BB FANS

Robert Fisk: Posturing and laughter as victims rot

Mahmoud Abbas stepped further into humiliation by saying the only option for Arabs isto make peace with Israel
Independent

Robert Fisk: So far, Obama's missed the point on Gaza...


It would have helped if Obama had the courage to talk about what everyone in the Middle East was talking about. No, it wasn't the US withdrawal from Iraq. They knew about that. They expected the beginning of the end of Guantanamo and the probable appointment of George Mitchell as a Middle East envoy was the least that was expected. Of course, Obama did refer to "slaughtered innocents", but these were not quite the "slaughtered innocents" the Arabs had in mind.

There was the phone call yesterday to Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe Obama thinks he's the leader of the Palestinians, but as every Arab knows, except perhaps Mr Abbas, he is the leader of a ghost government, a near-corpse only kept alive with the blood transfusion of international support and the "full partnership" Obama has apparently offered him, whatever "full" means. And it was no surprise to anyone that Obama also made the obligatory call to the Israelis.

But for the people of the Middle East, the absence of the word "Gaza" – indeed, the word "Israel" as well – was the dark shadow over Obama's inaugural address. Didn't he care? Was he frightened? Did Obama's young speech-writer not realise that talking about black rights – why a black man's father might not have been served in a restaurant 60 years ago – would concentrate Arab minds on the fate of a people who gained the vote only three years ago but were then punished because they voted for the wrong people? It wasn't a question of the elephant in the china shop. It was the sheer amount of corpses heaped up on the floor of the china shop.

Sure, it's easy to be cynical. Arab rhetoric has something in common with Obama's clichés: "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play ... loyalty and patriotism". But however much distance the new President put between himself and the vicious regime he was replacing, 9/11 still hung like a cloud over New York. We had to remember "the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke". Indeed, for Arabs, the "our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred" was pure Bush; the one reference to "terror", the old Bush and Israeli fear word, was a worrying sign that the new White House still hasn't got the message. Hence we had Obama, apparently talking about Islamist groups such as the Taliban who were "slaughtering innocents" but who "cannot outlast us". As for those in the speech who are corrupt and who "silence dissent", presumably intended to be the Iranian government, most Arabs would associate this habit with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (who also, of course, received a phone call from Obama yesterday), King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a host of other autocrats and head-choppers who are supposed to be America's friends in the Middle East.

Hanan Ashrawi got it right. The changes in the Middle East – justice for the Palestinians, security for the Palestinians as well as for the Israelis, an end to the illegal building of settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, an end to all violence, not just the Arab variety – had to be "immediate" she said, at once. But if the gentle George Mitchell's appointment was meant to answer this demand, the inaugural speech, a real "B-minus" in the Middle East, did not.

The friendly message to Muslims, "a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect", simply did not address the pictures of the Gaza bloodbath at which the world has been staring in outrage. Yes, the Arabs and many other Muslim nations, and, of course, most of the world, can rejoice that the awful Bush has gone. So, too, Guantanamo. But will Bush's torturers and Rumsfeld's torturers be punished? Or quietly promoted to a job where they don't have to use water and cloths, and listen to men screaming?

Sure, give the man a chance. Maybe George Mitchell will talk to Hamas – he's just the man to try – but what will the old failures such as Denis Ross have to say, and Rahm Emanuel and, indeed, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton? More a sermon than an Obama inaugural, even the Palestinians in Damascus spotted the absence of those two words: Palestine and Israel. So hot to touch they were, and on a freezing Washington day, Obama wasn't even wearing gloves.
Independent

Gaza: 'I watched an Israeli soldier shoot dead my two little girls'

Grieving Palestinian father says children were killed after family obeyed order from troops to leave Gaza home

By Donald Macintyre in Gaza City


A Palestinian father has claimed that he saw two of his young daughters shot dead and another critically injured by an Israeli soldier who emerged from a stationary tank and opened fire as the family obeyed an order from the Israeli forces to leave their home.

Khaled Abed Rabbo said Amal, aged two and Suad, seven, were killed by fire from the soldier's semi-automatic rifle. His third daughter, Samer, four, has been evacuated to intensive care in a Belgian hospital after suffering critical spinal injuries which he said were inflicted in the attack early in Israel's ground offensive.

Mr Abed Rabbo stood near the wreckage off his subsequently destroyed home on the eastern edge of the northern Gaza town of Jabalya yesterday and described how a tank had parked outside the building at 12.50pm on 7 January and ordered the family in Arabic through a megaphone to leave building. He said his 60-year-old mother had also been shot at as she left waving her white headscarf with her son, daughter in law and her three grandchildren.

"Two soldiers were on the tank eating chips, then one man came out of the tank with a rifle and started shooting the kids," Mr Abed Rabbo, who receives a salary as a policeman from the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in Ramallah said. The family say they think the weapon used by the soldier was an M16 and that the first to be shot was Amal. Mr Abed Rabbo said that Suad was then shot with what he claimed were 12 bullets, and then Samer.

The soldier who fired the rifle had what Mr Abed Rabbo thought were ringlets visible below his helmet, he said. The small minority of ultra-Orthodox Jews who serve in the army are in a unit which did not take part in the Gaza offensive and only a very small number of settlers who also favour that hairstyle serve in other units.

It has so far been impossible independently to verify Mr Abed Rabbo's claim and the military said last night Israeli Defence Forces "does not target civilians, only Hamas terrorists and infrastructure". It added: "The IDF is investigating various claims made with regard to Operation Cast Lead and at the end of its investigation will respond accordingly."

The district is named Abed Rabbo after the clan who live in most of it. The dense concrete roof of the house now hangs at more at more than a 45-degree angle, and at least three other substantial buildings have been flattened in the agricultural, semi-rural immediate neighbourhood. Khaled Abed Rabbo said that there had been a delay before the ambulance could reach the building because the road from the west had been made impassable by the churning of the tanks.

The soldiers had in the end let the family leave on foot, he said. He added that they walked two kilometres before finding a vehicle to take them to Kamal Adwan Hospital. He said: "I carried Suad, who was dead, my wife carried Amal and my brother Ibrahim carried Samer."

He added: "We are not Hamas. My children were not Hamas. And if they were going to shoot anyone it should have been me." He added: "I want the international community and the International Red Cross to ask Israel why it has done this to us. They talk about democracy but is it democracy to kill children? What did the kids do to them? What did my house do to them? They destroyed my life?

Gaza City is showing signs of returning to a form of normality as more shops reopen. The offices of the main Palestinian telephone company Jawwal reopened though this has not eased severe problems of connectivity on the Palestinian mobile network.

Some Hamas policemen were back directing traffic, though in smaller numbers than before the offensive. Unconfirmed figures are that 270 Hamas policemen were killed, mainly in the air attacks during the first week. In a victory rally in Gaza city yesterday, Hamas supporters converged on a square near the remains of the bombed parliament building..

'Heartbreaking': The ugly face of war

The UN secretary general, looking distressed, described the devastation of Gaza as "heartbreaking" on a visit to the area yesterday after the 22-day Israeli assault.

"I have seen only a fraction of the destruction," said Ban Ki-moon, as he stood in front of a UN warehouse set on fire by Israeli shells last Thursday. "This is shocking and alarming. These are heartbreaking scenes I have seen and I am deeply grieved by what I have seen today." he said.

Mr Ban demanded a full investigation into the Israeli shelling of the UN Relief and Works Agency compound. UN officials say the compound, still smouldering yesterday, was targeted by white phosphorus munitions which are not supposed to be used in densely populated areas because of the harm to civilians. Mr Ban said the Israeli attacks on UNRWA headquarters and two UN schools in Gaza, one of which killed 40 sheltering Palestinians, were "outrageous".

Amnesty International said Israel's repeated use of the munitions despite evidence of their indiscriminate effects and harm to civilians "is a war crime". The Israeli army has launched an investigation but says Hamas fighters operate from densely populated areas, and used UN buildings as cover for attacks.

Mr Ban said: "It has been especially troubling and heartbreaking for me as secretary general that I couldn't end this faster," he said. He urged Israel and Hamas to "exercise maximum restraint and nurture the ceasefire".

Independent

Hamas admits killing 'Israeli collaborators'

By Donald Macintyre


Hamas has effectively admitted killing Palestinians suspected of informing Israel on potential targets during the three week bombing and ground offensive in Gaza.

While purporting not to know details, Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for the Islamic faction said yesterday in Gaza City that Israel had relied on "spies" to provide information including on the whereabouts of Hamas leaders. He added: "Maybe some of them were were killed because they wereacting against the population, against the resistance."

Mr Barhoum was speaking in the wake of a report in the Qatari daily A-Sharq which quoted Moussa Abu Marzuk, deputy chief of Hamas's political bureau as confirming that it had executed Gazans suspected of collaborating with Israel.

Mr Barhoum also disclosed that there had been "some investigation and interrogation" of persons accused of informing on the whereabouts of the Hamas interior minister Said Siyam, who was killed when his brother's house in the Sheikh Radwan district of Gaza city was bombed last Thursday.

It was easily the highest profile assassination of a Hamas leader to be carried out during the 22-day offensive. Mr Barhoum said it could not have been carried out without "spies" because Mr Siyam had been "moving from place to place" during the offensive."

Despite suggestions from Fatah that its members have been attacked byHamas Mr Barhoum den ied that the "spies" concerned were Fatah members. Instead he said that the informers had been acting "against Fatah, against Hamas, against the people." He added: "The cause of the spies is the occupation [a term frequently used by Hamas hard-liners to describe Israel]. If there was no occupation there would be no spies."

Meanwhile Ehab al Ghsain, spokesman for the Hamas-controlled interior ministry, was quoted as saying: "The internal security service was instructed to track collaborators and hit them hard. They arrested dozens of collaborators who attempted to strike the resistance by giving information to the occupation about the fighters."

But he denied a statement which Reuters reported had been issued by Fatah in Gaza which said that internal oppression by Hamas had included: "shooting at the feet of Fatah members, brutal crimes of execution and throwing the bodies in the rubble of destruction."

At least two prisoners who escaped from the Soraya gaol when it was bombed by Israel early in the offensive are thought to have been killed in a wave of score-settling, including by the familes of victims of attacks which the alleged collaborators were accused of helping instigate by providinginformation on their whereabouts.
Independent

Fatah fears Gaza conflict has put Hamas in the ascendancy

Palestinian party created by Yasser Arafat suffers sharp decline in support

By Patrick Cockburn in Nablus



The Islamic movement Hamas is taking over from Fatah, the party created by Yasser Arafat, as the main Palestinian national organisation as a result of the war in Gaza, says a leading Fatah militant. "We have moved into the era of Hamas which is now much stronger than it was," said Husam Kadr, a veteran Fatah leader in the West Bank city of Nablus, recently released after five-and-a-half years in Israeli prisons.

"Its era started when Israel attacked Gaza on 27 December."

The sharp decline in support for Fatah and the discrediting of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, because of his inertia during the 22-day Gaza war, will make it very difficult for the US and the EU to pretend that Fatah are the true representatives of the Palestinian community. The international community is likely to find it impossible to marginalise Hamas in reconstructing Gaza.

"Hamas has been highly successful in portraying itself as the party of the resistance, and Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas as the opponents of resistance at a time [when] the public wants to resist," said Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian minister of planning. He adds that Mr Abbas was badly damaged in the eyes of Palestinians when he blamed Hamas for Israel's assault on Gaza in the conflict's first two days.

Mr Kadr, who says he was tortured by Israeli interrogators during detention, does not welcome Hamas's triumph. But he is convinced that, just as Fatah's long reign was launched by the battle of Karamah in March 1968, when Fatah fighters aided by the Jordanian army, repelled an Israeli attack on their HQ in the Jordan valley, so Hamas will gain from the Gaza war. "The Hamas era comes 40 years after Karamah began the Fatah period," he says.

Hamas is conscious of its political success even if it was able to do little against the Israeli army. Mr Khatib, in his office in Ramallah, the Palestinian capital on the West Bank, says the first priority must be the formation of a Palestinian unity government between Hamas and Fatah. But he adds gloomily that "the chances of this happening are slim" because the Gaza war has exacerbated hatred between the two sides as Fatah supporters are hunted down and sometimes executed in Gaza.

Aside from Gaza there is another reason why President Abbas and Fatah are weak. Long years of negotiations with Israel have achieved nothing while red-roofed Israeli settlements have sprouted on every West Bank hilltop. Driving into Nablus, a city of 250,000 people that was once the bustling heart of the West Bank, the streets are empty and row after row of shops are shut.

"We had eight years of complete closure when people could not get in or out of Nablus aside from the 3 per cent who had permits," complains the city's mayor Adly Yaish. "Most factories shut and 60 per cent of people live below the poverty line." The closure became a little looser three months ago, but yesterday there were long lines of vehicles at the Israeli checkpoints around the city.

The rise of Hamas and the demise of Fatah is best explained by the failure of President Abbas to achieve anything through negotiations for ordinary Palestinians. "We in Fatah have failed to remove a single Israeli checkpoint," admits Mr Kadr. "It takes me as long to reach Ramallah 50 kilometres away as it would to fly from Jordan to Ankara."

He believes the Gaza war has spread the seeds for another Palestinian uprising. "The coming uprising will be very hard for both the Palestinians and the Israelis," he warns, though he does not forecast when it will occur. He points to a television in his office on which a young Palestinian girl called Dalal is shown picking through the ruins of her house in Gaza where all her family had died and only her cat had survived. "Can you imagine how Palestinians feel when they see this?" he asks.
Independent

Mitchell prepares for mission to Middle East as peace envoy

By Leonard Doyle


Barack Obama has confirmed Bill Clinton's Northern Ireland peace envoy, George Mitchell, as his special representative in the Middle East, saying he would send the former Democratic senator to the region "as soon as possible" in an attempt to secure a lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The President also appointed Richard Holbrooke, the veteran US peace negotiator in the Balkans, as his special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Middle East was foremost in Mr Obama's mind when he visited the State Department. "It will be the policy of my administration to actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as Israel and its Arab neighbours," he declared, with the newly confirmed Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, at his side.

During his transition to power, Mr Obama had allowed the Israeli onslaught in Gaza to proceed almost without comment. Yesterday, he expressed deep sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians, but also made clear that Hamas rocket attacks against Israel were unacceptable. "America is committed to Israel's security and will always defend Israel's right to defend itself," he said. He went on to demand that Hamas meets the conditions of the latest ceasefire, makes clear its recognition of Israel's right to exist, and renounces violence.

Mr Mitchell, 75, from Maine, brings a wealth of experience and credibility to his new job. As the fourth of five children born to an Irish father and a Lebanese mother, he has found himself drawn to two of the world's most intractable conflicts. Under President Clinton, he negotiated the Good Friday agreement in almost complete secrecy, an achievement that led in 1998 to the IRA ceasefire that set the scene for reconciliation.

Mr Mitchell's contacts with senior Irish Republicans did not always please London and Dublin, but he was trusted by all sides and his diplomatic skills are widely credited with resolving the bitter conflict. Yesterday, he said that tackling the Irish conflict had taught him there was "no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended".

He admitted that the "volatile, complex and dangerous" stand-off between Israel and the Palestinians had become so entrenched that it was seen by many as unchangeable. However, he has dealt with the region's problems before. A report he wrote in 2000 was praised for its impartiality and became the basis of the "road map" to peace. A document he wrote later called for a halt to Israeli settlements and greater efforts by the Palestinians to fight terrorism. Mr Mitchell will be plunged into efforts to establish a long-term ceasefire between Israel and Hamas after the carnage of recent weeks. Until the truce was called on Sunday, Israel had killed more than 1,200 Palestinians and wounded thousands more.

However, Mr Mitchell's appointment may not please Israel, given his reputation for being scrupulously even-handed, because recent US envoys have listened more carefully to the Israeli side than the Palestinian. "He is neither pro-Israeli nor pro-Palestinian," said Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel. "He is, in a sense, neutral."

Mr Holbrooke, who negotiated the 1995 peace deal that ended the war in Bosnia, faces an array of challenges in Afghanistan. He is an unapologetically assertive supporter of US interests, he also served under President Jimmy Carter and was Mr Clinton's ambassador to the UN.
Independent

Obama shuts network of CIA 'ghost prisons'


Camp Delta compound at Guantánamo Bay, which the US president, Barack Obama, has vowed to close within 12 months. Photograph: Brennan Linsley/AP

Barack Obama embarked on the wholesale deconstruction of George Bush's war on terror, shutting down the CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and rendition, and calling for a new set of rules for detainees. The repudiation of Bush's thinking on national security yesterday also saw the appointment of a high-powered envoy to the Middle East.

Obama's decision to permanently shut down the CIA's clandestine interrogation centres went far beyond the widely anticipated move to wind down the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year.

He cast his scrapping of the legal apparatus set up by Bush as a way for America to reclaim the moral high ground in the fight against al-Qaida.

"We are not, as I said during the inauguration, going to continue with the false choice between our safety and our ideals," Obama said at the signing ceremony. "We intend to win this fight. We are going to win it on our own terms."

In a sign of the sweeping rejection of the legal standards set by Bush, officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday said the new administration would not be guided by any of the opinions on torture and detainees issued by the justice department after 11 September 2001.

Instead, Obama, in three executive orders, renewed the US commitment to the Geneva convention on the treatment of detainees. All detainees will be registered by the International Committee for the Red Cross, in another departure of past practice under the Bush administration.

A group of 16 retired admirals and generals, in a meeting organised by Human Rights First, said the move would restore America's moral authority in the world, and strengthen its national security. "President Obama has rejected the false choice between national security and our ideals," they said.

As expected, Obama made good on his campaign promise to shut down Guantánamo, issuing an executive order to close the camp within a year. He also ordered a taskforce, led by the attorney general and the secretaries of defence, state and homeland security, to review the intelligence and information on each detainee and to determine whether they can be released or put on trial.

He called for a review on the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo to be completed within 30 days.

Another order directs the CIA to follow the US army field manual on interrogations, which bars such techniques as waterboarding.

Obama also directed a taskforce to study and report back within 180 days on whether new guidelines were required for intelligence officials, beyond those set down by the military. Administration officials were adamant that the review was not intended as a back door to reinstate torture. "There is not a secret annexe that allows us to bring enhanced interrogation techniques back," said one.

The final order mandates a review of the case of Ali Saleh Khalah al-Marri, a Qatari, the last enemy combatant on US soil, who is being held in a naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina.

Obama followed up the burst of activity on detention policy by announcing that his administration would put resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the top of his agenda, "actively and aggressively" seeking a comprehensive peace deal. As a sign of that intent, he confirmed that former senator George Mitchell, a veteran US mediator, would be his Middle East envoy.

Obama, who had been criticised for his silence during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, set out a new position that, while still leaning towards Israel, was more even-handed than that under Bush. He called for Hamas to stop firing rockets at Israel, but also said that Israel must "complete the withdrawal of its forces from Gaza".
Independent

Benn accuses BBC of betrayal over Gaza appeal

By Laura May, Press Association
Independent

Growing concern over Israel's weapons use

By Donald Macintyre in Atatra, northern Gaza Strip


Whether from delayed shock or not, Mahmoud Abu Halima was almost dispassionate as he pointed to the hole in the roof made by the artillery shelling which killed his father and burned to death his baby sister and three of his younger brothers. He had been next door and had come running when he heard the first explosion. “I started to go upstairs shouting ‘mama, mama’,”.he said. “But she was already coming down. She was burning. All her clothes were on fire. I put my jacket on her. She told me: ‘go and get your father, he is hurt.”

The sight that greeted Mahmoud, 20, is one which will presumably haunt him for the rest of his life. The rest of his family had been eating lunch in one of the rooms but when they first heard shooting had moved - fatally - into the hallway for safety. The corpse of his 45 year old tenant farmer father Sadallah, directly hit from a shell - one of three all the family say arrived in quick succession - was, Mahmoud said, “stuck together” with the bodies his three still smouldering sons, Abed, 14, Zaid,10 and Hamza,8 seemingly having hugged them to him in his last seconds. His 15 month old sister Shahed was lying separately after, in the words of her severely burned mother Sabah, also 45, she “melted away” as the missiles struck while she was being breast-fed.

If the investigation which the Israeli military announced this week into the use of white phosphorous is serious, it will have to examine the events at the Abu Halima house here in this semi-rural suburb of of Beit Lahiya, among many other locations. It's unlikely to dwell for long on the fact that the war saw the first use of artillery in Gaza since late 2006.

The military ended it after 18 members of one family were killed by shelling on a civilian house in Beit Hanoun in November 2006.

But it will have to take into account that the Amnesty International have no doubt that the shells which killed the Abu Halima family contained phosphorus. Nafez al Shaban, the Glasgow and US trained head of Shifa Hospital’s Burns Unit is certain that the bone-deep tissue destruction sustained by Mrs Halima, her critically injured daughter in law and grandaughter, were caused by it. And finally fragments of the brown spongy substance, with its unpleasantly pungent smell, are still lying in the debris outside the Abu Halima house.

After a week of ceasefire Israel is facing growing questions not only about phosphorus but what other weapons it used. For the many thousands of Gazan civilians seeking to rebuild their ruined lives the hope that a new US president will be more active in the region than his predecessor still seems barely relevant. And this is not only because of an injury total put by the ministry of health in Gaza at 5,300, or worries about long-term psychological damage to their children. They also face a protracted dispute between Israel, the Ramallah based Palestinian Authority, and much of the international community on the one hand, and Hamas on the other before multi-billion dollar task of reconstucrion can even begin. For most Gazans peace is a return to their previous impoverished life under siege —only worse.

In Gaza City, as the shops open and the Hamas policemen return to the traffic junctions it is possible to see some kind of surface normality. But to drive out here past the bombed out buildings on roads turned into barely passable dirt tracks by the Israeli tanks is to see a landscape described –without hyperbole—by the Red Cross as resembling an earthquake zone. About a mile from the Abu Halima house, two donkeys still lay dead beside road, just as the decomposing body of Shahed Abu Halima did for four days and those of her father and three brothers for nine until the Red Cross could reach them. The family say that while relatives got Sabah Abu Halima through to hospital in the the first truck the second two vehicles were fired on from tanks a few hundred metres down the road, killing two members and leaving the rest of the passengers to flee and abandon the bodies.

Atatra has long been identified by the Israeli forces as a launching ground for Qassams, and maybe some of the ruined buildings a mile or more from the Abu Halima home were booby trapped. But the family insists that no gunmen were operating round the home when it was shelled as the Israeli forces occupied their commanding position here overlooking Beit Lahiya. In Shifa, the wounded and bereaved Sabah, who voted Hamas in 2006, threatens to become a suicide bomber and says she wants Tzipi Livni to “burn as my children burned.” But her cousin Ibrahim, 58, says none of that. “We are all farmers,” he says.” We have no connection to the factions. Why are the Israelis doing this to us?”
Independent