Army Bombards Gaza, One Resident Wounded

The Israeli Air Force bombarded on Wednesday night after midnight several areas in the Gaza Strip leading to excessive damage; at least one resident was injured.
Three consecutive air strikes were carried out against the “tunnels area” along the Gaza-Egypt border, in Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.

At first, the Air force fired several missiles at a siege-busting tunnel in Yibna refugee camp, in Rafah.

Shortly afterwards, the Air Force carried out two consecutive air strikes targeting areas near Salah ed-Deen Gate and al-Barazil neighborhood in Rafah. One resident was wounded and was moved to Abu Youssef Al Najjar Hospital, in Rafah.

The third attack was carried out when the Air Force fired at least one missile at an open area, east of al-Zeitoun neighborhood, south of Gaza city; damage was reported, no injuries.

On Wednesday at dawn, Israeli soldiers invaded several areas in the occupied West Bank, broke into and searched several homes and kidnapped three residents from the central West Bank city of Ramallah, and from Jenin, in the northern part of the West Bank.

Soldiers also installed several roadblocks and searched dozens of vehicles while inspecting the ID card of the drivers and the passengers.

http://www.imemc.org/article/61016?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Instead of Bombing Dictators, Stop Selling Them Bombs

When all you have is bombs, everything starts to look like a target. And so, after years of providing Libya's dictator with the weapons he's been using against his people, all the international community - France, Britain and the United States - has to offer the people of Libya is more bombs, this time dropped from the sky rather than delivered in a box to Muammar Qaddafi's palace.
If the bitter lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan has taught us anything, though, it's that wars of liberation exact a deadly toll on those they purportedly liberate - and that democracy doesn't come on the back of a Tomahawk missile.
President Barack Obama announced his latest peace-through-bombs initiative last week - joining ongoing US conflicts and proxy wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia - by declaring he could not "stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy and ... where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government."
Within 24 hours of the announcement, more than 110 US Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired into Libya, including the capital Tripoli, reportedly killing dozens of innocent civilians - as missiles, even the "smart" kind, are wont to do. According to The New York Times, allied warplanes with "brutal efficiency" bombed "tanks, missile launches and civilian cars, leaving a smoldering trail of wreckage that stretched for miles."
"[M]any of the tanks seemed to have been retreating," the paper reported. That's the reality of the no-fly zone and the mission creep that started the moment it was enacted: bombing civilians and massacring retreating troops. And like any other war, it's not pretty.
While much of the media presents an unquestioning, sanitized version of the war - cable news hosts more focused on interviewing retired generals about America's fancy killing machines than the actual, bloody facts on the ground - the truth is that wars, even liberal-minded "humanitarian" ones, entail destroying people and places. Though cloaked in altruism that would be more believable were we dealing with monasteries, not nation-states, the war in Libya is no different. And innocents pay the price.
Russia, the Arab League and others have said that coalition airstrikes have caused significant civilian casualties. Though the number of deaths are unconfirmed at this time, Reuters repots that the Arab League will be commissioning an analysis into health ministry claims that 64 civilians died in the initial flurry of missile strikes on Libya. The New York Times also reported that civilian cars were among those hit by coalition airstrikes.
If protecting civilians from evil dictators was the goal, though - as opposed to, say, safeguarding natural resources and the investments of major oil companies - there's an easier, safer way than aerial bombardment for the US and its allies to consider: simply stop arming and propping up evil dictators. After all, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi reaped the benefits from Western nations all too eager to cozy up to and rehabilitate the image of a dictator with oil with those denouncing him today as a murderous tyrant, and just a matter of weeks ago selling him the very arms his regime has been using to suppress the rebellion against it.
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In 2009 alone, European governments - including Britain and France - sold Libya more than $470 million worth of weapons, including fighter jets, guns and bombs. And before it started calling for regime change, the Obama administration was working to provide the Libyan dictator another $77 million in weapons, on top of the $17 million it provided in 2009 and the $46 million the Bush administration provided in 2008.
Meanwhile, for dictatorial regimes in Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, US support continues to this day. On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even gave the US stamp of approval to the brutal crackdown on protesters in Bahrain, saying the country's authoritarian rulers "obviously" had the "sovereign right" to invite troops from Saudi Arabia to occupy their country and carry out human rights abuses, including attacks on injured protesters as they lay in their hospital beds.
In Yemen, which has received more than $300 million in military aid from the US over the last five years, the Obama administration continues to support corrupt thug and president-for-life Ali Abdullah Saleh, who recently ordered a massacre of more than 50 of his own citizens who dared protest his rule. And this support has allowed the US to carry out its own massacres under the auspices of the war on terror, with one American bombing raid last year taking out 41 Yemeni civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, according to Amnesty International.
Rather than engage in cruise-missile liberalism, Obama could save lives by immediately ending support for these brutal regimes. But for US administrations, both Democratic and Republican, arms sales appear to trump liberation. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute documented that Washington accounted for 54 percent of arms sales to Persian Gulf states between 2005 and 2009.
Last September, The Financial Times reported that the US had struck deals to provide Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman with $123 billion worth of arms. The repressive monarchy of Saudi Arabia accounts for over half that figure, with it set to receive $67 billion worth of weapons, including 84 F-15 jets, 70 Apache gunships, 72 Black Hawk helicopters, 36 light helicopters and thousands of laser-guided smart bombs - the largest weapons deal in US history.
Instead of forking over $150 million a day to the weapons industry to attack Libya or selling $67 billion in weapons to the Saudis so they can repress not just their own people, but those of Bahrain, we - the ones being asked to forgo Social Security to help pay for empire - should demand those who purport to represent us in Washington stop arming dictators in our name. That might drain some bucks from the merchants of death, but it would give nonviolent protesters throughout the Middle East a fighting chance to liberate themselves.
The US government need not drop a single bomb in the Middle East to help liberate oppressed people. All it need do is stop selling bombs to their oppressors.

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'The bloody Israeli sojourn in Gaza'

Controversial American Jewish scholar and specialist on the Middle East, Norman Finkelstein, says Israel committed massive atrocities in Gaza during the three-week war against Hamas militants.

Gazans still struggle to cross Rafah border even after the whole world supported Egypt's freedom

Crowds gather outside the office of Gaza's Borders and crossings Authority, in the southern city of Rafah. The people who have come here hope to register their names with border officials in order to gain permission to leave Gaza.

Government officials announced that the registration office would open its doors Sunday morning for the first time since anti government protests broke out in Egypt on January 25th. Since then the Rafah border, the only entrance into the Gaza that bypasses Israel, has been fully closed.
But the Egyptian authorities only authorize travel through the Rafah terminal for people who fall into 4 categories: patients with medical referrals, foreign passport holders, people with visas to other countries, who go straight to the airport, and students with proof of enrollment in their universities. For all others hoping to cross the border remains unrealized.
Approximately 1400 Gazans who were stranded in Egypt during the popular revolution were finally allowed to return home. But not all were fortunate enough to make it. Finally after obtaining travel permission this man accompanied his son, sick with Cancer, to Egypt. When they got there the country fell into turmoil and they returned home without seeing the doctor. The young man died only minutes after they crossed the border back into Gaza.

His illness progressed as we were waiting for travel permission. Even if we had seen the doctors in Egypt we knew it was too late by the time we got there because he fell into a coma. He is at peace now.

As Gaza is cut off form the outside world following years of Israeli siege, government officials have announced that negotiations with Egypt to fully open the border crossing are ongoing, and observers view the gradual easing of the closure as a good sign.

The former Egyptian regime enabled the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip by closing its borders with the territory, and with both Palestinian and Egyptian figures calling for the full opening of the border, Gazans can only wait and hope that with a new Egyptian leadership the 4 year long isolation of the territory will finally come to an end.

Safa Joudeh, Press TV, Gaza

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/166204.html

America: Hooked on War and Getting Poorer

With record foreclosures and child poverty at a shameful level, can we really afford to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq for 10 years?

I hallucinate easily, a hangover from time spent in an acid-rock commune in London in the fevered 60s. Most evenings when I switch on the television 6.30 news with its now cliched pictures of deep sea oil spurting from BP's pipe rupture, I see not bleeding sludge but human blood surging up into the Gulf of Mexico.

I've learned to trust my visions as metaphors for reality. The same news programmes, often as a dutiful throwaway item, will show a jerky fragment of Afghan combat accompanied by the usual pulse-pounding handheld shots of snipers amid roadside bomb explosions, preferably in fiery balls. My delusional mind converts this footage into a phantasmagoria where our M60 machine guns are shooting ammunition belts full of $1,000 bills.

Blood, oil, bullets … and cash.

Why is nobody talking about the Afghanistan adventure as a cause of our plunging recession? Or at least citing the 30-year-old endless war as a major contributory factor in wasting our money to "nation-build" in the Hindu Kush while our own country falls to pieces on food stamps, foreclosures and child poverty – one in five kids – that would put the world's poorest nations to shame?

Iraq was George Bush's war. But, as Republican party chairman Michael Steele correctly says, "Afghanistan is Obama's war of choice", and a losing proposition. Historically, Bush and Dick Cheney merely toyed with Afghanistan while visiting shock and awe on Iraq. But President Obama is really, really serious about it. He told us so on his campaign trail, but most of us refused to believe him. We told ourselves: oh, he's a closet pacifist, or he'll somehow find a way out of the impasse, thus sealing a devil's pact with our own consciences.

Obama's "way out" is to dig deeper in so that he'll be able to get out, it's said. Where have we heard that before? Exit strategy, my foot. Obama is a willing prisoner of his generals, the latest four-star foot-in-mouther being General George Casey, army chief of staff, who a few days ago confessed to CBS News that the US could face another "decade or so" of persistent conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. (He then fudged it, but the cat was out of the bag.)

Our Afghanistan war, which began in 1980 under the Democrats (by weaponising Afghan resistance to the Soviets), and is now truly a bipartisan war, is as bankrupt as our economy. No connection? None that I can hear from Republicans or Democrats and the "liberal base". The war without purpose or common sense is simply a given, like the weather. Other than a few lonely members of Congress, like Florida's Alan Grayson (who introduced a bill titled "The War Is Making You Poor"), the antiwar Texas libertarian Ron Paul and Illinois's Tim Johnson, hardly anybody in public life dares to make a connection between teachers' pink slips, personal bankruptcies (6,000 a day now), our rotting infrastructure, lengthening queues at unemployment offices, child poverty … and the war. Source

War on Terror - Big blow to US forces in Afghanistan

KANDAHAR: Eight American troops died in attacks in southern Afghanistan, including a car bombing and gunfight outside a police compound in Kandahar, officials said Wednesday as the Taleban push back against a coalition effort to secure the volatile region.

In the southern city of Kandahar, a suicide attacker slammed a car bomb into the gate of the headquarters of the elite Afghan National Civil Order Police late Tuesday night, a NATO statement said. Minutes later, insurgents opened fire with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

Three US troops, an Afghan policeman and five civilians died in the attack, but NATO said the insurgents failed to enter the compound.

The special police unit, known as ANCOP, had only recently been dispatched to Kandahar to set up checkpoints along with international forces to try to secure the south’s largest city, the spiritual birthplace of the Taleban.

The dead civilians included three Afghan translators and two security guards, Kandahar provincial police chief Sardar Mohammad Zazai said.

Taleban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi telephoned reporters Wednesday to claim responsibility for the attack. The insurgents, however, claimed 13 international troops and eight Afghan security forces died in the raid.

Four more American troops were killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb in the south, while one more US service member died the same day of wounds from a gunbattle.

So far in July, 45 international troops have died in Afghanistan, 33 of them Americans.

Also Wednesday, a senior army officer identified the Afghan soldier who turned against his British allies and killed three of them as Talib Hussein, age 22 or 23, from the eastern province of Ghazni.

Hussein is a Hazara, a Shiite Muslim minority, said Gen. Ghulam Farook Parwani, the deputy corps commander for southern forces including those in Helmand.

The identity of the soldier deepened the mystery of his motive, since the Hazara were persecuted by the Taleban — who are made up mostly of ethnic Pashtun Sunnis. Very few Hazaras are known to have joined the Taleban insurgency.

Parwani said Hussein was recruited into the army only about eight or nine months ago and had spent most of his time posted in Helmand. He added that initial investigations indicate Hussein was a habitual hashish smoker.

In other attacks around the country, nine Afghan civilians died in the south when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb in the volatile district of Marjah in Helmand province, the Ministry of Interior said. Another homemade bomb killed two security guards traveling on a road in eastern Paktika province.

Two suspected Taleban also died in Helmand’s Lashkar Gar district when the roadside bomb they were trying to plant exploded prematurely, the ministry said.

US General David Petraeus, who assumed command of NATO troops this month, said it was vital to ensure that the trust between Afghan and international forces “remains solid in order to defeat our common enemies.”