Egypt: Militants attack gas pipeline to Israel
Saturday, July 30, 2011 EL-ARISH, Egypt --
Egyptian security officials say a militant Islamist group has blown up a terminal along the Egyptian natural gas pipeline to Israel in the northern Sinai Peninsula.
Officials say Saturday's attack on the terminal in al-Shulaq destroyed the last terminal before the line enters the sea on its way to Israel.It is the third attack on the pipeline this month and the fifth since the 18-day uprising toppled President Hosni Mubarak in February.While no one claimed responsibility, officials accused a militant Bedouin group for the attack.Clashes between the group and security forces killed 5 people Friday.The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
CAIRO (AP) _ Tens of thousands of ultraconservative Muslims in long beards, robes and prayer caps thronged Cairo's central Tahrir Square in a massive show of force Friday, calling for the implementation of strict Islamic laws and sparring with liberal activists over their visions for a post-revolution Egypt.It was the first rally with religious overtones in Egypt, and one of the largest, since the uprising that forced President Hosni Mubarak to step down in mid-February. The strong showing by the Islamists demonstrated their powerful organizational abilities, which will likely help them in parliamentary elections later this year.Islamic. Islamic. Not Western or Eastern. No liberal or secular, chants of Salafis, who follow a strict form of Islam, echoed through the square. Others shouted: "With our soul and blood we defend you Islam.They unfurled an Egyptian flag, removing the central emblem of an eagle and replacing the Islamic slogan: There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet,similar to the insignia on the Saudi flag.The youth activists who have been at the helm of mass protests calling for faster change from the country's interim military rulers withdrew from the rally soon after Friday prayers, accusing the Islamists of violating an agreement to avoid divisive issues.While the civil organizations are trying to respect the effort to complete the revolution by unifying the ranks, the Islamic groups insisted on breaking the unity and assisting the military council in a deal that I think will divide this country in two,said liberal activist Mustafa Shawki. This is what we were afraid of.
Several hundred protesters, mainly liberal and leftist groups, have camped out at the square for more than three weeks, demanding swifter justice for those blamed in the killing of nearly 900 protesters during the 18-day uprising and more measures to ensure Mubarak loyalists are purged from the government. It was a crowd vocally critical of the military council, which they accused of protecting Mubarak's regime.
Most of the Islamic groups, however, say the military needs time to break with the past.The decision by the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's best organized political force, to participate significantly boosted the turnout. But instead of a day of unity as had been advertised, the Islamists decided to flex their muscle, using the epicenter of the protests to press demands for a strict version of Islamic law.Some Salafi Islamist groups mobilized their members to the square to oppose the adoption of a set of guidelines for drafting a new constitution after parliamentary elections later this year. Buses from a number of cities transported followers, many who were in the square for the first time.Liberal parties are worried religious groups will win a large share of parliament and force an Islamic influence on the constitution. The Islamists say nothing should restrict the newly elected parliament's right to oversee the process of drafting the document.The liberals are talking about a civil state. This won't work in Egypt, said Tarek Shaheen, a 31-year-old resident of Ismailiya. We want to prove to the outside world even before domestically that Egypt is Islamic, that it has a large Islamic trend and that we are not terrorists.While opposing the measure, Muslim Brotherhood members did not press the issue Friday sticking to the agreement.Salafis are ultraconservatives, close to Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi interpretation of Islam and more radical than the Brotherhood. They seek to emulate the austerity of Islam's early days and oppose a wide range of practices like intermingling of the sexes that they view as un-Islamic.Many also reject all forms of Western cultural influence, and preach that authorities must be respected.Mubarak's regime cracked down heavily on Islamic groups, specifically the politicized Brotherhood, arrested thousands of its members. Salafi groups are new to the political scene in Egypt.
Many like Shaheen felt that Egypt's Islamic identity is threatened, reflecting the growing mistrust between the different groups only months before the first parliamentary elections, the first after Mubarak's ouster.Egypt's constitution, which has been suspended by the military rulers, set Islamic law as the basis for legislation and nobody has proposed changing that clause. But some Islamic groups believe the liberal groups will use the guidelines to introduce what they perceive as Western values.Our religion is the constitution,said Saber Mohammed, a 27-year-old Cairene wearing a short white robe and head cap, sporting the traditional bushy beard of a Salafi.Nourhan Zamzam, a 29-year-old banker who supports the call for a civil state, said the ultraconservative Islamist groups are vying for influence but have little experience.For her, the Salafi stance only undermines pressure on the military by dividing the efforts of the protesters.This is actually a message to us, the revolutionaries, who are critical of the military council,she said.This is a message to scar us: look infighting between groups is coming.By sundown, a large number of Islamists began leaving the square peacefully and the sit-in continued.It was more tense in other cities.In the southern city of Assiut, Salafist protesters beat up a group of protesters from the Communist party trying to join their demonstration, deputy police chief Yosri el-Gammasi said. At one point, some in the crowd yelled back at a speaker who criticized the idea of constitutional guidelines.In the Sinai city of el-Arish, government troops clashed with Islamic militants firing rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy weapons outside a police station. Four people were killed, including a military officer and three civilians, and 18 people injured.South of the capital in Minya province, gunmen fired on a car carrying Christians, killing two and injuring two, a military official said. It was the second killing in two weeks in the predominantly Christian village of Roman. While the motive was unknown, similar events have sparked religious violence in the past.Officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to brief the media.Friday's rally came a day after Egypt's Justice Ministry said Mubarak, along with his two sons, his former security chief and seven others, will be tried Wednesday at a Cairo convention center. Mubarak, 83, faces charges of corruption and ordering the deadly use of force against protesters.
Barak says Israel still looking for peace talk’s formula AFP JULY 30,11
UNITED NATIONS: Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak said Friday that his government is striving to find a formula that would allow for the resumption of peace talks with Palestinian leaders.Barak revealed the efforts after meeting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who again pressed for Israel to return to talks and expressed new concern over Israeli settlement building in the occupied territories, a UN spokesman said.Barak and Ban discussed the looming UN General Assembly in September when the Palestinian Authority is expecting to launch an initiative to get international recognition for a Palestinian state.The United States and Israel oppose the bid, insisting that an accord to end the Middle East conflict and set up a Palestinian state can only be reached through direct negotiations.The international Quartet on the Middle East — the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — is trying to arrange new Israel-Palestinian talks but has been unable to agree on a plan.We are still trying to find a formula that will enable an understanding between the members of the Quartet in a way that will enable a resumption of negotiations, Barak told reporters.I cannot honestly predict that it will happen but we are still trying to do our best to enable it,he added, stressing his belief that direct talks are the only way for a permanent solution.A UN spokesman said that Barak and Ban discussed the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and the situation in the West Bank and Gaza, in Lebanon and the region.The secretary general urged an early resumption of meaningful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations,said spokesman Martin Nesirky.Ban urged greater efforts to end the blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza and expressed his concern at settlement expansion in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,said the spokesman.The Palestinian leadership withdrew from US-brokered talks with Israel at the end of September in protest at Israel’s ending of a moratorium on settlement building.
Non-Negotiable
July 29, 2011: Negotiating peace deals with Palestinians continues to be complicated by the continuing Palestinian propaganda campaign that insists Israel should not exist and is not a legitimate government. Recent opinion polls show the majority of Palestinians oppose a peace deal with Israel. Most Palestinians favor continued anti-Israel violence, with the goal of destroying Israel. For decades, the pattern in Palestinian politics was to promote the most radical tactics against Israel. This has led to decades of failure, but this approach is still considered the only acceptable one by most Palestinians (and many Arab nations, although most Arabs prefer a peace deal and an end to the violence.)The revolution continues in Syria, with nearly 2,000 dead in four months of growing violence. Turkey has provided refuge for those fleeing Syrian government violence, as well as rebels. Syria has protested this, as has Iran, which threatened Turkey. Turks and Iranians have been enemies for over a thousand years, and for most of that time, the Turks had the military edge. But now Iran is warning Turkey to not support anti-Iran rebels in Syria. Iran sees the success of these rebels, who seek to overthrow a pro-Iran dictatorship, as a major defeat. But is unclear how far Iran will go to stop the rebels.The Arrow 3 anti-missile system recently conducted another successful test, and remains on track to enter service in four years. This version of Arrow can destroy missiles at higher altitudes (over 100 kilometers) and farther away.
So far this month, over 20 rockets and mortar shells have been fired from Gaza into Israel. This a big increase, as such attacks had largely disappeared in May and June. Israel believes that the easing of the Gaza blockade has led to far more rockets being smuggled into Gaza. This includes more large, long-range rockets. Israel believes there are several Iranian Fajr rockets, with a range of 70 kilometers, plus several hundred extended-range (40 kilometers) 122mm rockets, and even more standard range (20 kilometers) 122mm rockets in Gaza. There are believed to be over 10,000 rockets stored in Gaza, for some future major attack on Israel. While Hamas says it might negotiate a an extended ceasefire with Israel, it still maintains that the ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel.July 26, 2011: In southern Lebanon, five UN peacekeepers were wounded by a roadside bomb. This is the second such attack since May. Hezbollah has threatened peacekeepers with violence if Hezbollah violations (bringing in weapons, building fortifications) of the UN ceasefire are interfered with. In general, Hezbollah is left alone by the peacekeepers, but these attacks appear to be reminders to the UN troops.In Gaza, Hamas executed two locals who were arrested in 2004 and accused of spying for Israel. Another such execution took place two months ago. Israeli intelligence networks in Gaza and the West Bank are under constant attack, but survive, providing targeting information and identification of Palestinian terrorists.July 21, 2011: In Egypt, nearly 300 demonstrators were injured when a large crowd tried to protest military resistance to political reform. Military intelligence mobilized thugs, from informers and criminals employed by the army, to attack and beat protestors. This was the 15th day of demonstrations in Tahrir Square (where the current Egyptian revolution began earlier this year) and at other locations throughout the country. The military is supposed to be running a transition government, but is increasingly seeking to keep many of the officials from the old dictatorship in power. The Egyptian military was as corrupt and self-serving as the old Mubarak dictatorship, and refused to fire on the anti-Mubarak demonstrators because the generals knew most of the conscript soldiers would probably mutiny and start a civil war.
July 19, 2011: Another rocket was fired from Gaza into Israel, landing in an unoccupied area. No one took credit for this attack, which is becoming standard. Hamas insists it has stopped the rocket attacks, but even the UN recognizes this is not true. As usual, the Israeli Air Force responding by hitting two known terrorist targets. There were no injuries.July 17, 2011: Germany has agreed to pay for about 20 percent of the cost of a sixth Dolphin class submarine, to be built in Germany. Two other Dolphins are under construction, and three are already in service.Over the weekend, four rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel.
Hamas seeks to attract youngsters to summer camps
AFP News By Adel Zaanoun | AFP News – JULY 29,11
The militant Islamist group Hamas is seeking to attract youngsters to its annual summer camps in the Gaza Strip, offering activities far beyond religious study.
However, organisers say the activities do not include militia training.These camps have no military or political dimension; they are held outdoors, with sports, cultural, educational, social and recreational activities, said Saleh Hamdan, a member of the central committee for summer camps.An example, he said, were camps on Islamic fashion, being attended by thousands of girls, which he said do not focus on purely religious matters.We play, we learn and we make friends, said 11-year-old camper Samia Ashur, her hair covered with a brown head scarf.As happens every summer, Gaza has also witnessed an undeclared competition between the camps run by Hamas and those of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, whose facilities have been targeted several times by unknown attackers in recent years.In the latest incident, around midnight on Wednesday, 10 men vandalised a UN site being used to stage summer activities in northwest Gaza.Fathi Hammad, interior minister in Gaza's Hamas government, promised on Thursday the immediate opening of an inquiry to find the perpetrators of the attack.Organisers say that around 500 Hamas summer camps, held in schools and community centres, are expected to host 100,000 youngsters aged from nine years to 21.Another 20,000 will attend courses for the study of the Koran.
The Hamas camps are divided into three sections, depending on age, and are dedicated to areas such as IT, media or innovation.There are camps that specialise in different areas of technology and innovation to meet the aspirations of young people,said Mussa al-Samak, head of the summer camps movement.Hamas gives the campers a uniform, one meal a day and a little pocket money.The slogan emblazoned on the youngsters' caps this year reads, I have triumphed with the youth.Majed al-Sheikh is a former official of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Palestinian Authority, which was forced out of Gaza during bloody fighting with Hamas in 2007.
Although he says he is not a member of Hamas he is sending his son to camp.We must seize the opportunity to teach children self-confidence and make sure they do not turn away from the right path, he said.What encouraged me to enroll my son in this camp is that it doesn't have a political or military character; the main thing is that there are places available for the children to have fun, play and grow,he added.
Nidal Hamdan, a mother of four children aged nine to 13 years, opposes the idea. These camps in fact are meant to improve the image of the Hamas movement and lead children to join it,she said.I do not want my children to be part of any movement whatsoever, said Hamdan, who works in a beauty salon, adding that there is a grave lack of facilities for children during the summer with the exception of refugees.
Hamas summer camps are heavily outnumbered by those of UNRWA, which for six weeks starting June 15 are hosting 250,000 refugee children in Gaza in 1,200 sites across the territory.During these Summer Games, the children have set world records in a range of activities such as the simultaneous flying of more than 13,000 kites, wind-surfing, dribbling soccer balls and the largest hand print painting.The kite record was set on Thursday, despite the site for the attempt being vandalised the previous night by unknown persons.
Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s New Leader, Praises Syrian Protesters
IntelCenter, via Associated Press
Ayman al-Zawahiri in a still image from a web posting by As Sahab, the media branch of Al Qaeda. By J. DAVID GOODMAN Published: July 28, 2011
In what appeared to be his first video message since succeeding Osama bin Laden as the leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri expressed strong support for antigovernment protesters in Syria, claiming that their movement to topple the country’s authoritarian leader was rooted in a wider regional conflict with the United States and Israel.The seven-minute video was posted online Wednesday by As Sahab, the media branch of Al Qaeda, and recorded sometime in the past month, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist communications and translated the video. Al Qaeda announced in mid-June that Mr. Zawahri had been chosen to lead the group.
The video shows Mr. Zawahri seated with a black background and wagging a finger at the camera as he issued a sustained rebuke of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, whom he called the leader of the criminal gang, descendant of the treacherous ones.
Addressing the protesters who for more than four months have faced a crackdown by Mr. Assad’s government, Mr. Zawahri tried to link his network to their popular movement, and Mr. Assad to the United States. America, which cooperated with Bashar al-Assad during his entire regime, claims today that it is standing with you when it saw him on the ground due to the earthquake of your fury,he said.You are giving examples and explaining lessons to your Arab and Muslim Ummah in sacrifice, steadfastness and fighting oppression,he added, using the word for the global community of Muslims.Such belated declarations of support, which Al Qaeda has made previously, have been viewed by security experts as evidence that the pro-democracy uprisings have left Al Qaeda largely a bystander to recent world-changing events. The group’s leaders, first Bin Laden and now Mr. Zawahri, have struggled to address young demonstrators who appear to have little use for their ideology. In Egypt, the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, a central goal of Mr. Zawahri’s career, was carried out without him and by methods he had long denounced.Mr. Zawahri, a 60-year-old Egyptian, had previously issued a video eulogy for Bin Laden, but at that time the organization had yet to name him as Bin Laden’s successor.In that earlier video, Mr. Zawahri also tried to rhetorically connect Al Qaeda to the protests that spread through North Africa and the Middle East this year, saying that Al Qaeda supported the people in Yemen, Syria and Libya in their uprisings.Bin Laden was killed May 2 in a raid by members of the Navy Seals at his compound in Pakistan. In the video, Mr. Zawahri did not mention Bin Laden by name and did not directly mention his own new role.Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.
Israel tests advanced missile interceptor
by Staff Writers Washington (UPI) Jul 27, 2011
Israel, concerned about both homemade Qassam rockets launched from Palestinian territory as well as the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles, has field-tested its Arrow 3 interceptor, its new anti-ballistic, long-range air defense system.The Arrow 3 interceptor shot down a mock enemy ballistic missile in a trial flight, Global Security Newswire reported.The United States has underwritten a large part of the Arrow 3's development costs. The system is to be deployed in 2015, Arrow 3's program head Yoav Turgeman said, and is intended to provide the topmost level of protection in a planned framework for countering various rocket and missile threats to Israel from any direction.The Arrow 3's predecessor, the Arrow 2 missile, over the past decade have been deployed in multiple defense units under the operational command of the Israeli air force at a military facility north of Tel Aviv.The new Arrow 3 system is due to participate in a joint U.S.-Israeli exercise scheduled for January. The Juniper Cobra exercise is intended to incorporate every element of Israel's missile and air defenses -- the Arrow 2 and 3 systems, Iron Dome, Magic Wand (also known as David's Sling) and U.S. Patriot anti-missile batteries, as well a U.S. missile defense warship stationed offshore in the Mediterranean.
Iran factored high in Israel's decision to develop the Arrow 3 system as an answer to threats of aerial assaults, including recent declarations by Iran that it had missiles that could hit Israel.Last month, Iranian air force commander Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh declared: If the Zionist entity wants to attack us, we will strike at the heart of Tel Aviv before their planes even leave our airspace. We have planned and conducted calculations and we have reached the conclusion that we do not need a range of more than 2,000 kilometers, because Israel is no further than this from our borders.U.S. Army Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, Israel's multi-layered missile defense system is the only one in existence that can stop rockets and missiles of a variety of ranges and sizes.A year ago U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Andrew J. Shapiro said: Given the threat Israel faces from short- and medium-range missiles, Israel air and missile defense systems are an area of particular focus (between the U.S. and Israel), including the Arrow Weapon System to counter long-range ballistic missile threats, and David's Sling to defend against short-range ballistic missiles. For our part, we are working with Israel to upgrade its Patriot Air and Missile Defense System.
Why Netanyahu is suddenly unpopular in Israel
By Joshua Mitnick, Correspondent / July 26, 2011 Tel Aviv CHRI-SCIE-MON
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been put firmly on the defensive for the first time since his election, with tens of thousands of people protesting the surging cost of housing.With his approval ratings in a double-digit dive, Mr. Netanyahu canceled a trip to Poland today to unveil a series of measures aimed at cooling off real-estate prices that have risen by more than one third since 2007.But demonstrators rejected the reform package as too narrow, focusing too heavily on students even as the protest movement burgeons well beyond the young people who set up tents in Tel Aviv two weeks ago.The increasingly mainstream character of the demonstrations reflects an Israeli middle class that is struggling to make ends meet despite robust growth and an all-time low in unemployment.
A wide swath of Israelis blame Netanyahu for not doing enough to address social gaps that have emerged in the wake of Israel's shift from a socialist economy to a more freewheeling, capitalistic society.Netanyahu is paying a price for not being seen as socially conscious enough. It is easy to blame him for not caring about the average person,says Shmuel Rosner, a fellow at the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute.
There is a problem that people who earn decent salaries feel their lives are becoming more economically challenging; prices are rising and salaries are not rising,he adds.Israel’s economy is great, but not all sectors of Israeli society share the feeling of a more prosperous economy.
Approval rating plummets 19 points
The prime minister has received broad public backing for a confrontational foreign policy toward the Palestinians and a critical stance toward the Obama administration – his approval rating stood at 51 percent after crossing swords with the US president this spring.But the growing socioeconomic malaise has caused his approval rating to plummet to 32 percent, according to a poll published by the liberal Haaretz newspaper.The survey numbers reflect fallout from a nearly two-week tent protest on Tel Aviv’s tony Rothschild Boulevard that brought some 20,000 demonstrators into the streets Saturday night. On Sunday, hundreds of protesters marched to the Knesset in Jerusalem, while university students led solidarity tent protests around the country.The prime minister has pressed cabinet members to come up with proposals that will show the government is responding, and pledged today to build more dorms for students and allocate more new building for middle-class buyers and renters. Netanyahu also faces a festering labor dispute with state-employed doctors and complaints over runaway prices for gas and dairy products.Knesset members and ministers from the governing coalition have expressed concern about political fallout with the Likud’s blue-collar constituents.It will leave a stain, says Shlomo Madmon, a long-time Likud activist. People are who are dedicated Likudniks are protesting that they will never [again] vote Likud.
Lull in Palestinian violence turns Israelis' attention to pocketbook issues
Netanyahu has touted himself as an responsible economic leader who supports liberalization amid a globalized economy, but the public also remembers him cutting social-welfare payments and pushing privatization of state companies as finance minister in the first half of the 2000s.The housing is a symptom … . Although there is a really good macroeconomic aggregates like GDP [gross domestic product] growth and unemployment, the problem is that we have very large income inequality, says Momi Dahan, an economics professor at Hebrew University.He says that such issues are coming to the fore because of a relative low in Palestinian violence.When it is quiet in the area of security, then all of the other problems come to the surface, Prof. Dahan says.People are sick of the rules where some people get a six-digit salary, and a cleaning woman or a cashier has a hard time feeding their kids.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
ISRAELS THREAT TO BOMB IRAN NUKES
Israel's Threat to Bomb Nuclear Facilities is Central to its Iran Strategy Posted by Tony Karon Friday, July 23, 2011 at 5:00 am
The reason TIME.com's intelligence columnist Bob Baer this week found himself cast as the unintended source for authoritative claims that Israel is about to bomb Iran, is precisely because what he said had been speculative comments inadvertently played into the game of bluff at the heart of the matter. Bob saw an implicit warning in the unprecedented public comments last month by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and former Chief of Staff, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi warning that Israel attacking Iran would be an act of spectacular self-destructive folly -- and lamenting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were both prone to such reckless whims. The likes of Dagan and Ashkenazi don't bluff, Bob reasoned, and Israeli reports even suggested they may have directly blocked military action by their political masters. By speaking out, they seemed to be explicitly warning the Israeli public that Israel's elected decision-makers were strategically incompetent, and needed to be reined in by more sober heads.If these respected securocrats were willing to tempt the wrath of Israel's government to sound the alarm, they must surely be trying to stop something that was in the works. And Bob's history as a former CIA operative allowed some media outlets to cast what he insists was simply his analysis of what was being said in public as an authoritative claim that Israel was about to attack Iran.
Such an attack remains highly unlikely in the near term, of course, and Dagan even said as much, indicating that there were no imminent plans for a strike. But the centerpiece of Israel's Iran strategy has been to cultivate the belief that if sanctions and other pressures fail to force Tehran to yield, Israel will feel compelled to go to take military action, even without U.S. backing. Israel said nothing at all before its 1981 attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, but scarcely a month has passed over the past three or four years without some new report calculated to create the impression that it was planning air strikes in Iran. The main line of criticism of Dagan in the Israeli camp did not challenge the content of what he said -- that bombing Iran would be a catastrophic mistake, plunging Israel into a war it couldn't win but from there would be no exit; instead he was pilloried for giving the game away. Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that Israel's ability to deter Iran was weakened by any ability to disperse the ambiguity surrounding the issue -- Dagan's arguments had a valid place in a strategic debate, he said, but not in public. Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit also ripped into Dagan for undermining the impression that Israel was gearing up for war with Iran. This threat is crucial for scaring the Iranians and for goading on the Americans and the Europeans [into putting more pressure on Tehran],Shavit wrote. It is also crucial for spurring on the Chinese and the Russians. Israel must not behave like an insane country. Rather, it must create the fear that if it is pushed into a corner it will behave insanely. To ensure that Israel is not forced to bomb Iran, it must maintain the impression that it is about to bomb Iran.Atlantic Monthly correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, a leading exponent of the minutes to midnight idea, tore into Dagan as a bungling strategist. Goldberg echoed Shavit's logic in charging that if Israel does attack the Iranian nuclear program, it will in part be because Dagan undermined his country's deterrent credibility.Translation: Israel is bluffing, hoping that Iran will back off its nuclear program for fear of Israel doing something catastrophically stupid; should the bluff be exposed, however, Israel will have no choice but to actually go ahead and do something catastrophically stupid.Goldberg, of course, last August had set off a media flurry far more intense than the on that followed Bob Baer's comments with his piece in the Atlantic Monthly predicting that
...one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq's airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It's so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)
In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.Spring has come and gone, of course, and Goldberg's dramatically detailed scenario did not unfold. Undeterred, Goldberg insists that this was because the Stuxnet computer worm set back Iran's program, but he nonetheless believes his original thesis holds true. After all, Dagan wouldn't have spoken out if he didn't believe that Netanyahu and Barak were about to plunge Israel into a vortex.The obvious problem with his bluff-as-deterrence strategy, of course, is that it has had no effect on Iran's behavior. Even before Dagan burst the bubble, the Israelis were the ones most loudly sounding the alarm over Iran's nuclear progress despite Israel (and the U.S.) keeping all options on the table. Tehran has heeded none of the red lines previously laid down by the Israelis and the Americans (remember, uranium enrichment itself was once such a red line). No amount of ambiguity appears to have persuaded they Iranians that they face Israeli attack -- or else, if they believe such an attack is possible, they must assume they can withstand whatever the Israelis throw at them and exact the heavy price that Dagan himself warned of.Not so, says Netanyahu. In his speech to Congress earlier this year, the Israeli leader argued that Iran had briefly suspended its nuclear weapons program only once, in 2003, when it feared the possibility of military action. In that same year, Moammar Gadhafi gave up his nuclear weapons program and for the same reason. The more Iran believes that all options are on the table, the less the chance of confrontation.Some senior U.S. intelligence officials, quoted in a recent New Yorker piece by Seymour Hersh, suggested, in fact, that Iran had suspended work on a bomb program in 2003 because the threat it was meant to counter -- Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which Iran believed had been developing a bomb program, and which had killed many thousands of Iranians using chemical munitions in the '80s -- had been eliminated by the U.S. invasion. (They also told Hersh that the U.S. intelligence assessment remains that Iran is not currently developing nuclear weapons and has made no decision to do so, even though its nuclear program is designed to put the means to build weapons in Tehran's hands.)
But there may be an alternative explanation for Dagan's remarks on the idiocy of Israel attacking Iran. While the Iranians don't seem to believe the threat or take it overly seriously, a different problem arises if the Israeli public is seduced by Netanyahu's apocalyptic rhetoric, which paints Iran as the same threat to their physical survival as Nazi Germany was to Europe's Jews in 1938. To the extent that they Israeli public buys into that hysteria, they will expect their leaders to attack this implacable annihilationist threat no matter what the odds and consequences. In other words, they will expect their leaders to do something that sober heads in the Israeli strategic establishment believe is stupid, self-destructive and unnecessary given a realistic assessment of Iran's capabilities and the danger they represents.Even Defense Minister Barak appears to have recognized the danger created by alarmist rhetoric, repeatedly reiterating his belief that even a nuclear-armed Iran would not, repeat not, threaten Israel's existence.The real target audience for Israel's threatening to do something crazy may not be the leaders of Iran as much as it is the leaders of the Western powers and other international players, as Shavit noted, that the Israelis hope to scare into raising pressure on Iran. Dennis Ross, President Obama's point man on Iran and the wider Middle East had even suggested this strategy in the last book he published before joining the Administration, arguing that a diplomatic solution required that Iran and others believe that an Israeli attack is a real and imminent threat. Ross even advocated sending the Israelis around European capitals threatening to do something crazy, knowing that Europeans' fears of such a catastrophic course of action would stampede them into backing tougher sanctions. Presumably, the technique would be equally effective in Washington.Suggesting, as Dagan had done, that bombing Iran is not a plausible course of action for a serious Israeli leadership does not help that campaign. But any evidence, no matter how flimsy, that such a strike may be a looming possibility, reinforces it -- even if the Iranians don't seem to take it seriously.Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/07/22/israels-threat-to-bomb-nuclear-facilities-is-central-to-its-iran-strategy/#ixzz1SxUgGdhI
Official: Iranian Scientist Assassinated
Published July 23, 2011| Associated Press
TEHRAN, Iran -- Assailants on a motorcycle assassinated an Iranian physicist Saturday in front of his home in Tehran, Iranian media reports said, in a killing that bore similarities to other slayings of scientists involved in the country's nuclear work in recent years.One report, on the javanonline.ir news website, identified the man as a nuclear scientist. Iran's official IRNA news agency also reported the killing but had few details on the attack and the man's background.
Several Iranian nuclear scientists have been murdered in recent years in attacks that Iran has blamed on the U.S. and Israel, which both accuse Tehran of seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability under the cover of its civilian atomic energy program.The semi-official Mehr news agency identified the victim as a professor of physics and said he was assassinated in front of his house in Bani Hashem street in Tehran.The wife of the scientist was wounded in the attack and rushed to hospital for treatment, Mehr reported, quoting a police official.Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/07/23/official-iranian-scientist-assassinated/#ixzz1SxVzRNp6
Abbas: Israeli policy forced UN statehood bid-Palestinian president says Israel's refusal to halt settlement building has forced his people to seek recognition at UN.
Last Modified: 23 Jul 2011 16:43
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has said the Palestinians' bid for membership in the United Nations was forced upon them by Israel's refusal to halt settlement building and end its occupation.We are going to the United Nations because we are forced to, it is not a unilateral action, Abbas said on Saturday at a conference in Turkey. What is unilateral is Israeli settlement.Abbas made his remarks in Istanbul, where Palestinian diplomats are meeting to work out the final details of their plan to seek recognition as an independent state this September, when the UN holds its General Assembly.Al Jazeera's Tony Birtley, reporting from Istanbul, said it will be a difficult process for the Palestinian leadership.This underlies more than anything the deep-rooted frustration of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority that the peace process has gone nowhere for the last year,our correspondent said.What they are trying to do is get recognition by the Security Council. If that doesn't work, they will go to the General Assembly and use a rarely-used mechanism to get the General Assembly to vote. They will need a two-thirds majority. They have got 115 people to recognise Palestine but they will need another 13.
US veto threat
The US has said it will veto any move for recognition in the UN.Palestinians will seek recognition along a border that predates the 1967 war between Israel and neighbouring countries, including the territory that encompasses the occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.US President Barack Obama has said that any negotiations to establish a Palestinian state have to begin on the pre-1967 borders, but Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has rejected that condition.We have not been able to return to negotiations with Netanyahu because of his refusal to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 borders and to stop settlement,Abbas said at the meeting, attended by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Frozen peace talks
Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been on hold since late September, shortly after Washington relaunched the first direct negotiations between the two sides for nearly two years.The talks ground to a halt when Israel's partial freeze on settlement construction expired and Netanyahu declined to renew it.The Palestinians say they will not hold talks while Israel builds on land they want for a future state.Netanyahu blames the Palestinians for the deadlock.Our first, second and third choice is to return to negotiations,Abbas said on Saturday.Like the rest of the peoples of the world ... we wish to be members of the General Assembly, members of the UN; no more, no less.A senior Palestinian official told the AFP news agency on condition of anonymity that preparations for the UN plan would be completed on August 4, during a meeting of an Arab monitoring committee in Doha, attended by Qatar, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.An official letter would be sent to the UN during the first week of August, he added.To get significant results we have to speak with one voice,Abbas told his audience, adding that the decision to seek UN membership would have the backing of a large consensus, including his Fatah movement and Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip.God willing, Palestinian reconciliation will be achieved before we go to the UN, Abbas said, referring to a formal end to years of enmity between the two.Farah and Hamas agreed to mend their relationship on April 27 but have yet to implement the deal.Abbas said that 118 countries have already recognised the Palestinian state within the borders that preceded Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in June 1967 and that the total would rise to 130 by September.A joint Palestinian-Israeli poll last month showed that 65 per cent of Palestinian respondents supported the UN campaign.Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies.
IAEA chief says no progress on Syria
(AP)22 July 2011
VIENNA — International Atomic Energy Agency experts met with Syrian officials recently but were told that nothing would change the IAEA’s assessment that Damascus tried to secretly build a plutonium-producing reactor, the agency’s head said Friday.
There was nothing concluded” from the talks earlier this month, which arouse from a pledge by Damascus to cooperate with an agency probe, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano told The Associated Press.He said it was now up to Syria to disprove the agency’s assessment that a target destroyed in 2007 by Israeli warplanes was a nearly finished reactor built clandestinely, and meant to produce plutonium, which can be used to arm nuclear warheads .We have done our jobs,Amano said. If there is further cooperation it is very nice. If not, ... the conclusion is there.The U.N. Security Council met in closed session on July 14 to discuss the IAEA finding and some Western ambassadors said afterward that the agency’s assessment has raised concerns the country violated its nonproliferation obligations.The IAEA has tried in vain since 2008 to follow up on strong evidence that the site in the Syrian desert bombed by Israel was a nearly finished reactor built with North Korea’s help.
Syria has said the facility was a non-nuclear military site.The IAEA resolution that reported Syria to the Security Council on June 9 expressed serious concern over Syria’s lack of cooperation with the IAEA Director General’s repeated requests for access to additional information and locations as well as Syria’s refusal to engage substantively with the Agency on the nature of the Dair Alzour site.Asked whether the popular uprising in Syria contributed to the lack of progress at the July meeting between Syrian and IAEA officials, Amano said the Syrians didn’t have an explanation to that effect, but our understanding is that they were too busy.He said the agency was still hoping for cooperation from Damascus, but if they don’t prove otherwise, we continue to be very confident with our conclusion that the site Israel targeted was a secret nuclear reactor.
UN official says landmark resolution on Lebanon, Israel yields positive effects, but still needs work 11:05, July 21, 2011
Michael Williams, UN special coordinator for Lebanon told reporters here Thursday that an important Security Council resolution designed to prevent hostilities between Israel and Lebanon has had a positive impact, but that there are still issues surrounding the resolution that need to be resolved.Remarkably, despite tensions and despite some incidents, that resolution has held very well, and it has held very well when you compare it with what happened between Israel and Lebanon in the previous 20, 30 years, said Williams.Williams briefed reporters after giving a report to the Security Council on resolution 1701, which was passed to end a July 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. The resolution required all parties to respect the blue line that marks the border between Israel and Lebanon, work towards a permanent ceasefire, and disarm Lebanese armed groups.Williams said that although activity along the blue line has been relatively calm, Israel and Lebanon have not achieved a permanent agreement to end hostilities.There was also a recognition that while the cessation of hostilities had held well, there had been little or no movement towards a ceasefire, he said.In recent months it's become even more difficult because of course there was a prolonged period about six months when there was no government in Lebanon.Lebanon's coalition government fell apart in January, due to a disagreement over a UN-backed tribunal on the 2005 killing of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. The government has now been changed and formed again under new Prime Minister Najib Mikati.Mikati has showed support for the enforcement of resolution 1701, Williams noted.
I welcome the commitment of Prime Minister Mikati to 1701 and to all Security Council resolutions that apply to Lebanon,Williams said.I also welcome some concrete acts that he is already engaged in the first days of office, including the first ever visit by a Lebanese prime minister to UNIFIL (UN Interim Force in Lebanon), and to its headquarters in Naqoura and I accompanied him on that visit last Saturday.
Williams said that it is imperative that the government in Lebanon as well as in Israel work through some of the more difficult issues in resolution 1701. One such unresolved issue is the village of Ghajar, which is on the blue line, raising questions about its status.I hope we can move forward to the position we did have in 2000, when the Israelis did withdraw militarily from that village,he said.This would be an important first step. Of course it would not lead to an immediate assertion of Lebanese authority and sovereignty, but we do envisage a separate process where the United Nations would mediate and hold talks between Israel and Lebanon on a final solution which would include the people of that village.Disarmament of non-governmental armed groups is another area where Williams said parties could have dialogue to move forward. He said that with regards to Lebanese and Palestinian armed groups, there must be Lebanese national ownership of dialogue and disarmament processes.There is I think a need for both parties, Lebanon and Israel to recommit to 1701 against a background which frankly may be more difficult in the coming months, if not difficult certainly challenging,Williams said.He explained that the stalling of a peace process for Israel and Palestine as well as the looming question of Palestine's achieving statehood at the UN in September could complicate the issues surrounding resolution 1701. He also cited recent protests in Syria as an important influence on Lebanon and other Middle Eastern nations.Source:Xinhua
Israel deporting 15 foreigners aboard Gaza-bound boat
BOAT July 20, 2011|By the CNN Wire Staff
Dignite enters the Israeli port of Ashdod flanked by Israeli naval vessels after being intercepted in international waters.Fifteen foreigners aboard the Gaza-bound boat Dignite were being deported out of Israel on Wednesday, Israeli officials said.
Some of them have already left this morning and the rest will fly out during the day,said Sabin Hadad, spokeswoman for the Israeli interior ministry.The Dignite -- carrying 10 activists, three crew members and three journalists -- is affiliated with the Free Gaza Movement.One of the journalists is Israeli.Israeli naval forces Tuesday successfully took over the boat, which was intent on breaking what the activists call the siege of Gaza,without violent resistance.The forces operated in line with procedures and took every precaution necessary while using all operational tactics determined prior to the operation, and avoid causing harm to the activists on board while ensuring the safety of the soldiers,the Israel Defense Forces said.
After the boarding, the passengers' health was examined and they were offered food and beverages.The boat declared its destination as Alexandria, Egypt, so that it could leave Greek waters, said Greta Berlin, spokeswoman for the Free Gaza Movement.
But it changed its destination in international waters, which is legal, Berlin said.
Israel insists on controlling access to Gaza because it says it has to keep weapons out of the hands of Palestinian militants who would use them to attack Israelis.
Gaza is run by Hamas, which has carried out dozens of terrorist attacks and is listed by the United States as a terrorist organization.Israel emphasizes that it delivers large amounts of aid to Gaza. The country mounted a diplomatic offensive to try to stop the flotilla from setting sail.The ship was part of a group of vessels that had planned to sail to Gaza in an effort to promote public awareness about Israel's blockade of the area. The others were grounded in Greece.The activists connected with the Freedom Flotilla, as they call it, also wanted to commemorate a May 2010 incident in which Israeli troops boarded the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship filled with humanitarian aid and 700 activists from various countries. Nine people died in clashes with Israeli Navy commandos.The Dignite carries a message of solidarity and human empathy from the people of the world to the people of Gaza, and all of Palestine, that Israel's violence can never silence,the group said.
Israeli forces take over Gaza-bound boat; no resistance reported FREE GAZA MOVEMENT July 19, 2011|From Amir Ahmed, CNN
Benny Gantz, pictured in February, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, confirmed that naval forces seized the vessel.Israeli naval forces Tuesday successfully took over a boat of activists intent on breaking what they call the siege of Gaza without violent resistance.Benny Gantz, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, confirmed that naval forces had been ordered to seize the vessel, known as the Dignite, as it approached the coast of Gaza, where a maritime security blockade is in force.The forces operated in line with procedures and took every precaution necessary while using all operational tactics determined prior to the operation, and avoid causing harm to the activists on board while ensuring the safety of the soldiers,the IDF said.After the boarding, the passengers' health was examined and they were offered food and beverages.The Dignite -- carrying 10 activists, three crew members and three journalists -- is affiliated with the Free Gaza Movement, whose aim is to break the siege of Gaza.Greta Berlin, spokeswoman for the Free Gaza Movement, said the boat declared its destination as Alexandria, Egypt, so that it could leave Greek waters.But it changed its destination in international waters, which is legal, Berlin said.Four navy boats surrounded the Dignite as it approached the coast of Gaza, the boat's organizers said.After the Israeli Navy intercepted the vessel, it engaged in a dialogue with the activists in an attempt to dissuade them from continuing on their route toward a maritime security blockade off the Gaza coast, the IDF said.
It said that any supplies on board may be transferred, legally, through the existing land crossings and the Ashdod port.However, the IDF said, all diplomatic channels had been exhausted and continuous calls to the vessel had been ignored.Given the groups' unwillingness to arrive at the Ashdod port,the IDF said, it was unequivocally necessary to board the vessel and lead it to Ashdod.After all the options we suggested were refused, we decided to take over the yacht. We realized that the captain was lying. He lied to the authorities in Greece about his sailing route and changed it from Egypt to Gaza,said IDF spokesman Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai.
The boat was taken to Ashdod, and the relevant security authorities and the Israel police were set to begin the process of questioning the passengers, who will then be transferred to the Ministry of Interior and the immigration authorities, officials said.
Hizbullah Aimed at Israel in Istanbul-A bombing attack in Istanbul two months ago turns out to have been aimed at Israel – by the Lebanese-based Hizbullah terror group.by Chana Ya'ar18/07/11, 3:11 AM Arutz Sheva
A bombing attack in Istanbul that wounded eight people two months ago now appears to have been aimed at Israel, and not Turkish citizens, according to a report by an Italian newspaper.The attack was originally thought to have been the work of the Kuristan Workers' Party (PKK), a terrorist group outlawed in Turkey, the European Union and the United States. However, according to a report published Monday in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, three Hizbullah terrorists had arrived in Istanbul from Beirut to attack Israeli Consul General to Istabul Moshe Kimchi.The attack was intended to be carried out in retribution for the alleged assassination by the Mossad of Iranian nuclear physicist Masoud Ali Muhammedi last year in Tehran. The attempt failed, however, because the terrorists miscalculated – Kimchi's schedule ran late on the day of the attack, the report said.Ankara intelligence sources denied the report in an interview in the Turkish daily Hurriyet, saying, Israel carries out similar disinformation campaigns through newspapers from time to time.Security officials in Israel had issued a warning just one month earlier – in April – that Hizbullah was planning to attack Israelis abroad.The terrorist organization has for some time maintained its intention to murder Israelis in retaliation for the assassination of the group's #2 commander, Imad Mughniyeh in a Damascus car bombing in February 2008. Hizbullah accused Israel of carrying out the murder. Several such attempts have been foiled.
The reason TIME.com's intelligence columnist Bob Baer this week found himself cast as the unintended source for authoritative claims that Israel is about to bomb Iran, is precisely because what he said had been speculative comments inadvertently played into the game of bluff at the heart of the matter. Bob saw an implicit warning in the unprecedented public comments last month by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and former Chief of Staff, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi warning that Israel attacking Iran would be an act of spectacular self-destructive folly -- and lamenting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were both prone to such reckless whims. The likes of Dagan and Ashkenazi don't bluff, Bob reasoned, and Israeli reports even suggested they may have directly blocked military action by their political masters. By speaking out, they seemed to be explicitly warning the Israeli public that Israel's elected decision-makers were strategically incompetent, and needed to be reined in by more sober heads.If these respected securocrats were willing to tempt the wrath of Israel's government to sound the alarm, they must surely be trying to stop something that was in the works. And Bob's history as a former CIA operative allowed some media outlets to cast what he insists was simply his analysis of what was being said in public as an authoritative claim that Israel was about to attack Iran.
Such an attack remains highly unlikely in the near term, of course, and Dagan even said as much, indicating that there were no imminent plans for a strike. But the centerpiece of Israel's Iran strategy has been to cultivate the belief that if sanctions and other pressures fail to force Tehran to yield, Israel will feel compelled to go to take military action, even without U.S. backing. Israel said nothing at all before its 1981 attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, but scarcely a month has passed over the past three or four years without some new report calculated to create the impression that it was planning air strikes in Iran. The main line of criticism of Dagan in the Israeli camp did not challenge the content of what he said -- that bombing Iran would be a catastrophic mistake, plunging Israel into a war it couldn't win but from there would be no exit; instead he was pilloried for giving the game away. Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that Israel's ability to deter Iran was weakened by any ability to disperse the ambiguity surrounding the issue -- Dagan's arguments had a valid place in a strategic debate, he said, but not in public. Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit also ripped into Dagan for undermining the impression that Israel was gearing up for war with Iran. This threat is crucial for scaring the Iranians and for goading on the Americans and the Europeans [into putting more pressure on Tehran],Shavit wrote. It is also crucial for spurring on the Chinese and the Russians. Israel must not behave like an insane country. Rather, it must create the fear that if it is pushed into a corner it will behave insanely. To ensure that Israel is not forced to bomb Iran, it must maintain the impression that it is about to bomb Iran.Atlantic Monthly correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, a leading exponent of the minutes to midnight idea, tore into Dagan as a bungling strategist. Goldberg echoed Shavit's logic in charging that if Israel does attack the Iranian nuclear program, it will in part be because Dagan undermined his country's deterrent credibility.Translation: Israel is bluffing, hoping that Iran will back off its nuclear program for fear of Israel doing something catastrophically stupid; should the bluff be exposed, however, Israel will have no choice but to actually go ahead and do something catastrophically stupid.Goldberg, of course, last August had set off a media flurry far more intense than the on that followed Bob Baer's comments with his piece in the Atlantic Monthly predicting that
...one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq's airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It's so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)
In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.Spring has come and gone, of course, and Goldberg's dramatically detailed scenario did not unfold. Undeterred, Goldberg insists that this was because the Stuxnet computer worm set back Iran's program, but he nonetheless believes his original thesis holds true. After all, Dagan wouldn't have spoken out if he didn't believe that Netanyahu and Barak were about to plunge Israel into a vortex.The obvious problem with his bluff-as-deterrence strategy, of course, is that it has had no effect on Iran's behavior. Even before Dagan burst the bubble, the Israelis were the ones most loudly sounding the alarm over Iran's nuclear progress despite Israel (and the U.S.) keeping all options on the table. Tehran has heeded none of the red lines previously laid down by the Israelis and the Americans (remember, uranium enrichment itself was once such a red line). No amount of ambiguity appears to have persuaded they Iranians that they face Israeli attack -- or else, if they believe such an attack is possible, they must assume they can withstand whatever the Israelis throw at them and exact the heavy price that Dagan himself warned of.Not so, says Netanyahu. In his speech to Congress earlier this year, the Israeli leader argued that Iran had briefly suspended its nuclear weapons program only once, in 2003, when it feared the possibility of military action. In that same year, Moammar Gadhafi gave up his nuclear weapons program and for the same reason. The more Iran believes that all options are on the table, the less the chance of confrontation.Some senior U.S. intelligence officials, quoted in a recent New Yorker piece by Seymour Hersh, suggested, in fact, that Iran had suspended work on a bomb program in 2003 because the threat it was meant to counter -- Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which Iran believed had been developing a bomb program, and which had killed many thousands of Iranians using chemical munitions in the '80s -- had been eliminated by the U.S. invasion. (They also told Hersh that the U.S. intelligence assessment remains that Iran is not currently developing nuclear weapons and has made no decision to do so, even though its nuclear program is designed to put the means to build weapons in Tehran's hands.)
But there may be an alternative explanation for Dagan's remarks on the idiocy of Israel attacking Iran. While the Iranians don't seem to believe the threat or take it overly seriously, a different problem arises if the Israeli public is seduced by Netanyahu's apocalyptic rhetoric, which paints Iran as the same threat to their physical survival as Nazi Germany was to Europe's Jews in 1938. To the extent that they Israeli public buys into that hysteria, they will expect their leaders to attack this implacable annihilationist threat no matter what the odds and consequences. In other words, they will expect their leaders to do something that sober heads in the Israeli strategic establishment believe is stupid, self-destructive and unnecessary given a realistic assessment of Iran's capabilities and the danger they represents.Even Defense Minister Barak appears to have recognized the danger created by alarmist rhetoric, repeatedly reiterating his belief that even a nuclear-armed Iran would not, repeat not, threaten Israel's existence.The real target audience for Israel's threatening to do something crazy may not be the leaders of Iran as much as it is the leaders of the Western powers and other international players, as Shavit noted, that the Israelis hope to scare into raising pressure on Iran. Dennis Ross, President Obama's point man on Iran and the wider Middle East had even suggested this strategy in the last book he published before joining the Administration, arguing that a diplomatic solution required that Iran and others believe that an Israeli attack is a real and imminent threat. Ross even advocated sending the Israelis around European capitals threatening to do something crazy, knowing that Europeans' fears of such a catastrophic course of action would stampede them into backing tougher sanctions. Presumably, the technique would be equally effective in Washington.Suggesting, as Dagan had done, that bombing Iran is not a plausible course of action for a serious Israeli leadership does not help that campaign. But any evidence, no matter how flimsy, that such a strike may be a looming possibility, reinforces it -- even if the Iranians don't seem to take it seriously.Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/07/22/israels-threat-to-bomb-nuclear-facilities-is-central-to-its-iran-strategy/#ixzz1SxUgGdhI
Official: Iranian Scientist Assassinated
Published July 23, 2011| Associated Press
TEHRAN, Iran -- Assailants on a motorcycle assassinated an Iranian physicist Saturday in front of his home in Tehran, Iranian media reports said, in a killing that bore similarities to other slayings of scientists involved in the country's nuclear work in recent years.One report, on the javanonline.ir news website, identified the man as a nuclear scientist. Iran's official IRNA news agency also reported the killing but had few details on the attack and the man's background.
Several Iranian nuclear scientists have been murdered in recent years in attacks that Iran has blamed on the U.S. and Israel, which both accuse Tehran of seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability under the cover of its civilian atomic energy program.The semi-official Mehr news agency identified the victim as a professor of physics and said he was assassinated in front of his house in Bani Hashem street in Tehran.The wife of the scientist was wounded in the attack and rushed to hospital for treatment, Mehr reported, quoting a police official.Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/07/23/official-iranian-scientist-assassinated/#ixzz1SxVzRNp6
Abbas: Israeli policy forced UN statehood bid-Palestinian president says Israel's refusal to halt settlement building has forced his people to seek recognition at UN.
Last Modified: 23 Jul 2011 16:43
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has said the Palestinians' bid for membership in the United Nations was forced upon them by Israel's refusal to halt settlement building and end its occupation.We are going to the United Nations because we are forced to, it is not a unilateral action, Abbas said on Saturday at a conference in Turkey. What is unilateral is Israeli settlement.Abbas made his remarks in Istanbul, where Palestinian diplomats are meeting to work out the final details of their plan to seek recognition as an independent state this September, when the UN holds its General Assembly.Al Jazeera's Tony Birtley, reporting from Istanbul, said it will be a difficult process for the Palestinian leadership.This underlies more than anything the deep-rooted frustration of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority that the peace process has gone nowhere for the last year,our correspondent said.What they are trying to do is get recognition by the Security Council. If that doesn't work, they will go to the General Assembly and use a rarely-used mechanism to get the General Assembly to vote. They will need a two-thirds majority. They have got 115 people to recognise Palestine but they will need another 13.
US veto threat
The US has said it will veto any move for recognition in the UN.Palestinians will seek recognition along a border that predates the 1967 war between Israel and neighbouring countries, including the territory that encompasses the occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.US President Barack Obama has said that any negotiations to establish a Palestinian state have to begin on the pre-1967 borders, but Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has rejected that condition.We have not been able to return to negotiations with Netanyahu because of his refusal to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 borders and to stop settlement,Abbas said at the meeting, attended by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Frozen peace talks
Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been on hold since late September, shortly after Washington relaunched the first direct negotiations between the two sides for nearly two years.The talks ground to a halt when Israel's partial freeze on settlement construction expired and Netanyahu declined to renew it.The Palestinians say they will not hold talks while Israel builds on land they want for a future state.Netanyahu blames the Palestinians for the deadlock.Our first, second and third choice is to return to negotiations,Abbas said on Saturday.Like the rest of the peoples of the world ... we wish to be members of the General Assembly, members of the UN; no more, no less.A senior Palestinian official told the AFP news agency on condition of anonymity that preparations for the UN plan would be completed on August 4, during a meeting of an Arab monitoring committee in Doha, attended by Qatar, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.An official letter would be sent to the UN during the first week of August, he added.To get significant results we have to speak with one voice,Abbas told his audience, adding that the decision to seek UN membership would have the backing of a large consensus, including his Fatah movement and Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip.God willing, Palestinian reconciliation will be achieved before we go to the UN, Abbas said, referring to a formal end to years of enmity between the two.Farah and Hamas agreed to mend their relationship on April 27 but have yet to implement the deal.Abbas said that 118 countries have already recognised the Palestinian state within the borders that preceded Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in June 1967 and that the total would rise to 130 by September.A joint Palestinian-Israeli poll last month showed that 65 per cent of Palestinian respondents supported the UN campaign.Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies.
IAEA chief says no progress on Syria
(AP)22 July 2011
VIENNA — International Atomic Energy Agency experts met with Syrian officials recently but were told that nothing would change the IAEA’s assessment that Damascus tried to secretly build a plutonium-producing reactor, the agency’s head said Friday.
There was nothing concluded” from the talks earlier this month, which arouse from a pledge by Damascus to cooperate with an agency probe, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano told The Associated Press.He said it was now up to Syria to disprove the agency’s assessment that a target destroyed in 2007 by Israeli warplanes was a nearly finished reactor built clandestinely, and meant to produce plutonium, which can be used to arm nuclear warheads .We have done our jobs,Amano said. If there is further cooperation it is very nice. If not, ... the conclusion is there.The U.N. Security Council met in closed session on July 14 to discuss the IAEA finding and some Western ambassadors said afterward that the agency’s assessment has raised concerns the country violated its nonproliferation obligations.The IAEA has tried in vain since 2008 to follow up on strong evidence that the site in the Syrian desert bombed by Israel was a nearly finished reactor built with North Korea’s help.
Syria has said the facility was a non-nuclear military site.The IAEA resolution that reported Syria to the Security Council on June 9 expressed serious concern over Syria’s lack of cooperation with the IAEA Director General’s repeated requests for access to additional information and locations as well as Syria’s refusal to engage substantively with the Agency on the nature of the Dair Alzour site.Asked whether the popular uprising in Syria contributed to the lack of progress at the July meeting between Syrian and IAEA officials, Amano said the Syrians didn’t have an explanation to that effect, but our understanding is that they were too busy.He said the agency was still hoping for cooperation from Damascus, but if they don’t prove otherwise, we continue to be very confident with our conclusion that the site Israel targeted was a secret nuclear reactor.
UN official says landmark resolution on Lebanon, Israel yields positive effects, but still needs work 11:05, July 21, 2011
Michael Williams, UN special coordinator for Lebanon told reporters here Thursday that an important Security Council resolution designed to prevent hostilities between Israel and Lebanon has had a positive impact, but that there are still issues surrounding the resolution that need to be resolved.Remarkably, despite tensions and despite some incidents, that resolution has held very well, and it has held very well when you compare it with what happened between Israel and Lebanon in the previous 20, 30 years, said Williams.Williams briefed reporters after giving a report to the Security Council on resolution 1701, which was passed to end a July 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. The resolution required all parties to respect the blue line that marks the border between Israel and Lebanon, work towards a permanent ceasefire, and disarm Lebanese armed groups.Williams said that although activity along the blue line has been relatively calm, Israel and Lebanon have not achieved a permanent agreement to end hostilities.There was also a recognition that while the cessation of hostilities had held well, there had been little or no movement towards a ceasefire, he said.In recent months it's become even more difficult because of course there was a prolonged period about six months when there was no government in Lebanon.Lebanon's coalition government fell apart in January, due to a disagreement over a UN-backed tribunal on the 2005 killing of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. The government has now been changed and formed again under new Prime Minister Najib Mikati.Mikati has showed support for the enforcement of resolution 1701, Williams noted.
I welcome the commitment of Prime Minister Mikati to 1701 and to all Security Council resolutions that apply to Lebanon,Williams said.I also welcome some concrete acts that he is already engaged in the first days of office, including the first ever visit by a Lebanese prime minister to UNIFIL (UN Interim Force in Lebanon), and to its headquarters in Naqoura and I accompanied him on that visit last Saturday.
Williams said that it is imperative that the government in Lebanon as well as in Israel work through some of the more difficult issues in resolution 1701. One such unresolved issue is the village of Ghajar, which is on the blue line, raising questions about its status.I hope we can move forward to the position we did have in 2000, when the Israelis did withdraw militarily from that village,he said.This would be an important first step. Of course it would not lead to an immediate assertion of Lebanese authority and sovereignty, but we do envisage a separate process where the United Nations would mediate and hold talks between Israel and Lebanon on a final solution which would include the people of that village.Disarmament of non-governmental armed groups is another area where Williams said parties could have dialogue to move forward. He said that with regards to Lebanese and Palestinian armed groups, there must be Lebanese national ownership of dialogue and disarmament processes.There is I think a need for both parties, Lebanon and Israel to recommit to 1701 against a background which frankly may be more difficult in the coming months, if not difficult certainly challenging,Williams said.He explained that the stalling of a peace process for Israel and Palestine as well as the looming question of Palestine's achieving statehood at the UN in September could complicate the issues surrounding resolution 1701. He also cited recent protests in Syria as an important influence on Lebanon and other Middle Eastern nations.Source:Xinhua
Israel deporting 15 foreigners aboard Gaza-bound boat
BOAT July 20, 2011|By the CNN Wire Staff
Dignite enters the Israeli port of Ashdod flanked by Israeli naval vessels after being intercepted in international waters.Fifteen foreigners aboard the Gaza-bound boat Dignite were being deported out of Israel on Wednesday, Israeli officials said.
Some of them have already left this morning and the rest will fly out during the day,said Sabin Hadad, spokeswoman for the Israeli interior ministry.The Dignite -- carrying 10 activists, three crew members and three journalists -- is affiliated with the Free Gaza Movement.One of the journalists is Israeli.Israeli naval forces Tuesday successfully took over the boat, which was intent on breaking what the activists call the siege of Gaza,without violent resistance.The forces operated in line with procedures and took every precaution necessary while using all operational tactics determined prior to the operation, and avoid causing harm to the activists on board while ensuring the safety of the soldiers,the Israel Defense Forces said.
After the boarding, the passengers' health was examined and they were offered food and beverages.The boat declared its destination as Alexandria, Egypt, so that it could leave Greek waters, said Greta Berlin, spokeswoman for the Free Gaza Movement.
But it changed its destination in international waters, which is legal, Berlin said.
Israel insists on controlling access to Gaza because it says it has to keep weapons out of the hands of Palestinian militants who would use them to attack Israelis.
Gaza is run by Hamas, which has carried out dozens of terrorist attacks and is listed by the United States as a terrorist organization.Israel emphasizes that it delivers large amounts of aid to Gaza. The country mounted a diplomatic offensive to try to stop the flotilla from setting sail.The ship was part of a group of vessels that had planned to sail to Gaza in an effort to promote public awareness about Israel's blockade of the area. The others were grounded in Greece.The activists connected with the Freedom Flotilla, as they call it, also wanted to commemorate a May 2010 incident in which Israeli troops boarded the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship filled with humanitarian aid and 700 activists from various countries. Nine people died in clashes with Israeli Navy commandos.The Dignite carries a message of solidarity and human empathy from the people of the world to the people of Gaza, and all of Palestine, that Israel's violence can never silence,the group said.
Israeli forces take over Gaza-bound boat; no resistance reported FREE GAZA MOVEMENT July 19, 2011|From Amir Ahmed, CNN
Benny Gantz, pictured in February, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, confirmed that naval forces seized the vessel.Israeli naval forces Tuesday successfully took over a boat of activists intent on breaking what they call the siege of Gaza without violent resistance.Benny Gantz, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, confirmed that naval forces had been ordered to seize the vessel, known as the Dignite, as it approached the coast of Gaza, where a maritime security blockade is in force.The forces operated in line with procedures and took every precaution necessary while using all operational tactics determined prior to the operation, and avoid causing harm to the activists on board while ensuring the safety of the soldiers,the IDF said.After the boarding, the passengers' health was examined and they were offered food and beverages.The Dignite -- carrying 10 activists, three crew members and three journalists -- is affiliated with the Free Gaza Movement, whose aim is to break the siege of Gaza.Greta Berlin, spokeswoman for the Free Gaza Movement, said the boat declared its destination as Alexandria, Egypt, so that it could leave Greek waters.But it changed its destination in international waters, which is legal, Berlin said.Four navy boats surrounded the Dignite as it approached the coast of Gaza, the boat's organizers said.After the Israeli Navy intercepted the vessel, it engaged in a dialogue with the activists in an attempt to dissuade them from continuing on their route toward a maritime security blockade off the Gaza coast, the IDF said.
It said that any supplies on board may be transferred, legally, through the existing land crossings and the Ashdod port.However, the IDF said, all diplomatic channels had been exhausted and continuous calls to the vessel had been ignored.Given the groups' unwillingness to arrive at the Ashdod port,the IDF said, it was unequivocally necessary to board the vessel and lead it to Ashdod.After all the options we suggested were refused, we decided to take over the yacht. We realized that the captain was lying. He lied to the authorities in Greece about his sailing route and changed it from Egypt to Gaza,said IDF spokesman Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai.
The boat was taken to Ashdod, and the relevant security authorities and the Israel police were set to begin the process of questioning the passengers, who will then be transferred to the Ministry of Interior and the immigration authorities, officials said.
Hizbullah Aimed at Israel in Istanbul-A bombing attack in Istanbul two months ago turns out to have been aimed at Israel – by the Lebanese-based Hizbullah terror group.by Chana Ya'ar18/07/11, 3:11 AM Arutz Sheva
A bombing attack in Istanbul that wounded eight people two months ago now appears to have been aimed at Israel, and not Turkish citizens, according to a report by an Italian newspaper.The attack was originally thought to have been the work of the Kuristan Workers' Party (PKK), a terrorist group outlawed in Turkey, the European Union and the United States. However, according to a report published Monday in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, three Hizbullah terrorists had arrived in Istanbul from Beirut to attack Israeli Consul General to Istabul Moshe Kimchi.The attack was intended to be carried out in retribution for the alleged assassination by the Mossad of Iranian nuclear physicist Masoud Ali Muhammedi last year in Tehran. The attempt failed, however, because the terrorists miscalculated – Kimchi's schedule ran late on the day of the attack, the report said.Ankara intelligence sources denied the report in an interview in the Turkish daily Hurriyet, saying, Israel carries out similar disinformation campaigns through newspapers from time to time.Security officials in Israel had issued a warning just one month earlier – in April – that Hizbullah was planning to attack Israelis abroad.The terrorist organization has for some time maintained its intention to murder Israelis in retaliation for the assassination of the group's #2 commander, Imad Mughniyeh in a Damascus car bombing in February 2008. Hizbullah accused Israel of carrying out the murder. Several such attempts have been foiled.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
QUARTET AT LOSS FOR WORDS
LAND FOR PEACE (THE FUTURE 7 YEARS OF HELL ON EARTH)
JOEL 3:2
2 I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.
THE WEEK OF DANIEL 9:27 WE KNOW ITS 7 YRS
Heres the scripture 1 week = 7 yrs Genesis 29:27-29
27 Fulfil her week, and we will give thee this also for the service which thou shalt serve with me yet seven other years.
28 And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week: and he gave him Rachel his daughter to wife also.
29 And Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be her maid.
DANIEL 11:21-23
21 And in his estate shall stand up a vile person, to whom they shall not give the honour of the kingdom: but he shall come in peaceably, and obtain the kingdom by flatteries.
23 And after the league made with him he shall work deceitfully: for he shall come up, and shall become strong with a small people.
24 He shall enter peaceably even upon the fattest places of the province; and he shall do that which his fathers have not done, nor his fathers' fathers; he shall scatter among them the prey, and spoil, and riches: yea, and he shall forecast his devices against the strong holds, even for a time.
DANIEL 9:26-27
26 And after threescore and two weeks(62X7=434 YEARS+7X7=49 YEARS=TOTAL OF 69 WEEKS OR 483 YRS) shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary;(ROMAN LEADERS DESTROYED THE 2ND TEMPLE) and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.(THERE HAS TO BE 70 WEEKS OR 490 YRS TO FUFILL THE VISION AND PROPHECY OF DAN 9:24).(THE NEXT VERSE IS THAT 7 YR WEEK OR (70TH FINAL WEEK).
27 And he( THE ROMAN,EU PRESIDENT) shall confirm the covenant with many for one week:(1X7=7 YEARS) and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease,(3 1/2 yrs in TEMPLE SACRIFICES STOPPED) and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.
JEREMIAH 6:14
14 They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
JEREMIAH 8:11
11 For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
1 THESSALONIANS 5:3
3 For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.
ISAIAH 28:14-19 (THIS IS THE 7 YR TREATY COVENANT OF DANIEL 9:27)
14 Wherefore hear the word of the LORD, ye scornful men, that rule this people which is in Jerusalem.
15 Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves:
16 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.
17 Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.
18 And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it.
19 From the time that it goeth forth it shall take you: for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and by night: and it shall be a vexation only to understand the report.
Israeli-friendly MEPs lobby Ashton on Palestine
ANDREW RETTMAN 11.07.2011 @ 18:47 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A cross-party group of 104 eurodeputies has urged the EU's new diplomatic service to do all it can to avoid a UN vote on recognition of Palestine.The MEPs said in an open letter to EU foreign relations chief Catherine Ashton on Monday (11 July) that the Palestinian initiative, expected at the UN General Assembly in September, could destroy any chances of peace.A unilateral move will not bring reconciliation; it will not bring stability; it will not bring peace. Rather, it will most likely fell the peace process for good, the letter explains.The prospect of UN recognition also raises unrealistic expectations among Palestinians that they soon will have a sovereign state. But a UN vote will not change the reality on the ground and thus disappoint many Palestinians. Such disappointment has in the past often ignited new violence.The letter was signed by members of five of the biggest political groups in the European Parliament, ranging from British eurosceptics to Estonian greens.Most of the 104 come from traditionally Israeli-sympathetic countries such as Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania. But several names from more Palestinian-friendly EU members - France, Spain, Sweden, the UK - also featured in the roll call.The letter coincides with a meeting in Washington on the same day between Ashton, US secretary of state Hilary Clinton, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, UN chief Ban Ki Moon - the so-called Quartet - and its special envoy to the Middle East, former British leader Tony Blair.
The meeting is designed to help revive Arab-Israeli talks which unravelled last year in part due to Israeli settlement building on occupied land.The EU hopes that if the Quartet endorses a return to talks, while giving concessions to the Palestinian side, the Palestinians will put on hold their UN bid.The Quartet dinner starts at 7pm Washington time and may or may not generate a written communique, depending on the ouctome, Blair's assistant, Matthew Doyle told EUobserer. Tony Blair has always maintained that the only way to peace is through a negotiated solution by both sides. This remains his firm belief, Doyle said.No Israeli or Palestinian diplomats are to be present at the US-hosted event, but the two sides have made their positions clear via media.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday he is ready to resume talks tomorrow morning but that the Palestinians refuse. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said on Sunday: We call on the Quartet to issue a statement urging Israel to freeze construction in the settlements and accept the 1967 lines as the borders of the Palestinian state.Netanyahu has rejected returning to 1967 lines on the grounds that they are militarily indefensible.Restoring the old lines would force Israel to evict hardline settlers in a complex series of land swaps. It would also involve some form of joint control over East Jerusalem - a red line for Netanyahu.
Quartet at a Loss for Words
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu JULY 12,11
The Quartet not only has been unable to advance a deal between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, it also cannot find the words to say so.Representatives of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia are meeting for the second day in a row in Washington Tuesday after failing the day before – for the first time ever – to come up with a summary statement of their discussions.PA negotiator Saeb Erekat jumped on the Quartet’s silence by stating, There is no other option but to support the Palestinian plan to go to the United Nations to seek full membership for the state of Palestine on the 1967 borders.The United States, several leading EU countries and Israel oppose the Palestinian Authority plan, which violates the essence of the Oslo Accords and American Roadmap.While the Quartet tries to come up with some kind of statement to keep alive the term peace process by forging some kind of language acceptable to Israel and the Arab world, Erekat rejected any criticism of the Palestinian Authority and any compromise.The only way the PA may be convinced to relent is if it comes to the conclusion that its UN gambit for unilateral recognition of a PA state won’t work. Although most of the nations in the U.N. General Assembly back the PA bid for recognition based on its territorial demands, it does not have the support of most of the world's leading nations.However, the PA has gone so far out on the cliff, repeatedly insisting on all without taking into consideration they might end up with nothing,its leaders face trouble if it cannot deliver on their promises.(IsraelNationalNews.com)
JOEL 3:2
2 I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.
THE WEEK OF DANIEL 9:27 WE KNOW ITS 7 YRS
Heres the scripture 1 week = 7 yrs Genesis 29:27-29
27 Fulfil her week, and we will give thee this also for the service which thou shalt serve with me yet seven other years.
28 And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week: and he gave him Rachel his daughter to wife also.
29 And Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be her maid.
DANIEL 11:21-23
21 And in his estate shall stand up a vile person, to whom they shall not give the honour of the kingdom: but he shall come in peaceably, and obtain the kingdom by flatteries.
23 And after the league made with him he shall work deceitfully: for he shall come up, and shall become strong with a small people.
24 He shall enter peaceably even upon the fattest places of the province; and he shall do that which his fathers have not done, nor his fathers' fathers; he shall scatter among them the prey, and spoil, and riches: yea, and he shall forecast his devices against the strong holds, even for a time.
DANIEL 9:26-27
26 And after threescore and two weeks(62X7=434 YEARS+7X7=49 YEARS=TOTAL OF 69 WEEKS OR 483 YRS) shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary;(ROMAN LEADERS DESTROYED THE 2ND TEMPLE) and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.(THERE HAS TO BE 70 WEEKS OR 490 YRS TO FUFILL THE VISION AND PROPHECY OF DAN 9:24).(THE NEXT VERSE IS THAT 7 YR WEEK OR (70TH FINAL WEEK).
27 And he( THE ROMAN,EU PRESIDENT) shall confirm the covenant with many for one week:(1X7=7 YEARS) and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease,(3 1/2 yrs in TEMPLE SACRIFICES STOPPED) and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.
JEREMIAH 6:14
14 They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
JEREMIAH 8:11
11 For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
1 THESSALONIANS 5:3
3 For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.
ISAIAH 28:14-19 (THIS IS THE 7 YR TREATY COVENANT OF DANIEL 9:27)
14 Wherefore hear the word of the LORD, ye scornful men, that rule this people which is in Jerusalem.
15 Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves:
16 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.
17 Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.
18 And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it.
19 From the time that it goeth forth it shall take you: for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and by night: and it shall be a vexation only to understand the report.
Israeli-friendly MEPs lobby Ashton on Palestine
ANDREW RETTMAN 11.07.2011 @ 18:47 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A cross-party group of 104 eurodeputies has urged the EU's new diplomatic service to do all it can to avoid a UN vote on recognition of Palestine.The MEPs said in an open letter to EU foreign relations chief Catherine Ashton on Monday (11 July) that the Palestinian initiative, expected at the UN General Assembly in September, could destroy any chances of peace.A unilateral move will not bring reconciliation; it will not bring stability; it will not bring peace. Rather, it will most likely fell the peace process for good, the letter explains.The prospect of UN recognition also raises unrealistic expectations among Palestinians that they soon will have a sovereign state. But a UN vote will not change the reality on the ground and thus disappoint many Palestinians. Such disappointment has in the past often ignited new violence.The letter was signed by members of five of the biggest political groups in the European Parliament, ranging from British eurosceptics to Estonian greens.Most of the 104 come from traditionally Israeli-sympathetic countries such as Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania. But several names from more Palestinian-friendly EU members - France, Spain, Sweden, the UK - also featured in the roll call.The letter coincides with a meeting in Washington on the same day between Ashton, US secretary of state Hilary Clinton, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, UN chief Ban Ki Moon - the so-called Quartet - and its special envoy to the Middle East, former British leader Tony Blair.
The meeting is designed to help revive Arab-Israeli talks which unravelled last year in part due to Israeli settlement building on occupied land.The EU hopes that if the Quartet endorses a return to talks, while giving concessions to the Palestinian side, the Palestinians will put on hold their UN bid.The Quartet dinner starts at 7pm Washington time and may or may not generate a written communique, depending on the ouctome, Blair's assistant, Matthew Doyle told EUobserer. Tony Blair has always maintained that the only way to peace is through a negotiated solution by both sides. This remains his firm belief, Doyle said.No Israeli or Palestinian diplomats are to be present at the US-hosted event, but the two sides have made their positions clear via media.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday he is ready to resume talks tomorrow morning but that the Palestinians refuse. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said on Sunday: We call on the Quartet to issue a statement urging Israel to freeze construction in the settlements and accept the 1967 lines as the borders of the Palestinian state.Netanyahu has rejected returning to 1967 lines on the grounds that they are militarily indefensible.Restoring the old lines would force Israel to evict hardline settlers in a complex series of land swaps. It would also involve some form of joint control over East Jerusalem - a red line for Netanyahu.
Quartet at a Loss for Words
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu JULY 12,11
The Quartet not only has been unable to advance a deal between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, it also cannot find the words to say so.Representatives of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia are meeting for the second day in a row in Washington Tuesday after failing the day before – for the first time ever – to come up with a summary statement of their discussions.PA negotiator Saeb Erekat jumped on the Quartet’s silence by stating, There is no other option but to support the Palestinian plan to go to the United Nations to seek full membership for the state of Palestine on the 1967 borders.The United States, several leading EU countries and Israel oppose the Palestinian Authority plan, which violates the essence of the Oslo Accords and American Roadmap.While the Quartet tries to come up with some kind of statement to keep alive the term peace process by forging some kind of language acceptable to Israel and the Arab world, Erekat rejected any criticism of the Palestinian Authority and any compromise.The only way the PA may be convinced to relent is if it comes to the conclusion that its UN gambit for unilateral recognition of a PA state won’t work. Although most of the nations in the U.N. General Assembly back the PA bid for recognition based on its territorial demands, it does not have the support of most of the world's leading nations.However, the PA has gone so far out on the cliff, repeatedly insisting on all without taking into consideration they might end up with nothing,its leaders face trouble if it cannot deliver on their promises.(IsraelNationalNews.com)
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
MAN ACCUSED OF SETING BOMB IN ISRAEL
Mich. man accused of seeking to set bomb in Israel
Published July 06, 2011 | Associated Press
DETROIT – A Michigan man on the FBI's most wanted list of terror suspects is accused of using a fake passport in an attempt to get into Israel and conduct a bombing on behalf of the Islamic militant group Hezbollah, according to an indictment unsealed in federal court in Detroit.Faouzi Ayoub, 44, faces one count of passport fraud, according to the August 2009 indictment that was only unsealed in U.S. District Court in Detroit within the past week.Federal prosecutors accuse the Lebanese-born Ayoub, whose last known U.S. residence was in southeast Michigan, of using a passport under the name of Frank Mariano Boschi to enter Israel in October 2000. The indictment does not indicate whether authorities believe Ayoub participated in any bombing.The FBI's office in Detroit could not discuss the case Wednesday, say where Ayoub was believed to be now or explain why the indictment was unsealed, spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said. But she noted that he should be considered armed and dangerous and that anyone with information about him should contact their local FBI office, or nearest U.S. embassy or consulate.Future indictments may be handed down as various investigations proceed in connection to other terrorist incidents, according to a posting about Ayoub and others on the FBI's website.The U.S. government classifies Hezbollah, which dominates the Lebanese government coalition, as a terrorist group. Hezbollah fought a devastating, 34-day war with Israel in 2006 that that left 1,200 Lebanese and 160 Israelis dead. Lebanon and Israel technically remain at war.It was not clear how long Ayoub's name had been on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists, at the top of which is Egyptian Islamic Jihad founder Ayman Al-Zawahiri, indicted for his alleged role in the 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. The attacks killed 224 people.Al-Zawahiri's group later merged with al Qaeda.Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/07/06/mich-man-accused-seeking-to-set-bomb-in-israel/#ixzz1RNGvZaZC
6 July 2011 Last updated at 14:14 ET
Israel angry at UN report on Lebanon deaths BBC
Israeli officials are reportedly boycotting a UN official in Lebanon after he wrote a report criticising Israel's response to a border incursion by Palestinian protesters in May.Diplomatic sources in Israel have declined to comment on the reports.It is understood that the unpublished UN document criticises the Israeli army for using disproportionate force by firing on protesters.Seven protesters trying to cross from Lebanon were killed, the report says.The incident occurred on the anniversary of what the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or Catastrophe, their term for the founding of the Israeli state in 1948.Some protesters were also killed on Israel's border with Syria as they took part in a similar demonstration.
Not commensurate
The contents of the UN report, written by the organisation's senior representative in Lebanon, Michael Williams, have been circulating widely in the Middle East.
MapIt was delivered several days ago to members of the UN Security Council, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which also obtained a copy.The report apparently acknowledges that the actions of the Palestinian protesters initiated the violence.But the document is understood to criticise the Israeli army for being too quick to turn to the use of live ammunition against protesters who were not carrying firearms.Other than firing initial warning shots, the Israel Defense Forces did not use conventional crowd control methods or any other method than lethal weapons against the demonstrators, it says, according to quotes published by Haaretz.It adds that the Israeli response was not commensurate to the threat to Israeli soldiers.
Reports in the Israeli press say Israel's diplomats are now refusing to schedule meetings with Mr Williams, who they feel is readier to condemn its forces than the protesters who challenge them.Although that is not officially admitted in Jerusalem, the BBC's Kevin Connolly says one diplomat acknowledges that there is no hurry to restore contact with him.
Arab States’ Aid to Egypt Seen as Effort to Block Iran Influence July 06, 2011, 3:45 AM EDT More From Businessweek
By Vivian Salama and Alaa Shahine
July 6 (Bloomberg) -- The United Arab Emirates joined Saudi Arabia in offering a multibillion dollar economic assistance package to Egypt as it seeks to block the way for Iranian influence in post-Mubarak Egypt, analysts said.With Egypt’s first elections since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak due in September, members of the interim government are touring the Persian Gulf to get support for their country’s ailing economy. The benefit of aiding Egypt is twofold for nations including Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Kuwait: They can assert claims that Iran is meddlesome while benefiting from opportunities in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous nation.
Moving away from the established orbit of Egypt being part of an axis that views Iranian involvement in the region with suspicion and hostility is a major concern for the Gulf states,Salman Shaikh, director of Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, said in a telephone interview yesterday.There is in this changing and fluctuating region a competition taking place to shape the region and Egypt is very pivotal in that. Simply put, Egypt matters.Members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a bloc of six Sunni Muslim-dominated nations, have accused Iran, the region’s main Shiite Muslim power, of meddling in regional affairs. Bahrain says Iran assisted Bahraini Shiite protesters seeking to overthrow the monarchy. Kuwait has expelled a number of Iranian diplomats for spying, and the U.A.E. is embroiled in a territorial dispute with Iran over three Persian Gulf islands.
Businesses, Housing
The U.A.E. committed $3 billion to Egypt yesterday following a visit by interim Prime Minister Essam Sharaf to Abu Dhabi. The funds will be directed toward Egypt’s small- and medium-sized businesses and housing projects. Saudi Arabia offered budgetary aid worth $4 billion in May, and Qatar is expected to announce a package soon, Egypt’s Finance Minister Samir Radwan said July 4, adding that Egypt won’t require assistance from the International Monetary Fund or World Bank as long as Gulf allies are willing to help.Gulf countries know that if there is a serious change in Egypt, it will affect the whole region, Moustafa el-Husseini, author of Egypt on the Brink of the Unknown,said yesterday in a telephone interview from Cairo. They are worried about more Iranian and Turkish influence in the region.Mubarak was overthrown in February after a 19-day popular revolt fueled by grievances over issues including unemployment and complaints of police brutality. Less than two weeks after Mubarak was toppled, Egypt allowed two Iranian warships to use the Suez Canal to reach the Mediterranean Sea. The decision prompted an outcry from Israel, which alleged Iran sought to use Egypt’s vulnerability to intimidate countries in the region.
Middle East Divide
Iran and Egypt have been on opposite sides of the Middle East divide since ending full diplomatic relations in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution that brought Shiite clerics to power. In March, Egypt’s then-Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi said his country’s government doesn’t consider Iran to be an enemy state and that we’re opening a new page with all countries, including Iran,Egypt’s state-run Middle East News Agency reported.Iran continues to take credit for the political changes that began sweeping the Middle East and North Africa early this year. Mohammad Ali Ansari, head of the ideological department of the Iranian military’s naval forces, said July 2 that the regional uprisings are offshoots of his nation’s revolution, Iran’s state-run Fars news agency reported.
Unrest Saps Growth
The unrest has dimmed prospects for Egyptian growth. The International Monetary Fund said in April that the country’s economy will slow significantly,cutting its 2011 forecast to 1 percent from 5 percent, as the aftermath of the turmoil weighs on investments. Tourism plummeted by 80 percent in February and investment dropped 26 percent, Fitch Ratings Ltd. said July 1.There’s no debate over Egypt’s long-term potential,Simon Williams, chief Middle East economist at HSBC Holdings Plc in Dubai, said by phone yesterday. Gulf-based investors recognize that Egypt has a large, young population, great geographical location, unique appeal as a tourist destination, potential for agriculture; and the service-sector and manufacturing-base growth is clear.Countries in the Persian Gulf were vocal supporters of the Mubarak regime in the early days of the revolution and have since supported the democratic aspirations of Egyptian citizens. Only Bahrain and Oman have seen similar popular revolts, while other Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, have sought to quell protests through increases in public spending.
Gates Accuses Iran
Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates accused Iran last week of stepping up efforts to wield influence in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf region. The pattern has become particularly evident since revolts began against authoritarian rule in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, he said.Sharaf said yesterday that Egypt’s position toward Iran hasn’t changed, although he declined to say whether Iran was the source of recently reported tensions between Egypt and the U.A.E. The Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces said April 26 that Egypt wasn’t receiving any external pressure from Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., the Emirates News Agency reported April 26, following reports that Egyptians were being denied visitor and residency visas for the Gulf states.Several members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s biggest and best-organized opposition group under Mubarak, have said that they encourage dialogue with all regional parties.We support ensuring the Egyptian and Arab national security and holding a dialogue with Iran and Turkey that can achieve security and economic development for the region, said Essam el-Erian, deputy leader of the Freedom and Justice Party, which is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Those who support that stance will benefit and who try and stop it will fail,he said yesterday in a telephone interview from Cairo.--With assistance from Dahlia Kholaif and Fiona MacDonald in Kuwait City, and Robert Tuttle in Doha. Editors: Heather Langan, Digby Lidstone-To contact the reporters on this story: Vivian Salama in Abu Dhabi at vsalama@bloomberg.net; Alaa Shahine in Dubai at asalha@bloomberg.net.To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.net.
Israel flayed in UN Nakba Day report
AFP/Jerusalem Gulftimes JULY 6,11
A UN report into the bloodshed along the Israeli-Lebanon border on Nakba Day has slammed the Israeli army for using unnecessary force when firing on protesters, a newspaper said yesterday.The report was released by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon this week and passed on to the 15 members of the Security Council, with a copy also passed on to Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz newspaper.The study focuses on the events of May 15 when thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon marched on the Israeli border in a show of mass mourning over the creation of the Jewish state, known in Arabic as the Nakba, or catastrophe.As the protesters tried to scale the fence, Israeli troops opened fire, killing seven and injuring 111, the report said.
Another four people were killed and scores injured along the Syrian front line with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, but the report, which was based on the findings of an investigation by the UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon (Unifil), focuses solely on the Lebanese-Israeli confrontation.The report found that Israeli troops used direct live fire against unarmed demonstrators and urged the army to avoid doing so in situations where there was no immediate threat to life.Other than firing initial warning shots, the Israel Defence Forces did not use conventional crowd control methods or any other method than lethal weapons against the demonstrators, it says.
The firing of live ammunition... against the demonstrators, which resulted in the loss of civilian life and a significant number of casualties, constituted a violation of resolution 1701 (2006) and was not commensurate to the threat to Israeli soldiers,it said of the resolution which ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.In his concluding remarks, Ban urges the Israeli military to act only with the level of force appropriate to the threat facing its troops.I call on the Israel Defence Forces to refrain from responding with live fire in such situations, except where clearly required in immediate self-defence,he writes.The paper said Israel was furious with the UN’s special co-ordinator for Lebanon, Michael Williams, who reportedly wrote the report, and had cut all ties with him, cancelling a visit he was supposed to make in the coming weeks.
Lone boat heads to Gaza Strip
Thursday, July 07, 2011 » 03:32am BIGPOND
A lone French yacht with 12 people on board was on Wednesday the only vessel from a 10-ship flotilla to be heading for the Gaza Strip after the remaining vessels were tied up by red tape in Greece.The MV Dignite/Al Karama, which left Greek waters early on Tuesday, was heading slowly towards Gaza, a spokesman for the French Boat to Gaza campaign told AFP, saying they had not yet given up hope they would be joined by others from the ill-fated Freedom Flotilla which had been due to set sail last week.But attempts by pro-Palestinian campaigners on board a second ship, the MV Juliano, to join their French colleagues at sea failed for a second day running as the Greek coastguard once again thwarted their plans to leave.Most of the 10 ships that had been due to join the convoy are stuck at ports in Greece after Athens imposed a blanket ban on the departure of any vessels destined for Gaza.Another ship, the Irish-owned MV Saoirse, is undergoing repairs at a Turkish port after its propeller was damaged in what activists claimed was sabotage by Israel.They're getting on very well,' Thomas Sommer-Houdeville said by phone from Athens, saying the MV Dignite had begun to move slowly towards Gaza on Tuesday afternoon after waiting for several hours in international waters to see if the the Greek, Norwegian and Swedish activists on board the MV Juliano would to also manage to set sail.
Yesterday afternoon, our Greek colleagues (on board the MV Juliano) were not able to leave, so they decided to start sailing slowly' towards Gaza, he said after speaking by phone to activists on board the Dignite.They are now heading for Gaza slowly so if any of the boats manage to get out, they will be able to meet up with them.For the time being, our desire is to go to Gaza, Sommer-Houdeville said, admitting the activists on board would later decide based on what was possible 'logistically and technically.At the moment, we have one boat which has managed to break the Greek blockade and we are hopeful that there will be others,he said.The MV Juliano, which was to have set sail on Wednesday, said it was once again prevented from leaving Perama port near Athens, weighing anchor only to sail to a nearby port.It is not possible to leave for Gaza because the Greek authorities' ban remains in place, boat spokesman Dimitris Plionis said.Mary Norden, a Swedish MP who was to have been one of the six passengers on board, said she had decided to return to Sweden after failing in the fight with the Greek coastguard.Greek officials turned back the boat on Tuesday afternoon, she said earlier.Both the US Audacity of Hope and the Canadian vessel, the MV Tahrir, each of which have some 50 passengers and crew aboard, have tried to set sail since Athens imposed the ban on Friday, but were turned back.
And two of the vessels have also sustained damage, in what organisers claim was sabotage by Israeli agents.Officials in Athens say they imposed the ban for the safety of the activists on board in the wake of last year's bloody showdown. Israeli commandos raided a six-ship flotilla heading for Gaza, in a confrontation that left nine Turkish activists dead and dozens of people injured.More than 300 activists from 22 countries had signed up to participate in this year's flotilla, among them dozens of middle-aged and elderly Americans and Europeans.
Israel's easing of blockade helps Gaza's economy, but situation still dire ap Ibrahim Barzak, Associated Press, On Tuesday July 5, 2011, 8:34 am EDT
BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Maher Khoudari boasts that his Gaza grocery has a wide assortment of chocolates for sale -- even some you couldn't find in the cosmopolitan Israeli city of Tel Aviv. The problem is, there is no one to buy them.
Israel eased its blockade of the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory a year ago and now allows virtually all consumer goods in, meaning there are no longer acute shortages of foods or basic household items. Tiny construction projects have begun sprouting up, and Gaza is awash in big ticket items such as cars and refrigerators.
But deep troubles remain. Israel maintains restrictions on the key construction and export sectors, and the vast majority of Gazans are still barred from traveling in and out of the territory. Nearly half the work force is unemployed, and more than 70 percent of the population relies on food handouts, making fancy chocolates, like any other non-essential goods, a luxury most cannot afford.We have no customers, says Khoudari, 40, who owns one of Gaza's biggest supermarkets.His predicament sums up Gaza's economic situation after blockade was eased amid an international outcry over Israel's deadly raid on a blockade-busting international flotilla. Now pro-Palestinian activists in Greece are laying plans to launch a new protest flotilla toward Gaza, drawing attention back to the plight of the impoverished territory of 1.6 million.Israel dismisses claims by Palestinians and their sympathizers that there is a humanitarian crisis. Maj. Gen. Eitan Dangot, who oversees Israel's border policy with Gaza, told reporters last week that Israel has taken numerous measures in recent months to boost the Palestinian economy.
He said the number of trucks carrying goods into Gaza has more than tripled, cargo crossings with the area are being expanded and that Israel is now allowing dozens of building and infrastructure projects to move forward.Palestinian officials say the Israeli measures are far too little. Most critically, Israel continues to tightly restrict the entry of construction materials -- badly needed to repair the damage from an Israeli military offensive two years ago. Tight restrictions on exports, along with the entry of raw materials, mean that more than 80 percent of Gaza factories are either shuttered or working at limited capacity.Israel has made much of the fact that there is no starvation in Gaza, said Gaza economist Omar Shaban. But the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is not about food,he added.The humanitarian crisis is about education, it's about development, about imprisonment.The international community has repeatedly expressed concerns about the blockade -- but in a statement this week, the Quartet of Mideast peacemakers said conditions in Gaza have significantly improved.The statement noted a marked increase in the range and scope of goods and materials moving into Gaza, an increase in international project activity, and the facilitation of some exports.Nonetheless, it said considerably more needs to be done to increase the flow of people and goods to and from Gaza.The economy of Gaza, a crowded seaside strip sandwiched between Egypt and Israel, has always struggled.Shaban said that even if Israel lifted all restrictions on Gaza, it would take years for the economy to recover.This is not something you can achieve in days or months, he said, suggested the territory would need an international bailout similar to the post-World War II Marshall Plan that rescued Europe.Israel and Egypt imposed the blockade after Hamas-linked militants captured an Israeli soldier in 2006. The restrictions were further tightened after Hamas seized control of Gaza the following year.Israel says the measures are aimed at weakening Hamas, which it considers a terrorist group, and to prevent it from bringing arms into the territory. But the blockade failed to achieve either goal.Instead, a flourishing smuggling business sprouted up along the Egyptian border. A vast network of tunnels has actually helped strengthen Hamas, which collects taxes on the industry.
Pro-Palestinian activists from around the globe have been trying to breach the blockade since 2008, sending ships laden with supplies bound for Gaza. Israel allowed ships through five times, but has blocked them from Gaza since its three-week military offensive in January 2009.Under international criticism, Israel began to ease the blockade in early 2010. The situation changed drastically after Israeli naval commandos killed nine Turkish activists on board a Gaza-bound ship. The May 2010 incident was a public relations nightmare for Israel and forced it to greatly ease the blockade.The military says the number of supply trucks entering Gaza through Israeli-controlled cargo crossings grew 66 percent from a year ago.Now a loose network of activists organized a new flotilla based mostly in Greek ports, and planned to sail for Gaza last week. But their plans suffered a major setback when Greece banned the boats from leaving for the Palestinian territory, and the project is now in doubt.Israel says the activists trying to send another flotilla are naive and misguided.The International Monetary Fund said Gaza's economy expanded 16 percent in the first half of 2010, though that leap was largely a result of a very depressed economy the year before. Nonetheless, experts say economic activity remains below the 2006 levels.Israel's war in Gaza reduced Fayza al-Louh, her husband and eight kids to living in a single room with one bathroom and a small kitchen. With Israel still severely restricting the entry of construction materials into the coastal strip, thousands of homes and businesses damaged in the war still await repairs.Al-Louh's three-story home is damaged beyond use.Every night, I expect the remains of my house to collapse,Al Louh said. We suffer from the rain in the winter and the sun in the summer. And if the weather weren't enough of a problem, what about the rats and snakes and mosquitoes? Earlier this month, Israeli authorities agreed to allow the U.N. to import materials to rebuild some 1,200 homes destroyed in fighting with Israel nearly 10 years ago.
It is one of the largest projects Israel has authorized in Gaza, but will still only meet a fraction of Gaza's needs and will not help al-Louh, who lives in a different part of the territory. The U.N. estimates some 60,000 homes need to be repaired or rebuilt altogether.Israel says its only aim in preventing some materials and impeding some projects is security-related. It believes construction materials could be diverted by Hamas for military use. But critics say Israel applies too broad a definition and that the true, unspoken purpose is to punish Gazans for the rule of Hamas.Amjad Shawwa, a development worker and anti-blockade activist, says the blockade has deprived nearly 7,000 Gaza fishermen of a living, and water, sanitation, electricity and road projects remain stalled.You probably won't find hungry people, but the feeling of injustice and frustration is pervasive in all homes, Shawwa said.
U.N. panel to talk Syria nukes-Refusal to cooperate with probe spurs closed Security Council session George Jahn/ Associated Press JULY 5,11
Vienna — The U.N. Security Council plans to meet next week to discuss what to do about Syria's refusal to cooperate with a probe of its alleged secret nuclear activities, diplomats told the Associated Press on Monday.The move comes just weeks after the International Atomic Energy Agency referred it the council. The closed session could result in anything from debate to sanctions of the kind imposed on Iran for defying demands to cease activities that could be used to make nuclear arms.
Sanctions are unlikely: Iran continues to expand its nuclear activities in defiance of the council, whereas Syria's alleged violations appeared to have occurred in the past and thus do not seem to represent a present proliferation threat.Still, one of the three diplomats who agreed to discuss confidential information on condition of anonymity said the July 14 discussions are significant. He pointed to the fact that the council found the issue important enough to take it up less then a month after the June 9 IAEA referral.
The IAEA has tried in vain since 2008 to follow up on strong evidence that a site in the Syrian desert, bombed in 2007 by Israeli warplanes, was a nearly finished reactor built with North Korea's help.The resolution that reported Syria to the Security Council expressed serious concern over Syria's lack of cooperation with the IAEA Director General's repeated requests for access to additional information and locations as well as Syria's refusal to engage substantively with the Agency on the nature of the Dair Alzour site.Syria is already on the Security Council's docket. The council on Thursday expressed united support for the U.N. peacekeeping force on the tense Syrian-Israeli border — even while remaining divided over any direct condemnation of Syria's crackdown on peaceful demonstrators.All three diplomats said the council had asked high-ranking IAEA officials to testify at the hearing — another sign of the importance attached to it. They said IAEA chief Yukiya Amano and Herman Nackaerts, the agency's nonproliferation point man, either would both attend or one of them would go.IAEA officials contacted after office hours Monday said they could not comment.From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110705/NATION/107050353/U.N.-panel-to-talk-Syria-nukes#ixzz1RNObslog
Obama Plans Israel Visit
by Gavriel Queenann JULY 5,11
US ambassador to Israel James B. Cunningham told Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin during a meeting Tuesday that President Barack Obama is planning an Israel trip.
The president wants to visit and he will do so, Cunningham told Rivlin.Rivlin told Cunningham that Israelis sense that the atmosphere in the White House has changed for the worse. The feeling is that Obama views Israel as a burden more than as a strategic asset.When the president visited Egypt and the region, he decided not to visit Israel, something which bothered many Israelis, Rivlin continued.Rivlin also told Cunningham that under the Obama administration he would not want to depend on the Americans in the face of a dangerous situation.Cunningham responded to Rivlin telling him that such feelings were erroneous and that the president plans to visit Israel.But observers note the chilly relations between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have colored US-Israeli relations and that Obama's policy statements often snub Israel or ultimately prove detrimental to its interests.
Cunningham, who plans to resign after three years as ambassador to Israel, did not indicate a date for the visit.Political analysts suggest Obama's visit may be motivated by a desire to shore up his now dubious Israel credentials as he looks to reelection and a GOP field of staunchly pro-Israel candidates who may use Israel as lever against him in the 2012 campaign.(IsraelNationalNews.com)
Saboteurs bomb Egypt gas pipeline to Israel, Jordan
July 04, 2011 09:26 AM (Last updated: July 04, 2011 06:32 PM)
By Jailan Zayan Agence France Presse
CAIRO, Egypt: Saboteurs bombed an Egyptian gas pipeline in the Sinai peninsula on Monday, sending flames into the sky and cutting supplies to Israel and Jordan, a security official said.Officials said a car had parked near the pipeline in the Bir al-Abd area, 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) from the north Sinai town of El-Arish, shortly before the explosion.They said the bomb was activated remotely.Emergency services were deployed to the area to try to bring the fire under control, an official said.Witnesses said the flames reached as high as 10 meters (32 feet). There were no immediate reports of casualties.It was the third attack since February, when an uprising toppled former president Hosni Mubarak and saw power handed over to a military council.On April 27, the pipeline in the Al-Sabil area in north Sinai was also attacked, cutting off international gas supplies.In February, attackers used explosives against the pipeline in the town of Lihfren in north Sinai, near the Gaza Strip.There was also a failed attempt to attack the pipeline in March.Jordan, which buys 95 percent of its energy needs, imports about 240 million cubic feet (6.8 million cubic meters) of Egyptian gas a day, or 80 percent of its electricity requirements.
Egypt supplies about 40 percent of Israel's natural gas which is used to produce electricity. In December, four Israeli firms signed 20-year contracts worth up to $10 billion (7.4 billion euros) to import Egyptian gas.In April, Egypt's Prime Minister Essam Sharaf asked for the revision of all contracts to supply gas abroad, including to Israel.Sharaf said the contracts would be revisited so the gas would be sold with deserved prices that achieve the highest returns for Egypt.The controversial gas deal with Israel has been repeatedly challenged in Egyptian courts on the grounds of its secretive clauses and because it was done without parliamentary consultation.A court imposed an injunction on the deal, in a move ignored by Mubarak's government. A higher court overturned the freeze in 2010, on condition the government regulate the quantity and price of gas exported.Israel's government viewed the ouster of Mubarak with alarm.Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace deal with the Jewish state in 1979, but the public has remained hostile towards Israel over its policies in the occupied Palestinian territories.
After the military took power following Mubarak's ouster, it pledged that it would respect the 1979 peace treaty with Israel.In May, Jordan said Egypt was withholding its contracted gas supply to energy-poor Jordan unless a new deal was signed at a higher price.Under a 14-year deal signed in 2002, Egypt used to sell gas to Jordan at a discounted price – half of the market price, or $3 (2.16 euros) per million British Thermal Units (1,000 cubic feet of gas equals 1.027 million BTU).Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2011/Jul-04/Blast-hits-Egypts-gas-pipeline-to-Israel-Jordan.ashx#ixzz1RNR7BICI (The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)
Hamas calls on Greece to let Gaza flotilla sail
(AFP)3 July 2011
The Hamas government in Gaza on Sunday called on Greece to allow a flotilla of aid ships to set sail for the blockaded Palestinian territory.
We regret the position of Greece, which has responded to international pressure to stop the Freedom Flotilla from sailing, Hamas foreign minister Mohamed Awad told a press conference at Gaza’s port.We call on them to reconsider their ban on the flotilla setting sail and to allow them to leave, he added.Several ships participating in the so-called Freedom Flotilla have been forced to remain docked in Greece after local authorities warned that they did not have permission to set sail for Gaza.The ships, chartered by pro-Palestinian activists, are seeking to break an Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip and are loaded with items ranging from aid to letters from supporters.But the flotilla has been plagued by setbacks, including Greece’s refusal to let several ships head out to sea, and the discovery that at least two vessels had been damaged.Activists have accused Israel of sabotaging the damaged ships and putting political pressure on Greece to prevent the vessels from leaving shore.
Israel has denied any sabotage of the ships but ministers have expressed satisfaction at the flotilla’s difficulties. The Jewish state warned that it would not allow the ships to break its blockade of the Hamas-run territory.In 2010, Israeli commandos raided a flotilla of aid ships seeking to reach Gaza in an operation that left nine Turkish citizens dead and prompted widespread criticism of the Jewish state.In the wake of the criticism, Israel eased some of its restrictions on Gaza, loosening a blockade it imposed after Gaza-based militants captured an Israeli soldier in 2006. The rules were tightened in 2007 when Hamas seized Gaza.
No Israel ties in Tunisia reform pact
Sat Jul 2, 2011 6:31AM
Yadh Ben Achour, the president of the commission announced the adoption of the agreement without giving further details on its contents, AFP reported on Friday.
The pact will provide the basis for a new constitution in the North African country.
The document also states that Tunisia is a democratic country, its language is Arabic and its religion is Islam.It further says that Tunisia supports the Palestinian cause on top of refusing ties with Israel.Tunisians are expected to elect an assembly in October to draft a new constitution.At least 147 people were killed and 510 left injured during the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution that unseated Ben Ali in January after a 23-year-long authoritarian rule, according to the United Nations.On January 14, Ben Ali fled the North African country to the Saudi port city of Jeddah. There are unconfirmed claims that the deposed Tunisian dictator has gone into a coma in Saudi Arabia after suffering a stroke.Riots and protests broke out in Tunisia following the self-immolation of a 26-year-old fruit vendor, identified as Muhammad Bouazizi, who set himself on fire after police confiscated his merchandise.
GHN/MGH/HRF
Israel says it can't stop mass protests
Published: June 30, 2011 at 9:04 AM
JERUSALEM, June 30 (UPI) -- The Israeli military has no way to stop a mass protest in the West Bank, members of the military say.Still, Israeli forces are conducting drills in preparation for a potential uprising in the wake of a Palestinian bid seeking statehood recognition from the United Nations in September, Haaretz reported Thursday.A non-violent protest of 4,000 people or more, even if they only march to a checkpoint or a settlement, and especially if the Palestinian police does not deter them, will be unstoppable, an Israeli officer said. Such a great number of determined people cannot be stopped by tear gas and rubber bullets.Those comments were echoed by another high-ranking member of the Israeli military, who said, if we are to face protests similar to those in Egypt or Tunisia, we will not be able to do a thing.Mid-level Israeli officers completed special training Tuesday, attending lectures on how to deal with disorderly conduct, and viewed presentations on protest-dispersal methods used by the Israeli military and border police.At the end of the day, the decision is in the hands of the political echelon, another commander told Haaretz.It is fairly obvious that if there will be no progress on peace talks, the Palestinian police with whom we work very closely to prevent infiltrations will lose their patience.Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2011/06/30/Israel-says-it-cant-stop-mass-protests/UPI-37381309439080/#ixzz1RNVFDhVH
Iran says U.S. exploits Syria uprising to save Israel
Reuters Posted at 06/29/2011 7:13 AM |7:13 AM
TEHRAN - The United States and its allies are exploiting popular protests in Syria to try to break an alliance between Damascus and Tehran against Israel, a senior Iranian official said on Wednesday.Iran is watching the unrest in neighboring Syria with alarm and rejects western allegations it is helping its closest ally in the Middle East to crush a three-month popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's rule.Ramin Mehmanparast, a special advisor to Iran's Foreign Minister, said the alliance between Iran and Syria constituted a threat not only to Israel, but also to the West's interests in the Middle East.The West could not stop regional uprisings ... America lost a close ally in the region with the overthrow of (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak, Mehmanparast said.As interests of America and its allies are endangered in the region ... they are trying to shift the crisis by creating problems for independent countries (like Iran and Syria).Mehmanparast said the West planned to replace Assad with a leader less hostile to itself and Israel.
They are trying to harm Syria as it is playing a prime role in opposing Israel in the region,said Mehmanparast, who is also Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman.Iran, which has crushed its own opposition protests at home, supported popular uprisings that toppled U.S.-backed leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, praising the movements as an Islamic awakening inspired by its 1979 Islamic revolution.Tehran sees Syria's unrest as a Zionist plot against its close ally Damascus. The Islamic state is accused of equipping Syria to block the internet, drawing on its own extensive experience of crushing anti-government protests that followed the country's disputed 2009 presidential vote.Syria has denied receiving any support from Iran to put down the popular unrest. Iran also denies the accusation.
Discord among Muslims
A part of the people in Syria, which are not the majority, have some demands. Their demands should be expressed in a peaceful way as well,he said.Rights groups say security forces and gunmen loyal to Assad have killed over 1,300 civilians since March when the uprising for political freedom erupted in Syria, adding that scores of troops and police were also killed for refusing to fire on civilians.Syrian authorities say more than 250 soldiers and police died in clashes with armed terrorist groups, whom they also blame for most civilian deaths.The number of security forces killed in Syria shows (not all) protestors are ordinary people, Mehmanparast said, accusing the U.S. and Israel of provoking terrorist groups in Syria.Mehmanparast warned the West over repercussions that might go beyond Syria if destabilized.Syria, which borders Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Jordan, has regional influence because of its alliance with Iran and its continued role in Lebanon, despite ending a 29-year military presence there in 2005.Analysts say Iran, that sees itself as a bastion of Shi'ite Islam, is concerned about wider Sunni influence in the region.Iranians are trying to gain new allies to prevent expansion of Sunni's power in the region, said political analyst Ali Fazeli.Regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia and the United States, which bases its Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, both fear Iran's rising influence in the region since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, analysts say.Mehmanparast said Iran had no intention to adopt hostile foreign policy toward any regional country.Boosting regional ties has always been a priority for Iran ... any country ... that blocks such convergence is moving in line with the Zionist regime's interests, Mehmanparast said, accusing Washington of creating discord among Muslims.In March, tension increased between Iran and Saudi Arabia, both major oil exporters, when about 1,000 Saudi soldiers entered Bahrain as part of an effort by the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to help the island's Sunni Muslim elite cope with protests by members of its Shi'ite majority.
Published July 06, 2011 | Associated Press
DETROIT – A Michigan man on the FBI's most wanted list of terror suspects is accused of using a fake passport in an attempt to get into Israel and conduct a bombing on behalf of the Islamic militant group Hezbollah, according to an indictment unsealed in federal court in Detroit.Faouzi Ayoub, 44, faces one count of passport fraud, according to the August 2009 indictment that was only unsealed in U.S. District Court in Detroit within the past week.Federal prosecutors accuse the Lebanese-born Ayoub, whose last known U.S. residence was in southeast Michigan, of using a passport under the name of Frank Mariano Boschi to enter Israel in October 2000. The indictment does not indicate whether authorities believe Ayoub participated in any bombing.The FBI's office in Detroit could not discuss the case Wednesday, say where Ayoub was believed to be now or explain why the indictment was unsealed, spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said. But she noted that he should be considered armed and dangerous and that anyone with information about him should contact their local FBI office, or nearest U.S. embassy or consulate.Future indictments may be handed down as various investigations proceed in connection to other terrorist incidents, according to a posting about Ayoub and others on the FBI's website.The U.S. government classifies Hezbollah, which dominates the Lebanese government coalition, as a terrorist group. Hezbollah fought a devastating, 34-day war with Israel in 2006 that that left 1,200 Lebanese and 160 Israelis dead. Lebanon and Israel technically remain at war.It was not clear how long Ayoub's name had been on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists, at the top of which is Egyptian Islamic Jihad founder Ayman Al-Zawahiri, indicted for his alleged role in the 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. The attacks killed 224 people.Al-Zawahiri's group later merged with al Qaeda.Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/07/06/mich-man-accused-seeking-to-set-bomb-in-israel/#ixzz1RNGvZaZC
6 July 2011 Last updated at 14:14 ET
Israel angry at UN report on Lebanon deaths BBC
Israeli officials are reportedly boycotting a UN official in Lebanon after he wrote a report criticising Israel's response to a border incursion by Palestinian protesters in May.Diplomatic sources in Israel have declined to comment on the reports.It is understood that the unpublished UN document criticises the Israeli army for using disproportionate force by firing on protesters.Seven protesters trying to cross from Lebanon were killed, the report says.The incident occurred on the anniversary of what the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or Catastrophe, their term for the founding of the Israeli state in 1948.Some protesters were also killed on Israel's border with Syria as they took part in a similar demonstration.
Not commensurate
The contents of the UN report, written by the organisation's senior representative in Lebanon, Michael Williams, have been circulating widely in the Middle East.
MapIt was delivered several days ago to members of the UN Security Council, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which also obtained a copy.The report apparently acknowledges that the actions of the Palestinian protesters initiated the violence.But the document is understood to criticise the Israeli army for being too quick to turn to the use of live ammunition against protesters who were not carrying firearms.Other than firing initial warning shots, the Israel Defense Forces did not use conventional crowd control methods or any other method than lethal weapons against the demonstrators, it says, according to quotes published by Haaretz.It adds that the Israeli response was not commensurate to the threat to Israeli soldiers.
Reports in the Israeli press say Israel's diplomats are now refusing to schedule meetings with Mr Williams, who they feel is readier to condemn its forces than the protesters who challenge them.Although that is not officially admitted in Jerusalem, the BBC's Kevin Connolly says one diplomat acknowledges that there is no hurry to restore contact with him.
Arab States’ Aid to Egypt Seen as Effort to Block Iran Influence July 06, 2011, 3:45 AM EDT More From Businessweek
By Vivian Salama and Alaa Shahine
July 6 (Bloomberg) -- The United Arab Emirates joined Saudi Arabia in offering a multibillion dollar economic assistance package to Egypt as it seeks to block the way for Iranian influence in post-Mubarak Egypt, analysts said.With Egypt’s first elections since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak due in September, members of the interim government are touring the Persian Gulf to get support for their country’s ailing economy. The benefit of aiding Egypt is twofold for nations including Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Kuwait: They can assert claims that Iran is meddlesome while benefiting from opportunities in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous nation.
Moving away from the established orbit of Egypt being part of an axis that views Iranian involvement in the region with suspicion and hostility is a major concern for the Gulf states,Salman Shaikh, director of Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, said in a telephone interview yesterday.There is in this changing and fluctuating region a competition taking place to shape the region and Egypt is very pivotal in that. Simply put, Egypt matters.Members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a bloc of six Sunni Muslim-dominated nations, have accused Iran, the region’s main Shiite Muslim power, of meddling in regional affairs. Bahrain says Iran assisted Bahraini Shiite protesters seeking to overthrow the monarchy. Kuwait has expelled a number of Iranian diplomats for spying, and the U.A.E. is embroiled in a territorial dispute with Iran over three Persian Gulf islands.
Businesses, Housing
The U.A.E. committed $3 billion to Egypt yesterday following a visit by interim Prime Minister Essam Sharaf to Abu Dhabi. The funds will be directed toward Egypt’s small- and medium-sized businesses and housing projects. Saudi Arabia offered budgetary aid worth $4 billion in May, and Qatar is expected to announce a package soon, Egypt’s Finance Minister Samir Radwan said July 4, adding that Egypt won’t require assistance from the International Monetary Fund or World Bank as long as Gulf allies are willing to help.Gulf countries know that if there is a serious change in Egypt, it will affect the whole region, Moustafa el-Husseini, author of Egypt on the Brink of the Unknown,said yesterday in a telephone interview from Cairo. They are worried about more Iranian and Turkish influence in the region.Mubarak was overthrown in February after a 19-day popular revolt fueled by grievances over issues including unemployment and complaints of police brutality. Less than two weeks after Mubarak was toppled, Egypt allowed two Iranian warships to use the Suez Canal to reach the Mediterranean Sea. The decision prompted an outcry from Israel, which alleged Iran sought to use Egypt’s vulnerability to intimidate countries in the region.
Middle East Divide
Iran and Egypt have been on opposite sides of the Middle East divide since ending full diplomatic relations in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution that brought Shiite clerics to power. In March, Egypt’s then-Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi said his country’s government doesn’t consider Iran to be an enemy state and that we’re opening a new page with all countries, including Iran,Egypt’s state-run Middle East News Agency reported.Iran continues to take credit for the political changes that began sweeping the Middle East and North Africa early this year. Mohammad Ali Ansari, head of the ideological department of the Iranian military’s naval forces, said July 2 that the regional uprisings are offshoots of his nation’s revolution, Iran’s state-run Fars news agency reported.
Unrest Saps Growth
The unrest has dimmed prospects for Egyptian growth. The International Monetary Fund said in April that the country’s economy will slow significantly,cutting its 2011 forecast to 1 percent from 5 percent, as the aftermath of the turmoil weighs on investments. Tourism plummeted by 80 percent in February and investment dropped 26 percent, Fitch Ratings Ltd. said July 1.There’s no debate over Egypt’s long-term potential,Simon Williams, chief Middle East economist at HSBC Holdings Plc in Dubai, said by phone yesterday. Gulf-based investors recognize that Egypt has a large, young population, great geographical location, unique appeal as a tourist destination, potential for agriculture; and the service-sector and manufacturing-base growth is clear.Countries in the Persian Gulf were vocal supporters of the Mubarak regime in the early days of the revolution and have since supported the democratic aspirations of Egyptian citizens. Only Bahrain and Oman have seen similar popular revolts, while other Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, have sought to quell protests through increases in public spending.
Gates Accuses Iran
Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates accused Iran last week of stepping up efforts to wield influence in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf region. The pattern has become particularly evident since revolts began against authoritarian rule in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, he said.Sharaf said yesterday that Egypt’s position toward Iran hasn’t changed, although he declined to say whether Iran was the source of recently reported tensions between Egypt and the U.A.E. The Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces said April 26 that Egypt wasn’t receiving any external pressure from Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., the Emirates News Agency reported April 26, following reports that Egyptians were being denied visitor and residency visas for the Gulf states.Several members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s biggest and best-organized opposition group under Mubarak, have said that they encourage dialogue with all regional parties.We support ensuring the Egyptian and Arab national security and holding a dialogue with Iran and Turkey that can achieve security and economic development for the region, said Essam el-Erian, deputy leader of the Freedom and Justice Party, which is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Those who support that stance will benefit and who try and stop it will fail,he said yesterday in a telephone interview from Cairo.--With assistance from Dahlia Kholaif and Fiona MacDonald in Kuwait City, and Robert Tuttle in Doha. Editors: Heather Langan, Digby Lidstone-To contact the reporters on this story: Vivian Salama in Abu Dhabi at vsalama@bloomberg.net; Alaa Shahine in Dubai at asalha@bloomberg.net.To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.net.
Israel flayed in UN Nakba Day report
AFP/Jerusalem Gulftimes JULY 6,11
A UN report into the bloodshed along the Israeli-Lebanon border on Nakba Day has slammed the Israeli army for using unnecessary force when firing on protesters, a newspaper said yesterday.The report was released by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon this week and passed on to the 15 members of the Security Council, with a copy also passed on to Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz newspaper.The study focuses on the events of May 15 when thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon marched on the Israeli border in a show of mass mourning over the creation of the Jewish state, known in Arabic as the Nakba, or catastrophe.As the protesters tried to scale the fence, Israeli troops opened fire, killing seven and injuring 111, the report said.
Another four people were killed and scores injured along the Syrian front line with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, but the report, which was based on the findings of an investigation by the UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon (Unifil), focuses solely on the Lebanese-Israeli confrontation.The report found that Israeli troops used direct live fire against unarmed demonstrators and urged the army to avoid doing so in situations where there was no immediate threat to life.Other than firing initial warning shots, the Israel Defence Forces did not use conventional crowd control methods or any other method than lethal weapons against the demonstrators, it says.
The firing of live ammunition... against the demonstrators, which resulted in the loss of civilian life and a significant number of casualties, constituted a violation of resolution 1701 (2006) and was not commensurate to the threat to Israeli soldiers,it said of the resolution which ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.In his concluding remarks, Ban urges the Israeli military to act only with the level of force appropriate to the threat facing its troops.I call on the Israel Defence Forces to refrain from responding with live fire in such situations, except where clearly required in immediate self-defence,he writes.The paper said Israel was furious with the UN’s special co-ordinator for Lebanon, Michael Williams, who reportedly wrote the report, and had cut all ties with him, cancelling a visit he was supposed to make in the coming weeks.
Lone boat heads to Gaza Strip
Thursday, July 07, 2011 » 03:32am BIGPOND
A lone French yacht with 12 people on board was on Wednesday the only vessel from a 10-ship flotilla to be heading for the Gaza Strip after the remaining vessels were tied up by red tape in Greece.The MV Dignite/Al Karama, which left Greek waters early on Tuesday, was heading slowly towards Gaza, a spokesman for the French Boat to Gaza campaign told AFP, saying they had not yet given up hope they would be joined by others from the ill-fated Freedom Flotilla which had been due to set sail last week.But attempts by pro-Palestinian campaigners on board a second ship, the MV Juliano, to join their French colleagues at sea failed for a second day running as the Greek coastguard once again thwarted their plans to leave.Most of the 10 ships that had been due to join the convoy are stuck at ports in Greece after Athens imposed a blanket ban on the departure of any vessels destined for Gaza.Another ship, the Irish-owned MV Saoirse, is undergoing repairs at a Turkish port after its propeller was damaged in what activists claimed was sabotage by Israel.They're getting on very well,' Thomas Sommer-Houdeville said by phone from Athens, saying the MV Dignite had begun to move slowly towards Gaza on Tuesday afternoon after waiting for several hours in international waters to see if the the Greek, Norwegian and Swedish activists on board the MV Juliano would to also manage to set sail.
Yesterday afternoon, our Greek colleagues (on board the MV Juliano) were not able to leave, so they decided to start sailing slowly' towards Gaza, he said after speaking by phone to activists on board the Dignite.They are now heading for Gaza slowly so if any of the boats manage to get out, they will be able to meet up with them.For the time being, our desire is to go to Gaza, Sommer-Houdeville said, admitting the activists on board would later decide based on what was possible 'logistically and technically.At the moment, we have one boat which has managed to break the Greek blockade and we are hopeful that there will be others,he said.The MV Juliano, which was to have set sail on Wednesday, said it was once again prevented from leaving Perama port near Athens, weighing anchor only to sail to a nearby port.It is not possible to leave for Gaza because the Greek authorities' ban remains in place, boat spokesman Dimitris Plionis said.Mary Norden, a Swedish MP who was to have been one of the six passengers on board, said she had decided to return to Sweden after failing in the fight with the Greek coastguard.Greek officials turned back the boat on Tuesday afternoon, she said earlier.Both the US Audacity of Hope and the Canadian vessel, the MV Tahrir, each of which have some 50 passengers and crew aboard, have tried to set sail since Athens imposed the ban on Friday, but were turned back.
And two of the vessels have also sustained damage, in what organisers claim was sabotage by Israeli agents.Officials in Athens say they imposed the ban for the safety of the activists on board in the wake of last year's bloody showdown. Israeli commandos raided a six-ship flotilla heading for Gaza, in a confrontation that left nine Turkish activists dead and dozens of people injured.More than 300 activists from 22 countries had signed up to participate in this year's flotilla, among them dozens of middle-aged and elderly Americans and Europeans.
Israel's easing of blockade helps Gaza's economy, but situation still dire ap Ibrahim Barzak, Associated Press, On Tuesday July 5, 2011, 8:34 am EDT
BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Maher Khoudari boasts that his Gaza grocery has a wide assortment of chocolates for sale -- even some you couldn't find in the cosmopolitan Israeli city of Tel Aviv. The problem is, there is no one to buy them.
Israel eased its blockade of the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory a year ago and now allows virtually all consumer goods in, meaning there are no longer acute shortages of foods or basic household items. Tiny construction projects have begun sprouting up, and Gaza is awash in big ticket items such as cars and refrigerators.
But deep troubles remain. Israel maintains restrictions on the key construction and export sectors, and the vast majority of Gazans are still barred from traveling in and out of the territory. Nearly half the work force is unemployed, and more than 70 percent of the population relies on food handouts, making fancy chocolates, like any other non-essential goods, a luxury most cannot afford.We have no customers, says Khoudari, 40, who owns one of Gaza's biggest supermarkets.His predicament sums up Gaza's economic situation after blockade was eased amid an international outcry over Israel's deadly raid on a blockade-busting international flotilla. Now pro-Palestinian activists in Greece are laying plans to launch a new protest flotilla toward Gaza, drawing attention back to the plight of the impoverished territory of 1.6 million.Israel dismisses claims by Palestinians and their sympathizers that there is a humanitarian crisis. Maj. Gen. Eitan Dangot, who oversees Israel's border policy with Gaza, told reporters last week that Israel has taken numerous measures in recent months to boost the Palestinian economy.
He said the number of trucks carrying goods into Gaza has more than tripled, cargo crossings with the area are being expanded and that Israel is now allowing dozens of building and infrastructure projects to move forward.Palestinian officials say the Israeli measures are far too little. Most critically, Israel continues to tightly restrict the entry of construction materials -- badly needed to repair the damage from an Israeli military offensive two years ago. Tight restrictions on exports, along with the entry of raw materials, mean that more than 80 percent of Gaza factories are either shuttered or working at limited capacity.Israel has made much of the fact that there is no starvation in Gaza, said Gaza economist Omar Shaban. But the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is not about food,he added.The humanitarian crisis is about education, it's about development, about imprisonment.The international community has repeatedly expressed concerns about the blockade -- but in a statement this week, the Quartet of Mideast peacemakers said conditions in Gaza have significantly improved.The statement noted a marked increase in the range and scope of goods and materials moving into Gaza, an increase in international project activity, and the facilitation of some exports.Nonetheless, it said considerably more needs to be done to increase the flow of people and goods to and from Gaza.The economy of Gaza, a crowded seaside strip sandwiched between Egypt and Israel, has always struggled.Shaban said that even if Israel lifted all restrictions on Gaza, it would take years for the economy to recover.This is not something you can achieve in days or months, he said, suggested the territory would need an international bailout similar to the post-World War II Marshall Plan that rescued Europe.Israel and Egypt imposed the blockade after Hamas-linked militants captured an Israeli soldier in 2006. The restrictions were further tightened after Hamas seized control of Gaza the following year.Israel says the measures are aimed at weakening Hamas, which it considers a terrorist group, and to prevent it from bringing arms into the territory. But the blockade failed to achieve either goal.Instead, a flourishing smuggling business sprouted up along the Egyptian border. A vast network of tunnels has actually helped strengthen Hamas, which collects taxes on the industry.
Pro-Palestinian activists from around the globe have been trying to breach the blockade since 2008, sending ships laden with supplies bound for Gaza. Israel allowed ships through five times, but has blocked them from Gaza since its three-week military offensive in January 2009.Under international criticism, Israel began to ease the blockade in early 2010. The situation changed drastically after Israeli naval commandos killed nine Turkish activists on board a Gaza-bound ship. The May 2010 incident was a public relations nightmare for Israel and forced it to greatly ease the blockade.The military says the number of supply trucks entering Gaza through Israeli-controlled cargo crossings grew 66 percent from a year ago.Now a loose network of activists organized a new flotilla based mostly in Greek ports, and planned to sail for Gaza last week. But their plans suffered a major setback when Greece banned the boats from leaving for the Palestinian territory, and the project is now in doubt.Israel says the activists trying to send another flotilla are naive and misguided.The International Monetary Fund said Gaza's economy expanded 16 percent in the first half of 2010, though that leap was largely a result of a very depressed economy the year before. Nonetheless, experts say economic activity remains below the 2006 levels.Israel's war in Gaza reduced Fayza al-Louh, her husband and eight kids to living in a single room with one bathroom and a small kitchen. With Israel still severely restricting the entry of construction materials into the coastal strip, thousands of homes and businesses damaged in the war still await repairs.Al-Louh's three-story home is damaged beyond use.Every night, I expect the remains of my house to collapse,Al Louh said. We suffer from the rain in the winter and the sun in the summer. And if the weather weren't enough of a problem, what about the rats and snakes and mosquitoes? Earlier this month, Israeli authorities agreed to allow the U.N. to import materials to rebuild some 1,200 homes destroyed in fighting with Israel nearly 10 years ago.
It is one of the largest projects Israel has authorized in Gaza, but will still only meet a fraction of Gaza's needs and will not help al-Louh, who lives in a different part of the territory. The U.N. estimates some 60,000 homes need to be repaired or rebuilt altogether.Israel says its only aim in preventing some materials and impeding some projects is security-related. It believes construction materials could be diverted by Hamas for military use. But critics say Israel applies too broad a definition and that the true, unspoken purpose is to punish Gazans for the rule of Hamas.Amjad Shawwa, a development worker and anti-blockade activist, says the blockade has deprived nearly 7,000 Gaza fishermen of a living, and water, sanitation, electricity and road projects remain stalled.You probably won't find hungry people, but the feeling of injustice and frustration is pervasive in all homes, Shawwa said.
U.N. panel to talk Syria nukes-Refusal to cooperate with probe spurs closed Security Council session George Jahn/ Associated Press JULY 5,11
Vienna — The U.N. Security Council plans to meet next week to discuss what to do about Syria's refusal to cooperate with a probe of its alleged secret nuclear activities, diplomats told the Associated Press on Monday.The move comes just weeks after the International Atomic Energy Agency referred it the council. The closed session could result in anything from debate to sanctions of the kind imposed on Iran for defying demands to cease activities that could be used to make nuclear arms.
Sanctions are unlikely: Iran continues to expand its nuclear activities in defiance of the council, whereas Syria's alleged violations appeared to have occurred in the past and thus do not seem to represent a present proliferation threat.Still, one of the three diplomats who agreed to discuss confidential information on condition of anonymity said the July 14 discussions are significant. He pointed to the fact that the council found the issue important enough to take it up less then a month after the June 9 IAEA referral.
The IAEA has tried in vain since 2008 to follow up on strong evidence that a site in the Syrian desert, bombed in 2007 by Israeli warplanes, was a nearly finished reactor built with North Korea's help.The resolution that reported Syria to the Security Council expressed serious concern over Syria's lack of cooperation with the IAEA Director General's repeated requests for access to additional information and locations as well as Syria's refusal to engage substantively with the Agency on the nature of the Dair Alzour site.Syria is already on the Security Council's docket. The council on Thursday expressed united support for the U.N. peacekeeping force on the tense Syrian-Israeli border — even while remaining divided over any direct condemnation of Syria's crackdown on peaceful demonstrators.All three diplomats said the council had asked high-ranking IAEA officials to testify at the hearing — another sign of the importance attached to it. They said IAEA chief Yukiya Amano and Herman Nackaerts, the agency's nonproliferation point man, either would both attend or one of them would go.IAEA officials contacted after office hours Monday said they could not comment.From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110705/NATION/107050353/U.N.-panel-to-talk-Syria-nukes#ixzz1RNObslog
Obama Plans Israel Visit
by Gavriel Queenann JULY 5,11
US ambassador to Israel James B. Cunningham told Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin during a meeting Tuesday that President Barack Obama is planning an Israel trip.
The president wants to visit and he will do so, Cunningham told Rivlin.Rivlin told Cunningham that Israelis sense that the atmosphere in the White House has changed for the worse. The feeling is that Obama views Israel as a burden more than as a strategic asset.When the president visited Egypt and the region, he decided not to visit Israel, something which bothered many Israelis, Rivlin continued.Rivlin also told Cunningham that under the Obama administration he would not want to depend on the Americans in the face of a dangerous situation.Cunningham responded to Rivlin telling him that such feelings were erroneous and that the president plans to visit Israel.But observers note the chilly relations between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have colored US-Israeli relations and that Obama's policy statements often snub Israel or ultimately prove detrimental to its interests.
Cunningham, who plans to resign after three years as ambassador to Israel, did not indicate a date for the visit.Political analysts suggest Obama's visit may be motivated by a desire to shore up his now dubious Israel credentials as he looks to reelection and a GOP field of staunchly pro-Israel candidates who may use Israel as lever against him in the 2012 campaign.(IsraelNationalNews.com)
Saboteurs bomb Egypt gas pipeline to Israel, Jordan
July 04, 2011 09:26 AM (Last updated: July 04, 2011 06:32 PM)
By Jailan Zayan Agence France Presse
CAIRO, Egypt: Saboteurs bombed an Egyptian gas pipeline in the Sinai peninsula on Monday, sending flames into the sky and cutting supplies to Israel and Jordan, a security official said.Officials said a car had parked near the pipeline in the Bir al-Abd area, 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) from the north Sinai town of El-Arish, shortly before the explosion.They said the bomb was activated remotely.Emergency services were deployed to the area to try to bring the fire under control, an official said.Witnesses said the flames reached as high as 10 meters (32 feet). There were no immediate reports of casualties.It was the third attack since February, when an uprising toppled former president Hosni Mubarak and saw power handed over to a military council.On April 27, the pipeline in the Al-Sabil area in north Sinai was also attacked, cutting off international gas supplies.In February, attackers used explosives against the pipeline in the town of Lihfren in north Sinai, near the Gaza Strip.There was also a failed attempt to attack the pipeline in March.Jordan, which buys 95 percent of its energy needs, imports about 240 million cubic feet (6.8 million cubic meters) of Egyptian gas a day, or 80 percent of its electricity requirements.
Egypt supplies about 40 percent of Israel's natural gas which is used to produce electricity. In December, four Israeli firms signed 20-year contracts worth up to $10 billion (7.4 billion euros) to import Egyptian gas.In April, Egypt's Prime Minister Essam Sharaf asked for the revision of all contracts to supply gas abroad, including to Israel.Sharaf said the contracts would be revisited so the gas would be sold with deserved prices that achieve the highest returns for Egypt.The controversial gas deal with Israel has been repeatedly challenged in Egyptian courts on the grounds of its secretive clauses and because it was done without parliamentary consultation.A court imposed an injunction on the deal, in a move ignored by Mubarak's government. A higher court overturned the freeze in 2010, on condition the government regulate the quantity and price of gas exported.Israel's government viewed the ouster of Mubarak with alarm.Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace deal with the Jewish state in 1979, but the public has remained hostile towards Israel over its policies in the occupied Palestinian territories.
After the military took power following Mubarak's ouster, it pledged that it would respect the 1979 peace treaty with Israel.In May, Jordan said Egypt was withholding its contracted gas supply to energy-poor Jordan unless a new deal was signed at a higher price.Under a 14-year deal signed in 2002, Egypt used to sell gas to Jordan at a discounted price – half of the market price, or $3 (2.16 euros) per million British Thermal Units (1,000 cubic feet of gas equals 1.027 million BTU).Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2011/Jul-04/Blast-hits-Egypts-gas-pipeline-to-Israel-Jordan.ashx#ixzz1RNR7BICI (The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)
Hamas calls on Greece to let Gaza flotilla sail
(AFP)3 July 2011
The Hamas government in Gaza on Sunday called on Greece to allow a flotilla of aid ships to set sail for the blockaded Palestinian territory.
We regret the position of Greece, which has responded to international pressure to stop the Freedom Flotilla from sailing, Hamas foreign minister Mohamed Awad told a press conference at Gaza’s port.We call on them to reconsider their ban on the flotilla setting sail and to allow them to leave, he added.Several ships participating in the so-called Freedom Flotilla have been forced to remain docked in Greece after local authorities warned that they did not have permission to set sail for Gaza.The ships, chartered by pro-Palestinian activists, are seeking to break an Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip and are loaded with items ranging from aid to letters from supporters.But the flotilla has been plagued by setbacks, including Greece’s refusal to let several ships head out to sea, and the discovery that at least two vessels had been damaged.Activists have accused Israel of sabotaging the damaged ships and putting political pressure on Greece to prevent the vessels from leaving shore.
Israel has denied any sabotage of the ships but ministers have expressed satisfaction at the flotilla’s difficulties. The Jewish state warned that it would not allow the ships to break its blockade of the Hamas-run territory.In 2010, Israeli commandos raided a flotilla of aid ships seeking to reach Gaza in an operation that left nine Turkish citizens dead and prompted widespread criticism of the Jewish state.In the wake of the criticism, Israel eased some of its restrictions on Gaza, loosening a blockade it imposed after Gaza-based militants captured an Israeli soldier in 2006. The rules were tightened in 2007 when Hamas seized Gaza.
No Israel ties in Tunisia reform pact
Sat Jul 2, 2011 6:31AM
Yadh Ben Achour, the president of the commission announced the adoption of the agreement without giving further details on its contents, AFP reported on Friday.
The pact will provide the basis for a new constitution in the North African country.
The document also states that Tunisia is a democratic country, its language is Arabic and its religion is Islam.It further says that Tunisia supports the Palestinian cause on top of refusing ties with Israel.Tunisians are expected to elect an assembly in October to draft a new constitution.At least 147 people were killed and 510 left injured during the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution that unseated Ben Ali in January after a 23-year-long authoritarian rule, according to the United Nations.On January 14, Ben Ali fled the North African country to the Saudi port city of Jeddah. There are unconfirmed claims that the deposed Tunisian dictator has gone into a coma in Saudi Arabia after suffering a stroke.Riots and protests broke out in Tunisia following the self-immolation of a 26-year-old fruit vendor, identified as Muhammad Bouazizi, who set himself on fire after police confiscated his merchandise.
GHN/MGH/HRF
Israel says it can't stop mass protests
Published: June 30, 2011 at 9:04 AM
JERUSALEM, June 30 (UPI) -- The Israeli military has no way to stop a mass protest in the West Bank, members of the military say.Still, Israeli forces are conducting drills in preparation for a potential uprising in the wake of a Palestinian bid seeking statehood recognition from the United Nations in September, Haaretz reported Thursday.A non-violent protest of 4,000 people or more, even if they only march to a checkpoint or a settlement, and especially if the Palestinian police does not deter them, will be unstoppable, an Israeli officer said. Such a great number of determined people cannot be stopped by tear gas and rubber bullets.Those comments were echoed by another high-ranking member of the Israeli military, who said, if we are to face protests similar to those in Egypt or Tunisia, we will not be able to do a thing.Mid-level Israeli officers completed special training Tuesday, attending lectures on how to deal with disorderly conduct, and viewed presentations on protest-dispersal methods used by the Israeli military and border police.At the end of the day, the decision is in the hands of the political echelon, another commander told Haaretz.It is fairly obvious that if there will be no progress on peace talks, the Palestinian police with whom we work very closely to prevent infiltrations will lose their patience.Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2011/06/30/Israel-says-it-cant-stop-mass-protests/UPI-37381309439080/#ixzz1RNVFDhVH
Iran says U.S. exploits Syria uprising to save Israel
Reuters Posted at 06/29/2011 7:13 AM |7:13 AM
TEHRAN - The United States and its allies are exploiting popular protests in Syria to try to break an alliance between Damascus and Tehran against Israel, a senior Iranian official said on Wednesday.Iran is watching the unrest in neighboring Syria with alarm and rejects western allegations it is helping its closest ally in the Middle East to crush a three-month popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's rule.Ramin Mehmanparast, a special advisor to Iran's Foreign Minister, said the alliance between Iran and Syria constituted a threat not only to Israel, but also to the West's interests in the Middle East.The West could not stop regional uprisings ... America lost a close ally in the region with the overthrow of (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak, Mehmanparast said.As interests of America and its allies are endangered in the region ... they are trying to shift the crisis by creating problems for independent countries (like Iran and Syria).Mehmanparast said the West planned to replace Assad with a leader less hostile to itself and Israel.
They are trying to harm Syria as it is playing a prime role in opposing Israel in the region,said Mehmanparast, who is also Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman.Iran, which has crushed its own opposition protests at home, supported popular uprisings that toppled U.S.-backed leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, praising the movements as an Islamic awakening inspired by its 1979 Islamic revolution.Tehran sees Syria's unrest as a Zionist plot against its close ally Damascus. The Islamic state is accused of equipping Syria to block the internet, drawing on its own extensive experience of crushing anti-government protests that followed the country's disputed 2009 presidential vote.Syria has denied receiving any support from Iran to put down the popular unrest. Iran also denies the accusation.
Discord among Muslims
A part of the people in Syria, which are not the majority, have some demands. Their demands should be expressed in a peaceful way as well,he said.Rights groups say security forces and gunmen loyal to Assad have killed over 1,300 civilians since March when the uprising for political freedom erupted in Syria, adding that scores of troops and police were also killed for refusing to fire on civilians.Syrian authorities say more than 250 soldiers and police died in clashes with armed terrorist groups, whom they also blame for most civilian deaths.The number of security forces killed in Syria shows (not all) protestors are ordinary people, Mehmanparast said, accusing the U.S. and Israel of provoking terrorist groups in Syria.Mehmanparast warned the West over repercussions that might go beyond Syria if destabilized.Syria, which borders Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Jordan, has regional influence because of its alliance with Iran and its continued role in Lebanon, despite ending a 29-year military presence there in 2005.Analysts say Iran, that sees itself as a bastion of Shi'ite Islam, is concerned about wider Sunni influence in the region.Iranians are trying to gain new allies to prevent expansion of Sunni's power in the region, said political analyst Ali Fazeli.Regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia and the United States, which bases its Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, both fear Iran's rising influence in the region since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, analysts say.Mehmanparast said Iran had no intention to adopt hostile foreign policy toward any regional country.Boosting regional ties has always been a priority for Iran ... any country ... that blocks such convergence is moving in line with the Zionist regime's interests, Mehmanparast said, accusing Washington of creating discord among Muslims.In March, tension increased between Iran and Saudi Arabia, both major oil exporters, when about 1,000 Saudi soldiers entered Bahrain as part of an effort by the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to help the island's Sunni Muslim elite cope with protests by members of its Shi'ite majority.
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