Hamas spokesman: “This is a terrible crime committed by Egyptian security against simple Palestinian workers who were trying to earn their daily bread.” Egyptian security officials admitted that they had destroyed four tunnels north of the Rafah border crossing with Gaza on Wednesday.
Gaza siege
“The Karni crossing won’t resume operating,” said one. “At least not as long as Hamas controls the Strip.” Until June 2007, Karni was the principal cargo crossing into Gaza, despite a series of terror attacks that targeted both the crossing and the surrounding area.
IOA Editor: The strangulation of Gaza will continue. And now we know, from official sources, that it is not due to “terrorism.” Separately, as Amira Hass reports in Expulsion without trucks, Palestinians continue to be squeezed out of the occupied West Bank, as a matter of long-standing Israeli policy. And Hamas is not in power on the West Bank, at least not yet. Ethnic cleansing is the overall purpose of Israeli actions, now and in the past.
[M]any, across the political spectrum, are deeply uncomfortable with the shift in policy that has turned the Palestinians, from historical “brothers,” into something like enemies… [T]he columnist Fahmi Huwaydi remarks that Egypt’s “strategic vision has changed, and Egypt has come to reckon the Palestinians and not the Israelis a danger. And if this sad conclusion is correct, then I cannot avoid describing the steel wall…as a wall of shame.”
Egyptian FM Abul Gheit: “Egypt will no longer allow convoys, regardless of their origin or who is organising them, from crossing its territory”… Egypt accused Galloway, who once called at a London rally for the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, of trying to embarrass the country, which has refused to permanently open its Rafah border crossing with Gaza.
More on Mubarak’s position in Seumas Milne’s Terror is the price of support for despots and dictators
I wondered: Were the [Hamas] restrictions an order from above, or an unwise interpretation by lower ranks? Does Hamas think it can entirely prevent the few visitors – clearly pro-Palestinian – from hearing non-official versions? Don’t the people giving the orders realize what a bad image they were creating? Or was there really a security concern?
From the wider international perspective, it is precisely this western embrace of repressive and unrepresentative regimes such as Egypt’s, along with unwavering backing for Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land, that is at the heart of the crisis in the Middle East and Muslim world… The poisonous logic of this imperial quagmire is now leading inexorably to the spread of war under Barack Obama.
I’m an inveterate optimist, so someday there will be peace, but a lot of things have to change before that happens. If the occupation were to stop overnight, it would make all the difference in the world. Israel is the fourth-largest military entity in the world. They have the newest equipment, and it’s used on the Palestinians. Also, if the U.S. stopped funding Israel, that would be another way of bringing about peace.
The Egyptian regime blocked access for the mission, citing “security” concerns, and refused to grant entry visas to the assembled group. Cairo’s position, undoubtedly backed by its masters the US and Israel, condemned most of the marchers as “hoodlums” and “criminals”. In fact, many participants were the elderly and the religious and non-violent, Gandhian tactics were the central ideology.
Gaza Freedom Marchers approved today a declaration aimed at accelerating the global campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli Apartheid.
Cairo is currently experiencing civil disobedience, Western style… The fight is now with the Egyptian government and, according to Code Pink, their own embassies’ intransigence.
Activists, both from Gaza and abroad, have held demonstrations on either side of an Israeli border crossing to the Palestinian territory, protesting against its continued siege by Israel.
Egyptian security forces on Tuesday prevented dozens of American activists from reaching the U.S. embassy in Cairo, where they hoped to ask the ambassador to help them reach the Gaza Strip.
The population of the Gaza Strip is facing an acute cooking gas shortage this winter, after a unilateral Israeli decision in October to permanently close the sole oil and gas terminal between the coastal Palestinian territory and the Jewish state.
A Holocaust survivor, a retired military officer wife and I issued an invitation to Elie Wiesel to come to Gaza with us. This invitation was extended as he spoke before a standing-room crowd of around 2800 people on Tuesday evening, December 1, at St. Louis University… He responded with an immediate and dismissive “I heard you.” He then turned and looked in the other direction.
While a new entrepreneurial class dines in restaurants, four out of five Gazans… live in poverty; 20,000 war victims are still displaced. Gazans in rural areas continue to scavenge for basics, and mercantile families have begun to collect UN food rations. Short of gas, old men bent double haul bundles of wood. It’s not just the loss of their savings: Gazans complain that their leaders sheltered underground during the war, leaving their people exposed to the shelling.
[Professor] Abu Hein sees the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip as the main reason behind the rising rate of suicide attempts. “Every aspect of their lives is affected by the blockade. They became enclosed upon themselves and unable to communicate with the outside world. They cannot travel, marry, get an education, or buy basic goods from outside the strip.”
