One year ago, an elite Mossad hit squad traveled to Dubai to kill a high-ranking member of Hamas. They completed the mission, but their covers were blown, and Israel was humiliated by the twenty-seven-minute video of their movements that was posted online for all the world to see. Ronen Bergman reveals the intricate, chilling details of the mission and investigates how Israel’s vaunted spy agency did things so spectacularly wrong.
As the latest round of Middle East Peace Talks kicked off yesterday, public opinion across the Arab world could have been mapped out in a colorful spectrum, if one wished to do so. Opinions on the talks’ prospects ranged from the supportive to optimistic to downright pessimistic.
My own view is that this whole peace process is a sham, that it will result in nothing at all, and in the rare scenario that it does lead to something, that ‘something’ will not be accepted by the Palestinian populace in general, because it will be seen as “forced” upon the Palestinian.
The primary concerns are many and none of them have been addressed properly before the launch of these ‘negotiations’. In this story, In this piece, Al Jazeera’s Inside Story takes a look at one of these concerns, which is the issue of Hamas not being included in the talk. Hamas in the democratically elected representative of Gaza and by not negotiating with Hamas at the table, the peace process is ostensibly being worked out with just one-half of the Palestinian population.
The death of five Israeli servicemen in a helicopter crash in Romania this week raised scarcely a headline.
There was a Nato-Israeli exercise in progress. Well, that’s OK then. Now imagine the death of five Hamas fighters in a helicopter crash in Romania this week. We’d still be investigating this extraordinary phenomenon. Now mark you, I’m not comparing Israel and Hamas. Israel is the country that justifiably slaughtered more than 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza 19 months ago – more than 300 of them children – while the vicious, blood-sucking and terrorist Hamas killed 13 Israelis (three of them soldiers who actually shot each other by mistake).
But there is one parallel. Judge Richard Goldstone, the eminent Jewish South African judge, decided in his 575-page UN inquiry into the Gaza bloodbath that both sides had committed war crimes – he was, of course, quite rightly called “evil” by all kinds of justifiably outraged supporters of Israel in the US, his excellent report rejected by seven EU governments – and so a question presents itself. What is Nato doing when it plays war games with an army accused of war crimes?
Read more at The Independent
