Alexei Navalny’s demise spotlights how death and displacement are portrayed in the media and in literature
The government says Israel’s extension of its military operations in Rafah is in breach of the rights of Palestinians in Gaza
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/ 29 January 2008
Egypt boosted security around the border town of Rafah on Tuesday and resealed parts of the barrier blasted open a week ago as it tried to control the flow of people in and out of the Gaza Strip. Egyptian forces strung barbed wire along some of the gaps between two gates leading into the Palestinian territory, while riot police were deployed.
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/ 25 January 2008
Egypt began closing its breached border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Friday, using barbed wire and water cannons to keep Palestinians from crossing into Egypt in defiance of an Israeli blockade. Israeli air strikes overnight killed four Palestinian militants in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, where Hamas blasted open the border wall on Wednesday.
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/ 24 January 2008
Gazans poured into Egypt for a second consecutive day on Thursday to stock up on supplies after militants blew open the border barrier of the Hamas-run territory, witnesses said. Hundreds of people continued to cross the border, most of them intent on buying goods on the Egyptian side a week after Israel imposed a blockade on territory.
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/ 23 January 2008
Palestinian militants blew up part of the wall between Gaza and Egypt on Wednesday, and tens of thousands of Palestinians poured into Egypt to stock up on food and fuel in short supply due to an Israeli blockade. Egyptian riot police sent to reinforce the border mainly stood aside and let the Palestinians through.
Egyptian police opened fire on two Sudanese migrants trying to sneak across the border into Israel, injuring one, security sources said on Tuesday. A security source told Reuters the men, accompanied by traffickers smuggling them across the border, were trying to cross the border south of the Rafah crossing on Monday when they were spotted by border guards.
Wearing a green Hamas headband, waving a Hamas flag, swinging a Kalashnikov and chanting for Israel’s demise, Bassem Shorah looks to be a prototypical Palestinian militant. His olive green shirt, however, tells a different story. It’s a spot-on replica of those worn by soldiers in the United States Army, replete with combat patches and unit designations.
Palestinian militants blew a hole in the Palestinian border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt on Thursday, witnesses said. About 200 Palestinians gathered at the scene of the explosion, where witnesses said militants blew open an 8m wide hole in the wall. No casualties were reported.
The Palestinian government’s security chief, a key player in rocket attacks on Israel, was killed late on Thursday in an Israeli air strike that threatened to escalate clashes between the two sides into a far fiercer conflict. The militantly anti-Israel Hamas government called Jamal Abu Samhadana’s assassination a direct assault on the Palestinian Authority.
Security chaos in the Gaza Strip escalated further on Wednesday when gunmen loyal to the ruling Fatah faction barred access to the border with Egypt and tried to kidnap the parents of an American peace activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer three years ago.
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/ 25 November 2005
The Rafah border, Gaza’s only link to the outside world that bypasses Israel, was declared open by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Friday after being shut for nearly three months. ”It is a dream come true for us to be here to celebrate the reopening of the Rafah terminal,” Abbas told Palestinian and foreign dignitaries.
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/ 28 September 2005
Armed with an automatic rifle, the Egyptian guard, Ahmed, took shelter from the scorching sun in the ruins of an old border crossing. Nearby, a Palestinian teenager from the Gaza side of this poor border town emerged from a bushy trail that stretches across the buffer of clumsy barbed wire fences and guard posts. Then the 14-year-old, Salama, sneaked across the porous frontier, hauling a plastic bag.
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/ 18 September 2005
Palestinian forces fired warning shots and pushed back stone-throwing crowds on Saturday on the southern Gaza Strip’s Egyptian border, trying to reimpose order after a week of illegal crossings by thousands of people. About 1 500 soldiers and riot police warded off mobs along the 14km-long Rafah frontier.
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/ 16 September 2005
Thousands of Palestinians broke through Egyptian and Palestinian Authority lines on the Gaza border on Friday, pouring into Egypt in defiance of government attempts to secure the frontier. It was the second afternoon in a row when crowd power overwhelmed the measures imposed in the morning to restore order on the Gaza-Egypt border.
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/ 15 September 2005
Hundreds of people continued to cross the border between Gaza and Egypt unhindered on Thursday despite efforts by police on both sides of the frontier to assert control. Around 30 Palestinian police and 20 Egyptian border guards took up positions at dawn on the main road straddling the border but just hours later they failed to stop a group of Palestinians.
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/ 14 September 2005
Hamas militants blew a gaping hole on Wednesday in a concrete barrier on the Gaza Strip’s southern border, enabling Palestinians to continue surging into Egypt despite pledges to restore order. Under pressure from Israel, Egyptian authorities set a new deadline for all Palestinians to return to the Gaza side.
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/ 9 December 2004
The wanted leader of a Palestinian militant group and two of his lieutenants survived an Israeli assassination bid on Thursday after an air strike targeted their vehicle in the southern Gaza Strip. An unmanned plane fired a rocket at the white-coloured vehicle that was carrying three members of the militant Popular Resistance Committees.
The tiny hole buried under Asma Mughayar’s thick black hair, just above her right ear, is an illusion, according to the Israeli army. So is her family’s insistance that Asma (16) and her younger brother Ahmed, were both shot through the head by an Israeli soldier. As the carnage in Rafah escalates, bullet wounds belie the official Israeli line on killings of young teenagers.
Rawan Mohammed Abu Zaed, aged three and a half, went to the shop with two of her sisters to spend their pocket money on sweets. Sick of being cooped up at home after a week of Israeli army attacks, the girls were taking advantage of a lull in the violence, but minutes after leaving home Rawan was shot in the face and neck by an Israeli tank.
The day the tanks arrived at Rafah zoo
Ask to be directed to the latest wave of Israeli destruction in Rafah’s al-Brazil neighbourhood and many fingers point towards the zoo. Amid the rubble of dozens of homes that the Israeli army continued on Friday to deny demolishing, the wrecking of the tiny, but only, zoo in the Gaza Strip took on potent symbolism for many of the newly homeless.
Bulldozers crush hope
At least 15 Palestinians were killed and more than 30 wounded as dozens of Israeli tanks and hundreds of troops swept through the heart of Rafah in the Gaza Strip in one of the bloodiest operations of the intifada. Two of the victims were children, hit by bullets as they played inside their home.
‘There were rockets, shells. It was war’
Um Hisham Qishta stood at the spot where she cradled a dying Israeli soldier in her arms a few days ago and said she was going nowhere. But just in case the armoured bulldozers came too close, she bundled the entire contents of her immaculate flat into plastic sacks on Monday and sent the furniture off on the back of a donkey cart.
17 Palestinians killed in Rafah
‘Israeli army is like a savage dog’
Three Palestinians were killed on Thursday in a fresh Israeli helicopter raid on the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, Palestinian medical sources said. Two missiles were fired in the raid, which also left 15 people wounded, said Rafah hospital director Ali Mussa.
Gaza death toll mounts
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/ 24 December 2003
The Israeli army called a halt on Wednesday to a massive operation in the southern Gaza Strip as the death toll rose to nine from a raid denounced as a ”massacre” by the Palestinians and condemned by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. Medical sources said that nine Palestinians are known to have died in the raid.
A bloodstained white scarf on a makeshift memorial of concrete bricks and a rusty grid is all that is left here of James Miller, a freelance cameraman killed by the Israeli army as he filmed a documentary about house demolitions in the Gaza Strip.