Israel and Hamas attacks undermine Gaza ceasefire

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Written by Mark Tran and agencies Mark Tran and agencies

Published: 29 January 2009 29 January 2009

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Israel and Hamas attacks undermine Gaza ceasefire
Rocket fire and air strikes come as US envoy George Mitchell meets Palestinian Authority leader in effort to reinforce truce

    * Mark Tran and agencies
    * guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 January 2009 12.50 GMT
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/29/gaza-israel-hamas

PHOTO: George Mitchell with Barack Obama

U.S. President Barack Obama (L) listens to newly appointed Mideast envoy George Mitchell at the State Department in Washington January 22, 2009. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (UNITED STATES):rel:d:bm:GF2E51M1O5D01 Photograph: KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli air strikes today threatened to undermine efforts by the US Middle East envoy to reinforce a fragile Gaza ceasefire as he held talks with the leader of the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian militants in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip fired a rocket into Israel late yesterday – the first since the 18 January ceasefire – and another today. No one was hurt.

Israeli aircraft struck in southern Gaza, hitting and wounding a man on a motorcycle, and attacking a metal workshop that the Israeli military said was a weapons factory. Two militants and 10 youths were injured, medical workers said.

The violence provided a sombre backdrop for talks between George Mitchell and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Mitchell, who was in Jerusalem yesterday, said it "was of critical importance that the ceasefire be extended and consolidated".

The latest hostilities came despite separate ceasefires called by Israel and Hamas that ended a 22-day Israeli offensive in which 1,300 Palestinians, including at least 700 civilians, died, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. Israel put its death toll in the war at 10 soldiers and three civilians.

Mitchell said on Tuesday that any durable truce between Israel and Hamas must end smuggling into Gaza and reopen border crossings controlled by Israel to relieve its economic blockade. Half of the 1.5 million people in the territory depend on food aid.

Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister, told Mitchell that Israel would object to reopening any crossings into Gaza – except to allow the flow of vital aid – until an Israeli soldier captured by Gaza militants in a crosws-border raid in 2006 was freed.

"We don't intend to open the crossings before Gilad Shalit returns home," Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, an Israeli cabinet minister, said.

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, today launched an emergency appeal seeking more than $600m (£420m) to assist the rebuilding effort in Gaza.

"Help is indeed needed urgently," Ban said at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. "The civilian population suffered greatly during three weeks of military operations. More than one-third of the 6,600 deaths and injuries were children and women."

In Qatar yesterday, Hamas's supreme leader, Khaled Mashaal, said the group would not link the opening of crossings to the release of the Israeli soldier. Hamas wants Israel to free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Shalit.

Mitchell's trip comes just a week after the US president, Barack Obama, took office, and signals the new US administration's willingness to make a determined diplomatic push early on.

Mitchell, a former US Senate majority leader and a broker of the 1998 Northern Ireland Good Friday peace agreement, said he would make recommendations to Obama and Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, after consultations in the region and with European leaders.

Mitchell did not meet officials from Hamas, which is considered a terrorist group by the US, the European Union and Israel.

  

Gaza detainee treatment 'inhuman'

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Written by BBC News BBC News

Published: 29 January 2009 29 January 2009

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 Gaza detainee treatment 'inhuman'

Palestinians seized during Israel's operation in Gaza faced "appalling" conditions and "inhuman" treatment, Israeli human rights groups have said.

The seven groups say they have gathered 20 testimonies which indicate detainees were kept in pits without shelter, toilets or adequate food and water.

Some detainees also said they had been held near tanks and in combat areas, the groups said.

The Israeli military says it is investigating the allegations.

The accounts were gathered by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) and Hamoked, the Center for the Defense of the Individual, from Palestinians now being held in Israel.

'Gross violation'

"The reports indicate that... many detainees - minors as well as adults - were held for many hours - sometimes for days - in pits dug in the ground, exposed to bitter cold and harsh weather, handcuffed and blindfolded," the groups said in a statement.

"These pits lacked basic sanitary facilities... while food and shelter, when provided, were limited, and the detainees went hungry," it said.

The groups accused the military of "gross violation of international humanitarian law" by holding some of the detainees close to tanks.

Read more: Gaza detainee treatment 'inhuman'

U.S. professors call for academic, cultural boycott of Israel for first time

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Written by Raphael Ahren Raphael Ahren

Published: 29 January 2009 29 January 2009

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In the wake of Operation Cast Lead, a group of American university professors has for the first time launched a national campaign calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

While Israeli academics have grown used to such news from Great Britain, where anti-Israel groups several times attempted to establish academic boycotts, the formation of the United States movement marks the first time that a national academic boycott movement has come out of America. Israeli professors are not sure yet how big of an impact the one-week-old movement will have, but started discussing the significance of and possible counteractions against the campaign.

"As educators of conscience, we have been unable to stand by and watch in silence Israel's indiscriminate assault on the Gaza Strip and its educational institutions," the U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel stated in its inaugural press release last Thursday. Speaking in its mission statement of the "censorship and silencing of the Palestine question in U.S. universities, as well as U.S. society at large," the group follows the usual pattern of such boycotts, calling for "non-violent punitive measures" against Israel, such as the implementation of divestment initiatives, "similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era."

The campaign was founded by a group of 15 academics, mostly from California, but is, "currently expanding to create a network that embraces the United States as a whole," according to David Lloyd, a professor of English at the University of Southern California who responded on behalf of the group to a Haaretz query. "The initiative was in the first place impelled by Israel's latest brutal assault on Gaza and by our determination to say enough is enough."

"The response has been remarkable given the extraordinary hold that lobbying organizations like AIPAC exert over U.S. politics and over the U.S. media, and in particular given the campaign of intimidation that has been leveled at academics who dare to criticize Israel's policies," Lloyd wrote in an e-mail to Haaretz Monday. "Within a short weekend since the posting of the press release, more than 80 academics from all over the country have endorsed the action and the numbers continue to grow."

Asked if the group would accept the endorsement of Hamas supporters, Lloyd said, "We have no a priori policy with regard to the membership or affiliation of supporters of the boycott so long as they are in accord with the main aims stated in the press release."

He argued that, "on several occasions Hamas has sought direct negotiations with Israel, a pursuit that constitutes de facto recognition of Israel, and has openly discussed abandoning its call for the destruction of the state of Israel conditional on reciprocal guarantees from Israel."

Lloyd wrote that to the best of his knowledge, all supporters of the anti-Israel boycott were also opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Asked if logic wouldn't dictate that he and his colleagues boycott themselves, he responded, "Self-boycott is a difficult concept to realize. But speaking for myself, I would have supported and honored such a boycott had it been proposed by my colleagues overseas."

Durban bred, British approved

The idea of an academic boycott against Israel originated in 2001 at the "World Conference Against Racism" in Durban, South Africa. A first attempt to implement a boycott was undertaken by British professors in the wake of Israel's 2002 Operation Defensive Shield and the Jenin massacre claim. Since then, British academics tried several times to establish boycotts, with the latest such effort failing because legal advisers a few months ago pointed out that academic boycotts are discriminatory and thus illegal. Yet, analysts say that another British boycott campaign is to be expected in the follow up of Cast Lead.

In the U.S., on the other hand, only a few professors have supported the idea of an academic boycott. In 2006, the American Association of University Professors declared its objection to the British boycott, saying members, "especially oppose selective academic boycotts that entail an ideological litmus test."

In 2007, nearly 300 university presidents across the United States signed a statement denouncing the boycott, under the motto "Boycott Israeli Universities? Boycott Ours, Too!"

First indications that the climate might change in light of the Gaza operation could be seen earlier this month when the Canadian Union of Public Employees Ontario proposed, "Israeli academics be barred from speaking, teaching or conducting research at the province's universities unless they condemn Israel's actions in Gaza," as the Inside Higher Ed Web site reported.

Not a mass movement

Israeli academics are hesitant to sound the alarm bells in light of the recent development. "One has to look at this with some degree of caution," said Gerald Steinberg, the American-educated chair of Bar Ilan University's political studies department. "Yes, the organization's declarations are coming from the United States, but this is not at all yet a mass movement."

Jonathan Rynhold, who also teaches political science at Bar Ilan, explained that boycott movements are rare in America, "because the U.S. has much stronger political culture and laws about freedom of speech than the UK. In America, there is stronger sense that one should be able to think and say whatever one wants."

"What they're trying to do," Rynhold continued in his analysis of anti-Israel boycotts, "is blurring the distinction between criticism of Israeli policies and criticism of Israel's existence. Their game is to move the liberals, who accept Israel's right to exist and don't think Israel is wrong every time but criticize Israeli policies as and when they think it's right, and turn them into radical left-wing critics [who believe] Israel is racist in its core and everything it does is wrong."

Rynhold and Steinberg said that the new U.S. campaign is a clone of its British predecessors. The two professors, who were both born in England, speak out of experience. When the original boycott movement arose - initially attacking only Bar Ilan and Haifa University - they were among the co-founders of the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom, which was fighting the boycott but ultimately folded for lack of funding. Although none of the previous boycott efforts were successful, Steinberg is concerned about every new round. While he said that it's too early to predict the impact of the U.S. boycott, he sharply criticized the Israeli government and local universities for their handling of the previous boycott.

"The government and the universities have completely neglected not just the academic boycott but in general this kind of soft war," he said. "The military prepared to go into Gaza for two and half years. But in terms of the boycott movement, both the ministry of education and the foreign ministry - which had pledged support for the existing anti-boycott frameworks - completely failed to prepare their own portfolios for this."

"The battle is just beginning now," Steinberg added. "The main response will have to come from American academics who find this kind of bias to be unacceptable and will fight it. But for those of us in Israel who are interested in helping to be a catalyst in that process, the funding has been completely cut off. There was the naive view that having won a few battles in Britain meant the war had been won." Yet, giving the boycotters too much attention might be counterproductive, Steinberg emphasized.

Effective counterattacks need to be prepared, he said, "but at the same time we must not overreact and provide stimulation and amplification to this process - that is precisely what they're seeking."

Other pro-Israel advocates are less hesitant and soft-spoken in their assessment of the U.S. boycott.

"The usual anti-Israel suspects in U.S. universities may sign on to the petition, but it won't amount to much," predicted Mitchell Bard, executive director at the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, which seeks to strengthen the pro-Israel camp at American colleges. "If it becomes a widespread effort, I'm sure some effort will be given to countering it, but it is out of touch with the mood in the country," he said. "Israel has near record high support, [U.S. President Barack] Obama has just taken office with a positive message and the focus will be on moving the peace process forward, not sideshows by anti-Semites and cranks among American pseudo-academics."

Who will rebuild Gaza? Politics takes precedence while ordinary people suffer

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Written by Heather Sharp, BBC News Heather Sharp, BBC News

Published: 28 January 2009 28 January 2009

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 Who will rebuild Gaza?

By Heather Sharp
BBC News, Jerusalem

Even as aid agencies struggle to meet the immediate needs of those left injured, homeless and traumatised by the Israeli operation in Gaza, concerns are growing that reconstruction efforts could become bogged down in a complex political tangle.

Initial Palestinian estimates said rebuilding would cost $2bn (£1.4bn) and take three to five years, even without the host of obstacles Gaza faces.

International agencies are still assessing the scale of the destruction in preparation for a drive for reconstruction pledges.

But with the international community refusing to deal directly with Hamas, the militant group which controls Gaza, it remains unclear how the money could be spent.

Israel is determined that Hamas should in no way benefit from international aid funds. It also controls everything entering the Gaza Strip.

It is demanding strict controls on building materials - urgently needed before the fighting and now required in vast quantities - which it says could be used to build rockets and launching sites.

Waiting to see

Then there is the long-standing feud between Hamas and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA) - both battling for popularity among Palestinians and vying for international recognition.

Hamas spokesmen say they are the legitimate authority in Gaza and the PA is corrupt and cannot be trusted with reconstruction money.

US President Barack Obama and the European Union favour channelling aid through the PA - although the European Commission Representative in Jerusalem, Christian Berger, said the EU was waiting to see the outcome of Egyptian-brokered reconciliation talks between the Palestinian factions.

But as Hamas has purged PA figures from many of Gaza's institutions, it remains unclear what the PA could achieve on the ground.

Along with Israel, the US and EU regard Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

The Middle East Quartet, which brings the US and EU together with the UN and Russia, refuses to talk to Hamas unless it renounces violence and recognises Israel's right to exist.

But UN agencies do co-ordinate with Hamas, which won elections in 2006 and consolidated its control in Gaza by force a year later.

'Yes, they're Hamas'

UN relief agency Unrwa says it has contacts with Hamas "even at ministerial level", but strictly on technical issues related to the delivery of its humanitarian services in line with wider UN policy.

And the distribution of some World Food Programme aid is carried out by Hamas - albeit with strict monitoring in place to ensure it reaches the people it is intended for.

"In every country that we work in, we deal with the authorities - so in Gaza we deal with the Ministry of Social Affairs.

"If the next question is 'Are they Hamas?', then the answer is 'Yes they are'," says spokesman Robin Lodge.

The EU, a major donor which has spent 3bn euros ($3.9bn, £2.8bn) in the Palestinian territories since 2000, channels much of its funding through such UN agencies.

It is widely expected that the UN's agencies - including the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UN Development Programme, and the World Health Organization - will end up playing a major role in Gaza's reconstruction.

But even Unrwa, which has the largest UN presence in Gaza, is primarily focused on - and experienced in - food aid, schools and primary health clinics, not major construction projects.

"I don't think they have the capacity by themselves," says political analyst George Giacaman of Birzeit University.

A further question is whether the rebuilding of the roads, health, education, water, power and sanitation infrastructure can be carried out by UN agencies if their contacts with Hamas are limited only to essential, technical co-ordination for the delivery of humanitarian services.

"Some projects may well be feasible, others will be very difficult," says the WHO's acting head of mission, Tony Laurance.

He gives the example of training programmes for medical staff: "It looks like a fairly straightforward activity - but still requires the assent of the relevant authorities."

Unity bid

And if past experiences are anything to go by, the power struggle between Hamas and the PA is likely to further complicate matters.

Last year strikes by teachers and doctors in protest at the replacement of key staff with Hamas loyalists disrupted health and education services.

And the UN had to step in to supply fuel for water pumps because a row over control of the Palestinian Water Authority paralysed some of the body's operations.

The PA and Hamas have both accused each other of diverting aid for their own benefit, according to Israeli press reports.

Egypt is pushing to broker some form of unity government, but the sides remain far apart.

Hamas has, however, indicated it may support the formation of a Palestinian body, including the Arab League, to manage funding.

A further problem is bringing in the necessary construction materials and spare parts for things like generators, sewage plants, power infrastructure and medical equipment.

A solution to the question of the crossings into Gaza is a key issue in ceasefire talks.

Hamas wants the total lifting of Israel's 18-month blockade, which permits little more than food, grain and medicines to enter Gaza. Israel wants to ensure Hamas cannot re-arm if borders are re-opened.

Israeli Defence Ministry spokesman Peter Lerner stressed that Israel wanted "each and every pipe accounted for", along the lines of a project-by-project approvals process used for a small number of projects in the past.

But international aid officials say the approach was inadequate before the war, and fear it will spell disaster for reconstruction attempts on the necessary scale.

For Gaza's health system as a whole - much of which is run by the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health - it would be "a nightmare," says Mr Laurance.

"The health sector has not been able to get essential medical equipment into Gaza… it can be incredibly convoluted going through these approval procedures," he said.

The prospects for reconstruction hang on the outcome of the political process, but it remains unclear when - and what - it will eventually deliver.

"What may happen is that ordinary people will suffer - we're witnessing the political interests of the parties taking precedence over the actual work that is needed," says Prof Giacaman.
Story from BBC NEWS:
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Published: 2009/01/28 14:23:50 GMT

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