Gaza

Israel, Hamas Agree to 72-Hour Ceasefire: 1,452 Gazans Killed

Both Sides Agree to Humanitarian Ceasefire

Anti War,

31 July, 2014

Both Israel and Hamas have agreed to a UN-brokered humanitarian ceasefire for 72 hours, beginning at 1 AM Eastern Friday morning, and which will include efforts to negotiate a more permanent settlement.

Before the announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted he would not accept any ceasefire that didn’t allow Israel to continue destroying tunnels inside the Gaza Strip, though the current ceasefire does not seem to allow them to keep attacking the strip.

Fighting continued throughout the day, though it seemed to be tapering off by evening, with the toll standing at 1,452 Gazans killed, 8,295 wounded, both overwhelmingly civilians. On the Israeli side, the death toll is 64, with 61 of them soldiers.

Previous ceasefires have not lasted their entire span before being canceled, though there are high hopes among Western negotiators that this would be a serious chance to make a deal.

Making a deal isn’t going to be easy, with Hamas seeking an end to the Gaza blockade and Israel hoping to see a full disarmament of every faction in the strip. Either way, talks on a settlement are planned in Cairo.

Though Egypt has traditionally been the broker of these assorted ceasefires, the current junta is hostile toward Hamas, and is refusing to allow them to send any representatives unless it is in a Fatah-led delegation.

Collective Punishment in Gaza

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A Palestinian man leaves the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya after receiving treatment for his wounds caused by an Israeli strike at a U.N. school in Jebaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, July 30, 2014. More than a dozen people were killed early Wednesday after tank shells hit the Abu Hussein U.N. school where hundreds of Palestinians had taken refuge from Israeli attacks. (Photo: AP/Khalil Hamra)

Common Dreams,

30 July, 2014

Three days after the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the current war in Gaza, he held a press conference in Tel Aviv during which he said, in Hebrew, according to the Times of Israel, “I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

It’s worth listening carefully when Netanyahu speaks to the Israeli people. What is going on in Palestine today is not really about Hamas. It is not about rockets. It is not about “human shields” or terrorism or tunnels. It is about Israel’s permanent control over Palestinian land and Palestinian lives. That is what Netanyahu is really saying, and that is what he now admits he has “always” talked about. It is about an unswerving, decades-long Israeli policy of denying Palestine self-determination, freedom, and sovereignty.

What Israel is doing in Gaza now is collective punishment. It is punishment for Gaza’s refusal to be a docile ghetto. It is punishment for the gall of Palestinians in unifying, and of Hamas and other factions in responding to Israel’s siege and its provocations with resistance, armed or otherwise, after Israel repeatedly reacted to unarmed protest with crushing force. Despite years of ceasefires and truces, the siege of Gaza has never been lifted.

As Netanyahu’s own words show, however, Israel will accept nothing short of the acquiescence of Palestinians to their own subordination. It will accept only a Palestinian “state” that is stripped of all the attributes of a real state: control over security, borders, airspace, maritime limits, contiguity, and, therefore, sovereignty. The twenty-three-year charade of the “peace process” has shown that this is all Israel is offering, with the full approval of Washington. Whenever the Palestinians have resisted that pathetic fate (as any nation would), Israel has punished them for their insolence. This is not new.

Punishing Palestinians for existing has a long history. It was Israel’s policy before Hamas and its rudimentary rockets were Israel’s boogeyman of the moment, and before Israel turned Gaza into an open-air prison, punching bag, and weapons laboratory. In 1948, Israel killed thousands of innocents, and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands more, in the name of creating a Jewish-majority state in a land that was then sixty-five per cent Arab. In 1967, it displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians again, occupying territory that it still largely controls, forty-seven years later.

In 1982, in a quest to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization and extinguish Palestinian nationalism, Israel invaded Lebanon, killing seventeen thousand people, mostly civilians. Since the late nineteen-eighties, when Palestinians under occupation rose up, mostly by throwing stones and staging general strikes, Israel has arrested tens of thousands of Palestinians: over seven hundred and fifty thousand people have spent time in Israeli prisons since 1967, a number that amounts to forty per cent of the adult male population today. They have emerged with accounts of torture, which are substantiated by human-rights groups like B’tselem. During the second intifada, which began in 2000, Israel reinvaded the West Bank (it had never fully left). The occupation and colonization of Palestinian land continued unabated throughout the “peace process” of the nineteen-nineties, and continues to this day. And yet, in America, the discussion ignores this crucial, constantly oppressive context, and is instead too often limited to Israeli “self-defense” and the Palestinians’ supposed responsibility for their own suffering.

In the past seven or more years, Israel has besieged, tormented, and regularly attacked the Gaza Strip. The pretexts change: they elected Hamas; they refused to be docile; they refused to recognize Israel; they fired rockets; they built tunnels to circumvent the siege; and on and on. But each pretext is a red herring, because the truth of ghettos—what happens when you imprison 1.8 million people in a hundred and forty square miles, about a third of the area of New York City, with no control of borders, almost no access to the sea for fishermen (three out of the twenty kilometres allowed by the Oslo accords), no real way in or out, and with drones buzzing overhead night and day—is that, eventually, the ghetto will fight back. It was true in Soweto and Belfast, and it is true in Gaza. We might not like Hamas or some of its methods, but that is not the same as accepting the proposition that Palestinians should supinely accept the denial of their right to exist as a free people in their ancestral homeland.

This is precisely why the United States’ support of current Israeli policy is folly. Peace was achieved in Northern Ireland and in South Africa because the United States and the world realized that they had to put pressure on the stronger party, holding it accountable and ending its impunity. Northern Ireland and South Africa are far from perfect examples, but it is worth remembering that, to achieve a just outcome, it was necessary for the United States to deal with groups like the Irish Republican Army and the African National Congress, which engaged in guerrilla war and even terrorism. That was the only way to embark on a road toward true peace and reconciliation. The case of Palestine is not fundamentally different.

Instead, the United States puts its thumb on the scales in favor of the stronger party. In this surreal, upside-down vision of the world, it almost seems as if it is the Israelis who are occupied by the Palestinians, and not the other way around. In this skewed universe, the inmates of an open-air prison are besieging a nuclear-armed power with one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.

If we are to move away from this unreality, the U.S. must either reverse its policies or abandon its claim of being an “honest broker.” If the U.S. government wants to fund and arm Israel and parrot its talking points that fly in the face of reason and international law, so be it. But it should not claim the moral high ground and intone solemnly about peace. And it should certainly not insult Palestinians by saying that it cares about them or their children, who are dying in Gaza today.

Satellite footage: Gaza destruction before & after Israel's bombs

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At least 15 Palestinians, including a journalist and two paramedics, were killed when Israeli airstrikes hit a busy market place in Gaza. The shopping area was busy because Israel's 4-hour humanitarian ceasefire was supposed to have been in force. Israel's four week bombardment has claimed more than 1300 Palestinian lives, the majority were civilians.

'Can't be quiet anymore': More than 50 IDF reservists refuse to serve

Israel is calling up sixteen thousand additional reserve troops as its assault goes on. But, there are 51 IDF soldiers who are making a stand and refusing to take part in any more destruction.

Chinese hackers obtained info on Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system - report

RT,

31 July, 2014

In a raid seeking information related to Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, Chinese hackers infiltrated the databases of three Jewish defense contractors.

In addition to taking information on the Iron Dome, the attackers were also able to nab plans regarding other projects – including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, ballistic rockets, and “detailed schematics and specifications” for the Arrow III missile interceptor.

According to independent journalist Brian Krebs, the intrusion occurred between 2011 and 2012 and was carried out by China’s infamous “Comment Crew” – a group of cyber warriors linked to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

In May, the United States charged five members of this group with cyber espionage against American computer networks. The hackers reportedly infiltrated US systems in order to “steal information that would provide an economic advantage” for Chinese companies, including “Chinese state-owned enterprises.”

Although it’s unclear exactly how much data the hackers were able to obtain, Maryland-based intelligence firm Cyber Engineering Services (Cyber ESI) identified more than 700 documents that were stolen. The real number is believed to be much higher.

Speaking to Business Insider, University of California researcher Jon Lindsay said the intrusion could signal that the Chinese are interested in learning more about missile defense – which is considered notoriously difficult to become proficient in – but it could also be an extension of Beijing’s typical cyber espionage practices.

"The Chinese style of espionage is more like a vacuum cleaner than a closely-directed telescope,"Lindsay said. "They go after a lot of different kinds of targets — the leaders in any particular industry."

As the news outlet speculated, Chinese interest in the Iron Dome could have been triggered by the missile shield’s success during Israel’s battle with Hamas in 2012. Krebs noted that Israel claims the Iron Dome has intercepted one-fifth of the 2,000-plus rockets fired their way in the most recent outbreak of violence.

An Israeli soldier walks near the launcher of an Iron Dome missile interceptor battery deployed in the southern Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon (Reuters/Amir Cohen)

Regarding the hack, one of the Israeli defense firms involved declined to say whether any of its partners in the US were alerted to the security breach, which is notable considering that Congress has delivered hundreds of millions of dollars to Tel Aviv in Iron Dome funding.

“At the time, the issue was treated as required by the applicable rules and procedures,” Eliana Fishler, a spokesperson for the defense firm Israel Aerospace Industries, said to Krebs. “The information was reported to the appropriate authorities. IAI undertook corrective actions in order to prevent such incidents in the future.”

Meanwhile, CyberESI CEO Joseph Drissel explained that much of the stolen information was restricted by the US State Department.

“Most of the technology in the Arrow 3 wasn’t designed by Israel, but by Boeing and other U.S. defense contractors,” he told Krebs. “We transferred this technology to them, and they coughed it all up. In the process, they essentially gave up a bunch of stuff that’s probably being used in our systems as well.”

Of course, the US has accused Beijing of this type of espionage before, even outside of the five Chinese officials charged in May. As RT reported in June, American cyber security company CrowdStrike said that one unit within the PLA has been linked to seven years of hacking against the US aerospace industry. 

This information was shared with US intelligence agencies as well as the Justice Department.

For its part, China has consistently denied allegations of hacking, often claiming that it is subject to numerous cyber attacks from the United States