Beaten Palestinian youth is U.S. citizen, cousin of murdered kidnap victim
Video shows the boy being beaten by three policemen; U.S. State Department calls for a 'credible investigation and full accountability for any excessive use of force.'
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) meets with US President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, March 3, 2014. (photo by REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)
“Secretary Kerry and I remain determined to work with both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas to pursue a two-state solution.” This is the pledge made by US President Barack Obama in an article being published July 8 in the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Summary On the occasion of the 2014 “Israel Conference on Peace,” President Barack Obama calls on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to compromise, but does the US not bear any responsibility for the negotiation crisis?
Author Akiva Eldar Posted July 7, 2014 Translator(s)Ruti Sinai
In the lead article of the special supplement being issued by the newspaper on the occasion of the Israel Conference on Peace, convened by Haaretz in Tel Aviv on the morning of July 8 (in the interest of full disclosure, I serve as director-general of the conference), Obama leaves no doubt as to the essence of that “determination.” The president makes clear that he and Secretary of State John Kerry .. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/john-kerry-benjamin-netanyahu-mahmoud-abbas-arab-spring.html .. will get to work and contribute their fair share only when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas themselves show that “the political will exists to recommit to serious negotiations.”
Indeed, good tidings for the people of Israel. But if the president is so committed to Israel’s security .. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/03/obama-in-israel-it-was-worth-the-wait.html , and if his belief in peace is the basis for that commitment, why does he abandon the task of peace making? After all, according to his own testimony, it is the belief in peace which constitutes the basis of his commitment to the security of Israel's citizens?
The US president further notes in his article that ''refusing to compromise or cooperate with one another won’t do anything to increase security for either the Israeli or the Palestinian people.''
Given the deteriorating security in recent days, on both sides of the Green Line, is there any doubt that the words “compromise” and “cooperation” have left the Israeli-Palestinian lexicon for an extended vacation?
According to comments made by Abbas in a recorded interview to be aired at the conference, Obama and Kerry were the ones who failed to display exemplary political will to promote the negotiations. “Kerry did not propose any framework,” the Palestinian president .. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/02/kadima-leader-shaul-mofaz-abu-mazen-is-the-only-partner.html .. contends. “He only verbally conveyed certain ideas concerning the framework.”
Abbas says that the wording of the framework agreements was orally read to him, but he did not receive any document in his hands. When President Obama asked him whether he was willing to adopt Kerry’s framework, Abbas says his answer was: “I cannot say whether I do, or do not, accept the framework without having it as a written text. Since if it [the framework] had been delivered to me verbally, any person, any side, can claim this happened and this did not. Until now, we have not been submitted any written framework. When I ask of it, I'm told: ‘We're working on it.’”
Abbas also said that Kerry told him it would be better at that stage to give up on a framework and instead “we may better work on summarized small ideas — he named ‘petite’ — that he will present us.” Abbas rejected Israel’s claim that he did not accept Kerry’s proposal. “Tell me how exactly did we refuse and did not accept?” he claimed, insisting, “We refused nothing.”
What are Obama’s options at this point? To watch from the sidelines as the radical Jewish right wing and the Hamas zealots turn Palestine and Israel into the arena of another bloody Middle Eastern war? To drag the sides into another round of talks based on the same failed formula of the bilateral negotiations between Israeli chief negotiator Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat? To sit idly by until the Israeli public wises up and stops walking with its eyes wide shut into an abyss of racism and ostracism?
Prince Turki al-Faisal .. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/05/prince-al-faisal-amos-yadlin-meeting-israel-arab-peace-initiativ.html , who served as chief of Saudi intelligence (1977 to 2001) and his country’s ambassador to the United Kingdom (2002 to 2005) and the United States (2005-2006), suggests another option. In an article in the special Haaretz peace supplement — the first by a senior Saudi in an Israeli newspaper — the prince wrote that the timeout in Kerry’s mediation efforts and the grave disappointment in the failed US diplomacy provide a rare opportunity to advance the Arab Peace Initiative, first proposed by Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz and adopted by the Arab League in 2002. According to him, the initiative constitutes a framework for a just and comprehensive solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as with the Arab world.
Turki proposes the Arab Peace Initiative as an alternative to Kerry’s suggestion of negotiating individually on each of the core issues (borders, security, Jerusalem and refugees). He writes in his article that acceptance of this initiative’s principles (normalization with all Arab states in return for Israeli withdrawal to a border based on the 1967 lines and a just and agreed upon solution to the refugee problem based on UN Resolution 194) will enable the opening of negotiations over the exact borders and the refugee problem, in accordance with international principles. He noted that an Arab League delegation to Washington in April 2013 made clear that the Arab Peace Initiative was not static and was not a simplistic dictate; rather it could be adapted in order to reflect everything on which Israelis and Palestinians agree upon in negotiations.
The Saudi prince ends his article with an expression of concern. He is worried that an alternative to the Arab initiative, which Israel keeps stubbornly ignoring, is a continuous conflict until the day when the question will no longer be how to reach a two-state solution but whether bloodshed will continue to be the norm. “Is that really what Israel wants?” Turki wonders.
That question can also be put to Obama, who wishes to show the Israelis his commitment to their security through slogans about joint development of technological defense systems, such as devices for the long-distance detection of explosives. The president would be better off helping them detect the explosives lying at their feet. When the ground is burning in Israel and the territories, true friends are not allowed to watch the impending disaster from afar.
F6, yours is spot on, not so sure of this one as there is no doubt President Obama is committed to Israel's security .. i think Abbas' point is fairly put ..
Israel 150+ Hamas 0 As Israel Hits Mosque and Clinic, Air Campaign’s Risks Come Home
By STEVEN ERLANGERJULY 12, 2014
Slide Show|11 Photos .. Air Strikes Continue Into a Sixth Day in Gaza
CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times
BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip — As Israel’s air war against Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters in Gaza entered its sixth day on Saturday, a pair of bombings threw the difficulties of the campaign into painful relief: Israel bombed a mosque, which its aerial photos indicated was harboring a weapons cache, and a center for the disabled, killing two residents and wounding three, as well as a caretaker.
A separate strike on the house of a police commander killed at least 18 people, the highest toll so far this conflict, bringing the total number of dead to at least 140, Palestinian officials said.
In response, Hamas fired a barrage of rockets at Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city, garnering much attention despite causing no deaths or injuries, as three of them were intercepted.
There were also signs of imminent escalation as the Israeli military said it was going to send messages to northern Gaza residents to vacate their homes “for their own safety,” amid preparations for a possible invasion.
--- Major Strikes So Far
Here are approximate locations of 19 major airstrikes that resulted in deaths since Israel began its air campaign on Tuesday. The Israeli military says it has struck more than 1,100 targets since it started the operation in response to waves of rockets being fired from Gaza.
Sources: Palestinian Center for Human Rights (strike locations and estimates of the number of dead); United Nations (map) ---
The Interior Ministry in Gaza urged Palestinians to ignore the warnings, calling them psychological warfare.
But the Israeli military said early Sunday that four soldiers were slightly wounded during a brief incursion into northern Gaza to destroy a rocket launching site, according to The Associated Press. It is the first time that Israeli ground troops are known to have entered Gaza in this offensive, The A.P. said, but the raid was carried out by special forces and did not appear to be the beginning of a broad ground offensive.
The Israeli bombing of the center for the disabled, the Mabaret Palestine Society here in northern Gaza, occurred just before dawn, when a missile crashed through the roof and exploded. Because it was the weekend, only five of the 19 severely disabled residents were at the center, while the rest were with their families, said Jamila Elaiwa, who founded the center 20 years ago.
She spoke at Al Shifa hospital’s burn unit, while she was visiting the wounded, including Mai Hamada, 30, and Salwa Abu al-Qomssan, 53, the caretaker, both of them with severe burns. Two more residents were in intensive care. The dead were identified as Ula Wisha, 31, and Suha Abusada, 39, whose family said she had been born severely disabled and unable to speak.
Muhammad Abu al-Qomssan, 32, the caretaker’s eldest son, said that his mother “has a soft heart,” and felt fortunate to have found this new job only three weeks ago. She had been to predawn prayers and told him she had arrived only a few minutes before the bomb struck, he said.
Ms. Elaiwa, 59, said that her center was well-known in the neighborhood and that it had been in the same building for almost a decade. She said she had no idea why it would be bombed. “No one lived there except us,” she said. “There was no one else in the building.”
At the site, neighbors picked through the rubble of modest medical equipment and scattered children’s books, from the small neighborhood children’s library Ms. Elaiwa ran. There was a seared copy of “Jane Eyre,” condensed, in English with Arabic translation, and an English-language copy of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”
Neighbors like Yasir Abu Shoodq, 32, stared up at the sky through the holes the missile cut through the roof and each floor before making a crater in the ground. Children picked up the chunks of sharp steel from the crater and made off with them.
Mr. Abu Shoodq said, and Ms. Elaiwa confirmed, that there had first been a warning rocket, “a knock on the roof,” a few minutes before the missile hit. “But no one understood what it meant,” she said. “No one could imagine the center would be a target for anyone.” In any case, she said, the severity of the residents’ disabilities would have prevented them from fleeing on their own.
An Israel Defense Forces map of the mosque that was hit in central Gaza. Credit Israel Defense Forces
Azzedin Ali, 26, another neighbor, said angrily: “They are bankrupt of targets and of pity. What would the handicapped have been resisting? This is the enemy striking civilians in the places they think they are safe.”
As he spoke, perhaps a mile away, a rocket was launched from Gaza toward Israel, its contrail slightly wobbly in a hot, hazy sky.
In a rare Saturday briefing for reporters at Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv, a senior military official said, when asked, that the army was looking into what happened at the center for the disabled. “A group is investigating now what was the target, what was the intelligence,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with military protocol.
The briefing was an apparent effort to rebuff growing international alarm at the rising death toll from the airstrikes in Gaza and the calls for restraint.
The official spoke of the difficulties the air force faced in minimizing collateral damage in the densely populated environment of Gaza, describing the mission as “very challenging,” and showed video clips from the air that he said demonstrated the military’s care in targeting.
One clip showed a mission that was aborted because civilians, including children, were spotted in the vicinity of the target. Another showed a strike on a three-story house the official said belonged to a Hamas brigade commander in a crowded neighborhood of Khan Younis, which set off huge secondary explosions, indicating a weapons cache.
“Hamas’s operational infrastructure is not in specific military camps or posts,” he said. A building with two floors may have a weapons storage site on the first floor, he said, “and above it, regular families.”
At the mosque that was bombed on Saturday, in the Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, only the minaret was left standing. Young men joined the junior imam, Muhammad Hamad, 25, in digging through the rubble to save copies of the Quran and other religious works.
But this attack, one of two mosques hit on Saturday, was no mistake. Here Israeli intelligence was convinced, and issued photographs to support its case, that the mosque also served as “a Hamas rocket cache and a gathering point for militants,” the army’s spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, said in a statement.
Play Video|2:41 .. Mideast Rockets and Airstrikes Continue
Gazans and Israelis braced for further conflict as Hamas fired more rockets into Israel and Israel continued its aerial assaults on Gaza. By Reem Makhoul, Tamir Elterman and Azmi Keshawi on Publish Date July 11, 2014. Image CreditSaid Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Hamad, the young imam, denied categorically that any weapons had been in the mosque, but it was impossible for an untrained eye to tell, in part because it was considered too dangerous to try to enter the collapsed structure. “That charge is baseless,” he said. “This is the house of God.”
Neighbors said that there had been a “knock on the roof,” followed by the bomb a few minutes later, and that only four people were wounded because it was still too early for the predawn Ramadan prayers.
Mr. Hamad said he had found a Quran open to a page with a particular sura that he felt had special meaning. “Victory is imminent for those who remain steadfast,” he read.
The strike on the house of the police commander killed people in the house, in eastern Gaza City, as well as people coming out of a nearby mosque after evening prayers. The apparent target, Gen. Tayseer al-Batsh, was seriously wounded, medics said.
A rocket strike outside an apartment building in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood killed six Palestinians. The son of a local Hamas leader, Ismail Haniya, said the attack had targeted his aunt’s home and two of the dead were her children.
The United Nations Security Council issued a statement on Saturday calling on both sides to return to a 2012 cease-fire. The statement did not point a finger, but called for “respect for international law including the protection of civilians.”
The statement, endorsed by all 15 members of the Council, was largely symbolic; it does not have the force of a resolution, which Arab countries have called for.
The difficulties for Hamas and its allies in Gaza were also on display on Saturday as they fired at least 90 rockets at Israel, causing no deaths or injuries, two of them even falling into the West Bank towns of Hebron and Bethlehem.
In its most audacious attack yet, the military wing of Hamas announced at 8 p.m. that it would fire rockets at Tel Aviv an hour later. The news set off a flurry of air-raid sirens and people running to shelters but the rockets caused no injuries or damage, according to initial reports.
Hamas said it fired 10 J-80 rockets at Tel Aviv and central Israel. At least three of them were intercepted above the city while others fell in open areas.
Earlier, a rocket struck a residential neighborhood of Netivot, a southern Israeli town, causing property damage.
At least two rockets were fired from Lebanon into northern Israel late Saturday, the military said. In response, Israeli forces fired artillery rounds toward the launch site in Lebanon.
Reporting was contributed by Fares Akram from Gaza, Isabel Kershner from Tel Aviv, Nayef Hashlamoun from Hebron, and Somini Sengupta from New York.
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