The Middle East

Friendly attitudes towards the Palestinian government in Gaza?  This Muslim Brotherhood government is similar to preceding Egyptian govenments.

Egypt court orders tunnels to Gaza destroyed

Ruling will remove routes between Egypt and the Gaza Strip for smuggled weapons, but also a lifeline for Palestinians.

Egyptian forces flooded some of the tunnels with sewage earlier this month [Reuters]

al- Jazeera, 26 February, 2013 A Cairo court has ruled the government must destroy all tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, removing a route for smuggled weapons but also a lifeline for Palestinians. Egypt's ruling Muslim Brotherhood has close ties with the Hamas movement that runs Gaza, but many Egyptians fear the enclave is a security risk for Egypt. Leftist lawyers said they brought the case along with activists to force the government's hand. President Mohammed Morsi's national security adviser, Essam Haddad, has said Egypt will not tolerate the two-way flow of smuggled arms through the tunnels that is destabilising its Sinai peninsula. Egyptian forces flooded some of the tunnels with sewage earlier this month. "The court ruled to make it obligatory that the government destroys the tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip," the Cairo administrative court judge, Farid Tanaghou, said on Tuesday. An estimated 30 percent of goods that reach Gaza's 1.7m Palestinians come through the tunnels, circumventing a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt for more than seven years. "I filed the case because I was worried about the state of national security in my country after the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power and its unclear policies and links with Hamas," said Wael Hamdy, one of the lawyers involved. He said the case had been brought after 16 Egyptian border guards were killed last August by militants near the Gaza border that highlighted lawlessness in the Sinai desert region adjoining Israel and Gaza. Cairo said some of the gunmen had entered Egypt through the Gaza tunnels, an accusation denied by Palestinians. Dozens of tunnels have been destroyed since that incident, but, according to Hamdy, 2,000 are still open.

Already the zionist masses are baying for blood – see comments HERE

Rocket explodes in Israel, first attack from Gaza since November truce

A rocket fired from Gaza exploded in Israel on Tuesday, the first such attack since a November truce, and a militant group said it launched the strike to retaliate for the death of a Palestinian in an Israeli jail.

Video footage is from Israeli TV.

Reuters,

26 January, 2013

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's West Bank-based Fatah movement, called the rocket a "first response" to inmate Arafat Jaradat's death in disputed circumstances on Saturday.

"We must resist our enemy by all available means," the group said in a statement emailed to reporters. "We stress our commitment to armed struggle against the Zionist enemy."

Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, said it was investigating the attack, which caused no casualties and followed a surge in West Bank protests since Jaradat's death and intermittent hunger strikes by four other prisoners.

The rocket hit a road near the southern city of Ashkelon, police said. Israel responded by closing the Kerem Shalom border crossing through which produce and other goods are moved into the Gaza Strip, but it took no immediate military action.

The rocket was the first to hit Israel since a November 21 truce brokered by Egypt that ended eight days of cross-border air strikes and missile attacks in which 175 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed.

In addition to the fire from Gaza, a surge of unrest in the occupied West Bank has raised fears in Israel of a new Palestinian Intifada, or uprising.

Abbas accused Israel of inciting the unrest but urged calm.

"We did not want things to go as far as they have. We do not want tension or any escalation," Abbas said in the West Bank, in his second appeal in as many days to tamp down the violence.

TORTURE ALLEGATIONS

On Monday, thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank turned out for the funeral of Jaradat, 30, who died a week after his arrest for throwing stones at Israeli vehicles.

Palestinian officials said he had died after being tortured in prison. But Israel said an autopsy carried out in the presence of a Palestinian coroner was inconclusive.

In confrontations after the emotive funeral, Israeli police shot and wounded five Palestinian youths in Bethlehem and outside a West Bank prison, leaving a 15-year-old boy with a critical head injury, Israeli and Palestinian medics said.

An Israeli military spokeswoman, commenting on the incident, said troops had opened fire at Palestinians who threw homemade hand grenades at a Jewish holy site called Rachel's Tomb.

Before the rocket attack from Gaza, media reports said Israeli officials had hoped the Palestinian protests were winding down.

Palestinian frustration has also been fuelled by Israel's expansion of Jewish settlements in territory captured in a 1967 war and deadlocked diplomacy for a peace agreement since 2010.

The U.S. State Department said American diplomats have contacted Israeli and Palestinian leaders to appeal for calm.

The United Nations coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Robert Serry, called Tuesday's rocket fire "totally unacceptable" and urged an investigation into Jaradat's death.