Palestine: Abbas Claims Secret Israeli Talks with Hamas

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Hamas declared on Saturday that all groups in Gaza have reached consensus to halt rocket attacks upon Israel.

“We have agreed with the factions that nobody carries out any action involving rockets for now,” said Hamas’ interior minister Fathi Hammad. He stated that the aims of the agreement were to avoid another Israeli military operation and to enable people to rebuild after January’s Israeli invasion.

Haaretz’s Amos Harel writes that there is an implicit truce between Israel and Hamas, as the latter are aware that rockets have not caused severe damage to the “enemy” and the Israeli offensive broke the power of Hamas. The Palestinian Authority is claiming secret meetings leading to a truce between Hamas and Israel; the Gazan group denies the accusation.

Harel argues that the real tension for Israel is now in the north, as Hezbollah which has accumulated a tremendous arsenal since the end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006. It was reported on Saturday thatthe Lebanese army opened fire on an Israeli unmanned aerial vehicle, and the Lebanese military chief said he would heighten border security.

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Co-written with Ali Yenidunya:

UPDATE 13 August, 0630 GMT: A good psychological warfare campaign can’t go silent for long. Reuters reported on Wednesday: “Under a photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sitting the previous day in the cockpit of an F-15I long-range fighter-bomber, mass-selling [Israeli newspaper] Ma’ariv quoted the official as saying Israel could carry out such a strike without U.S. approval but time was running out for it to be effective. The official said, “”The military option is real and at the disposal of Israel’s leaders, but time is working against them.”

You have to hand it to The Times of London: when it comes to propaganda, their reporters never run the risk of subtlety.

On 3 August, an article signed by no less than three intrepid reporters, including the Defence Correspondent, proclaimed, “Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb.” A research programme to create weaponised uranium had been completed in the summer of 2003, and Iranian scientists “could feasibly make a bomb within a year of an order” from Khamenei.

Two days later, Foreign Editor Richard Beeston, one of the three authors of the Bomb Is Imminent piece, found another angle in a pair of articles, one co-written with Nicholas Blanford, “Tehran is investing…in its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah”, which had “amassed tens of thousands of rockets and missiles capable of bombarding half [of Israel]“.

The threat of an Iranian nuclear attack, coupled with its sponsorship of a regional war on Tel Aviv? Where could Beeston and his companions have discovered these master plans? According to one of the articles, “Western intelligence sources”.

Which is absolutely right, if by “Western” you mean “Israeli”.
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This week, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz featured the testimony of Israeli soldiers detailing the killing of civilians and the destruction of their property during the Gaza War. The soldiers, graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College,  made their statements on 13 February, and they were published in the newsletter for the course’s graduates.

On Thursday Israel’s military advocate general ordered the Israel Defense Forces to launch two official inquiries into the soldiers’ testimonies.

Minister of Defense Ehud Barak commented, “”We have the most moral army in the world.”

Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement
Amos Harel
18 March 2009

During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property, say soldiers who fought in the offensive.
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