Category: Palestine 2008

Debka-file’s interesting take on the Gaza bust-out

Here’s how Israel’s Debka-file reported* on today’s Gaza bust-out:

    Senior [Israeli] military sources told DEBKAfile that the strategic feat achieved by Hamas Tuesday night, in capturing a section of Sinai from Egyptian forces, is irreversible. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert held tense talks on the crisis Wednesday night, Jan. 23.
    By demolishing the 10-km concrete barrier dividing the Gaza Strip from Egyptian Sinai, Hamas, backed by 200,000 Palestinians who surged across Wednesday, has acquired a new stronghold outside Israel’s military reach.

And here’s how they reported the Egyptian political dimension:

    [Condi] Rice and David Welch, assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, made a point of warning Mubarak that he must act expeditiously to restore border security because the entire Washington Palestinian strategy hinging on Abbas and the Annapolis declarations hangs in the balance.
    But the Egyptian president replied that his main worry is not the Palestinian issue but concern that his own opposition, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, may adopt Hamas tactics and stir up trouble in his cities. Mubarak said he would leave the situation in northern Sinai as it is for the time being.

What did I tell you?
I see that Hamas’s spokesman in Gaza, Dr. Sami Abu Zuhri, has meanwhile described Egypt as,

    the natural depth of the Palestinian people, adding that the Gaza people want to break their subjection to the Israeli occupation which blackmail them everyday with their basic needs; instead, they need their basics to come from their Arab nation rather than the occupation and this was what pushed them to rush towards the Rafah crossing.
    The spokesman pointed out that the leadership of Hamas along with the Palestinian government in Gaza is conducting contacts with the Egyptian leadership to rearrange some issues about the Rafah crossing and also to find solutions to end the suffering of Gaza people.

The story continues…
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* Update Thursday morning: I just tried to revisit that Debka-File URL linked to there and found that the content quoted here has been replaced by some other extremely important content, which I comment on here.

And I can now reveal…

…that last week in Damascus I interviewed Hamas head Khaled Mishaal and Palestinian Islamic Jihad head Ramadan Shallah.
More– including as soon as possible a link to the audio from both full interviews– to follow.
My first bottom line: Mishaal very definitely talked about being interested, under certain circumstances, in a ceasefire between Gaza and Israel. (However, he notably didn’t tell me about any plans for an imminent “bust-out” from Gaza! Why didn’t he tell me all their secret plans, I wonder?)
I’m just working on making the best possible plan to report on/disseminate what I got in these interviews. They provide a good complement and updating to a lot of my earlier reporting on Palestinian issues (and also, to the reporting I did in February 2007 on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.)

Gaza bust-out: Past plans and future prospects

This report from the London Times’s James Hider strongly indicates that the demolition of vast long stretches of the wall between Gaza and Egypt had been long planned by Gaza’s present Hamas rulers. Hider writes– and the accompanying photo also indicates– that,

    a Hamas border guard interviewed by The Times at the border today admitted that the Islamist group… had been involved for months in slicing through the heavy metal wall using oxy-acetylene cutting torches.
    That meant that when the explosive charges were set off in 17 different locations after midnight last night the 40ft wall came tumbling down, leaving it lying like a broken concertina down the middle of no-man’s land as an estimated 350,000 Gazans flooded into Egypt.

The accompanying photo certainly shows indications of considerable amounts of cutting.
Hider also writes:

    As Gazans flooded into Egypt, the strip’s Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, called for an urgent meeting with his rivals in Fatah and with the Egyptian authorities to work a new border arrangement.
    Mr Haniya called for the border crossing to be reopened “on the basis of national participation,” meaning that Hamas would be prepared to cede some control to President Abbas and his Fatah-led government in the West Bank. “We don’t want to be the only ones in control of these matters,” Mr Haniyeh said, speaking from his Gaza City office live on Hamas TV.

The downing of the wall may well have been planned to coincide with the opening of the current, Hamas-led conference of Palestinian oppositionists in Damascus, Syria.
Here is a Reuters report of the conference’s first day.
The Hamas people argue that their actions are not aimed at undermining Palestinian national unity. But very evidently the big bust-out from Gaza is a major embarrassment to PA president Mahmoud Abbas, who has so far had little or nothing to show for his insistence on pursuing the Palestinians’ grievances only through the US-sponsored peace talks with Israel. Abbas has been able to do little but sit idly by, voicing occasional and unheeded protests, while Israel tightened its siege around Gaza over recent weeks.
I spent the past few days in Beirut. (I got back to the US yesterday.) It strikes me that Hamas’s opening of Gaza’s wall with Egypt could make the situation between Egypt and Israel somewhat analogous to that between Lebanon and Israel?
Recall also the plans Gaza’s Hamas leaders have long talked about their hope of reconnecting Gaza to the outside world through Egypt rather than through Israel, as I wrote about here and here and elsewhere.
What is clear already is that the Gaza bust-out has considerably upped the political stakes for Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak. His regime’s survival may now be at stake.
Who can reimpose order on the Gaza-Egypt situation? Israel? I doubt it. Egypt? Very risky indeed. Fateh without coordinating with Hamas? Impossible. A hastily assembled NATO peacekeeping force? Forget about it…
This is, it strikes me, Hamas’s bid to become included in the decisionmaking order. I truly don’t see any resolution to the present situation without Hamas being a party to it.
This story will continue to be big.

Gaza’s opening to Egypt

At dawn this morning, Palestine-Israel time, masked gunmen set explosive charges that felled much of the high wall that has separated Israeli-occupied Gaza from Egypt since the conclusion of Israel’s peace with Egypt in 1979. That opening burst a massive hole through the situation of tight siege that Israel has maintained on Gaza’s 1.5 million people since 2000.
Gaza’s people were quick to take advantage. If you look at the sat photo at the bottom of this BBC news report you can see for about one-third of its length, the Gaza-Israel boundary cuts through the edge of the heavily populated city of Rafah. (Built-up zones appear as brown on the image.) People from throughout Gaza crossed into Egypt to buy basic commodities to take back into the Strip. We can only speculate over what other kinds of goods are being carted into the Strip, but they may well include military supplies.
Hamas’s “caretaker government” in Gaza, elected in a free and fair territories-wide election in January 2006, reportedly moved quickly to take control of the blasted-apart border, closing all of it except for two gaps, over which it maintained control.
This development raises the intriguing possibility that the elected Hamas leaders may now seek to implement a plan they have long had to re-open Gaza’s connection with the world economy through Egypt, rather through Israel, which has sustained a monopoly on all of Gaza’s links with the outside world since it brought the Strip under Israeli military occupation in 1967. (I wrote about how Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahhar discussed that plan in a March 2006 interview with me, here and elsewhere.)
These developments will also, quite evidently, affect the political situation inside Egypt, where Hamas’s allies from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood form the main opposition to the .US-backed president Hosni Mubarak. Demonstrators in Egypt have been stepping up their demonstrations calling on Mubarak to lift the siege of Gaza.
Yesterday and today Mubarak hit back with harsh repression, detaining scores of MB activists and beating protesters in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square with sticks.
On Tuesday, Hundreds of Palestinian women and children organized a mass, nonviolent confrontation with the Egyptian troops tasked with maintaining the Israeli-coordinated siege at the previous sole crossing-point between Gaza and Egypt, at Rafah. At the behest of the Israelis and Americans, Egypt had been keeping that crossing completely closed in recent weeks.
Also of great note: People I talked with during my just-completed trip to Lebanon and Syria all said that public opinion in the Arab world believes strongly that during President Bush’s recent visit to the region he gave a “green light” to Israel to escalate its campaign of military and economic violence against Gaza.
On Tuesday night, the UN Security Council considered the issue of the tight Israeli siege against Gaza. This report from Xinhua makes clear that the “draft presidential statement” prepared by the SC’s current president, Libya, dealt only with Israel’s collective, economic violence against Gaza’s people and not with either Israel’s disproportionate use of military violence against targets in Gaza or the use by Hamas and other Gaza-based militant groups of primitive, almost untargeted rocket fire against targets inside Israel.
But even though the draft statement dealt only with the immediate humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and not with either aspect of the military confrontation between the two sides,US representative Zal Khalilzad still said it was “unacceptable.”
Twelve Israeli civilians have died because of ordnance launched from Gaza in the past seven years. 360 Palestinian civilians– along with some 450 accused Palestinian “militants”– are reported to have died because of Israeli military attacks against Gaza within just the past two years. Khalilzad and far too many other members of the western political elites tend to mention only Israel’s casualties from the ongoing military confrontation between the two sides, and fail to mention the far greater number of civilian Palestinian casualties from it.
So last night, the Security Council was unable to come out in support of any statement at all about the Gaza crisis. They are supposed to discuss it again today…
Meantime, I’d love to know whether any negotiations, and of what kind, are underway between Egypt and Hamas?

Gaza crisis: Where is the ‘West’?

I have been reading the latest round of upsetting reports (portal here) on the horrendous effects on Gaza’s 1.45 million people of the greatly escalated collective punishment that the US-funded and US-backed Government of Israel has been inflicting on them in recent days.
The fact of this collective punishment is not new. It has been sustained in a systematic and intentional way since 2000, if not before. It saw one noticeable escalation after the Palestinians’ January 2006 parliamentary elections– in what was quite clearly a move to punish the Gaza Palestinians for the choice they made in those elections. It saw a further escalation in the past two weeks– even while President Bush was touring the region expressing promises about the imminent arrival of “independence” for the Palestinians.
Three things are going on between the well-established and well-supported State of Israel and the extremely vulnerable and effectively stateless community of Gaza Palestinians:

    1. The State of Israel’s collective punishment against all the Gaza Palestinians: men, women, and children.
    2. The State of Israel’s pursuit of continued military operations against suspected militants inside Gaza, using its army’s very considerable firepower in a way that has also– and quite predictably– killed and wounded many Palestinian noncombatants. And
    3. The use by Palestinian militants from a number of organizations including, now, Hamas of military operations, generally of a very low-tech variety, and including the launching of primitive– and in practice, almost untargetable– rockets of a low degree of lethality against areas of southern Israel that include both civilian and some military targets.

Every single harm suffered by noncombatants in this asymmetrical contest is to be deeply regretted. All parties to armed conflict, whether states or non-state actors, are under an international-law obligation to do their utmost to avoid entangling noncombatants in their military contest.
The Israeli paper HaAretz recently noted that 810 Palestinians were killed by the IDF in Gaza in the two years 2006 and 2007, with some 360 of those judged by HaAretz to have been civilians. Meanwhile, in the seven years since 2001 twelve people in Israel have been killed by military actions launched from Gaza. That’s how asymmetrical the military aspect of this contest in. International actors who treat the IHL violations of the two sides as broadly commensurate fail to understand that.
And then, in addition to their very numerous casualties from that military contest, the Palestinians are also suffering the casualties from the collective punishment regime imposed on them by Israel.
So what has been the response to this situation from governments, intergovernmental bodies, and non-governmental organizations in the currently dominant “western” portion of the world?
From the US government: silence.
From the US-based “human-rights” organizations, as far as I can see: silence.
From the EU’s Commissioner for External Relations, Bentita Ferrero-Waldner today, this:

    I condemn the rocket fire into Israel and we fully understand Israel’s need to defend its citizens. I have called for an immediate ceasefire.
    However, the recent decision to close all border crossings into Gaza as well as to stop the provision of fuel will exacerbate an already dire humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and risks escalating an already difficult situation on the ground…

Notice there that, regarding military actions, she doesn’t even mention Israel’s numerous and extremely damaging military operations against Gaza!
Notice, too, the unsatisfactory nature of the policy prescription she ends with:

    “Neither the blockade nor the recent military strikes are able to prevent the rocket attacks [against Israel.] Only a credible political agreement this year, as foreseen at Annapolis, can turn Palestinians away from violence. That is why we must support Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas in their current efforts.”

I agree with her first sentence there. But note that she then specifies that only the Annapolis-based peace process is capable of “turning the Palestinians away from violence.” But the Gaza Palestinians were in no way represented at Annapolis. Plus– and this an even greater error here– she is assuming that it is only the Palestinians who need to be “turned away from violence”???? That this whole pesky problem in Gaza has arisen because only the Palestinians have this primitive urge to use violence?
I wonder what she calls the things Israel has been doing to the Palestinians? Non-violence?
Here was UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki-Moon’s statement on Friday:

    The Secretary-General appeals urgently for an immediate end to the violence now engulfing Gaza and affecting communities in southern Israel. He repeats his earlier calls for an immediate cessation of Palestinian sniper and rocket attacks into Israel, and for maximum restraint on the part of the Israel Defense Forces. He reminds the parties, once again, of their obligation to comply with international humanitarian law and not to endanger civilians.
    Of particular concern today, in addition to the upsurge in violence, is the decision by Israel to close the crossing points in between Gaza and Israel used for the delivery of humanitarian assistance…
    The Secretary-General expresses his deep concern that the hostilities taking place on the ground will undermine the hopes for peace generated by the political process begun at Annapolis.

That statement was, I think, somewhat more balanced and politically realistic than Ms. Ferrero-Waldner’s.
Speical kudos, meanwhile, should go to Oxfam for their continued following of the (anti-)humanitarian effects of Israel’s continued tightening of the blocade on Gaza, including this statement today.
And to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, John Dugard, for this statement from January 18, which rightly foregrounds the effects on Palestinian civilians of Israel’s military actions in Gaza and is worth quoting in its entirety:

    The killing of some forty Palestinians in Gaza in the past week, the targeting of a Government office near a wedding party venue with what must have been foreseen loss of life and injury to many civilians, and the closure of all crossings into Gaza raise very serious questions about Israel’s respect for international law and its commitment to the peace process. Recent action violates the strict prohibition on collective punishment contained in the Fourth Geneva Convention. It also violates one of the basic principles of international humanitarian law that military action must distinguish between military targets and civilian targets. Israel must have known about the wedding party in Gaza near to the interior ministry when it launched missiles at the ministry building. Those responsible for such cowardly action are guilty of serious war crimes and should be prosecuted and punished for their crimes. The United States and other states which attended the Annapolis conference are under both a legal and a moral obligation to compel Israel to cease its actions against Gaza and to restore confidence in the peace process, ensure respect for international law and protect civilian life.

Readers may ask why Dugard did not mention the casualties from the Palestinians’ rocket attacks against Israel. I imagine this is because his mandate is precisely to look at the human rights situation in the occupied territories. Evidently, though, in any broader consideration of the Gaza-Israel military conflict and its effects, the casualties among Israelis should of course be fully noted.
But it is also worth recalling just why the UN felt it needed to appoint a special rapporteur on the situation of the people of the OPTs. That was, I think, precisely because the members of the UN General Assembly recognized the particularly vulnerable situation of people who are still stateless and cannot rely on having any state intervene to protect their interests or even their lives.
Kudos, too, to B’tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and its allies, who have been petitioning the Israeli High Court to issue an interim order requiring Israel to allow the return of the supply of fuel oil to Gaza to its usual level. This request, B’tselem says, “was filed as part of a petition against the sanctions on the Gaza Strip, from October 2007.”
And meantime, let’s not forget the many dimensions of the assault that Palestinians in the West Bank continue to suffer at the hands of the military occupation regime that has ruled over them for 40.5 years now.
AFP reported yesterday that,

    The number of Jewish settlers living in the occupied West Bank excluding annexed Arab east Jerusalem rose by 5.1 percent last year, figures released by the Israeli interior ministry on Sunday showed.
    The Jewish population increased to 282,362 in January this year compared to 268,163 in January 2007 and 253,371 in the first month of 2006.
    The figures exclude a further 200,000 or so settlers in east Jerusalem which Israel annexed following its capture in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

So much for Israel’s obligations under Annapolis and the “Road Map”…