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Thread: :icon_sadangel2: Palestine Peace a dream?

  1. #941
    Despite mounting international pressure on Tel Aviv, Israel has accelerated settlement activity in East Jerusalem (al-Quds) in the first half of 2009.

    An Israeli activist group, Ir Amim, says that from January through June, about 150 additional housing units have been under construction in the annexed part of Jerusalem (al-Quds).

    This is while the international community including the United States has been calling on Israel to halt the illegal settlement expansion, a move deemed as a prerequisite to the resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians.

    Hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly maintained that his government has not made any decision to stop settlement activity in the West Bank.

    Last week, in a meeting with the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Netanyahu claimed that settlement expansions were 'very different from grabbing land."

    He argued that the construction was necessary because hundreds of thousands of Jews who settled down in the West bank now need more educational and housing space.

    Israel's illegal settlement activity, which is in violation of the United Nations Security Council Resolutions 446, 452 and 465, has also caused complication in Tel Aviv's relations with Washington.

    MMN/SME/MMA

  2. #942
    Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has finally been indicted over a corruption case that involved dealings during his career before taking office as the premier.

    "The attorney general... has decided to press charges against former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert," the Israeli Attorney General Office announced Sunday, quoted by AFP.

    Based on the charge sheet, Olmert was accused of "fraud, breach of trust, registering false corporate documents, and concealing fraudulent earnings."

    Among the charges leveled against Olmert is accepting bribes from the US businessman Morris Talansky.

    He was also accused of cronyism during his term as the minister of trade and industry between 2003 and 2006 and other unlawful acts when he served as the mayor of Jerusalem (Al-Quds) from 1993 to 2003.

    Olmert's secretary Shula Zaken was also indicted in connection with the same case.

    SB/MB

  3. #943
    Four mortar shells fired from the besieged Gaza Strip land in southern Israel hours after Israeli warplanes bombed a building in northern Gaza.

    According to Israeli sources the mortars hit an open area in Negev Sunday evening, reportedly causing no damage or casualties.

    No Palestinian group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, which came after an Israeli fighter jet bombed a building in northern Gaza early on Sunday morning.

    The Israeli military claimed the house had been used to access a tunnel. Israel says Palestinians use the Gaza Strip tunnels to carry out cross border attacks, but Gazans say they dig tunnels to carry food and supplies into the besieged coastal enclave.

    The impoverished Palestinian sliver has been under a strict blockader ever since the Islamic resistance movement won 2006 parliamentary elections.

    The siege of Gaza has created a humanitarian crisis for its 1.5 million-population.

    HE/SC/DT

  4. #944
    An Israeli gunboat has opened fire on a Palestinian boat, injuring a fisherman on board the boat off the Gaza shore, Palestinian sources and witnesses say.

    The boat, which was badly burnt, has been pulled to a fishing port in Gaza city, Xinhua reported.

    According to Hamas ministry of agriculture, the fisherman was moderately burned as his partners succeeded in taking him to a hospital.

    In another incident last Thursday, a Palestinian fisherman was killed when the Israeli navy ships hit his boat in southern Gaza Strip.

    Patrols and attacks by the Israeli navy targeting Palestinians, regularly occur in as little a distance as three miles from the shore.

    Israel does not allow the Palestinian boats to sail farther than two nautical miles (3.7 km) away from the shore though deals between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority have set the fishing zone of up to 20 nautical miles.

    SB/MB

  5. #945
    Israel claims it has arrested a Palestinian with suspected links to Hezbollah on charges of plotting to assassinate Army Chief of Staff General Gabi Ashkenazi.

    An indictment was filed on Monday at the Petah Tikva District Court against Rawi Sultani, a 23-year-old Palestinian, who was charged with a series of security offences, including conveying information to an enemy agent and conspiracy to commit a crime.

    Prosecutors alleged that he attended a summer camp a year ago in Morocco, where he met a Hezbollah activist and provided him with information about Ashkenazi, Israeli media reported.

    Sultani reportedly worked out at the same gym Ashkenazi did in the town of Kfar Saba.

    His father, an attorney who represented him at Monday's hearing, confirmed that his son had belonged to the health club but told the Israel Radio his membership expired a year ago.

    In December 2008, Sultani allegedly flew to Poland to meet "Sami", another Hezbollah activist, where he then imparted all the information he had collected on Ashkenazi.

    Attorney Fuad Sultani, however denied the allegations, saying his son is innocent.

    SB/MB

  6. #946
    Israeli soldiers shoot dead a Palestinian teenager and wounded two others including an ambulance driver who was providing first aid to another victim in the occupied West Bank.

    Palestinian medical sources reported Monday night that one Palestinian teenager was killed and two others were wounded by Israeli military fire near the road that separates between Al Jalazoun refugee camp and Beit El settlement, east of the central West Bank city of Ramallah.

    The 17-year old youth, Mohammad Nayef, was seriously wounded and was moved to Hadassah hospital in al-Quds. He died of his wounds several hours later, the sources said.

    Mohammad is the son of Riyadh Nayef, a Palestinian security official who was assassinated by the Israeli army several years ago.

    The Israeli army claims the boy was hurling fire-bombs outside the settlement.

    The two other wounded Palestinians are Ali Al Qaisi, shot in his arm, and ambulance driver, Osama Al Najjar, who was wounded in his leg while providing first aid to Mohammad Nayef.

    In addition to this incident, according to Palestinian sources Israeli troops kidnapped several Palestinian youth and took them to an unknown destination.

    MSH/SC/DT

  7. #947
    A Human rights group says Israeli authorities force Gazan fishermen into spying on the Hamas movement and other Palestinian resistance groups.

    The Al-Mezan human rights group says it has documented hundreds of fishermen who face pressure to work as Israeli informants. Local fishermen give similar accounts.

    They say Israeli authorities blackmail and threaten them to give information on Palestinian resistance movement Hamas.

    Ramadan al-Sultan, who has been fishing the Mediterranean waters off Gaza for 20 years, says he was seized last year and taken to Israel, where an officer tried to recruit him as a spy.

    "First he offered me money and told me I'm an OK guy, that I have no problems with Israel and no ties with Hamas."

    "Then he threatened me and said I would be banned from fishing if I didn't collaborate, but I refused," he says, sitting on the shore in northern Gaza with other fishermen.

    The Israeli navy prevents Palestinian fishing boats from going further than 2 nautical miles (about 3.7 kilometers) although the Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine allows boats from Gaza to sail up to 20 nautical miles.

    The Israeli navy ships have in several occasions opened fire at the Palestinian ships, forcing them to sail back.

    On Monday, Israeli gunboats opened fire on Palestinian boats, injuring a fisherman on board the boat off the Gaza shore.

    Israel keeps all the crossings into the Gaza Strip closed despite a humanitarian crisis in the region.

    MSH/SC/DT

  8. #948
    The rape and sexual harassment trial of Israel's former president Moshe Katsav, has been resumed in Tel Aviv.

    Katsav, 63, who was forced to step down from office over the charges two years ago, arrived at the Tel Aviv court on Tuesday.

    The trial, in which at least 56 witnesses have been called to testify, will be held behind closed doors with three hearings per week, Israeli daily Haaretz reported.

    Katsav has been indicted on two counts of rape, forcible indecent assault and abuse of power against an employee at his office while he was tourism minister in the 1990s, according to the Israeli justice ministry.

    The case against him was opened in 2006 when the then president alleged that a former female employee was trying to blackmail him.

    After an investigation was launched, the female employee accused Katsav of raping her while she was his secretary in the late 1990s.

    Katsav was forced to leave office following the scandal.

    SB/MB

  9. #949
    An Israeli cabinet minister has categorically confirmed that construction and expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in and around Jerusalem (al-Quds) will continue.

    Speaking on September 1 at a conference entitled "Preserving Jerusalem and the Golan Heights”, Yossi Peled of the ruling Likud Party repeated what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had said during his recent visit to Germany, namely that Jerusalem is the “eternal and united capital of Israel” and that there would be no freeze whatsoever on the construction of settlements.

    The minister without portfolio, who is a Belgian immigrant, insisted that the Jews would continue to live and build in and around the city, which was captured from the native Arabs by military force, Israel's Ynet News reported.

    Israel recently announced that it would accept a temporary freeze on settlements but that it would never accept a permanent halt to the construction of Jewish settlements on occupied territories, despite the prohibitions of international law, the Fourth Geneva Convention, and worldwide condemnation.

    FTP/ZAP/HGL

  10. #950
    A female Palestinian detainee has recounted how she was under continuous interrogation, intimidation, and abuse for 14 days by Israeli soldiers and interrogators.

    Najwa Awni Abdul-Ghani told a Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) lawyer that on July 21, 2009, Israeli soldiers searched her family's home for three hours. They caused damage to property, terrorized the family, and kidnapped her and her brother Salah.

    During the search operation, the soldiers forced the family, including children and her elderly parents, out of their home in Saida town, near the northern West Bank city of Tulkarem.

    Later, soldiers took her and her brother forcibly in two separate vehicles, she said, adding that she did not know the whereabouts of her brother.

    She stated that she was taken first to the Sharon Prison and later to the al-Jalama interrogation center where she was interrogated, intimidated, and abused for 14 days.

    She told the PPS lawyer that she was deprived of sleep and proper food. "The living conditions in the cells are very bad; the cells are dirty, smelly, lack ventilation and proper mattresses,” she said.

    After 14 days, she was loaded, handcuffed and in leg-irons, onto a military vehicle and transferred to the al-Damoun prison, she added.

    FTP/ZAP/HGL

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