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Israel says 10 killed on Golan, Syria inflated toll

June 6, 2011 Comments off

ahram.org

The Israeli army on Monday said 10 people had been killed during Sunday’s “Naksa Day” protests along the Syrian ceasefire line, describing Damascus’s toll of 23 as “exaggerated.”
Troops in the Golan Heights remained on high alert after Sunday’s bloodshed in which Syrian state television said 23 people were killed and 350 wounded when Israeli troops shot at protesters marking the anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War.

But the Israeli military said it counted 10 protesters dead — none of whom was killed by Israeli fire.
“We are aware that around 10 of the casualties that the Syrians reported yesterday were killed by the fact that they used Molotov cocktails in the Quneitra area that hit some Syrian landmines,” Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibovitz told AFP.

“I think there is solid ground to believe that (the Syrian figures) are exaggerated,” she said. “A big number of them died as a result of their own deeds.”
Asked whether any protesters were killed or wounded by Israeli fire, she was Read more…

Categories: Israel, Syria Tags: , , , , , ,

Netanyahu speech eyed for sign of U.S.-Israel rift

May 24, 2011 Comments off

reuters

President Barack Obama meets with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, May 20, 2011. REUTERS/Jim Young

President Barack Obama meets with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, May 20, 2011.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses Congress on Tuesday, many will be watching to see whether he escalates a war of words with the White House over how to make peace in the Middle East.

Netanyahu has a mostly sympathetic ear in Congress, where few lawmakers in either party speak up for the Palestinians, hewing to decades of Read more…

Categories: Israel, United States Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Netanyahu: Israel willing to ‘cede parts of our homeland’ for true peace

May 17, 2011 Comments off

haaretz

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that Israel would be prepared to compromise and “cede parts of our homeland” for true peace with the Palestinians, but added that he did not believe the latter was ready to be a true partner for peace.

A Palestinian government that comprises representatives of Hamas, a movement that refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, is not a government with which it would be possible to make peace, said Netanyahu.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses Knesset, on May 16, 2011.
Photo by: Emil Salman

Addressing the Knesset a day after an unprecedented wave of demonstrations marking Nakba Day, on which Palestinians annually protest the creation of the state of Israel, Netanyahu said Israel must stop blaming itself for the conflict and start looking at the “reality” of the situation with “open eyes”.

The root of conflict was not the absence of a Palestinian state, said Netanyahu, but Palestinian opposition to the creation of the State of Israel.

“This is not a conflict about 1967 but about 1948, when the state of Israel was established,” said Netanyahu. “The Palestinians call this a day of catastrophe, but their catastrophe is that their leadership has not succeeded in reaching a compromise. Still today, they don’t have a leadership Read more…

Categories: Israel Tags: , , , ,

Egypt and Israel Headed for Crisis

May 6, 2011 Comments off

palestinechronicle

Israeli officials have expressed alarm at a succession of moves by the interim Egyptian government that they fear signal an impending crisis in relations with Cairo.

The widening rift was underscored yesterday when leaders of the rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah signed a reconciliation pact in the Egyptian capital. Egypt’s secret role in brokering the agreement last week caught both Israel and the United States by surprise.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the deal “a tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism”.

Several other developments have added to Israeli concerns about its relations with Egypt, including signs that Cairo hopes to renew ties with Iran and renegotiate a long-standing contract to supply Israel with natural gas.

More worrying still to Israeli officials are reported plans by Egyptian authorities to open the Rafah crossing into Gaza, closed for the Read more…

Categories: Egypt, Israel Tags: , , , , , , ,

Israel and Hamas Consider Cease-Fire

April 11, 2011 Comments off

nytimes

 

JERUSALEM — Israel and Hamas signaled on Sunday that they were willing to restore calm after days of intense fighting, and while militants in Gaza fired about 10 rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel, most fell in open areas close to the border and Israel did not immediately respond.

“We are interested in calm in the Gaza Strip,” Ghazi Hamad, the Hamas deputy foreign minister, told Israel Radio Sunday.

That represented a sharp reduction in activity since Hamas fired an antitank missile at an Israeli school bus on Thursday, critically wounding a 16-year-old boy and setting off Israeli aerial, artillery and tank fire against targets in Gaza that killed 18 Palestinians, 10 of whom were militants and the rest civilians, according to officials in Gaza.

Hamas and other militant groups fired about 130 mortar shells and rockets, including several mid-range ones, at southern Israel over the previous three days.

Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said Sunday that Israel had received several messages indicating that Hamas, the militant Islamic group that controls Gaza, was interested in a cease-fire.

“If they stop firing on our communities, we will stop firing,” Mr. Barak told Israel Radio.

Hamas spokesmen offered similar messages. Ghazi Hamad, the deputy foreign minister of the Hamas government in Gaza, told Israel Radio, “We are interested in calm in the Gaza Strip, but also that the Israeli Army cease operations against our people.”

Salah al-Bardaweel, a Hamas spokesman, said that Israel appeared to have accepted the idea of reducing hostilities. “The factions will be committed to Read more…

Categories: Hamas, Israel Tags: , ,

Sudan Accuses Israel Of Attack; Khartoum ‘Reserves The Right To React’

April 6, 2011 Comments off

huffingtonpost

Israel Sudan Attack

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Sudan’s Foreign Minister Ali Karti on Wednesday accused Israel of carrying out an attack on Tuesday near Port Sudan that killed two people and said Khartoum reserved the right to react to the aggression.

“This is absolutely an Israeli attack,” he told reporters.

He said Israel undertook the attack in order scupper Sudan’s chances of being removed from a U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

One of the two people killed in the strike was a Sudanese citizen who had no ties to Islamists or the government, he said.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor declined to comment on the accusation.

Sudanese officials have offered different versions on how the strike was carried out. Police say a missile struck the car near the port city, but a state government official blamed a bombing by a foreign aircraft that flew in from the Red Sea.

Sudanese officials in 2009 said unknown aircraft had killed scores in a strike on a convoy of suspected arms smugglers on a remote road in the east, which some reports said may have been carried out by Israel to stop weapons bound for Gaza.

Sudan is on a U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, but Washington this year initiated the process to remove it from that list after a peaceful January referendum in which the country’s south voted to secede.

Categories: Israel, Sudan Tags: , , , , ,

Leading Israelis push for two-state solution with new peace initiative

April 6, 2011 Comments off

guardian

Gaza funeral

A father weeps at the funeral of his 21-year-old son, killed on Tuesday by Israeli fire in northern Gaza. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images

A group of prominent Israelis, including heads of the army and security services, hope to revive the peace initiative by announcing details of possible treaties with the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon.

The Israeli Peace Initiative, a two-page document, states that Israel will withdraw from the land it occupied in 1967 in both the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and pay compensation to refugees. The document has been given to Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, who has said he will read it with interest.

The authors of the document, which will be launched at a press conference in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, say that it is partly inspired by the revolutions that have taken place in the Middle East. It presents an opportunity for Israelis to participate in the “winds of change” blowing through the Middle East, they say.

“We looked around at what was happening in neighbouring countries and we said to ourselves, ‘It is about time that the Israeli public Read more…

Categories: Israel, Palestine Tags: , , , , , , ,

Israel passes a law facilitating citizenship cancellation for “terrorists”

April 4, 2011 1 comment

ahram.org

Liberman

Israel has passed a law facilitating the process of cancelling citizenship, in a move condemned as a threat to the Arab minority in Israel. This amendment is the so-called “Law of Nationality”, the latest move in a list of recent parliamentary procedures that have been denounced by civil rights advocates as non-democratic, but which Israeli jurists believe are necessary to defend the “Jewish state.”

This law allows judges to take Israeli nationality from any person who is convicted of spying, or who commits acts of violence for national motivations.

The official explanatory note said that the law aims to “expand the possibility of deprivation of nationality and the authorization of the court which condemned any person convicted for committing crimes of terrorism or to strip him of citizenship.”

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman described this step as a victory, saying he had made a pledge to voters to suppress “any citizen who is biased to the enemy.”

The Civil Rights Association criticized the law, saying that it “sends degrading and discriminatory massage to Israeli Arabs, that citizenship is not automatic.”

Categories: Israel Tags: , , , , ,

Israel to deploy ‘Iron Dome’ anti-rocket system

March 26, 2011 Comments off

telegraph

Israel will deploy its Iron Dome multi-million-pound missile defence system in southern Israel for the first time next week in the wake of rocket attacks from Gaza, officials said on Friday.  

A rocket fired by the ‘Iron Dome’ system during a test fire in southern Israel Photo: AP
7:12PM GMT 25 Mar 2011

“I authorised the army to deploy in the next few days the first battery of “Iron Dome” for an operational trial,” Defence Minister Ehud Barak said as he toured the tense Gaza Strip border.

The order comes after a spate of rocket fire by Gaza militants in recent days, some of them striking deep into Israel.

The deployment of the Iron Dome interceptor, designed to combat short-range rocket threats from the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, has been delayed until now with officials saying operating crews needed more training and suggestions the system was prohibitively expensive.

The system, developed by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defence Systems with the help of Read more…

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Israeli military says new weapon shot down Gaza anti-tank rocket in first combat test

March 2, 2011 Comments off

canadianpress

JERUSALEM — A new Israeli weapons system knocked down a Palestinian anti-tank rocket in its first combat test Tuesday, the military said, showing off technology that could protect the heavy vehicles that have been the mainstay of the world’s ground forces for decades.

Palestinian militants said they fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an Israeli tank as it patrolled near the Gaza-Israel border, a frequent occurrence. This time, the “Trophy” system sensed the incoming rocket and fired its own projectile, blowing it up away from the tank, the military said.

Trophy is thought to be the only active defence system of its kind in the world. Up till now, tanks have relied on heavier and thicker armour plating to protect against more powerful anti-tank weapons.

Experts say the active defence concept, if it works consistently, could allow the construction of smaller, lighter and more efficient tanks.

The Israeli military did not make Read more…

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