Israel kills 10-year and six year old in Gaza

A ten-year-old Palestinian was killed and his sister seriously injured in an Israeli airstrike launched early Saturday in the northern Gaza Strip after rockets were fired from the besieged enclave.
Spokesman for the Gaza Ministry of Health Ashraf al-Qidra confirmed the death of Yasin Suleiman Abu Khusah,10, and told Ma’an his six-year-old sister Israa had sustained serious head injuries during the strike. Israa later died.
A Ma’an reporter based in Gaza said the children were in their house at the time of the strike, located in northwestern Beit Lahiya, adding that the family was still living in their home that was partially destroyed during the most recent Israeli offensive on the strip in 2014. Israa was transferred to Shifa Medical Center in Gaza City from Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya due to critical injuries, al-Qidra said.
The Israeli army said the Israeli air force targeted four Hamas sites in the northern Gaza Strip after four rockets were fired from the strip Friday evening.

Wednesday: three young Palestinians killed in two attacks, Israel wants to complete Wall in Jerusalem

 The car in which two Palestinians were shot. (Ma'an)

Israeli forces shot dead a 16-year-old Palestinian boy after he allegedly attempted to carry out a stabbing attack at a military checkpoint outside the blockaded village of al-Zawiya in Salfit district on Wednesday morning.
 The incident in al-Zawiya occurred shortly after the Israeli police shot dead two Palestinians outside Jerusalem's Old City after they opened fire in the area -- continuing a string of deadly encounters that shook Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories a day earlier.
Israeli police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld said the two Palestinians initially opened fire on an Israeli bus in the settlement of Ramot in occupied East Jerusalem, before fleeing the scene without causing any injuries.The shooting sparked a massive manhunt across Jerusalem, with Israeli police later spotting the car outside the Old City's New Gate. Rosenfeld said that a gun battle erupted between Israeli police and the two Palestinians, with both gunmen shot dead. They were later identified as Abdul-Malak Saleh Abu Kharoub,19, and Muhammad Jamal al-Kalouti, 21. A Palestinian bystander was also shot in the head in the crossfire.

Tuesday: Four Palestinians, one US tourist dead, 12 wounded after four Palestinian attacks

Ambulances after the shooting in Jerusalem.

Four Palestinians were shot dead after they allegedly carried out separate attacks in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, killing one tourist from the U.S. and wounding at least 12 others, on Tuesday morning, afternoon and evening.
In the first deadly encounter, shortly before 5 p.m., Israeli police spokesperson Luba al-Samri said a Palestinian man was shot dead after he allegedly stabbed and wounded an Israeli man near Petah Tikva, around seven miles east of Tel Aviv.Al-Samri said that an "Arab terrorist" stabbed a Jewish Israeli in his mid-30s "in the upper part of his body," leaving him with light to moderate injuries.Israeli police forces arrived on the scene and shot dead the Palestinian, she said, adding that Israeli forces closed the area for investigation.
Minutes later, another Palestinian was shot dead after allegedly firing gunshots at Israeli police forces near Salah al-Din Street in occupied East Jerusalem, injuring two Israeli officers.Israeli police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld said two Israeli policemen were wounded when a Palestinian shot them with an automatic weapon.

Israeli Arab parliamentarians again under fire after they criticize GCC decision to label Hezbollah ''terrorist organization''

Israel Katz

Israeli members of parliament (the Knesset) renewed their cries that Arab representatives have to be removed after the parties Balad and Hadash, who are part of the Joint Arab List,  Monday criticized the decision of the Gulf Cooperation Council to label Hezbollah a terrorist organization. 
"Hezbollah fights against Israeli attacks on Lebanon, and this decision only serves the interests of Israel and the US," a Balad spokesperson said. 
The GCC officially decided to label Hezbollah as a terrorist organization last Wednesday. Balad officials explained that they view the decision by the interior ministers of the GCC as dangerous because they are fueling the Sunni-Shia conflict, and adding fuel to the fire of this bloody conflict. Furthermore, the Balad officials claimed, the decision serves to widen the sectarian divisions in Lebanon, Syria, and the wider Arab world.
They also said that "the party doesn't believe that it is correct to tag Hezbollah - an organization which represents a large part of the Lebanese nation - as a terrorist organization, despite criticism over its participation in the fighting in Syria."

Sudanese leader Hassan al-Turabi 1932-2016

Turabi in 2012 (Reuters)

Prominent Sudanese politician Hassan al-Turabi, a veteran Islamist and leader of the opposition Popular Congress Party (PCP), has died at the age of 84, medical sources said on Saturday.
Turabi, one of the country's most influential political figures, formed the PCP in 1999 to challenge long-serving President Omar al-Bashir and his ruling National Congress Party, with which Turabi had previously been aligned.
He was rushed to hospital earlier on Saturday after suffering a heart attack, the sources said.
Turabi was elected speaker of parliament in 1996 and was close to Bashir before a bitter power struggle and split in 1999.

The media keep saying that the West isn't involved in Syria. This is not true

 

By Ian Sinclair, Open democracy



“The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary”, George Orwell noted in his censored preface to his 1945 book Animal Farm. “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban”. Orwell went onto explain that “at any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it”.
The corporate media’s ‘coverage’ of Syria adds a twist to Orwell’s dictum – inconvenient reports and facts do occasionally appear in respected newspapers and on popular news programmes but they are invariably ignored, decontextualised or not followed up on. Rather than informing the historical record, public opinion and government policy these snippets of essential information are effectively thrown down the memory hole.
Instead the public is fed a steady diet of simplistic, Western-friendly propaganda, a key strand of which is that the US has, as Channel 4 News’s Paul Mason blindly asserted in January 2016, “stood aloof from the Syrian conflict”. This deeply ingrained ignorance was taken to comical lengths when Mason’s Channel 4 News colleague Cathy Newman interviewed the former senior US State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter, with both women agreeing the US had not armed the insurgency in Syria.
In the real world the US has been helping to arm the insurgency since 2012, with US officials telling the Washington Post in last year that the CIA’s $1bn programme had trained and equipped 10,000 rebel fighters. “From the moment the CIA operation was started, Saudi money supported it”, notes the New York Times. According to the former American Ambassador to Syria, the US "has looked the other way" while fighters it has backed have "coordinated in military operations" with the Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria. The UK, of course, has obediently followed its master into the gates of hell, with the former UK Ambassador to Syria recently explaining the UK has made things worse by fuelling the conflict in Syria.

Mohammed Hassanein Heikal 1923-2016

President Gamal Abdel Nasser with his close confident Heikal

One of the most famous Egyptian journalists, authors and political commentators, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, died this Wednesday aged 92. According to sources around him three weeks ago his health started to deteriorate as a result of kidney failure. 
Heikal was born in 1923 and started his career as a journalist in the fall of 1942 at the Egyptian 
Gazette. His breakthrough came with his coverage of the WWII Battle of Al-Alamein. He later moved on to join the most established editor of the time, Mohamed El-Tabei, in the then most widely-circulated paper Akhr Saa. Lateron he joined Akhbar Al-Youm of the Amin-brothers.
His real fame came under president Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he helped to to coin his pan-Arabic ideology and whom he served as a close adviser. Heikal became editor-in-chief of the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper for 14 years starting in the year 1957. Also served four years starting in 1970  as Information Minister before returning to journalism.

HRW: Hamas should investigate torture and execution of member of Ezzedin al-Qassam-Brigades

Hamas authorities in Gaza should investigate their military wing for the apparent torture and execution of Mahmoud Eshtewi. Eshtewi, a member of that military wing, was detained in secret locations for over a year.

Eshtewi

Relatives said they and Eshtewi himself informed the most senior officials in Hamas’s civilian government that the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades was torturing Eshtewi, but officials did not intervene. Family members say one senior Hamas official endorsed the use of torture.
The Eshtewi case raises serious questions about who’s in charge in Gaza, Hamas’s civilian authorities or its military,” said Sari Bashi, Israel and Palestine director. “Hamas should conduct a genuine investigation into Eshtewi’s death, prosecute those responsible, and shut down any units operating outside the law.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed five relatives, whose names are withheld to protect them, and reviewed photographs of Eshtewi’s body and handwritten notes apparently smuggled out of a detention center. Human Rights Watch also contacted Hamas and hospital officials, but they declined to comment. The evidence supports allegations that Qassam operatives tortured Eshtewi, trampled upon his rights to due process, and may have extrajudicially executed him.

Saturday: 18-year old Palestinian girl killed in Hebron

A young Palestinian woman was shot dead on Saturday after stabbing an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian bystander near the Ibrahimi Mosque in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.
A witness told Ma’an that the young woman stabbed and lightly injured a soldier at a checkpoint near the mosque before she was shot by Israeli forces stationed on site.An Israeli army spokesperson confirmed the attack to Ma’an, saying that “an assailant drew a knife on a soldier guarding the Tomb of Patriarchs,” referring to the Ibrahimi Mosque.
A Palestinian at the site of the attack was also stabbed by the young woman. A witness told Ma’an that a Palestinian attempted to grab the young woman after she stabbed the soldier, in what the witness believed to be an attempt to protect the woman from getting shot.The woman then stabbed the man in the waist after he grabbed her, the witnesses said, adding that he believed the young woman may have mistaken the man for an Israeli settler.The Israeli army for their part said: “During an attempt to stab the soldier, the attacker stabbed a Palestinian who tried to intervene,” confirming that the soldier had been lightly wounded.

Israeli parliament rejects bill for proportional funding to Arab culture institutions

The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, has rejected a bill, which would require proportional budgeting from the Ministry of Culture to the Arab community. Minister of Culture, Miri Regev stated, “I can't accept such a principle that supports the idea that one-fifth of the population will receive one-fifth of the budget.

Yousef Jabareen

The bill, which was submitted by Member of Knesset, Dr. Youssef Jabareen on Wednesday, February 10^th, was rejected by a vote of 45 against and 37 for. The bill states that the Ministry of Culture does not equitably allocate funding to the different sectors and that the Arab population should not receive less than 20% which is their percentage of the total population in Israel.
Minister Regev stated that the reasons for her opposition to proposal are that she can't accept the idea that one-fifth of the population would get one-fifth of the budget. The Bill was intended to limit the discretionary power of the Minister over the distribution of funds. It was submitted in response to her initiative to make allocation of funding conditional upon loyalty to the state.

Israelis shoot dead 16-year old in refugee camp near Hebron

 Funeral of 16-year old Omar Madi. 

Israeli forces shot dead a 16-year-old Palestinian during clashes in the southern occupied West Bank district of Hebron's al-Arrub refugee camp on Tuesday, medical sources told Ma'an.
Doctors at al-Mizan hospital in Hebron said the boy, identified as Omar Madi, was shot in the chest during clashes in the camp and was evacuated to the hospital where he succumbed to his wounds. An Israeli army spokesperson did not immediately respond for comment. Locals said Israeli forces shot tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and live fire during clashes in the camp, while youths responded with rocks and Molotov cocktails.Al-Arrub refugee camp lies along Route 60, a major West Bank road that Israeli settlers regularly use to reach a cluster of illegal Israeli settlements in Hebron, and the camp has been site to frequent clashes with Israeli military over the past several months.On Friday, Israeli soldiers killed a 14-year-old Palestinian and detained another young boy along the route, after the two allegedly tried to throw Molotov cocktails at passing vehicles.

Netanyahu wants ''a fence to protect Israel from the wild beasts''

Netanyahu inspects fence at the border with Jordan near Eilat. (Photo EPA).

Binyamin Netanyahu has announced his intention to “surround all of Israel with a fence” to protect the country from infiltration by both Palestinians and the citizens of surrounding Arab states, whom he described as “wild beasts”.
The Israeli prime minister unveiled the proposal during a tour of the Jordan border area in Israel’s south, adding that the project – which would cost billions of shekels – would also be aimed at solving the problem of Hamas infiltration tunnels from Gaza, a recent source of renewed concern.
He called the border project a part of a “multi-year plan to surround Israel with security fences to protect ourselves in the current and projected Middle East”. Describing the need for new walls and fences on Tuesday, Netanyahu said: “In our neighbourhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts.