From Occupied Palestine

Checkmate
EYAD EL SERRAJ
Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, 29 June 2006

[ed. influential Palestinian activist calls for disbanding of the Palestinian Authority after, among other events, Israel's arrest of numerous elected Hamas lawmakers and cabinet ministers in the West Bank.]

Israel has crossed the line many times. By destroying the infrastructure again and again of the Palestinian Authority, by arresting ministers and Members of Parliament, and by preventing Mahmoud Abbas President of the Palestinian Authority from leaving Gaza, [Israel] unveils true nature of its relations with the Palestinian Authority.

Shalit seen as prisoner of war and bargaining chip
CHRIS McGREAL
Guardian, 30 June 2006

The terminology alone reflects the gulf of views over the plight of Corporal Gilad Shalit. To Israelis, the teenage soldier was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists and is a hostage just as much as foreigners held in Iraq. To Palestinians he is a prisoner of war - a legitimate target as a soldier in the uniform of an army that has killed dozens of civilians in the Gaza Strip in recent weeks - and a bargaining chip.

Harsh reality governs fate of snatched soldiers
CHRIS McGREAL
Guardian, 28 June 2006

Corporal Gilad Shalit was perhaps fortunate that as he was dragged into the Gaza Strip by Palestinian gunmen on Sunday his colleagues were not around to carry out the "Hannibal Directive", rumoured among Israeli forces to be an order to rain gunfire at an enemy abducting one of their own even if it costs the snatched soldier his life.

Israel: A history of prisoner deals
JEROME TAYLOR
Independent, 27 June 2006

Israel has a history of negotiating prisoner exchanges with her enemies, who have often used hostage taking as a political tool.

In 1985 Israel agreed to the release of more than 1,150 Palestinian prisoners in return for three soldiers taken captive in Lebanon.

Almost 20 years later, a similar deal was reached with the militant group Hizbullah, in which years of German-brokered negotiations led to an agreement between Israel and the militants in early 2004 to release more than 400 militants in exchange for the businessman Tannenbaum Elhanan, who had been captured four years earlier, and the bodies of three soldiers.

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].

Two children among 11 killed in missile strike on Gaza City
CHRIS McGREAL
Guardian, 14 June 2006

Gaza City -- An Israeli air strike on a busy Gaza City street killed 11 people yesterday, including two young children and their father, after Palestinians who ran to help those wounded by the first missile were caught by the blast from a second rocket.

'I saw my brother. I tried to wake him. He never woke'
DONALD MACINTYRE
Independent, 14 June 2006

The harrowing television pictures of 11-year-old Huda Ghalia screaming and distraught over her father's death on a Gaza beach last Friday went round the world, making her globally recognisable and, for Palestinians, an icon of their suffering.

Carnage on the beach leaves truce hanging by a thread
DONALD MACINTYRE
Independent, 11 June 2006

[ed. Watch the Ramatan video broadcast on Al Jazeera]

BEIT LAHIYA, GAZA -- Seven-year-old Hadeel Ghalia was recovering from shrapnel cuts yesterday, still unaware that her mother, father, baby brother and three other siblings were killed in an Israeli shelling attack which could bring Hamas's 15-month informal ceasefire to an end.

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.

Israel's "demographic demon" in court
JONATHAN COOK
Middle East Report Online, 1 June 2006

A low-key but injudicious war of words briefly broke out between Israel's two most senior judges in the wake of the May 2006 decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law. A temporary measure passed by the Knesset in July 2003, the law effectively bans marriages between Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and Israeli citizens.