Audio: Gaza - After the Flotilla, What Next? (Fintan Lane & Derek Graham from the Flotilla)

by Bazooka Joe Sat Jun 26, 2010 05:48

A bloggers view on Israels backdown.

by Sean Og Mon Jun 28, 2010 08:32

Hamas-Fatah fuel spat leaves thousands in the dark
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH
06/28/2010 04:34

The continued power struggle between Hamas and Fatah has left tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the dark following the closure of the area’s main power plant.

The power plant, which supplies 25% of electricity to the Gaza Strip, was shut down on Friday night because of a dispute between the rival Palestinian parties over payment for fuel that is needed to keep it running.

Hamas and Fatah traded allegations over the power outage, with each party blaming the other for the crisis.

The Hamas government accused the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank of failing to deliver the fuel although it had received payment for the supply.

The PA, on the other hand, blamed Hamas for the electric outage and said that the Hamas government was not collecting money from consumers in the Gaza Strip.

The PA also said it has been covering up to 95% of the Gaza Strip’s total bill for electricity every month.

Kana’n Obaid, director of the power plant in the Gaza Strip, blamed the PA’s Finance Ministry for the crisis, claiming that it had reduced the fuel supply needed to keep the plant running.

He said that there were no direct contacts between Hamas and Fatah to solve the crisis. Instead, he added, he was talking to representatives of the European Union with the hope that they would intervene to solve the problem.

Obaid claimed that a payment of $2 million was sent to the PA government in Ramallah to cover the cost of fuel last week.

Ghassan Khatib, spokesman for the PA government in the West Bank, accused Hamas of creating a crisis for “political considerations” and with the purpose of inciting against the PA.

He said that Hamas was also seeking to exploit the crisis to win sympathy.

Hamas’s Health Ministry warned that the lives of some 500 patients hospitalized in various hospitals were at risk because of the electric outage. It said that those who would die first are the ones in intensive care units and heart and kidney patients.

The Gaza City Municipality warned of an “environmental crisis” in the area because of the possibility that the sewage system would break down. It said that the sewage was already threatening to flood the power plant and other parts of the city.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) on Sunday cast blame on both sides for the blackouts.

“It is such a tragedy that, on top of all the other crises that we have in the Gaza Strip, we now have a crisis of electricity,” John Ging, director of UNRWA in Gaza, was quoted by AFP as saying.

“It's an unbearable situation here at the moment, and it needs to be solved very quickly. It’s a Palestinian problem, made by Palestinians, and causing Palestinian suffering. So let’s have a Palestinian solution,” he added.

by oh you know who Mon Jun 28, 2010 10:36

Hamas accepts 'Israel’s right to exist’

By KHALED ABU TOAMEH - printed in The Jerusalem Post

Hamas has accepted Israel’s right to exist and would be prepared to nullify its charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, Aziz Dwaik, Hamas’s most senior representative in the West Bank, said on Wednesday.

"The [Hamas] charter was drafted more than 20 years ago," Dwaik noted, adding that his movement would even be prepared to "nullify" the document.

"No one wants to throw anyone into the sea," he said.

by Sean Og Mon Jun 28, 2010 19:07

I said in 1993 that at Oslo Israel should not have given Arafart and his PLO cronies any status and should not have rescued him from Tunis but evidently the EU and UN and USA told them to deal with him. Nobody listened to me then and they listened to EU , UN etc

Everyone knows that israel should have dealt directly then with Hamas as the DUP dealt with the S F ,
If Hamas have indeed retracted their refusal of israels rights then maybe some good will come about

It would be interesting to see the time and date of this [latest ] Hamas statement -as
Wednesday was 5 days ago and nobody has said anything about it .

Hope it is not a false dawn

by opus diablos - the regressive hypocrite party Tue Jun 29, 2010 10:19

Based on fabricated history extracted from the folk tales of the bible, by which(with the help of the colonial powers chasing the oil wealth of the region)they claimed the ground from under the inhabitants of the region and proceeded to evict and slaughter and intimidate in a program of ethnic cleansing devised in the 19thy century in parallel with the mythical Teutonic Aryan race theories that brought so much viciousness down on the heads of the Jewish people that it can now be used by cynical manipulators as justification for the same crimes under a different flag.

The parallel I see in 'rights' is the Nazi claim to self-defined 'Lebensraum' at the expense of any and all 'inferior races'.

by Colemanatlarge Wed Jun 30, 2010 19:55

The Palestinian Ambassador joins Marc in the studio this evening for a discussion on recent events.

Coleman At Large on Newstalk 106-108fm from 10pm till 12am