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/ 22 December 2008
Palestinian armed groups in Gaza are observing a 24-hour halt to rocket fire against Israel at the request of Egyptian mediators, an official said.
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/ 22 December 2008
Israel has launched a diplomatic campaign to gather international support for a major offensive on Hamas-ruled Gaza, officials said on Monday.
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/ 19 December 2008
Tension surged in and around Gaza on Friday as Hamas declared an end to the troubled truce with Israel and warned they would respond to any attack.
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/ 25 November 2008
Israel has again sealed off the Gaza Strip in response to rocket fire, only a day after the border was opened to allow in humanitarian supplies.
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/ 14 November 2008
Israel’s air force attacked a Hamas rocket crew in Gaza on Friday and Hamas rockets hit an Israeli city, in skirmishes threatening to wreck a truce.
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/ 7 November 2008
Hamas has threatened to boycott next week’s Palestinian reconciliation talks, accusing president Mahmoud Abbas of arresting hundreds of its members.
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/ 5 November 2008
Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired more than 35 rockets towards Israel on Wednesday, hours after the Israeli army killed six militants.
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/ 21 October 2008
A prominent Palestinian human rights group says it has found evidence that 68 children were killed in the Gaza Strip in the 12 months to June.
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/ 18 September 2008
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has appealed to the UN Human Rights Council to show concern for protecting Israelis from Palestinian attacks.
Hamas forces on Saturday battled Fatah gunmen with mortars and machine guns in a crowded Gaza City neighbourhood, leaving nine dead.
The meeting was not supposed to be public. The man invited into Ehud Olmert’s residence was Aviam Sela, architect of Operation Opera in 1981.
Israel kept three border crossings with the Gaza Strip closed on Wednesday following rocket attacks that breached a truce with Hamas rulers.
Gaza residents savoured a weekend of calm after months of bloodshed in the Palestinian enclave as a tenuous truce with Israel entered its second day.
Israel on Wednesday threw its weight behind Egyptian efforts to broker a truce with Hamas in and around Gaza but at the same time ordered its armed forces to prepare for a possible offensive.
Israeli forces killed a nine-year-old Palestinian girl and a militant in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Wednesday.
Hamas’s exiled political chief, Khaled Meshaal, said his Palestinian Islamist movement was ready for dialogue with its rivals in Fatah during a meeting on Monday with Syria’s foreign minister.
Tony Blair has ruled out talks with Hamas until it recognises Israel and stops firing rockets.
An Israeli air strike killed a young Palestinian girl in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Thursday after an Israeli died in a militant cross-border mortar attack on a kibbutz.
Osama bin Laden has plenty on his mind but he managed to pay close attention this month to the events surrounding Israel’s 60th anniversary and the parallel commemoration of the ”nakba” — the catastrophe — that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 meant for the Palestinians.
United Nations envoy Archbishop Desmond Tutu, concluding a fact-finding mission to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Thursday, condemned as a ”massacre” the killing of 18 members of a Palestinian family by Israeli shelling in 2006. Tutu planned to present a report about the incident to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva at a session in September.
Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu on Wednesday plunged into the harsh reality of the conflict in Gaza, where a tearful Palestinian family recounted losing loved ones in an Israeli attack and the ruling Hamas movement expounded its hard-line stance. The South African cleric is heading a team of United Nations human rights observers.
Desmond Tutu, the South African archbishop, met the former Palestinian prime minister and Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Gaza at the start of a much-delayed United Nations investigation into the shelling by the Israeli military of a Palestinian house which killed 18 members of a single family in Beit Hanoun.
Former United States president Jimmy Carter has said Israel holds at least 150 nuclear weapons, the first time a US president has publicly acknowledged the state’s atomic arsenal. Asked how a future US president should deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, Carter put the risk in context by listing atomic weapons held globally.
Britain and other European governments should break from the United States over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter said on Sunday. Carter described the current European Union position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as ”supine” and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as ”embarrassing”.
Israel and Syria said in surprise announcements on Wednesday they were conducting indirect peace talks with Turkish mediation. Senior officials from both sides were currently in Turkey, an Israeli government official said. He would not confirm there had been direct contacts between the two delegations.
A Democratic win in the solidly conservative Mississippi capped a week in which Senator Barack Obama finally turned his eyes to the coming November election and his opponent, John McCain. Now many Democrats believe the signs are good that the tide of American public opinion is firmly swinging their way.
The United States agreed on Friday to help Saudi Arabia protect its oil industry from terrorist attack, while offering to back conservative Arab countries resisting Iranian influence spreading across the Middle East — but King Abdullah was not persuaded to boost Saudi oil production to ease the effect of the -a-barrel price on the US.
The lesson was coming to an end, the last for this class of 15-year-olds before their annual exams in a few days’ time. The girls are keen students and answered correctly nearly all of the questions put to them by their teacher, Nahida al-Katib, even though the subject this time was the intricate grammar of classical, Qu’ranic Arabic
United States President George Bush used a visit to Israel on Thursday to denounce Democratic party offers to negotiate with America’s enemies in the Middle East as comparable to appeasement of Hitler. Although Bush did not name any Democratic politician, the party’s presidential contender Barack Obama has offered to open negotiations with the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
United States President George Bush offered a peace prophecy for the Middle East on Thursday in which the enemies of the United States faced a future of defeat. ”This is a bold vision, and some will say it can never be achieved,” Bush told Israel’s Parliament.
United States President George Bush arrived in the Middle East on Wednesday to celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday and try to energise peace efforts complicated by a corruption scandal that could topple Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. A smiling Olmert and his wife, Aliza, greeted the president and First Lady Laura Bush at a red-carpet ceremony at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport.
Her bed is on the third floor of Gaza’s Shifa hospital, where shafts of warm afternoon sunshine reach in from the window. The ward is crowded, and the bed on which Asma’a Abu Me’tiq lay is curtained off from the rest and surrounded by the blankets her sister-in-law uses when she sleeps on the floor next to her at night.