Rabbis for Human Rights.

Rogue states embrace the Bush-Sharon press conference
PHYLLIS BENNIS
Znet, 15 April 2004

Talking Points

OCCUPIED ARAB JERUSALEM

Bush's embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's unilateral plan to annex six major West Bank settlement blocs and reject the internationally-recognized Palestinian right of return as a quid pro quo for Sharon's pull-out from most Gaza settlements represents a major defeat for Palestinian human rights and international law, and a huge consolidation of the U.S.-Israeli alliance. While U.S. policy has, since 1967, tacitly accepted Israel's illegal settlements and done nothing to even encourage the end of the occupation, Bush's position represents a sharp break with longstanding precedent of supporting a negotiated settlement and even more sharply with Bush's own (however disingenuous) claim to support a two-state solution.

The man who knew too much
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 23 March 2004

He was drugged, kidnapped and locked up for 18 years after revealing Israel's nuclear secrets to the world. Next month Mordechai Vanunu is finally set to be released, but just how much freedom will he be allowed? Robert Fisk reports

Any Israeli who bought the 16 February edition of the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth would have believed that a truly wicked man was about to be released from Ashkelon prison. Each time a suicide bomber blew himself up, the prisoner would celebrate. Worse still, said the paper, the inmate - once a keeper of Israel's nuclear secrets - wants to endanger his country further after his release. "He told me," a former prisoner was quoted as saying, "that he has additional material and that he will reveal secrets..."

Words have failed us
AMIRA HASS
Ha'aretz, 2 March 2004

This is an admission of failure. The written word is a failure at making tangible to Israeli readers the true horror of the occupation in the Gaza Strip. When something is written about the sea being closed off to Palestinians in the north and south of the Strip, the response will be "they are terrorists." If something is written about neighborhoods in the western part of the Khan Yunis refugee camp and how the buildings are all full of bullet holes from heavy machine guns and cannon shells, the response will be "the Palestinians started it." Tell the story of how 15-year-old Yusuf Bashir's family home in Dir al-Balah has been turned into an army fortress, and in Israel they'll say, "there is no choice, the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom must be protected, like Kfar Dekalim, Atzmona and Morag."