Warned him? Or what? They’ll put him in Gitmo? Yah, don’t talk to them, because as you can clearly see, OUR foreign policy is working so wonderfully……we don’t need to talk to anybody we don’t like. And when we do talk, it’s in a threatening, bully manner. Get with the program Jimmah!! Seven more months of this shit.

From USA Today:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday the Bush administration explicitly warned former President Jimmy Carter against meeting with members of Hamas, the Palestinian faction that controls the Gaza Strip and which is regarded by the U.S. as a terror group.
Rice, attending a regional meeting on Iraq’s security and future, contradicted Carter’s assertions that he never got a clear signal from the State Department. Rice told reporters that the U.S. thought the visit could confuse the message that the U.S. will not deal with Hamas.

“I just don’t want there to be any confusion,” Rice said. “The United States is not going to deal with Hamas and we had certainly told President Carter that we did not think meeting with Hamas was going to help” further a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Carter said top Hamas leaders told him during seven hours of talks in Damascus over the weekend that they are willing to live next to Israel, but a top Hamas official said the group would never outright recognize the Jewish state.

Separately Tuesday, a Hamas official said the militant group has softened its demands for a cease-fire with Israel.

*More than 80% of population rely on humanitarian aid
*Unemployment about 40%
*No running water for 25-30% of Gazans

Gaza’s humanitarian situation is at its worst since Israel occupied the territory in 1967, say UK-based human rights and development groups.

They include Amnesty International, Save the Children, Cafod, Care International and Christian Aid.

They criticise Israel’s blockade on Gaza as illegal collective punishment which fails to deliver security.

Israel says its military action and other measures are lawful and needed to stop rocket attacks from Gaza.

Israel pulled its troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, but retains control over Gaza’s airspace and coastline, and over its own border with the territory.

More at the BBC

by Mike Whitney

When Hamas gunmen stormed the Fatah security compounds in Gaza last week they found huge supplies of American-made weaponry including 7,400 M-16 assault rifles, dozens of mounted machine guns, rocket launchers, 7 armored military jeeps, 800,000 rounds of bullets and 18 US-made armored personnel carriers. They also discovered something far more valuable— CIA files which purportedly contain “information about the collaboration between Fatah and the Israeli and American security organizations; CIA methods on how to prevent attacks, chase and follow after cells of Hamas and the Committees; plans about Fatah assassinations of members of Hamas and other organizations; and American studies on the security situation in Gaza.” (Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily.com)

If the documents prove to be authentic, they will confirm what many critics of Fatah believed from the beginning; that US-Israeli intelligence agencies have been collaborating with high-ranking members of the PA to help crush the Palestinian national liberation movement. The information could be disastrous for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his newly-appointed “emergency government”. It could destroy their credibility before they even take office.

The extent of Fatah’s cooperation with the CIA is still unknown, but an article in The New York Sun, (”Hamas Takes over Gaza Security Services” 6-15-07) suggests that the two groups may have been working together closely. Former Middle East CIA operations officer Robert Baer, who was interviewed in the article, said that the discovery of the documents was “a major blow to Fatah” and will show “a record of training, spying on Hamas”.

Baer added ironically, “Fatah equals CIA is not a good selling point.”

Baer is right. The uncovering of the documents is “big trouble” for Abbas who is already facing a loss of public confidence from his closeness to Israel and for his appointment of Salam Fayyad, the ex-World bank official who the Israeli newspaper Ha-aretz calls “everyone’s favorite Palestinian.”

Continue reading at Global Research

JERUSALEM (CNN) — Several dozen pro-Fatah Palestinians with little food and no toilets remained stranded Wednesday inside the Erez Crossing walkway connecting Hamas-led Gaza to Israel.

“The situation is dreadful,” Saeb Erakat said. “The situation is very, very dire.”

The refugees are inside the 300-yard long covered walkway bordered by two 10-yard high concrete walls, which is now filled with waste and feces. They are mostly young men, but a few women are also there with several children. They represent what is left of several hundred people who rushed to the border crossing last week when fighting between Hamas and Fatah militants raged for control of Gaza.

Some of them tell stories of narrow escapes from Hamas militants and many say they fear for their lives if forced return to Gaza.

The Israeli government allowed several dozen senior Fatah leaders and their families to pass through on their way to the Fatah-controlled West Bank. People with foreign citizenship were also allowed to pass, according to Israeli daily Haaretz.

On Monday, grenade attacks inside the tunnel wounded at least 17 people. Israel has already allowed wounded Five of the critically wounded were rushed to Israeli hospitals, but the others remained in Gaza, Erakat said.

Erakat said the Palestinian Authority was “looking at various options” for resolving the Erez Crossing crisis.

Erakat urged all other Palestinians in Gaza to “please stay home.”

More at CNN

A man with a brain……and compassion.

DUBLIN, Ireland - Former President Jimmy Carter accused the U.S., Israel and the European Union on Tuesday of seeking to divide the Palestinian people by reopening aid to President Mahmoud Abbas‘ new government in the West Bank while denying the same to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was addressing a human rights conference in Ireland, also said the Bush administration’s refusal to accept Hamas’ 2006 election victory was “criminal.”

Carter said Hamas, besides winning a fair and democratic mandate that should have entitled it to lead the Palestinian government, had proven itself to be far more organized in its political and military showdowns with Abbas’ moderate Fatah movement.

Hamas fighters routed Fatah in their violent takeover of the Gaza Strip last week. The split prompted Abbas to dissolve the power’sharing government with his rivals in Hamas and set up a Fatah-led administration to govern the West Bank.

Carter said the consensus of the U.S., Israel and the EU to start funneling aid to Abbas’ new government in the West Bank but continue blocking Hamas in the Gaza Strip represented an “effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples.”

“All efforts of the international community should be to reconcile the two, but there’s no effort from the outside to bring the two together,” he said.

More at the Houston Chronicle

JERUSALEM, June 14 — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the Palestinian unity government Thursday and declared a state of emergency as the surging Islamic forces of the rival Hamas movement nearly completed their military conquest of the Gaza Strip.

In a presidential decree, Abbas fired Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and suggested he would “return to the people” with new national elections in the future. His decision ends the four-month power’sharing arrangement between his Fatah movement and Hamas, the two largest Palestinian political parties. Sami Abu Zouhri, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said, “In practical terms these decisions are worthless.”

“Prime Minister Haniyeh remains the head of the government even if it was dissolved by the president,” Abu Zouhri told the Reuters news agency.

More at the Washington Post

By SARAH EL DEEB, Associated Press Writers

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Israeli aircraft launched missiles at Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, killing at least five people, after Hamas fired rocket barrages into Israel in an apparent attempt to draw Israel into increasingly violent Palestinian infighting.

Hamas gunmen fatally shot six guards from the rival Fatah movement and mistakenly ambushed a jeep carrying their own fighters, killing five. In all, 16 Palestinians were killed in Palestinian infighting Wednesday - the bloodiest day since violence broke out in the Gaza Strip four days ago.

The streets of central Gaza City echoed with gunfire and were empty except for gunmen in black ski masks. Terrified residents stayed home from school and work, huddling in dark homes after electricity to some neighborhoods was cut off by a downed power line.

At nightfall, Hamas announced its intention to begin observing a unilateral cease-fire, and President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah also called on the warring parties to hold their fire. However, similar truces the two previous evenings did not hold.

In four days of fighting, 41 people have been killed and dozens more have been injured - not including the dead from the Israeli airstrikes. Most of the dead have been from Fatah. The violence threatened to bring down the Palestinians’ two-month-old unity government - and brought the Palestinians dangerously close to all-out civil war.

Despite Israel’s vow to stay out of the fray, its missile strikes added another layer of complexity to Gaza’s mayhem, and raised the specter of a large’scale Israeli invasion.

“What is happening in Gaza endangers not only the unity government, but the Palestinian social fabric, the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian strategy as a whole,” said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.

Abbas was expected to meet with Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas in Gaza on Thursday to discuss the situation, Abbas aide Yasser Abed Rabbo said. One option was declaring a state of emergency, he said. Abbas also spoke by phone with Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Syria on Wednesday, and the two agreed to work to end the violence.

Hamas officials said the organization’s men launched eight rockets at Israel, following a barrage of around 20 rockets Tuesday. That salvo at the Israeli town of Sderot, just outside Gaza, wounded five Israelis, one seriously, said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

Is it any wonder they grow up to hate?

NABLUS, West Bank - Their worried parents call them the lost generation of Palestine: its most radical, most accepting of violence and most despairing.

They are the children of the second intifada, which began in 2000, growing up in a territory riven by infighting, seared by violence, occupied by Israel, largely cut off from the world and segmented by barriers and checkpoints.

To hear these young people talk is to listen in on budding nihilism and a loss of hope.

“Ever since we were little, we see guns and tanks, and little kids wanting little guns to fight against Israel,” said Raed Debie, 24, a student at An Najah University here.

Issa Khalil, 25, broke in, agitated. “We never see anything good in our lives,” he said. He was arrested for throwing stones in the first intifada, the civil disobedience that began in the late 1980s and led to the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel. He was arrested again in the second uprising as the agreement faltered.

“And for what?” he asked. “I wasted 14 years of my life. We all did. For five years I haven-t left Nablus. Here there’s unemployment and no peace; it retreats, we go backward.”

Full article at the New York Times

DAMASCUS (AFP) - The United Nations has opened a tented school for some 90 Palestinian refugee children in the no-man’s land between Iraq and Syria.

The children are among 354 Palestinians who have been stranded at the border for nine months since fleeing sectarian violence in Iraq in which Palestinians are often targeted as suspected sympathisers of Sunni Arab insurgents.

The school’s eight teachers are drawn from among the refugees themselves and underwent a week-long training course in Damascus last month, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said Monday.

Read more at YahooNews

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Travel agents report a brisk demand for visas to Cuba, one of the few places that welcomes Palestinians.
Driven by fear of civil war and increasingly bleak economic prospects, Palestinians are fleeing their violence-wracked lands in growing numbers. Many are skilled and educated, and are leaving behind an increasingly impoverished and fundamentalist society.

Many countries make it difficult for the stateless Palestinians to obtain even tourist visas, because they often overstay them.

Two popular destinations for Gazans are Canada, which still offers legal immigration, and Cuba, which imposes few restrictions on Palestinian travelers.

Those with tourist visas to Cuba often don’t plan to go there. Instead, they get off in transit at a European airport, rip up their Palestinian travel document and seek asylum.

Read more at Chicago Sun Times