From Occupied Palestine

The assassination of Count Bernadotte - and the death of peace
DONALD MACINTYRE
Independent, 18 September 2008

Keeping the peace? The El Al flight and the Israeli army officer
ANDY McSMITH
Independent, 20 February 2008

Heathrow airport, September 2005. An Israeli general accused of war crimes flies in. Waiting for him is a team of Met police officers. Would they dare to arrest him and risk provoking an international incident?

Family of nine killed as they slept
CONAL URQUHART
Guardian, 13 July 2006

Gaza City -- Awad Abu Salmiah lay in a small ward covered in bandages, drifting in and out of consciousness. He looked around but did not seem to notice the absence of his parents or brothers and sisters.

The 19-year-old was dug out of the remains of his two-storey house on Wednesday morning, four hours after a 550lb bomb crumpled the building. He does not know that almost all his family is dead.

Israel kills 23 in Gaza, targets Hamas commanders
NIDAL AL-MUGHRABI
Reuters, 12 July 2006

Gaza City -- Israel killed at least 23 Palestinians in Gaza on Wednesday, including nine members of one family in an air strike that destroyed a house where the army said senior Hamas commanders were meeting, witnesses said.

A week of Israeli restraint
TANYA REINHART
Yediot Aharonoth, 21 June 2006

[Translated from Hebrew and annotated by MARK MARSHALL]

In Israeli discourse, Israel is always presented as the side exercising restraint in its conflict with the Palestinians. This was true again for the events of the past week: As the Qassam rockets were falling on the Southern Israeli town of Sderot, it was "leaked" that the Israeli Minister of Defense had directed the army to show restraint [1].

30,000 attend Samhadana's funeral
ALI WAKED
YNet, [Yedioth Ahronoth] 9 June 2006

Rafah -- Some 30,000 Palestinians arrived in the Gaza town of Rafah Friday afternoon to attend the funeral of Popular Resistance Committees chief Jamal Abu Samhadana.

At the end of the funeral, a special prayer was expected to be held at the local soccer field. Dozens of gunmen deployed across the city ahead of the funeral.

A sudden exit, a jail is stormed - and Israel's long wait is over
CHRIS McGREAL
Guardian, 15 March 2006

[see also, STEVE BELL cartoon]

Jericho -- With explosions and gunfire echoing across Jericho yesterday, Colonel Ronnie Blekin finally got the men for whom he and his army had waited for four years: the Palestinians accused of one of the most audacious political killings in Israeli history - the assassination of a cabinet minister in a Jerusalem hotel in 2001.

The jailer
JUAN COLE
Salon.com, 12 January 2006

Ariel Sharon is lauded for breaking with his hard-line past. But the truth is that he simply embraced a smarter way of locking up the Palestinians.

Even as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stirs fitfully from his coma, in the aftermath of a massive stroke and several operations, Gazan militants with a bad aim have fired several Qassam rockets into Israel. Israel is now, and is likely to remain for some time, a dark postmodern terrain of wealthy fortress communities besieged by hopeless unemployed militants from isolated ghettos. This archipelago of anxiety, reminiscent of the noir science fiction film "Blade Runner," is in some significant respects the creation and legacy of Sharon.

Good night Battle of Britain, Good morning, Gaza
JON ELMER
Briarpatch Magazine, December 2005

Ratings bombshell
GIDEON LEVY
Ha'aretz, 8 September 2005

"The unit" has done it again. Another graduate of the Israeli "Harvard" is making his way to the top. In a country where there will never be a military coup, one has existed for years, with too many generals in politics and too many politicians in the General Staff, where concepts like "success," "hope" and "promise" are nearly always