http://www.imemc.org/content/view/23101/1/
One day after opening it, Israel closes the Rafah Border Crossing
IMEMC & Agencies - Thursday, 07 December 2006, 15:16

Wa'el Abu Al Thahab, media spokesperson of the border crossing and the presidential guards, reported on Thursday, that Israel closed the Rafah Border Crossing, linking between Egypt and Gaza Strip. The Crossing was opened on Wednesday morning.

The Israeli closure of the crossing forced hundreds of residents back home especially after several hundreds headed to the crossing after Israel opened on Wednesday. Only several hundreds managed to cross on Wednesday.

A Palestinian security source said that the crossing was opened for the Palestinian residents stranded on the Egyptian side to enable them come back to Gaza, and for humanitarian and urgent cases.

Israel closed the Rafah Border Crossing since it initiated the Summer Rains offensive six months ago, Since then, the crossing was opened for limited hours on a number of days over the past six months.

he Rafah Border Crossing was closed ton June 25, and was only opened for several short periods enabling some residents to cross back into the Gaza Strip.

At least eight residents died at the Rafah Border Crossing since August after they were stranded there for several weeks due to the Israeli closure and siege imposed on the Gaza Strip after Palestinian fighters captured an Israeli soldier in a raid that targeted a military post near the Gaza borders.

http://www.imemc.org/content/view/23100/1/
Israeli violations of international law in Jerusalem serious as reported by human rights coalition
Palestine News Network - Thursday, 07 December 2006, 14:09

The coalition of civil institutions to defend the rights of Jerusalemites said that the Israeli authorities occupying Jerusalem continue to commit grave breaches to the International Law.

The violations include those of human rights, international law, international humanitarian law, United Nations conventions, and the International Declaration of Human Rights. The coalition issued a monthly report in cooperation with the Jerusalem Center for Democracy and Human Rights.

Israeli forces continued the policy of land confiscation, building and expanding settlements, Wall construction, and confiscating 1,328 Dunams of Anata Village in East Jerusalem.

The Wall is nearly complete in surrounding Jerusalem, cutting off residents from their city, schools, and medical facilities. Students cannot reach schools, nor can teachers.

The report also pointed out that farmers from Beit Jala and Bethlehem can no longer reach Jerusalem to market their olives and other agricultural products in Jerusalem, with passage through settler Road 60 now entirely forbidden for such purposes.

Freedom of worship is under duress, as it has been, with access to Al Aqsa Mosque nearly impossible for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, contradicting the International Declaration of Human Rights, Article 53 of the Geneva Convention Protocol I from 1977 which prohibits hostile acts against places of worship.

It is also considered a war crime under Article 8, Paragraph B of the Statute of the International Criminal Court passed in 1998 to intentionally direct attacks against buildings dedicated to religion. Everyday Israeli forces surround Al Aqsa Mosque and prevent most Palestinians from entering for worship, particularly on Fridays.

Home demolitions continued in Anata and Beit Hanina. Since 1967 Israeli forces have been demolishing Palestinian homes in Jerusalem in contravention to Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. And one day during the report period Israeli forces arrested 10 Palestinians, and on another 10, including four children.

Jerusalem is one of the most glaring examples of the slow, yet steady, process of ethnic cleansing, according to the coalition report which relies heavily on international law.

http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2006%20Opinion%20Editorials/December/7%20o/US%20and%20Israel%20Targeting%20DNA%20in%20Gaza%20The%20DIME%20Bomb%20Yet%20another%20genotoxic%20weapon,%20Part%20III%20By%20James%20Brooks.htm
(http://www.aljazeerah.info/)
US and Israel Targeting DNA in Gaza? The DIME Bomb: Yet another genotoxic weapon, Part III

By James Brooks

Al-Jazeerah, December 7, 2006

The human genome: target or innocent bystander?

Since early July, Israeli forces have been using a new weapon in the Gaza Strip that inflicts strange and deadly wounds. Doctors and medics say the unidentified device has significantly increased fatalities from Israel’s attacks. (1)(2)

In the first two parts of this article we reviewed evidence that Israel’s new weapon may be Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME), a “low collateral damage” weapon developed by the US Air Force. The DIME bomb’s “micro-shrapnel” is reportedly made of HMTA, a tungsten alloy that disrupts body biochemistry, damages the immune system, rapidly causes cancer, and attacks DNA (genotoxic). (3-9)

The Road to DIME

DIME weapons are "spin-offs" from the military’s “bunker buster” research. Initially, “bunker busters” were made with depleted uranium (DU), which had already been used in armor-piercing bombs, bullets, and artillery shells. (10)

The former director of the US Army’s Depleted Uranium project, Dr. Douglas Rokke, warns us that DU is an “illegal…radioactive toxic material”, the use of which “is absolutely unacceptable, and a crime against humanity.” (11)

During Gulf War I, US forces deployed more than 300 tons of DU in Iraq. A few years later, more was dropped during Operation Desert Fox. Iraqi doctors reported alarming rises in the incidence of cancer, leukemia, and birth defects, in clusters closely correlated with US bombsites. Scientists found strong links between DU and Gulf War Syndrome, which is slowly killing thousands of veterans. (12-14)

Despite the science, the vets, and the tragedies in Iraq, the US has stubbornly refused to end its use of DU. US-UK forces may have expended more than 2000 additional tons of DU in Iraq since March 2003. Nowadays, however, commanders are supposed to warn GIs to avoid contact with the results of their work. (15)

After the 2001-2002 bombing of Afghanistan, the Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC) found that the urine of Afghanis living near US bombing sites contained 4 to 20 times the normal level of non-depleted uranium (NDU). These unexpected results could not “be explained by…any known geological or other features in the area.”

UMRC researchers were “shocked” that, “without exception, at every bombsite investigated, people are ill…[with] symptoms consistent with internal contamination by uranium.” (13)

Their field results indicated that our weapons scientists had “progressed” beyond DU to NDU, a processed form of pure uranium that is even more toxic than the depleted form. The “slightly enriched” uranium reported from recent Israeli bombsites in Lebanon may possibly be NDU from modified GBU 28 ‘bunker busters’ supplied by the United States. (16)(17)

Dual-Purpose Munitions

Considering the scope of their destructive power, DU and NDU may be said to function as Dual-Purpose Munitions, like cluster bomblets that kill both tanks and people. As their exotic metallurgy “burns” through concrete and steel, DU and NDU bombs are converted to micron-sized particles that sicken and kill and murder the next generation in the womb.(18)(19)

Agent Orange, an herbicide heavily used during the war on Vietnam, also performed two functions. It obliterated the ‘jungle cover hiding the Viet Cong’ while it ‘weakened the enemy’ with burns, illness, and death, and corrupted the DNA of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. The third generation of its disfigured and suffering victims is now being born.(20)(21)

This madness seems to have begun during World War II, within the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb. In a 1943 memo to Brigadier General L. R. Groves, three researchers proposed steps to develop:

“a gas warfare instrument” [of radioactive material, such as uranium] “ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke….in this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small. It has been estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulating in a person's body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty.” (22)

The good doctors were concerned the Germans might be preparing such a weapon. They urged the Army to be ready to respond, or act, in kind. General Groves promptly followed their recommendations.

The toxic HMTA “micro-shrapnel” spewed by DIME weapons appears to be the latest development in a long string of carcinogenic and genotoxic weapons developed and deployed by the US military.

Return to Gaza: The mythology of murder

Israel has denied using DIME weapons. Nonetheless, Israel’s military has used the occupied Palestinian territories as a weapons development zone for decades, testing bright ideas like depleted uranium and poison gases. It would not surprise us to find that it is now testing a weapon for the US Air Force on Palestinians in Gaza. (23)

Unfortunately, the DIME hypothesis is the most plausible explanation for the grotesque effects of Israel’s new weapon. We can only pray that we have not witnessed the first experiment in the effects of embedded HMTA in human subjects.

Still, DIME may not explain all of the evidence. For example, one of the metals found in victims’ wounds was copper. DIME bombs are not known to contain significant copper, but another US marvel, the Sensor Fuzed Weapon (SFW), sprays slugs of molten copper at its targets. Is Israel also testing the SFW? (24)(25)

If DIME weapons are designed to reduce civilian casualties, why has Israel’s ‘mystery weapon’ increased the civilian death toll? Perhaps this question should be addressed to the advocates of Focused Lethality Munitions, and to the remote-control operators of Israel’s drone aircraft and their commanders and politicians.

Although much remains unclear about Israel’s new weapon, a few devastating facts are indisputable:

The weapon causes enormous and indiscriminate pain and suffering.

It operates as both a chemical weapon and an anti-personnel explosive. At the very least, it is likely to induce heavy metal poisoning in its surviving victims.

The weapon has significantly increased civilian mortality rates, in part because it inflicts virtually untreatable wounds.

Despite this public parade of horrors, Israeli forces have continued to use this weapon against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for nearly five months.

“Whenever and wherever necessary”

If the DIME hypothesis is confirmed, authorities will probably explain that it is a new class of weapon not regulated by international law. The truth is that existing conventions and treaties have already prohibited some of the most egregious effects of the new weapon.

To cite one example, the bomb may be in direct violation of Protocol I of the 'Geneva Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons', which "prohibits the use of any weapon the primary effect of which is to injure by fragments which in the human body escape detection by X-rays." (26)

We will likely be told that DIME weapons provide a more “humane” way to fight “terrorism” by “reducing collateral damage” and “helping US troops win hearts and minds”. At the same time, we’ll be assured that the new weapon “packs quite a punch” and will “give our troops more options” to “take the battle to the enemy”, even if he is “hiding among civilians”.

Whether Israel’s new weapon is the Air Force’s DIME bomb or another similarly dreadful invention, the horrors unfolding in Gaza make it clear that “Focused Lethality” is a blood-drenched lie. It promises only a deadlier form of indiscriminate warfare.

US plans to explode payloads of cancer-causing genotoxic heavy metal powder “wherever and whenever necessary” may portend an escalation of a campaign currently limited to the vicinity of “hard targets” we attack with DU and NDU. Whatever we make of the intent behind these weapons, the habitual result is chemical-genetic warfare. It cannot be allowed to continue.

References:

1) Gaza doctors say patients suffering mystery injuries after Israeli attacks
By Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, 10/18/2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1924675,00.html

2) Israel used chemical weapons in Lebanon and Gaza
By Jean Shaoul, Centre for Research on Globalization/wsws.org, 10/24/2006
http://wsws.org/articles/2006/oct2006/isra-o24.shtml

3) Abstract: Potential late health effects of depleted uranium and tungsten used in armor-piercing munitions: comparison of neoplastic transformation and genotoxicity with the known carcinogen nickel
Miller, AC, et al, PubMed, 11/26/2006
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11873492&dopt=Abstract

4) Neoplastic transformation of human osteoblast cells to the tumorigenic phenotype by heavy metal–tungsten alloy particles: induction of genotoxic effects
Miller, AC et al
Carcinogenesis, Vol. 22, No. 1, 115-125, January 2001, Oxford University Press
http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/22/1/115

5) Abstract: Carcinogenic Potential of Depleted Uranium and Tungsten Alloys
Alexandra C Miller, Ph. D., Department Of Defense, Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI)
http://www.deploymentlink.osd.mil/du_library/reports/projects/dod122.htm

6) Depleted uranium-catalyzed oxidative DNA damage: absence of significant alpha particle decay
Miller, AC et al, Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, Issue 91, 2002 pp. 246– 252
http://www.afrri.usuhs.mil/www/outreach/pdf/tungsten_cancer.pdf

7) Embedded Weapons-Grade Tungsten Alloy Shrapnel Rapidly Induces Metastatic High-Grade Rhabdomyosarcomas in F344 Rats
Kalinich et al, Environmental Health Perspectives Volume 113, Number 6, June 2005
http://www.ehponline.org/members/2005/7791/7791.html

8) Abstract: Effect of the militarily-relevant heavy metals, depleted uranium and heavy metal tungsten-alloy on gene expression in human liver carcinoma cells (HepG2)
By Miller, AC et al, SpringerLink/Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, 1/1/2004
http://www.springerlink.com/content/u8830115617471jl/

9) Preconceptional paternal exposure to radiation or heavy metals like cadmium can induce cancer in unexposed offspring
By Alexandra C. Miller, Rafael Rivas, Robert J. Merlot and Paul, Carcinogenesis 5: Environmental and Endogenous Carcinogens/Proc Amer Assoc Cancer Res, Volume 47, 2006
http://www.aacrmeetingabstracts.org/cgi/content/abstract/2006/1/448-b

10) Cancer Worries for New U.S. Bombs
DefenseTech.org, 5/20/2006
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002434.html

11) Depleted Uranium and US-Israeli Bombs
By Dr. Doug Rokke, PhD, Media Lens, 7/24/2006
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1153759483.html

12) Dirty Weapons - Casualties From Iraq War Will Mount
By Chalmers Johnson, Pacific News Service, 5/3/2003
http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=84a8df02a7c1f370c5ca152d5ef14d6b

13) Uranium Radiation Levels in Afghanistan Not Attributable to Depleted Uranium
Centre for Research on Globalization - Middle East, 6/5/2003
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/UMR306B.html

14) Depleted Uranium Radioactive Contamination In Iraq: An Overview
By Prof Souad N. Al-Azzawi, Centre for Research on Globalization - Middle East, 8/31/2006
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=AL-20060831&articleId=3116

15) Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons Lingers as Health Concern
By Larry Johnson, Common Dreams, 8/4/2003
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0804-04.htm

16) Further Evidence Of Enriched Uranium In The Air In Lebanon Following The Recent Conflict
Stop Uranium Wars/Pandora DU research Project, 11/22/2006
http://www.stopuraniumwars.blogspot.com/

17) Mystery of Israel's secret uranium bomb
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, 10/28/2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1935945.ece

18) The Real Dirty Bombs: Depleted Uranium
By Christopher Bollyn, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, 8/6/2004
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2004/08/06_bollyn_real-dirty-bombs.htm

19) Depleted Uranium
Australian Peace Committee, 12/2/2006
http://www.peacecourier.com/depleted_uranium.htm

20) Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign
http://www.vn-agentorange.org/

21) Agent Orange DNA injury confirmed in Vietnam veterans
By Patrick Gower, New Zealand Herald, 7/29/2006
http://subs.nzherald.co.nz/feature/story.cfm?c_id=500855&objectid=10393538

22) Memorandum to: Brigadier General L. R. Groves From: Drs. Conant, Compton, and Urey
Midfully.org/War Department, United States Engineer Office, Manhattan District, Oak Ridge Tennessee, 10/30/1943
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Groves-Memo-Manhattan30oct43.htm

23) The Israeli Poison Gas Attacks
James Brooks, Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel
http://www.vtjp.org/report/

24) CBU-97
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBU-97

25) Textron Systems' Sensor Fuzed Weapon Production to Include Maritime Capability
Textron Systems Corporation, 8/10/2006
www.systems.textron.com/mainframe/pressroom/archives/2006/08_10_06.html

26) Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons...
United Nations: International Law, 10/10/1980
http://www.un.org/millennium/law/xxvi-18-19.htm

James Brooks serves as webmaster for Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel (www.vtjp.org). He can be contacted at jamiedb@wildblue.net.

http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2006%20Opinion%20Editorials/December/7%20o/The%20Independent%20Appeals%20to%20Readers%20to%20Help%20the%20Palestinian%20People.htm
(http://www.aljazeerah.info/)

An appeal for an abandoned people
This year, The Independent's Christmas Appeal will focus on the dispossessed of the Palestinian territories, for whom 2006 has been the worst of times
By Donald Macintyre in Gaza
Published: 05 December 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/appeals/indy_appeal/article2040128.ece

Maybe they are just conveniently forgetting other periods in Gaza's turbulent and blood-stained history, but most Gazans will tell you that 2006 is the worst year they can remember.
In Gaza City's deserted gold souk, people are not even coming to sell their jewellery any more. "We just sit and drink tea," said Yasser Moteer, 35, who runs a jewellery stall. "It's worse than any time in the 20 years I've been here. It's crazy."

The gold-selling started soon after the international and Israeli boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority started to plunge Gaza's economy into collapse last March. But having long ceased to buy here, the poor now have nothing left to sell.

Certainly, the 1.3 million population of this ancient coastal strip of territory, a mere 225 square miles, can never have experienced as intense a swing of hope to despair as they have in little more than 12 months. Ariel Sharon's decision to withdraw Israel's settlers and troops in August 2005, unilateral and circumscribed in both its genesis and its implementation as it was, made many Palestinians here, almost despite themselves, hope for a better future.

It was not just the sudden freedom to travel from north to south without the endless delays at the hated Abu Houli checkpoint, or that children in the southern town of Khan Younis could run west through what were now the ruins of the Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim and plunge into a Mediterranean they had only ever dreamt about.

It was the sense that for the first time in five dark, stifling and dangerous years, Gaza could breathe, psychologically, and just maybe, economically.

As 2006 nears its close and The Independent launches its Christmas appeal partly focused on Gaza, it is easy to see how cruelly those hopes have been mocked by what has happened this year.

Since Hamas and other Gaza militants seized the Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit, and killed two of his comrades in late June, shells, drones and machine gun-fire from Israeli forces have killed some 400 Palestinians, civilians, women and children among them, in an operation Israel stated was to free Cpl Shalit and stop the Qassam rockets being fired from Gaza.

For five long months, electricity was cut to eight hours a day, damaging water supplies, after a surgically accurate bombing condemned by Israelis as well as foreign human rights groups as collective punishment in breach of humanitarian law.

Reaching a peak in July, the use of sonic booms, often deliberately timed as children were going to school, created misery and fear. As if that was not enough, a far lower but significant number of civilians, also including children, have been killed or wounded in the sporadic fighting between Fatah and Hamas, the two dominant factions in Palestinian politics, or in clan battles.

For the immediate survivors of the Israeli shells that killed 17 members of the Athamneh family as they tried to flee their home in Beit Hanoun as it was attacked, the bereavement is, if anything, harder to bear now that more than three weeks have elapsed since it happened. In late afternoon sunshine on Sunday, in the now eerily peaceful alley where the carnage was perpetrated, Hayat Athamneh, 56, a strong woman who lost three adult sons, all fathers themselves, sat with their still devastated and injured brother Amjad, 31, and his wife, who lost their own son Mahmoud, 10. "Now I feel it," said Hayat, covering her eyes as they fill with tears. " It wasn't so bad at the beginning. There were a lot of people around. Now there is nobody."

As she reeled off the list of Palestinian and foreign dignitaries who had visited the site, her daughter-in-law Tahani, 35, said: "They all came. But nothing happened." Tahani talks about the three surviving Athamneh members, two of them children, who lost limbs in the attack.

"We have to worry about the ones who lost arms and legs now and will see the others who haven't. We have to look after them and then worry about where we are going to live."

Arriving to join them, her brother-in-law Majdi Athamneh, who lost his 12-year-old son Saad, says that not only do the extended family fear to go back to their shelled house because of the structural damage, but they no longer think they should live together as they did for so many years.

"When so many members of one family were killed, it is better to make sure it doesn't happen again and live apart," he said.

Five miles away in Gaza City, Adeeb Zarhouk, 44, is a man used to hard work and 4am starts to support his wife Majda, 44, and their seven children in the 20 years he was employed in Israel as a freelance metalworker and electrician, and then for five working for an Israeli company in the now flattened Erez industrial zone on the northern edge of Gaza. But this morning he apologises for being asleep when we call.

Each day, he hopes for a request to install a TV satellite or do another odd job. "But the phone hasn't rung for two weeks," he says. " Nobody has any money to do these things." Mr Zarhouk is part of the 64 per cent increase in "deep poverty" among Palestinian refugees in the past year.

He is naturally cheerful but, as his wife prepares a three-shekel (36p) family breakfast of beans, felafal and a few tomatoes, he says: "When I'm at home by myself I start crying. When your son asks you for half a shekel and you do not have it ..."

Mr Zarhouk gets up to wash the tears from his eyes. Then he says that although as a refugee he earned $240 (£120) a month on a three-month UNRWA job programme, he now owes $540 in rent and that the family eat meat only when his 20-year-old policeman son has an irregular 1,500-shekel handout in lieu of his salary as a policeman.

Who does Mr Zarhouk, who voted Fatah in the last election, blame? "I blame democracy," he says with a flash of sarcasm. "The whole world wanted us to have democracy and said how fair had been our election. The problem is they didn't like our results."

The world's boycott since those elections did not only end salaries for the PA employees on whom Gaza's economy disproportionately depends. The health service, in many ways highly professional but desperately under-equipped, is also suffering. In her bed at Shifa Hospital, Intisar al Saqqa is waiting for the drug Taxoter which doctors said she needs to treat a breast cancer which has spread to her lung and her liver. "Every week, they say it will come on Monday," says her mother, Hadra, 62. "But it doesn't. Inshallah, it will come soon." Her daughter says: "I don't blame anybody. I just want this [the political problems beyond her control] to end. "

The EU-sponsored Temporary International Mechanism was supposed to get a full range of drugs and badly needed new equipment to Gaza long before now ­ but because of its own bureaucratic delays has failed to do so.

Similarly, a year after Condoleezza Rice brokered an agreement to open up Gaza's borders, a UN report said last week that Gaza's access to the outside world was "extremely limited" and that commercial trade was " negligible".

That is diplomatese for saying Gaza is ­ the word every Palestinian uses ­ a prison again. Israel refuses to take the blame, saying the boycott and closures result directly from security anxieties and from the refusal of Hamas to modify its stances on recognition and violence.

The power is back on and a fragile ceasefire holding. But with Fatah-Hamas talks collapsed, there is little political hope in sight; and plenty to do for the NGOs and charities ­ like Merlin and the Welfare Association ­ which are trying to keep Gaza alive.

Maybe they are just conveniently forgetting other periods in Gaza's turbulent and blood-stained history, but most Gazans will tell you that 2006 is the worst year they can remember.
In Gaza City's deserted gold souk, people are not even coming to sell their jewellery any more. "We just sit and drink tea," said Yasser Moteer, 35, who runs a jewellery stall. "It's worse than any time in the 20 years I've been here. It's crazy."

The gold-selling started soon after the international and Israeli boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority started to plunge Gaza's economy into collapse last March. But having long ceased to buy here, the poor now have nothing left to sell.

Certainly, the 1.3 million population of this ancient coastal strip of territory, a mere 225 square miles, can never have experienced as intense a swing of hope to despair as they have in little more than 12 months. Ariel Sharon's decision to withdraw Israel's settlers and troops in August 2005, unilateral and circumscribed in both its genesis and its implementation as it was, made many Palestinians here, almost despite themselves, hope for a better future.

It was not just the sudden freedom to travel from north to south without the endless delays at the hated Abu Houli checkpoint, or that children in the southern town of Khan Younis could run west through what were now the ruins of the Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim and plunge into a Mediterranean they had only ever dreamt about.

It was the sense that for the first time in five dark, stifling and dangerous years, Gaza could breathe, psychologically, and just maybe, economically.

As 2006 nears its close and The Independent launches its Christmas appeal partly focused on Gaza, it is easy to see how cruelly those hopes have been mocked by what has happened this year.

Since Hamas and other Gaza militants seized the Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit, and killed two of his comrades in late June, shells, drones and machine gun-fire from Israeli forces have killed some 400 Palestinians, civilians, women and children among them, in an operation Israel stated was to free Cpl Shalit and stop the Qassam rockets being fired from Gaza.

For five long months, electricity was cut to eight hours a day, damaging water supplies, after a surgically accurate bombing condemned by Israelis as well as foreign human rights groups as collective punishment in breach of humanitarian law.

Reaching a peak in July, the use of sonic booms, often deliberately timed as children were going to school, created misery and fear. As if that was not enough, a far lower but significant number of civilians, also including children, have been killed or wounded in the sporadic fighting between Fatah and Hamas, the two dominant factions in Palestinian politics, or in clan battles.

For the immediate survivors of the Israeli shells that killed 17 members of the Athamneh family as they tried to flee their home in Beit Hanoun as it was attacked, the bereavement is, if anything, harder to bear now that more than three weeks have elapsed since it happened. In late afternoon sunshine on Sunday, in the now eerily peaceful alley where the carnage was perpetrated, Hayat Athamneh, 56, a strong woman who lost three adult sons, all fathers themselves, sat with their still devastated and injured brother Amjad, 31, and his wife, who lost their own son Mahmoud, 10. "Now I feel it," said Hayat, covering her eyes as they fill with tears. " It wasn't so bad at the beginning. There were a lot of people around. Now there is nobody."

As she reeled off the list of Palestinian and foreign dignitaries who had visited the site, her daughter-in-law Tahani, 35, said: "They all came. But nothing happened." Tahani talks about the three surviving Athamneh members, two of them children, who lost limbs in the attack.

"We have to worry about the ones who lost arms and legs now and will see the others who haven't. We have to look after them and then worry about where we are going to live."
Arriving to join them, her brother-in-law Majdi Athamneh, who lost his 12-year-old son Saad, says that not only do the extended family fear to go back to their shelled house because of the structural damage, but they no longer think they should live together as they did for so many years.

"When so many members of one family were killed, it is better to make sure it doesn't happen again and live apart," he said.

Five miles away in Gaza City, Adeeb Zarhouk, 44, is a man used to hard work and 4am starts to support his wife Majda, 44, and their seven children in the 20 years he was employed in Israel as a freelance metalworker and electrician, and then for five working for an Israeli company in the now flattened Erez industrial zone on the northern edge of Gaza. But this morning he apologises for being asleep when we call.

Each day, he hopes for a request to install a TV satellite or do another odd job. "But the phone hasn't rung for two weeks," he says. " Nobody has any money to do these things." Mr Zarhouk is part of the 64 per cent increase in "deep poverty" among Palestinian refugees in the past year.

He is naturally cheerful but, as his wife prepares a three-shekel (36p) family breakfast of beans, felafal and a few tomatoes, he says: "When I'm at home by myself I start crying. When your son asks you for half a shekel and you do not have it ..."

Mr Zarhouk gets up to wash the tears from his eyes. Then he says that although as a refugee he earned $240 (£120) a month on a three-month UNRWA job programme, he now owes $540 in rent and that the family eat meat only when his 20-year-old policeman son has an irregular 1,500-shekel handout in lieu of his salary as a policeman.

Who does Mr Zarhouk, who voted Fatah in the last election, blame? "I blame democracy," he says with a flash of sarcasm. "The whole world wanted us to have democracy and said how fair had been our election. The problem is they didn't like our results."

The world's boycott since those elections did not only end salaries for the PA employees on whom Gaza's economy disproportionately depends. The health service, in many ways highly professional but desperately under-equipped, is also suffering. In her bed at Shifa Hospital, Intisar al Saqqa is waiting for the drug Taxoter which doctors said she needs to treat a breast cancer which has spread to her lung and her liver. "Every week, they say it will come on Monday," says her mother, Hadra, 62. "But it doesn't. Inshallah, it will come soon." Her daughter says: "I don't blame anybody. I just want this [the political problems beyond her control] to end. "

The EU-sponsored Temporary International Mechanism was supposed to get a full range of drugs and badly needed new equipment to Gaza long before now ­ but because of its own bureaucratic delays has failed to do so.

Similarly, a year after Condoleezza Rice brokered an agreement to open up Gaza's borders, a UN report said last week that Gaza's access to the outside world was "extremely limited" and that commercial trade was " negligible".

That is diplomatese for saying Gaza is ­ the word every Palestinian uses ­ a prison again. Israel refuses to take the blame, saying the boycott and closures result directly from security anxieties and from the refusal of Hamas to modify its stances on recognition and violence.

The power is back on and a fragile ceasefire holding. But with Fatah-Hamas talks collapsed, there is little political hope in sight; and plenty to do for the NGOs and charities ­ like Merlin and the Welfare Association ­ which are trying to keep Gaza alive.

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=17876
Israel assigns US $38 million to encouraging business development in the Arab sector in Israel
Date: 07 / 12 / 2006 Time: 13:11

Ma'an - On 5 December, the Israeli government announced that it would establish a private equity fund aimed at encouraging business development in minority sectors, particularly the Arab Israeli sector.

According to official media statements from the Israeli prime minister's office, this fund will make 160 million Israeli shekels (~US $38 million) available to the Arab Israeli sector over a 7 to 10 year period.

At a Jewish-Arab Center for Economic Development conference in the Israeli city of Herzliya, a prime ministerial official said that Israel needs to “realize the great economic and human potential that exists in the Arab sector but which has yet to be utilized.”

The official, Ra’anan Dinur, said that the fund is aimed at encouraging investment in business in Arab areas.

He added: “We want to prevent a situation in which Israel has two separate economies – with different patterns of participation in the workforce, different levels of participation and unequal opportunities. Government policy must provide the tools to ensure the sector’s ability to integrate into the Israeli economy.”