...Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.
It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat...
The main UN compound in Gaza was in flames today after being struck by Israeli artillery fire, and a spokesman said that the building had been hit by shells containing the incendiary agent white phosphorus.
The attack on the headquarters of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) came as Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, arrived in Israel on a peace mission and plunged Israel's relations with the world body to a new low.
made me wish this was for real
From The Independent, 18th June 2008:
Wiki page listing rocket attacks from Gaza, 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rocket_and_mortar_attacks_in_Israel_in_2008
Wiki page listing rocket attacks from Gaza, pre-2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Qassam_rocket_attacks[/IMG]
...A deal was agreed but Hamas did not stick to their side of the bargain, i.e. stopping the flow of rockets....
1- Mutual agreement to cease all military activities by the start of “zero hour” on Thursday, June 19, at 6:00AM.
2- Duration of ceasefire is six months according to agreement concluded among the national parties under Egyptian auspices.
3- Ceasefire will be implemented under national consensus and under the Egyptian auspices.
4- After seventy two hours from the start of the ceasefire, the crossing points will be opened to allow 30% more goods to enter the Gaza strip.
5- Ten days after that (i.e., 13 days after ceasefire begins), all crossings would be open between Gaza and Israel, and Israel will allow the transfer of all goods that were banned or restricted to go into Gaza.
6- Egypt will work to expand the ceasefire into the West Bank later.
Amnesty etc... said:The situation for 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is worse now than it has ever been since the start of the Israeli military occupation in 1967. The current situation in Gaza is man-made, completely avoidable and, with the necessary political will, can also be reversed.
Gaza has suffered from a long-term pattern of economic stagnation and plummeting development indicators. The severity of the situation has increased exponentially since Israel imposed extreme restrictions on the movement of goods and people in response to the Hamas take over of Gaza...
...B'tselem said:Despite the easing of restrictions that Israel declared following the Sharm el-Sheikh summit in February 2005, there has been almost no improvement in the movement of Palestinians to and from Gaza, nor in the movement of goods. The report illustrates the extent to which Israel treats many fundamental human rights – among them the right to freedom of movement, family life, health, education, and work – as “humanitarian gestures” that it grants or denies at will...
...The strangulation of the Gaza Strip increased following Palestinian attacks against civilians in Israel and the Occupied Territories over the past few years. Targeting civilians is a “war crime” and never justified. Israel is entitled, even obligated, to protect its citizens. However, Israel’s right to self-defense does not permit it to trample on the rights of an entire population...
Vimothy said:Israel closed the borders in response to continued rocket attacksthat have (almost eight years after the first attacks) united Israeli society. And so for Hamas, either Gaza is their problem and they broke the ceasefire, or it is not their problem and they cannot claim a single counterterror operation as deus ex machina.
Time Magazine said:Mar. 13, 2008: Moving Toward an Israeli-Hamas Truce
When Palestinian militants this week laid down their terms for a cease-fire with the Israelis — an end to Israeli military operations in Gaza and in the West Bank, and the re-opening of borders into the besieged Mediterranean strip — it wasn't long before the Israelis responded.
In Bethlehem on Wednesday evening, Israeli agents disguised as Arabs and driving a car with a Palestinian license plate ambushed and killed four suspected militants, including a senior commander of Islamic Jihad...
MSNBC said:April 21, 2008: Hamas offers truce in return for 1967 borders
The leader of Hamas said Monday that his Palestinian militant group would offer Israel a 10-year "hudna," or truce, as implicit proof of recognition of Israel if it withdrew from all lands it seized in the 1967 Middle East War.
Khaled Mashaal told The Associated Press that he made the offer to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in talks on Saturday. "We have offered a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, a truce of 10 years as a proof of recognition," Mashaal said.
CS Monitor said:April 25th 08: Israel rejects Hamas cease-fire offer as humanitarian crisis deepens in Gaza
Israel rejected a cease-fire offer from the Palestinian group Hamas as a humanitarian aid crisis erupting in the Gaza Strip threatened wider instability. The crisis in the troubled Palestinian territory deepened as President Bush, meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Washington, offered assurances that a two-state deal is possible before he leaves office in January.
Hamas offered a six-month truce to Israel on Friday if Israel would end a blockade it has imposed since June on the Gaza Strip, after Hamas seized the disputed territory...
Ma'an News said:Nov 23, 2008 Egypt reportedly brokers Hamas-Israel ceasefire, easing blockade of Gaza
Gaza – Ma’an – An agreement has been reached between Palestinian resistance factions in the Gaza Strip and Israel, Hamas announced on Sunday.
The agreement centers around a pledge to stop firing on Israeli targets in return for Israel opening crossing points into the besieged Strip, a top Hamas leader said.
Hamas official Ayman Taha announced that he had received a telephone call from Egyptian intelligence on Friday, which delivered a message from Israel asking that operations be scrapped in exchange for opening the crossing points...
YNET said:30 Dec, 08: UN official says Israel attacked during lull
Palestinians in Gaza believed Israel had called a 48-hour "lull" in retaliatory attacks with Hamas when Israeli warplanes launched a massive bombardment of Hamas installations in the Gaza Strip, a UN official said Monday.
Karen Abu Zayd, commissioner of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which helps Palestinian refugees, raised the possible violation of an informal truce in a video press conference with UN reporters from her base in Gaza...
IPS said:Jan 9, 2009 Israel Rejected Hamas Ceasefire Offer in December
WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (IPS) - Contrary to Israel's argument that it was forced to launch its air and ground offensive against Gaza in order to stop the firing of rockets into its territory, Hamas proposed in mid-December to return to the original Hamas-Israel ceasefire arrangement, according to a U.S.-based source who has been briefed on the proposal.
The proposal to renew the ceasefire was presented by a high-level Hamas delegation to Egyptian Minister of Intelligence Omar Suleiman at a meeting in Cairo Dec. 14. The delegation, said to have included Moussa Abu Marzouk, the second-ranking official in the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, told Suleiman that Hamas was prepared to stop all rocket attacks against Israel if the Israelis would open up the Gaza border crossings and pledge not to launch attacks in Gaza.
REUTERS said:Fri Jan 9: Israel rebuffs U.N. resolution, pursues Gaza war
Israel rejected a U.N. resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Friday and warplanes and tanks pounded the Palestinian enclave.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert dismissed Thursday's binding Security Council resolution demanding an "immediate and durable" ceasefire in the two-week-old war as "unworkable."
PRESSTV said:Fri, 09 Jan 2009 : Israel pounds Gaza during truce hours
Israel has violated a three-hour truce declared to allow the passage of humanitarian aid, and has resumed attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Israeli troops violated the truce on Friday and continued their attacks on the costal sliver.
The cities of Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya in the north and the Zeitun neighborhood of Gaza City came under Israeli tank fire, witnesses said on Friday...
Vimothy said:The wider context is the thousands of rockets fired into Israel since its unilateral withdrawal in 2006.
Even if Hamas takes a back seat, these atrocities have now galvanized people who otherwise opposed them to the point where now they are expressing outrage at the perceived complicity of places like Egypt (who in my opinion are complicit) and Jordan.
The IDF has also forced at least 40,000 people to leave their homes in agricultural and border areas. In Rafah, most of the 20,000 people removed from their homes were lodging with relatives and not in UNRWA facilities
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache...+posing+as+hamas+men&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=uk
...Haaretz has also learned that one of the army's methods for evacuating a home is to fire a missile toward its upper level. That is how B.'s house in Sajaiyeh was destroyed. It was bombed just a few minutes after a missile struck and 40 shell-shocked family members walked out of the house...
Re Friedman, Matt Taibbi's recent v. funny takedown: http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html
Thwarting Palestinian moderation
...The use of force by Israel to end unwanted ceasefires and avert the threat of Palestinian moderation has a long history. The most obvious example is the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 20,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians. Launched on an even flimsier pretext than was the invasion of Gaza, the war’s objective was the “annihilation of the PLO”, which Israel did “not want as a partner for talks or as an interlocutor for any solution in the West Bank”. (Yoel Marcus, cit. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel & The Palestinians, p. 199) Like the present-day Hamas, the PLO had scrupulously observed a ceasefire with Israel in the face of repeated Israeli violations, and, like Hamas, was becoming increasingly explicit about its acceptance of a two-state settlement. This political moderation terrified Israel into launching the invasion. As leading Israeli scholar Yehoshua Porath observed at the time, the decision to invade “flowed from the very fact that the cease-fire had been observed”. Arafat’s ability to enforce adherence to the truce for so long was “a veritable catastrophe in the eyes of the Israeli government” since it indicated that the PLO “might agree in the future to a more far-reaching arrangement”, leaving Israel unable to justify its rejectionism on the grounds that the PLO were merely “a wild gang of murderers”. It was thus the threat of PLO moderation that the invasion was “primarily designed to prevent”:
“The government’s hope is that the stricken PLO … will return to its earlier terrorism: it will carry out bombings throughout the world, hijack airplanes and murder many Israelis. In this way, the PLO will lose … political legitimacy … [and thereby undercut] the danger that elements will develop among the Palestinians that might become a legitimate negotiating partner for future political accomodations.” (cit. ibid., pp. 200-201)
As Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein explained, the PLO “as an orderly political body is more terrifying to the government of Israel than the powerful terrorist PLO” because it undermines Israeli rejectionism. The only solution was to force it to revert to “murderous terror”. (cit. ibid., p. 201) The “terrible danger” posed by the PLO to Israel was, as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir stated, “[n]ot so much a military one as a political one”. Specifically, Israel feared the prospect of having to negotiate with any genuine Palestinian nationalist movement because, as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin explained, any such negotiations would “provide a basis for the possibility of creating a third state between Israel and Jordan”, a possibility that, as Rabin emphasised, Israel refuses to countenance. (Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, p. 70)
In short the invasion of Lebanon was, as Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv describes, intended to crush the PLO’s “peace offensive” and “to halt [the PLO's] rise to political respectability” by undermining “the position of the moderates within [the PLO] ranks”.
Replace ‘the PLO’ with ‘Hamas’ and you’ve got a pretty accurate explanation of invasion and siege of Gaza. A key goal for Israel is the destruction of Hamas as a credible political force. As Livni recently explained:
“Hamas wants to gain legitimacy from the international community. Hamas wants to show that there is a place which is called the Gaza Strip, that this kind of an organization - an extremist Islamic organization that acts by terrorism and which is a designated terrorist organization - can rule. And to make it seem a legitimate regime. So they want the crossings to be opened, not only for the sake of the population, but because this symbolically is how they can show that the Gaza Strip has become a kind of a small state, which is controlled by them…
“[It is] important to keep Hamas from becoming a legitimate organization”.
This explains the findings of a recent study that “it is overwhelmingly Israel, not Palestine, that kills first following a lull. Indeed, it is virtually always Israel that kills first after a lull lasting more than a week.” In Livni’s words, an extended calm or truce “harms the Israel strategic goal, empowers Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel recognizes the movement”...
but in Gaza they were brutes -- because they could defeat Hamas.
5. Too early to say. The IAF destroyed munitions and smuggling tunnels so reduced Hamas/PIJ/whoever's capacity to launch rockets -- we will surely see in the coming months whether Israel has managed to reduce the incidence of rocket fire from Gaza.
Pictures of the UNRWA school hit by WP. If there could be any doubt about this its gone now.