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/ 25 January 2007
The invitations described it as an opportunity for the "notable people" of Gaza to meet their prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader who was elected as Palestinian prime minister a year ago. Dressed in a suit and tie and with a red and white keffiyeh draped over his head and shoulders, Haniyeh spoke for an hour to an audience of Palestinian newspaper editors and local figures in Gaza City this week.
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/ 20 October 2006
Doctors in Gaza have reported previously unseen injuries from Israeli weapons that cause severe burning and leave deep internal wounds, often resulting in amputations or death. The injuries were first seen in July, when Israel launched operations in Gaza following the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants.
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/ 16 October 2006
Police in Israel said on Sunday night that the country’s president should be charged with raping and sexually assaulting several women who worked for him. In the most serious allegations faced by an Israeli head of state, Moshe Katsav was also suspected of bugging his staff’s telephones and of fraud, police said
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, said on Wednesday that attempts to form a coalition government with the ruling Hamas movement had failed despite a mounting economic and security crisis. A joint programme agreed between his Fatah movement and Hamas last month had collapsed.
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/ 7 September 2006
Rival Palestinian factions are close to forming a new power-sharing government, which Hamas expects to lead, the Palestinian Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, said this week. A national unity government is intended to lift the international freeze on funding to the Palestinian Authority, which has left it facing an economic crisis and a wave of strikes by thousands of unpaid civil servants.
It has millions of people glued to their television sets, voting in the most authoritarian societies of the Arab world, yet it has nothing to do with politics, Rory McCarthy reports.
Hezbollah threatened ”open war” on Friday night as Israel ramped up its attacks on Lebanon, bombing roads and bridges in the centre of Beirut and warning that its fight would last until the militant group was destroyed. Israeli politicians and army officers brushed aside international criticism and said their goal was to force Hizbullah’s disarmament.
Hizbullah had previously threatened to capture Israeli soldiers, but it had limited its attacks to shelling across the border. Wednesday’s strike marked the Islamic militia’s biggest operation since 2000, when Israel ended its military occupation of southern Lebanon.
The posters at the bus stops show either the Syrian flag or a large, simple portrait of the President, Bashar al-Assad. There are no words, for the message is well understood: support the regime. In shop windows, stickers show the flag, this time accompanied by a rallying cry such as ”Only for Syria” or ”Syria bows to no one but God”. The clamour for reform is drowned out by a tide of patriotism.
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/ 28 January 2005
A workman is pinning a banner to the wall as a chill draft swirls through the near-empty ballroom at the Palestine hotel. ”An equal, secular Constitution is the first step to total fairness,” the sign says in Arabic. This is supposed to be one in a series of pioneering public meetings to address the growing inequalities of women in the new Iraq. But since the war, life has badly deteriorated for women, and girls are being forced to wear the veil again.