From Occupied Palestine

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?

Peter MacKay in Israel and Palestine
JON ELMER
The Dominion, 25 January 2007

Israeli planes bomb house in northern Gaza Strip
Ramatan News Agency, 7 August 2006

Beit Lahiya, Gaza -- An Israeli aeroplane fired at least one missile at a house in the northern Gaza Strip town of Bayt Lahiya on Monday pre-dawn and completely destroying it, RNA correspondent said.

The correspondent said that the residents of the two-story home received telephone call from the Israeli army urging them to leave the house before the aeroplanes struck it. The house owner, Muhammad al-Shurafa, told RNA correspondent that the Israeli army telephoned him and ordered him to leave the house with his family as the army will strike it. Shurafa added that he took his family out of the home but he thought that someone might be joking so he returned to the house few minutes later and immediately the telephone rang again "and it was again the Israeli army".

It's not the olive trees
AMIRA HASS
Ha'aretz, 11 January 2006

There is something very human about these stumps of olive trees, hundreds upon hundreds of them, their amputated branches reaching skyward as if to ask for help. Last Friday, in Tawana in the southern Hebron hills, 120 trees; in Burin, south of Nablus, earlier this week, about 50 trees; another 100 or so in Burin on December 24; and 140 trees, again in Burin, on December 14.

Ariel Sharon
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 6 January 2005

I shook hands with him once, a brisk, no-nonsense soldier's grip from Sharon as he finished a review of the vicious Phalangist militiamen who stood in the barracks square at Karantina in Beirut. Who would have thought, I asked myself then, that this same bunch of murderers - the men who butchered their way through the Palestinian Sabra and Chatila refugee camps only a few weeks earlier - had their origins in the Nazi Olympics of 1936. That's when old Pierre Gemayel - still alive and standing stiffly to attention for Sharon - watched the "order" of Nazi Germany and proposed to bring some of this "order" to Lebanon. That's what Gemayel told me himself. Did Sharon not understand this. Of course, he must have done.

Former Gaza general eludes UK war crimes charge
JON ELMER
The NewStandard, 13 September 2005

Ramallah -- The former head of Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip evaded arrest by Scotland Yard agents in Britain on a war crimes charge when he refused to disembark a flight from Israel at London's Heathrow airport on Sunday.

Shards of memory
GIDEON LEVY
Ha'aretz Magazine, 3 June 2005

This is the most Arab-free area in Israel. It was the scene of total ethnic cleansing, which left not a vestige apart from the heaps of ruins and the sabra bushes. On the coastal plain, between Jaffa and Gaza, not one Palestinian village remains intact. Now the settlers of the Gush Katif bloc from the Gaza Strip are to be brought here. In a bitterly ironic jest of fate, the settlers who sowed ruin and destruction in the Gaza Strip will now live on the ruins of the homes of the residents who were their invisible neighbors in the refugee camps.

Demolition threat to Palestinian homes
DONALD MacINTYRE
Independent, 1 June 2005

Jerusalem -- Almost 1,000 Palestinians face the prospect of losing their homes in one of the biggest planned demolitions in Jerusalem since Israel annexed the Arab eastern sector of the city during the Six Day War in 1967.

A court battle is already under way to halt the demolition of the 88 houses that form the entire valley neighbourhood of Al Bustan in Silwan, below the walls of the Old City. The Jerusalem municipality says it wants to turn it into a national park because of the site's biblical and archaeological importance.

Amnesty International Report 2005
Covering events from January - December 2004

The Israeli army killed more than 700 Palestinians, including some 150 children. Most were killed unlawfully

Israelis Act to Encircle East Jerusalem
JOHN WARD ANDERSON
Washington Post, 7 February 2005

Jerusalem -- The Israeli government and private Jewish groups are working in concert to build a human cordon around Jerusalem's Old City and its disputed holy sites, moving Jewish residents into Arab neighborhoods to consolidate their grip on strategic locations, according to critics of the effort and a Washington Post investigation.