From Occupied Palestine

Fears of far-right plot to kill Sharon
CHRIS McGREAL
Guardian, 7 July 2004

Israel's intelligence service has warned of growing concern for Ariel Sharon's safety as the far-right gives increasing support to violent resistance to his plan to remove Jewish settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

Thwarted Hamas turns from bombs to politics
CHRIS McGREAL
Guardian, 2 July 2004

Sharon may trumpet a fall in suicide attacks, but Palestinian militants are set on controlling Gaza after a pullout

Gaza City -- Israel's security establishment is quietly congratulating itself on breaking the back of Palestinian "terror networks", months after driving the leaders of Hamas and its smaller allies underground or killing them.

IDF spends hundreds of thousands on Gaza checkpoints
ARNON REGULAR
Ha'aretz, 22 June 2004

Despite the plans for disengagement, the army recently spent hundreds of thousands of shekels on two checkpoints at Hila and Tufah, leading to the Mouassi enclave in the center of Gaza overlooking Gush Katif.

Working under the supervision of the district coordination office in charge of liaison with the Palestinian population and humanitarian aid in the area, contractors renovated two crossing points through which goods and people move on a daily basis. Some 8,000 people live in the area, the most agriculturally fertile section of the Strip, where there is also extensive fishing.

The occupier is not convinced
AMIRA HASS
Ha'aretz, 16 June 2004

The unilateral disengagement plan is also progressing in the West Bank. And, just as in the Gaza Strip, it is less a security disengagement between Israel and the Palestinian areas than it is a political plan for isolating each Palestinian area from every other via a network of fortifications that includes fences, walls, enclaves and settlement expansions.

The address for protest is Labor's headquarters
TANYA REINHART
Yediot Aharonot, 8 June 2004

[Translated from Hebrew by Edeet Ravel]

How can we explain the conjurer's trick by which Sharon has turned into the darling of the Israeli peace camp?

Sharon is the worst prime minister we have ever had. No one else has managed to destroy so much in so little time. In the occupied territories, Sharon is realizing with frightening efficiency his long-standing vision of evicting the maximum number of Palestinians from their land. We have become a land of walls and fences and checkpoints in Rafah, in Jerusalem, in the West Bank. And now Israeli Arabs in Lydda are also being imprisoned behind a wall. We have an army that acts in unthinkable ways. Reading a newspaper fills one with shame; it is shameful to be an Israeli abroad.

Disengaged from reality
AMIRA HASS
Ha'aretz, 2 June 2004

The government hospital in Rafah last week received a donation from a Palestinian NGO - four mortuary refrigerators with room for 24 bodies, in addition to the old refrigerator, which catered for only six bodies. There won't be any need for the macabre photographs of the dead casualties, held a week or more in commercial refrigerators ordinarily used to hold food.

A gift of dust and bones
JONATHAN FREEDLAND
Guardian, 2 June 2004

Sharon's plan for a pullout owes more to demographic shifts than a belated conversion to peace-making

Gaza -- It is hardly the Mediterranean's shiniest pearl. And yet this strip of land - cramped, dusty and overrun with poverty and squalor - currently stands at the centre of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whether the near-dead peace process twitches back into life will depend on it; the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon could fall over it. All eyes are on the Gaza Strip.

The price of withdrawal
GRAHAM USHER
al Ahram Weekly, 20-26 May 2004

Rafah -- A woman pulls a wooden cart laden with bedding, kitchen utensils and water tanks through a jagged landscape of destroyed homes and smouldering rubbish. It could be a still from the 1948 war which saw the new Jewish state born and most of the Palestinians' ancestral homeland lost -- events whose 56th anniversary was commemorated last weekend in rallies and marches throughout Israel, the occupied territories and the wider Palestinian diasporas. It is Rafah refugee camp, Sunday 16 May, one day ahead of Israel's most massive military incursion into Gaza since it was occupied in the 1967 war.

The rape of Rafah
URI AVNERY
Gush Shalom, 22 May 2004

The immense might of the Israeli army, assembled from all over the country, has attacked a small Palestinian township on the margin of the destitute Gaza Strip. Palestinians, both fighters and civilians, are being killed by the dozen, homes are being destroyed wholesale, the sight of the fleeing population bring back memories of 1948.

More carnage in Gaza as the US mutters its disapproval
JONATHAN STEELE
Guardian, 21 May 2004

Israel's revenge attacks are, as ever, completely disproportionate

Israel's latest outrages in Gaza have produced a rare but tiny hint of American disapproval. For the first time since the Israeli assault on West Bank cities two years ago, the United States has abstained on a critical UN resolution rather than vetoing it. Colin Powell, the secretary of state, said Israel's actions "have caused a problem and worsened the situation". James Cunningham, representing the US at the UN, said the Israeli behaviour has "not enhanced Israeli security".