One way is to survive the until a cease fire:
"A poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, released Tuesday, showed that the popularity of Hamas and its armed resistance approach toward Israel had greatly increased among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza because of the war. The poll showed that Hamas would win parliamentary and presidential elections if they were held today, and that more West Bank residents support transferring the use of the Hamas method to the West Bank."
What a backfire!
"Palestinians push 3-year deadline for Israel to end occupation" by Somini Sengupta and Rick Gladstone | New York Times September 03, 2014
UNITED NATIONS — President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority plans to ask the Security Council to compel Israel to end its occupation within three years as part of his initiative to overcome diplomatic deadlock and move toward a two-state solution, one of his top aides said Tuesday.
The assertion by the aide, Hanan Ashrawi, was the most specific time frame given for Abbas’s demand for a deadline, which he began to float last month in the midst of fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. Ashrawi also gave one of the clearest signals yet that the Palestinians would use their observer status at the United Nations, an upgrade won nearly two years ago over Israeli and US opposition, to join the International Criminal Court and seek the prosecution of Israeli behavior in the occupied territories. That prospect has caused deep concern in Israel and the United States.
“We are intending to take Israel to the ICC,” Ashrawi, a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and of the Palestinian Legislative Council, told reporters at a news briefing at UN headquarters. “We do not have a time frame.”
Ashrawi, one of the most outspoken advocates of International Criminal Court membership, spoke as part of a new effort by Abbas to shift strategies in pursuit of the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, after the collapse of the US-brokered peace talks earlier this year.
Abbas and his aides spoke increasingly in recent days of wanting an internationally approved deadline for the end of Israel’s occupation to lands captured in the 1967 war. His ambassador to the UN, Riyad H. Mansour, suggested last week that Abbas may formally seek such a deadline at the General Assembly annual debate this month, attended by many world leaders.
Ashrawi asserted that peace talks with Israel had been so frustrating to the Palestinian side that a shift in strategy was needed and expected by the Palestinian population, which has grown increasingly bitter and disappointed. She said the failed US-sponsored talks, which had been pushed aggressively by Secretary of State John Kerry, had basically allowed Israel to perpetuate policies long opposed by the Palestinian side.
Which is what the talks were ultimately designed to do.
Palestinian anger was reinforced Sunday when the Israeli government seized nearly 1,000 acres in the West Bank near Bethlehem, an action that also drew widespread condemnation including from the United States, which said it was counterproductive to achieving a two-state solution.
Related:
"Israel announced the expropriation of about 1,000 acres of West Bank land Sunday in a step that could help clear the way for construction of a new Jewish settlement. Military officials said the decision was made at the end of an operation in June to search for three Israeli teens who were abducted and killed by Hamas militants. The Hamas kidnapping and murder of the teens sparked a chain of events that led to the 50-day war in the Gaza Strip."
I noticed it is expropriation and not annexation (like Russia in Crimea), and I didn't see any US criticism in there, the only problem being it is the "wrong move at wrong time." Also, the premise upon which the actions rest turn out to be a deception.
Abbas has advanced his new deadline strategy amid signs that his popularity as a Palestinian leader has faltered in part because of the 50-day Gaza war between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that dominates in Gaza and that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. The war was halted by an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire a week ago.
While declining to go into the Israel narrative regarding Hamas, it's obvious the ICC is Abass's reaction to his polls.
A poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, released Tuesday, showed that the popularity of Hamas and its armed resistance approach toward Israel had greatly increased among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza because of the war.
The poll showed that Hamas would win parliamentary and presidential elections if they were held today, and that more West Bank residents support transferring the use of the Hamas method to the West Bank.
Well, blaming Hamas for what happened and dissolving the unity government obviously did not go over too well as the Zionist tool sees the war as a foothold back into Gaza.
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"Abbas seen as ready to seek Mideast pact on his own" by Jodi Rudoren | New York Times August 26, 2014
Welcome back!
JERUSALEM — With no clear resolution in sight to the battle between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, who has been largely sidelined as his popularity sank during the conflict, is attempting to reassert his role and cast himself as the leader of all Palestinians.
Abbas plans to present an initiative Tuesday to the Palestinian leadership that, several people close to him said, would bypass US-brokered negotiations with Israel that have failed for many years to produce a Palestinian state.
Instead he will call for an international conference or UN resolution demanding a deadline to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. As leverage, Abbas would finally join the International Criminal Court and other institutions where he has long threatened to pursue Israeli violations, these people said.
Egypt, Israel, and the United States have said for weeks that strengthening Abbas and reinstating his security forces on Gaza’s borders was a goal of cease-fire negotiations in Cairo, but Hamas, the Islamist faction that dominates Gaza, has yet to accede to these and other conditions.
Now, Abbas’s allies said they hoped to seize on the Gaza crisis and diplomatic stalemate to press for a fresh approach to the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to show the public that he is at the helm.
He is in real trouble then! It's looking like even Palestinians are finally seeing the Palestinian Authority -- created by USrael in the wake of the death of Arafat and the PLO, and who benefited? -- for what it is.
“This is exactly our moment, like it was the moment of the European Jews after the Holocaust, when they said, ‘Never again.’ This is our ‘never again,’ ” said Husam Zomlot, a senior foreign policy official in Abbas’s Fatah faction. “This is the time to really operate. We either operate or we let the patient die, and the patient here is the two-state solution. We cannot just put [on] bandages.”
The two state solution is essentially dead.
US diplomats said they did not have details of Abbas’s plan, and Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said he would not comment until it was presented in full.
Details of the Abbas initiative remained under wraps. He teased it only as “a nonconventional solution” in an interview on Egyptian television this weekend and acknowledged that Israel and the United States probably would reject it.
More than 120 rockets soared from Gaza into Israel’s south on Monday, the sixth straight day of intense barrages; most landed in open areas and caused little damage, though some in the evening were aimed at Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Airport.
The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 11 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes Monday. Three were killed in a car in Gaza City and several others in Beit Lahiya, health officials said.
Early Tuesday local time, an Israeli airstrike leveled a 14-story building in Gaza, wounding at least 25 people, said Gaza health official Ashraf al-Kidra, the Associated Press reported. It was the tallest building in Gaza to be demolished by an airstrike in the fighting.
The initiative comes amid renewed Egyptian efforts to halt the hostilities between Israel and Hamas.
Arab news agencies reported Monday that Egypt called for an open-ended cease-fire in exchange for a full opening of Gaza’s border crossings, rehabilitation of what the fighting destroyed in the coastal enclave, and an expansion of the permitted fishing zone.
Hamas’s demand for a Gaza seaport and airport — and Israel’s demand for Gaza’s demilitarization — would be discussed within a month.
Israeli officials declined to comment on the reports.
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"For Hamas and Israel, truce does little to resolve myriad problems" by Jodi Rudoren | New York Times August 27, 2014
JERUSALEM — After 50 days of fighting that took some 2,200 lives, leveled large areas of the Gaza Strip, and paralyzed Israel’s south for the summer, Israeli and Palestinian leaders reached an open-ended cease-fire agreement Tuesday that promised only limited change to conditions in Gaza and left unresolved the broader issues underpinning the conflict.
Hamas, the militant Islamist faction that dominates Gaza, declared victory even though it had abandoned most of its demands, ultimately accepting an Egyptian-brokered deal that differs little from one proffered on the battle’s seventh day. In effect, the deal put both sides back where they were at the end of eight days of fighting in 2012, with terms that called for easing but not lifting Israeli restrictions on travel, trade, and fishing in Gaza.
Then Hamas did win. They survived the Israeli onslaught and gained in popularity.
In Israel, continual barrages of rocket fire and fears about starting school Monday without a cease-fire had increased pressure on the government from citizens exhausted by what had become a war of attrition. Yuval Steinitz, a senior Israeli minister, said in a television interview Tuesday night that he accepted the cease-fire “with a sour taste of missed opportunity.”
“We did not want this violence, and we did not want this war,” Steinitz said. “This is a reasonable arrangement.”
Sounds like a loser.
In Gaza City, Gaza Strip, “God is great” blared from mosque loudspeakers and celebratory gunshots exploded in the air as hundreds waved the green flags of Hamas, while displaced residents raced on mattress-laden tuk-tuks and donkey carts back to damaged or destroyed homes in border areas.
“We declare the victory of the Palestinian resistance, the victory of Gaza,” Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, announced at Al Shifa Hospital. “We achieved some of our instantaneous demands out of this battle. We become closer to Jerusalem and our Palestinian lands.”
A statement from Egypt’s foreign ministry describing the deal included only vague language about “the aspirations of the Palestinian people” and the need to create “an independent Palestinian state to achieve peace and security in the region.” Hamas’s call for a seaport and airport in Gaza, and Israel’s call for demilitarization of the coastal territory — along with an exchange of Israeli soldiers’ remains for Palestinians in Israeli prisons — were put off for discussion within a month if the truce holds.
“We are all aware that this is an opportunity, not a certainty,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement. He described “certain bedrock outcomes” as essential to a long-term solution, saying that Israel needed to live “without terrorist attacks, without rockets, without tunnels, without sirens going off and families scrambling to bomb shelters,” and that Palestinians required “full economic and social opportunities to build better lives for themselves and for their children.”
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations welcomed the cease-fire but said in a statement, “The blockade of Gaza must end; Israel’s legitimate security concerns must be addressed.” He warned, “Any peace effort that does not tackle the root causes of the crisis will do little more than set the stage for the next cycle of violence.”
The agreement followed a week of renewed fighting after the collapse of the latest in a series of short-term cease-fires.
Israel killed several top Hamas military commanders and felled three high-rise buildings in audacious airstrikes, while more than 100 rockets a day pounded its battered south.
More than 2,100 Palestinians were killed since the operation began July 8. Most of them were civilians, including two young siblings struck in their car in the southern city of Khan Younis moments before the cease-fire took effect at 7 p.m. Tuesday, said the Gaza Health Ministry. On the Israeli side, 64 soldiers and six civilians were killed, including two men felled by a mortar that exploded near a swimming pool in a kibbutz just outside Gaza around 6 p.m., the military said.
“The human catastrophe is just very immense, it’s getting worse and worse every day, and I think that’s one of the reasons Hamas took into consideration in accepting the cease-fire,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. “The mood is very critical of Israel, but they are also asking questions of Hamas: Why did we have to go through all this? Why is there no cease-fire? Why did we provoke Israel into this war? More and more questions are in the minds of the Palestinians, especially in this last week.”
Then how did they get so popular, and why am I still reading this Zionist bs?
In Israel, support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s performance dropped by more than half this weekend, according to polls conducted for Channel 2 News.
And Hamas's went up, huh?
Israel’s central bank cut interest rates Monday to their lowest level ever to counter economic fallout, and Netanyahu has lashed out in recent days against ministers critical of the campaign, which commentators and politicians have increasingly argued was ill-conceived.
OMG, Hamas really did win!
“At this point, a cease-fire to me only means that I need to prepare the city for the next round,” Mayor Itamar Shimoni of Ashkelon, a city of 115,000 less than 10 miles from Gaza, said in a radio interview. “I will only believe in an agreement with Hamas if we have an international guarantee that all of the planned goals of this operation are reached.”
Israel achieved its original stated goal, to restore quiet, but Hamas’s repeated penetration of Israeli territory through tunnels, the deaths of the most Israeli soldiers since the 2006 Lebanon war, and the killing on Friday of 4-year-old Daniel Tregerman in a kibbutz near Gaza have scarred the country’s psyche.
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, whose stature fell throughout the conflict, promised Tuesday a diplomatic initiative to accompany the cease-fire. His allies said it would demand international guarantees for a clear deadline to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, bypass US-brokered peace talks, and use UN institutions and the International Criminal Court as leverage.
“The vision should be very clear, very specific, and understood from A to Z,” Abbas said as he convened an evening meeting of 52 Palestinian leaders at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, “because engaging in vague negotiations is something we cannot continue to do.”
Though Egypt, Israel, and the United States have all said a cease-fire should strengthen Abbas and give him the leading role in rebuilding Gaza, he was not mentioned in the Egyptian statement.
Once again they misread the situation.
The statement also said nothing about Gaza’s southern Rafah crossing with Egypt, whose frequent closings since President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi came to power in Egypt have been a prime Palestinian complaint.
The agreement restores the 6-nautical-mile fishing zone off Gaza’s coast that Israel agreed to in 2012 but later cut. It also says that Israeli-controlled border crossings will be opened to allow the “quick entry” of humanitarian aid and materials to reconstruct Gaza, where more than 11,000 homes and scores of schools and mosques have been reduced to rubble.
A senior Israeli official said the entry of cement and concrete would be monitored to ensure it was used for civilian purposes, because “we’re not interested in allowing Hamas to rebuild its military machine.”
Criticism of the cease-fire came from Israel’s right and left.
“I ask myself, ‘What have we accomplished?’” Danny Danon, a leader of Netanyahu’s Likud Party who is often at odds with the prime minister, said on Army Radio. “If we would have acted much more aggressively to begin with, we would have ended this fighting with a much lower price and much preferable conditions.”
Zehava Galon, head of the left-wing Meretz Party in Parliament, said that the cease-fire came “50 days too late” and that “its terms prove once and for all that this operation was Netanyahu’s strategic failure for embarking on this war without goals and ending it by giving Hamas support.”
But Israeli analysts said that since 1973, no prime minister has emerged from a war unscathed. Yehuda Ben Meir, an expert on public opinion at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, cautioned that it was too early to assess the outcome of the campaign.
Several Palestinian analysts said they, too, were waiting for more details. Noura Erakat, a lawyer and professor at George Mason University, called the agreement “unreliable at best,” saying it “lacks precision” about who will oversee the border crossings and reconstruction.
In Gaza City, health officials said Randa Nemer, 19, had been killed and 45 others wounded by the mass firing of gunshots skyward as many residents rushed to celebrate.
But some Gazans were circumspect.
“We are happy that the war is over, but there is nothing requiring celebrations in the agreement,” said Bassam Hannouna, 24. “We will celebrate when we see the postponed demands existing on the ground.”
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Of course, in times like these I always turn to the BG editorial page for solutions:
"Cease-fire marks start of real work toward peace in Gaza" | August 28, 2014
If it holds, the much-anticipated cease-fire between Hamas and Israel represents a tentative first step toward normalcy in Gaza after 50 days of war. But normalcy isn’t really a solution to the tensions that have caused more than 2,000 deaths over the past two months. Since 2007, normalcy there has meant 1.8 million Palestinians living under a blockade. It has also meant 8 million Israelis living with the possibility of rocket fire raining down from Gaza. Although the cease-fire agreement reportedly calls for the easing of border crossings between Israel and Egypt, and a widening of the zone in which Palestinians are permitted to fish in the Mediterranean Sea, the deal seems to tweak, but not fundamentally change, the situation on the ground. For this cease-fire to mean more than previous agreements, it must provide an effective mechanism for opening the border to food, medicine, and other civilian goods, while keeping weapons out.
Although Secretary of State John Kerry has pledged US assistance in rebuilding Gaza, the futility of rebuilding a place that seems destined to be destroyed again must be apparent, even to him. This was the deadliest of a series of confrontations with Hamas in Gaza. Among the victims of the violence this summer were more than 400 children. Across the border, Israelis are mourning the deaths of 64 soldiers and six civilians. Despite this bloodshed, neither side seems to have achieved its core objectives. Israeli officials, who hoped to defeat or perhaps even remove Hamas from power in Gaza early in the conflict, fell short of that goal. Meanwhile, Hamas’s greatest victory so far has been mere survival.
Hamas’s demands for a seaport, the reopening of the Gaza airport, and the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails will reportedly be discussed in Cairo in the coming weeks, along with Israel’s demands for a demilitarized Gaza Strip. If Hamas does succeed in obtaining the release of prisoners or its other demands, then the militant group will arguably have gotten more out of Israel with seven weeks of violence than Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas achieved with seven years of peace talks.
This sends a bad message. Indeed, Abbas has suggested that he will not return to the negotiating table with Israel, and will instead pursue a solution at the United Nations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had an historic opportunity to make peace with Abbas, who renounced violence long ago. But talks went nowhere, and even good-faith gestures, such as the release of prisoners Abbas wants from Israeli jails, proved too difficult politically for Netanyahu to pull off. If Netanyahu is unable to solve Israel’s problems through diplomacy or through war, then perhaps it is time for Israelis to begin looking for another prime minister.
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Related: How we got here
He's talking two-state solution when Israel has basically wiped that solution from the map.
Israeli-Palestinian peace is needed now
US the only power that can push for peace
The last thing the U.S. is pushing around this planet is peace!
"Gazans suspected of collaborating with Israel executed" by Fares Akram | New York Times August 23, 2014
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — One day after an intelligence coup enabled Israel to kill three top commanders of Hamas’s armed wing, as many as 18 Palestinians suspected of collaboration with Israel were fatally shot in public Friday, in what was seen as a warning to the people of the Gaza Strip.
Translation: Gazan = Nazi
In Israel, a 4-year-old boy was killed by a mortar shell on a kibbutz just outside Gaza on Friday, the third consecutive day of steady barrages fired by Palestinian militants, according to an Israeli police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld.
I'm not going to get into the Gazan rocket squads or which zettlers may be responsible for the false flag provocations right now.
The boy was the first child and the fourth civilian on the Israeli side to be killed in the conflict, which also has left 64 Israeli soldiers dead as well as about 2,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including more than 460 children.
I'm not complaining because I realize what I'm reading, but Palestinians always get second billing. One Israeli child killed gets coverage before the cold statistical numbers are cited.
“Hamas will pay a dear price for this severe terror attack,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a statement offering condolences to the boy’s family. He said Israeli forces would “intensify their activity against Hamas and the terror organizations in Gaza” until the operation’s objective — to restore quiet — had been met.
The Palestinians killed Friday were not identified, but they were reported to have been arrested or convicted of collaboration, a crime punishable by death under Palestinian law, before this summer’s bloody battles between Israel and Hamas, the militant Islamist movement that dominates Gaza.
Gaza’s Interior Ministry, which handles judicial and security matters, declined to address the reported executions. But a statement published on many Palestinian websites — including some affiliated with Hamas — said a “revolutionary court” had been formed “in agreement with the war’s circumstances.”
Al Majd, a website run by the Internal Security Service of the Hamas government that ran Gaza until June, quoted an unidentified official as saying, “The judiciary procedures and measures were completed against the accused,” and future collaborators would be dealt with in the field, not in courthouses, to create deterrence.
The executions, by masked gunmen, were the most public and numerous since the 47-day-old conflict began. They echoed executions Hamas had carried out during two previous Israeli military operations in Gaza. Palestinian news agencies had reported Thursday that three other suspected collaborators were killed.
The timing of the public executions — after Thursday’s airstrike by Israel that killed the three leaders of Hamas’s armed wing, and after Tuesday night’s attempted assassination of its chief, Mohammed Deif, whose fate remains unknown — suggested that Hamas wanted to send a harsh public message against informing on the locations of militants.
“I think this has provoked, and let’s say triggered, this process,” said Hamdi Shaqqura, deputy director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Gaza group that has long tracked and condemned such extrajudicial killings.
“If you speak to any regular citizen in Gaza, nobody is looking with mercy on these people. Why? Because people are being bombarded,’’ Shaqqura said. “A lot of the blame for bombardment of specific places is being put on collaborators.”
Another word for that might be spies, and spies should be put to death. It's treason.
The executions came during renewed violence after Tuesday’s collapse of cease-fire talks in Cairo that had halted hostilities for nine days.
A steady stream of 75 rockets from Gaza soared into Israel on Friday, with sirens sounding as far north as Tel Aviv and several suburbs, Ramat Gan, Bat Yam, Bnei Brak, and Holon. Two men and a woman were wounded by shrapnel when one rocket exploded at a synagogue in the southern city of Ashdod, and another Israeli was hurt by a mortar barrage in Beersheva.
Yeah, the poor, poor Jews always under attack in this world when they never did anything to anyone and just wanted to live in piece.
Palestinian officials reported two men killed in the Nusseirat refugee camp Friday morning after an Israeli airstrike.
That's what we call an afterthought paragraph.
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Executions by masked gunmen?
"Israeli airstrike levels Gaza apartment tower; Missiles targeted a Hamas room, Israel officials say" by Karin Laub | Associated Press August 24, 2014
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israel bombed an apartment tower in downtown Gaza City on Saturday, destroying the 12-story building, while Hamas kept up heavy rocket fire that sent more Israelis fleeing border areas close to Gaza.
I saw something about that, yeah.
The violence signaled that a speedy resumption of truce talks is unlikely, despite another appeal by mediator Egypt. Gaps between Israel and Hamas on a border deal for blockaded Gaza remain vast, and repeated rounds of talks have ended in failure.
In the Gaza City strike, a huge fireball followed by a black column of smoke rose into the sky after two Israeli missiles toppled the Zafer Tower, one in a group of several high-rises in the upscale Tel al-Hawa neighborhood. Neighboring buildings shook from the blasts.
The Israeli military said the missiles targeted a Hamas operations room in the building, but did not explain why the entire tower with 44 apartments was brought down.
Gaza police said a warning missile had been fired five minutes earlier and that some residents rushed out of the building in time. Still, 22 people were wounded, including 11 children and five women, according to Gaza hospital officials.
Maher Abu Sedo, an area resident, said the two strikes came within seconds of each other.
‘‘People started shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’ and women and kids were screaming,’’ he said. ‘‘This is crazy. The state of Israel has resorted to madness. In less than a minute, 44 families have become displaced . . . They lost everything, their house, their money, their memories, and their security.’’
I think the entire world has recognized that fact. It is a band of psychopaths running that country and there is nothing, nothing I would put past them.... and if a nuclear bomb ever destroys an American city I will be looking at them first!
Cui bono?
Some 100,000 Gazans have become homeless, with more than 17,000 homes destroyed or damaged beyond repair, according to UN figures.
I think that was the idea. Create more displaced people that will have to be moved along -- and then Israel can take the strip.
However, the Saturday strike marked the first time an entire apartment high-rise was destroyed.
Elsewhere in Gaza, an airstrike on a car killed a man and wounded 11 people, said Ayman Sahabani, head of the emergency room at Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine later identified the man killed as a field commander.
Meanwhile, Gaza militants fired over 100 rockets and mortar shells at Israel on Saturday. The barrage came a day after a mortar shell from Gaza hit a farming village in southern Israel, killing a 4-year-old boy.
Israeli media said large numbers of residents of southern Israeli communities near the Gaza border were leaving their homes and heading for safer areas following the death of the boy in Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
Related:
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Honestly, that explains much of what I'm reading. I'm not complaining; just serving their dwindling readership.
‘‘I say whoever can leave, whose presence is not crucial, should leave,’’ said public security minister Yitzhak Ahronovich during a visit to the south on Saturday.
Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon called on southern residents to be ready for a prolonged campaign against Hamas militants.
‘‘In the end we will win,’’ he said Saturday. ‘‘This is a test of staying power and strength.’’
You have already lost. The world is simply not standing for Israeli aggression anymore.
Since the fighting erupted on July 8, Israel has launched some 5,000 airstrikes at Gaza, while Gaza militants have fired close to 4,000 rockets and mortars, according to the Israeli military.
More than 2,100 Palestinians, including close to 500 children, have been killed, according to Palestinian health officials and UN figures. Israel has lost 64 soldiers and four civilians.
Israel says it is targeting sites linked to militants, including rocket launchers, command centers and weapons depots. The UN says about three-fourth of the Palestinians killed have been civilians.
A formula for ending the war remains elusive.
Hamas demands that Israel and Egypt lift a Gaza border blockade they imposed in 2007, after Hamas seized the territory from Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
They didn't seize it, they won a legitimate election, the propaganda pre$$ knows it, and yet they repeat the distortion. Why should we believe anything from the Zioni$t organ?
As for the blockade, I'm disappointed there is not an armada of ships and planes delivering goods.
Israel says it can ease, but not remove, the stifling restrictions on Palestinian trade and travel unless Gaza militants agree to disarm and stop manufacturing or smuggling weapons. Hamas has rejected that demand.
When is Israel going to disarm and disgorge itself of all its high-tech AmeriKan hardware?
Hullo?
Earlier Saturday, Hamas announced that it had signed a pledge to back any Palestinian bid to join the International Criminal Court. Such a bid could expose Israel, as well as Hamas, to possible war crimes prosecution.
Hamas had hesitated for weeks before giving its written consent. Its decision could further increase domestic pressure on Abbas to turn to the court.
Validating what was said by me above regarding his popularity.
Abbas has debated the issue for months because seeking International Criminal Court action could strain his ties with the United States and deprive his government of badly needed Western financial support.
Like I said, he/it is a tool.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev had no immediate comment regarding the renewed call for a cease-fire. Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for Gaza’s ruling Hamas, said the group would consider the Egyptian appeal, but there was no sign it would budge from longstanding demands.
During stop-and-go truce talks, Egypt has presented compromise proposals, including a gradual easing of movement for people and cargo at two crossings between Israel and Gaza. However, Israel offered no specific commitments, and Hamas rejected the idea.
Egypt has presented Israel's position and called it a peace proposal.
Abbas has urged Hamas to accept the plan, which would also give him a new foothold in Gaza because forces under his command would be deployed at the border crossings.
Abbas met Saturday with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt in Cairo to try to find ways to resume truce talks.
What do you when a leader is totally irrelevant?
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"Hamas finance official killed in airstrike" by Fares Akram | New York Times August 25, 2014
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — An Israeli missile strike in Gaza City killed the Hamas official responsible for the Islamic group’s financial transactions, in one of a wave of attacks aimed at the Hamas leadership, the Israeli military said.
The missile killed the official as he rode in a car, ripping open the vehicle and scattering American currency on the street, according to a witness.
??????????
Gaza authorities did not immediately identify the victim, but the Israeli military said he was Muhammad al-Ghoul, who it said handled Hamas’s “terror funds.”
The missile attack was the latest in a string of recent Israeli airstrikes based on what appears to be precise intelligence about the movements of some Hamas operatives who have emerged from their bunkers as the more intensive fighting has subsided.
Will someone please flip the record over?
Last week, airstrikes killed three senior Hamas commanders in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, and Israel tried to assassinate Mohammed Deif, the chief of Hamas’s military wing, whose fate remains unknown.
Israeli forces continued on Sunday to strike Palestinians suspected of being militants and buildings in which they are said to operate in Gaza as militants fired scores of rockets and mortar rounds into Israel.
Yeah, yeah,
Israeli airstrikes leveled a seven-floor office building and severely damaged a retail and office complex in the Gaza Strip early Sunday, signaling a new escalation in seven weeks of fighting with Hamas, the Associated Press reported.
The strikes in Rafah came just hours after Israel bombed a residential tower in Gaza City, collapsing the 12-story building with 44 apartments.
The Health Ministry in Gaza said 16 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, including the financial official of Hamas, which dominates Gaza. It said 52 people were wounded.
In the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, artillery shells or missiles hit a home, killing five people, including a mother and her three children. Hours after the strike on Ghoul’s car at least two missiles hit his home, destroying it.
The war crimes continue.
In remarks broadcast Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called on the residents of Gaza “to immediately evacuate any building from which Hamas is carrying out terrorist activity.”
Netanyahu added: “Any such place is a target for us. In recent days we have proven there is no immunity for those who fire at Israel’s citizens.”
The military wing of Hamas claimed responsibility for firing mortar rounds at the Erez crossing point on Gaza’s northern border with Israel. The attack wounded four Israeli civilians who were providing humanitarian assistance at the crossing, according to Israeli authorities.
Why would they do that, bomb a checkpoint bringing in goods?
In a separate development Sunday, aides to the Palestinian president said he will soon appeal to the international community to set a deadline for Israel to end its occupation of lands captured in the 1967 Mideast war and make way for an independent Palestinian state, the AP reported.
The aides said President Mahmoud Abbas would unveil his proposal at a meeting of the Palestinian leadership on Tuesday. They said it was part of a comprehensive response to the current war in the Gaza Strip. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Abbas has not yet made the plan public.
One official said Abbas has grown disillusioned after two decades of failed efforts to reach a negotiated peace settlement with Israel. He said the Palestinians want a fixed date for an Israeli withdrawal from lands claimed by the Palestinians and a timetable for establishing a Palestinian state.
And the destruction of his popularity and credibility forced his hand.
‘‘This should be done through a mechanism to compel Israel as the occupying power to end its occupation and agree on a timetable for the implementation of the withdrawal,’’ he said.
With Israel at war with Hamas militants in Gaza, Abbas has been searching for ways to assert himself on the international stage. He is eager to show the Palestinian public he is working to end the fighting and lead the Palestinians to independence.
In an interview on Egyptian television over the weekend, Abbas said he would soon present his plans to Arab, American, and European leaders.
‘‘It is an unconventional solution, but I will not declare a war on Israel. It is a political and diplomatic solution,’’ he said.
He declined to elaborate, saying only that he would tell the United Nations in an address next month that the Palestinians want independence immediately. ‘‘Otherwise, this opportunity will be lost forever,’’ he said.
An aide to Abbas said the plan would include an appeal to the Security Council to call for an end to Israel’s occupation of lands captured in the 1967 Mideast war.
The Palestinians seek the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza for their state. Israel captured all three areas in 1967, though it withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
There are still U.N. resolutions on the books that Israel constantly violates, but no big deal.
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Here is an attempt at further division in line with the centuries-old strategy of divide and rule:
"Israeli Arabs, Jews far more divided amid Gaza conflict" by Carol Morello | Washington Post August 24, 2014
UMM AL-FAHM, Israel — Ameer Talal once got 100 customers a day at the car wash he runs outside Israel’s biggest Arab town. But fear has kept away his Jewish clientele.
His little car wash, like most of the other Arab-owned businesses around him, has fallen victim to a widening rift between Israeli Arabs and Jews.
After a pair of hideous murders and a no-holds-barred war, the suspicions and anger that have long marked Jewish Israeli relations with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are now being trained on the Arabs who are almost 1 in 5 of Israel’s 8 million citizens.
‘‘What we’ve seen in the last two months are ugly expressions of hyper-nationalism,’’ said Tamara Hermann, a political scientist who said that ‘‘some people think all Israeli Arabs are a fifth column.’’
I wonder if the word Zionism will be seen in this article.
Hermann works for the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that has run ads urging Jewish Israelis to be more tolerant of Israeli Arabs who have expressed sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians during Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip.
What? Racist Jews?
Talal says he is afraid to visit the Jewish towns and neighborhoods he used to frequent, because he has heard tales of Arabs being subjected to insults, discrimination, and even beatings by Jews.
Happens all over the place all the time, but is not much covered by my Zionist pre$$.
‘‘It’s impossible,’’ the 40-year-old said as he sat on a white plastic chair inside his storefront while three employees stood idly nearby. ‘‘Five radicals can look at you and shout: ‘Terrorist! Terrorist!’ They’ll beat you, and what can you do?’’
In its intensity and character, the latest wave of anti-Arab sentiment appears different from what arose in previous times of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, specialists say.
It's the radical, right-wing turn of Zionism, folks.
Dozens of Israeli Arabs were fired from their jobs after posting strong antiwar views on social media, including some missives that seemed to delight in Israeli casualties. Soccer fans booed an Arab player on Israel’s most popular team. Israeli police arrested several Jews who attacked Arabs on the street. Now, Arab merchants are watching their businesses wither away as Jewish customers and suppliers balk at venturing into an Arab neighborhood, even one where they have friends.
As business and personal relationships crack under the strain, those who work toward coexistence say relations between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority have never been worse, not even during two intifadas and two previous military operations in Gaza.
‘‘There’s been a deterioration, a serious one, that leaves me concerned with the fabric of relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel,’’ said Rachel Liel, executive director of the New Israel Fund, a liberal civil rights group.
Some now question whether the wounds rubbed raw in the past two months can be healed.
Related: Memory Hole: Future Vision of Israel
And that was in 2005.
How you gonna make a state out of that when Israel is keeping all settlements?
Israeli Arab author and journalist Sayed Kashua moved with his family to Chicago last month.In his last column from Israel for the daily newspaper Haaretz, Kashua wrote that he and his wife argued when he begged her to stay home from work after a Palestinian teen was burned alive, allegedly by Jews in revenge for the kidnap and murder of three Jewish teenagers by Arabs.
‘‘I was silent, knowing that my attempt at living together with others in this country was over,’’ he wrote of his tiff with his wife. ‘‘That the lie I’d told my children about a future in which Arabs and Jews share the country equally was over.’’
Many of us have known this for a long time, and events since have only proved the point. Israel wants it all.
The tensions of the last two months have been building for years, as Israeli Arabs have grown more outspoken in their demands for equal rights.
I was told by my Israeli pre$$ they had equal rights, voting, all that.
A group of Arab intellectuals issued a ‘‘vision’’ statement in 2006 that, among other things, called for Israel to stop thinking of itself as a Jewish state and become ‘‘a state of all its citizens.’’
Polling data has shown a rise over a decade in the number of Israeli Arabs who identify themselves as Palestinian Israelis and a drop in those who would vote for Israel to define itself as a Jewish state if they were given equal rights. Many Israelis have watched those developments with unease, seeing in them an existential threat.
The sentiments collided on, of all places, a soccer field. Fans shouted anti-Arab odium at Mahran Radi, an Arab midfielder with the team Maccabi Tel Aviv, after the three Jewish teens were killed in the West Bank. President Reuven Rivlin publicly condemned the slurs.
I've noticed Jewish prejudice is not that much of a problem when compared to others in my Jewish pre$$.
And btw, since the incident that precipitated the war happened in the West Bank why did Israel pound Gaza? Forget all the deceptions and distortions presented by the paper (knew the kids were dead for days and not reported, Hamas didn't do it) and just ponder that disconnect for a minute.
Tensions were further exacerbated by the war in Gaza, experienced by Jews following Israeli media highlighting the battle against Hamas and by Arabs watching Al Jazeera footage of women and children who died.
Yeah, how dare you take Israel's victims into consideration. It's always the poor, poor Jew narrative and nothing else!
Some Israeli Arabs who posted sentiments about the war on Facebook were abruptly fired, said Maha Shehade, a lawyer at Worker’s Hotline, an Israeli group that advocates for employee rights.
Proving the whole thing is a data collection platform for Israeli intelligence.
Their postings highlighted the different perceptions. One post showed photos of dead Palestinian children. Another person posed at a protest with a Palestinian flag. Someone called the Israeli army immoral; another accused it of war crimes.
That's all I'm perceiving out of this.
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Related: Bomb shelters expose rifts in Israeli society
Honestly, the BG coverage stinks in more ways than one.
Maybe this will help repair the Zionist image:
"Israel begins Gaza war investigation" New York Times September 11, 2014
TEL AVIV — Israel’s Military Advocate General Corps has ordered criminal investigations into five occurrences of possible misconduct on the part of Israeli forces in the 50-day Gaza war, a senior Israeli military official said Wednesday.
I'm taking this seriously. What are the charges?
Word of the investigations, coming two weeks after a cease-fire in the conflict, appeared to be the beginning of an Israeli effort to preempt international inquiries into allegations of possible Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
Oh, it is a self-serving investigation, not a remorseful look at their blood-soaked hands.
The most prominent of the five cases have already drawn international censure: an Israeli strike that resulted in the death of 16 civilians sheltering at a UN school in Beit Hanoun and the killing of four boys on a Gaza beach.
Another case involves a Palestinian teenager, Ahmed Abu Raida, who said he was mistreated while in detention and used for military purposes, with the decision to investigate largely based on the youth’s allegations as reported in the New York Times, according to the military official.
I'm surprised that cleared the censor.
The other cases are a Palestinian woman who was shot to death even though she had coordinated her movements in advance with Israeli forces; and a soldier who is alleged to have stolen money from a private home while operating in Gaza.
Maybe that was a bad idea on her part, as was the UN giving Israel the coordinates of the shelters that were subsequently struck.
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Palestinians shouldn't take things personally; it is just the way Israel is:
"Israel forced migrants out, group says" New York Times Syndicate September 10, 2014
JERUSALEM — Thousands of Sudanese migrants to Israel and hundreds of Eritreans have returned to their home countries this year as a result of an Israeli policy that amounts to “unlawful coercion,” Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.
The group said the migrants had been left few other options even though they were at risk of imprisonment or abuse at the hands of repressive governments back home.
The New York-based group said in a lengthy report it had documented seven cases in which citizens of Sudan were detained and interrogated in Khartoum on their return.
Although four of the seven were released after short periods, the report said, one was tortured, a second was put in solitary confinement, and a third was “charged with treason for visiting Israel,” which does not maintain diplomatic relations with Sudan. The group said that under Sudanese law it is a crime to visit Israel, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, and that at least 6,400 Sudanese had returned between January 2013 and the end of June 2014.
That and the fact that Sudan has supported the Palestinian cause makes them an enemy of Israel. Thus we get this turn of the propaganda under the guise of criticism of Israel. They didn't protect someone!
The report also said 367 Eritreans had returned home after reaching Israel.
The group said the decision to leave Israel could not be considered voluntary. In many cases, migrants were offered a choice between going home — or in some cases to a third country — or facing the threat of “indefinite detention” in the Negev desert.
That's odd because on of the Egyptian peace proposals was for Gazans to move to the Sinai and begin anew.
Israel strongly contested that assessment.
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Oddly, the last report from I received from the area was a week ago. Since then it has been all silence from the Boston Globe. Gaza is once again forgotten as Israel's atrocious conduct towards Palestinians continues.
Hey, if you can't beat them, don't cover them.
Related:
"In South Sudan, security services loyal to President Salva Kiir raided the church-run Bakhita Radio in Juba, taking it off the air for alleged violations of national security. Most observers saw it as an effort to muzzle criticism, which was seemingly confirmed when officials said the station could resume broadcasting if it agreed not to air political programs.
Catholics are an important chunk of the population in South Sudan, and Kiir himself is Catholic. The church backed independence in 2012, but many Catholics have soured on the country’s direction. It’s mired in a civil war and, according to the United Nations, has the worst food crisis in the world, with 50,000 children facing death from malnutrition.
Bakhita Radio was a voice of the independence movement, and Kiir appears afraid it could be a threat to his power as well."
