Video of Noam Chomsky giving a lecture to MIT Center of International Studies.
"..the aggression was undertaken, to defend israel mainly from the threat of a peaceful political settlement"
For Hamas, the primary goal is the creation of an independent Palestinian state. For Jund Ansar Allah, it is the violent imposition of Taliban-style stone age religious subserviance. If there's one thing the Gaza Strip doesn't need right now, it's a group which attacks Hamas for being too liberal.
'Karen AbuZayd, the Head of the UN Agency that provides food, health and housing to millions of Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) was at the European Parliament Thursday (11 September). She was there to hold talks with Members of the Foreign Affairs Committee. In an exclusive interview she told us that 60 years of refugees status for the Palestinians is nothing to celebrate, of her concern over Israeli settlements and that "periods of hope...have all been dashed and things have got worse".'
'An Israeli human rights group has claimed that far more innocent Palestinian civilians were killed in the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip this year than the military has admitted. According to Israeli rights group B'Tselem, 1,387 Palestinians were killed during the three weeks of Operation Cast Lead, of whom 773 were civilians - including children.
The group's report contradicts an Israeli army report stating that fewer than 300 civilians died in the conflict that took place between December 2008 and January 2009.'
Palestinians run for cover during the Israeli phosphorus strike over the UN Relief and Works Agency HQ in Gaza in January
'A fact-finding team from the United Nations has accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza. The investigation set up by the Human Rights Council concluded that Israeli forces had been systematically reckless in their use of white phosphorus during the Gaza war earlier this year. '
Israeli minister Ehud Barak faces war crimes arrest threat during UK visit
'Israel received an uncomfortable reminder of international anger over the Gaza war today when lawyers representing 16 Palestinians asked a London court to issue an arrest warrant for its defence minister, Ehud Barak, who is visiting Britain.
After a day of delays and legal wrangling the bid failed on the grounds that Barak enjoyed diplomatic immunity from prosecution. But the episode triggered a brief storm that is likely to give Israeli officials second thoughts about the risk of prosecution in foreign courts.'
'US agency co-operating with Palestinian counterparts who allegedly torture Hamas supporters in West Bank
Palestinian security agents who have been detaining and allegedly torturing supporters of the Islamist organisation Hamas in the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA, the Guardian has learned.
Less than a year after Barack Obama signed an executive order that prohibited torture and provided for the lawful interrogation of detainees in US custody, evidence is emerging the CIA is co-operating with security agents whose continuing use of torture has been widely documented by human rights groups.'
'Omri Buson says his "blood boils" every time he hears about the negotiations between Hamas and Israel over the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
From his point of view, Israel should have never ended last year's military offensive on Gaza without Shalit's return.
"We needed to hurt them and not have mercy ... to destroy every house till [we] found that soldier," says Buson, who dropped out of law school to open clothing shops in Jerusalem.
He admits that his views have become "very extreme in the last year because of the war" .
But he is not alone. Israeli Knesset members have expressed similar views.'
'Israel must end its suffocating blockade of the Gaza Strip, which leaves more than 1.4 million Palestinians cut off from the outside world and struggling with desperate poverty, Amnesty International said one year on from the end of Israel's military offensive in Gaza.
Amnesty International's briefing paper Suffocating: The Gaza Strip under Israeli blockade gathers testimony from people still struggling to rebuild their lives following Operation "Cast Lead", which killed around 1,400 Palestinians and injured thousands more.'
'GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian high-school student Fida Hejji died of cancer waiting for Israeli permission to go to an Israeli hospital for treatment.
Hejji, 18, was promised an entry permit three times. Three days after she died last November, her family got a call to say the hospital had set the date for her admission.
One year after Israel's offensive on Hamas-ruled Gaza, U.N. agencies and the Association for International Development Agencies (AIDA), representing over 80 NGOs, on Wednesday highlighted the health impact of the continuing blockade there.'
'JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on Sunday that Israel would keep parts of the West Bank forever, planting trees in a settlement bloc to reaffirm a land claim long rooted in Israeli government policy.
"Our message is clear: We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here, this place will be an inseparable part of the State of Israel for eternity," Netanyahu said in the Gush Etzion enclave.
Speaking after meeting U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East envoy in Jerusalem, Netanyahu vowed Israel would also keep its two biggest West Bank settlements, Maale Adumim and Ariel.
His comments came as no surprise to the Palestinians, who were put on notice by previous Israeli leaders that Israel intended to hang on to major settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank in any future peace accord.'
Palestinian women huddle amid their belongings after Israeli forces demolished their homes in the West Bank village of Khirbet Tana, near Nablus earlier this month
'In the richest of the Occupied lands, Israeli bureaucracy is driving Palestinians out of their homes. Robert Fisk reports from Jiftlik'
'Area C doesn't sound very ominous. A land of stone-sprinkled grey hills and soft green valleys, it's part of the wreckage of the equally wrecked Oslo Agreement, accounting for 60 per cent of the Israeli-occupied West Bank that was eventually supposed to be handed over to its Palestinian inhabitants.
But look at the statistics and leaf through the pile of demolition orders lying on the table in front of Abed Kasab, head of the village council in Jiftlik, and it all looks like ethnic cleansing via bureaucracy. Perverse might be the word for the paperwork involved. Obscene appear to be the results. '
'Israel's new immigration police has joined security forces in cracking down on foreign activists residing in the Palestinian West Bank, Haaretz has learned.
The Oz Unit participated last week in the attempted arrest of a number of activists in the West Bank town of Bil'in, and also in the raid that nabbed leading Palestinian militants Mohammed Hatib that same night. Two weeks ago, the unit took part in the arrest of a Czech activist in Ramallah.'
'GAZA, Feb. 4 (Xinhua) -- Israel deported a Palestinian from the West Bank to the isolated, Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Thursday, a Palestinian prisoners rights association said.
The Palestinian Prisoner Club said in a statement that Baker al- Haffi has spent nearly one month in an Israeli detention center after he was arrested in Tulkarem city in the West Bank.
According to the statement, al-Haffi's ID card indicates that he was originally from Gaza and that's why Israel has expelled him. Al-Haffi is married to a woman from the West Bank and had lived there for 10 years. He also has two children, a house and a farm in Tulkarem.
Since Israel announced Gaza a hostile entity following Hamas' takeover of the coastal strip in 2007, it is increasingly deporting the West Bank-residents of Gazan origins if they are caught in raids the Israeli army conducts on daily basis.
In October last year, Israel deported a Palestinian student of Bethlehem University to Gaza two months before her graduation after soldiers on a checkpoint found out that she was born in Gaza. Later, in December, the Israeli High Court ruled that Berlanty Azzam, 22, can't return to the West Bank to continue her studies.'
'Palestinian security forces have for the first time arrested a suspected cell of Al-Qaeda sympathisers in the occupied West Bank, a senior officer said on Wednesday.'
IDF court free soldier convicted of beating Palestinian, rejects demand to return officer to the ranks.
'The Israel Defense Forces prosecution on Thursday filed an indictment against two combat soldiers suspected of inappropriate conduct during Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip in 2008.
The soldiers, who served as staff sergeants in the Givati Brigade during Operation Cast Lead, allegedly forced a 9-year-old Palestinian boy to open a number of bags they thought might contain explosive materials. The bags turned out to be harmless.'