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A lawyer for an imprisoned Palestinian soccer player who has been on a hunger strike for more than three months says his client has agreed to resume eating and will be released July 10 in a deal with Israel.
The attorney, Mohammed Jabareen, spoke Monday after the deal was struck at an Israeli prison clinic. Israeli prison officials could not be reached for comment.
The soccer player, Mahmoud Sarsak, has been held by Israel for nearly three years without charges or trial. Israel claims he was active in the violent group Islamic Jihad. Sarsak denies the allegations.
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on Monday welcomed the claim of a Muslim Brotherhood victory in Egypt's presidential election, distributing sweets, praising God and expressing hope for a new era of warm relations between Gaza and Egypt.
Gaza, a small, densely populated territory, borders Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. The strip's ruling militant Hamas group is a local offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and draws inspiration from the Egyptian organization.
The Lebanese army shot dead two Palestinians in a refugee camp near the northern city of Tripoli on Monday after confrontations broke out during the funeral of man killed in the camp on Friday, residents said.
The army said in a statement the soldiers used tear gas and rubber bullets before opening fire on a crowd that attacked an army post inside the Nahr al-Bared camp. It said three soldiers had been wounded by stones and petrol bombs thrown at them.
Medical sources said 20 other people had been injured in the clashes.
Militants who crossed into Israel from Egypt's Sinai Desert fired on Israelis building a barrier on the border on Monday, killing one worker, before soldiers shot dead two of the attackers, Israel's military said.
Israel later launched air strikes killing four Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including two militants from the Islamic Jihad group on a motorcycle. Two other militants were killed while trying to fire a rocket, Israel said.
Unknown vandals set fire to a mosque near Ramallah early Tuesday morning, damaging the structure, and sprayed Hebrew slogans against a pending evacuation at a disputed settlement neighborhood.
"At one o'clock we heard screaming from the people of the village and realized the mosque was on fire," Jab'a Mayor Abdul Karim Sharaf said, according to The Jerusalem Post. "More than three hundred people awoke and we managed to put it out."
Amid a fresh round of hostilities along Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, Israeli and Palestinian scientists are continuing joint efforts to combat a potentially lethal bacterium that is spreading in Gaza City.
The research group has recently identified a unique strain of Methicillin - resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA), a particularly aggressive antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which has become common in Gaza, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported on Monday.
The military wing of Hamas fired four rockets toward Israel overnight Monday, which landed in open areas and caused no casualties.
Hamas claimed responsibility for the act. The rocket fire marks an unusual move for the group, which has been avoiding launching rockets toward Israel for many months now.
Following the attack, communities near the Gaza border were put on heightened alert. The residents were given instructions to remain at a close distance to a bomb shelter.
Hamas on Tuesday took responsibility for at least some of the rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilians Monday night, stating that it was responding to the killing of Palestinians in recent days. The IAF killed four Palestinian terrorists in the last 24 hours, at least two of whom were members of the Islamic Jihad terrorist group.
The Israeli delegation to the Olympics in London will not include even one Arab athlete. Not that it’s been any better in previous years; only two Arabs have represented the country in Olympic Games to date. The Arab sector is convinced that this is due to discrimination, but the athletic establishment denies the accusations.
After 20 to 30 years of detention, how does a released Palestinian prisoner live his life? What kind of psychological situation does he face? After all those years, does he believe that he still has a future?
"We expect full-status participation because we already have it in UNESCO and we have ties with Brazil (the host country which recognizes the Palestinian state) and with more than 130 countries," Palestinian ambassador Ibrahim Alzeben told AFP.
The stalemate in negotiations with the Palestinians and the assumption that it's impossible at present to reach a final-status solution have revived the idea of evacuating part of the West Bank unilaterally. Supporters of this idea believe that current trends, especially the expansion of the settlement enterprise, must be stopped before taking a decision that will anchor the two-state solution. A unilateral evacuation, they believe, will create a two-state reality that will make it easier to implement a final-status agreement.
Every month I drive to Bar-Ilan University to tape four or five discussions with national-Religious Rabbi Uri Sherki that are posted under the title "The Rabbi and the Professor" (unfortunately there are no English subtitles so far). I do this because I believe that there is desperate need for dialogue between Israel’s liberals and the national-religious. We have come to the point where we live in universes so different that it is becoming questionable how these groups can ever cooperate fruitfully for a common future.
There is something ironic about the situation in Sinai, a senior defense official said on Monday. Israel is officially in a perpetual state of war with Lebanon and Syria, but those are two of Israel’s quietest borders today.
“Egypt, which we have peace with, is turning into our biggest problem,” the official said.
Afew days ago, Israel marked the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of the war initially “Operation Peace for the Galilee,” now known as the “First Lebanon War,” since it was recently followed by another one. With the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the concept of the “Good Fence,” through which Israel had tried to good relations with Lebanon, collapsed.
From what I hear around the area, once again the reconciliation talks between Fatah and Hamas have re-entered the freezer. Just last week the parties announced that on June 20, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal would be announcing a new transitional government supported by both movements without any direct or representatives of either. The task of the transitional government was to prepare new elections for president of the Palestinian Authority, the PA Legislative Council and the Palestinian National Council of the PLO.
MRSA is an all-too-real monster. A bacterium that can resist most antibiotics, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus can be fatal. It spreads easily and quickly, and is particularly dangerous to patients in hospitals and nursing homes, where it is increasingly found.
And now a strain of this microbe has been found in Gaza City, Haaretz reports. The danger of this fast-moving, hard-to-treat and potentially deadly germ must now be added to the list of tribulations afflicting people in Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.
Urban legends, fantasies, misconceptions abound in life. But nowhere do they seem to be more pronounced and durable than in the discussion of America's relationship with the State of Israel. Some are simply a result of fuzzy thinking; others flow from the willful propaganda efforts of both the pro and anti-Israeli advocates and the battles they wage for the hearts and minds of the committed and the not-so-committed.
The only difference between the hate crime perpetrated at Neve Shalom ("Oasis of Peace," a cooperative village jointly established by Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel as a model of coexistence) and others is that the target this time around was an Israeli village.
With Israeli-Palestinian efforts at an impasse and immediate-term hopes for progress toward any agreement fading, the appeal of new ideas is understandable. This is no doubt why discussion of Israeli unilateral options—generally in terms of unilateral “withdrawals” from the West Bank—is in the air.
Links:
[1] http://www.americantaskforce.org/print/26141
[2] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printmail/26141
[3] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printpdf/26141
[4] http://www.americantaskforce.org/rss/wpr
[5] https://www.americantaskforce.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1
[6] http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/palestinian-footballer-to-end-strike-go-free-2401286.html
[7] http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/gazans-welcome-claim-of-islamist-victory-in-egypt-2401202.html
[8] http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/two-palestinians-killed-in-lebanon-refugee-camp/
[9] http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/seven-killed-on-israels-egypt-and-gaza-borders/
[10] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2012-06/19/c_131663572.htm
[11] http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2012-06/18/c_131661336.htm
[12] http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/hamas-fires-four-rockets-from-gaza-into-israel-1.437290
[13] http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=274383
[14] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/culture/2012/06/its-not-only-about-sports.html
[15] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/politics/2012/06/freed-palestiniansfrom-small-cel.html
[16] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/environment/developmental-issues/palestinians-seek-full-representation-at-rio20/articleshow/14266374.cms
[17] http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/the-minuses-of-unilateral-withdrawal-from-the-west-bank.premium-1.437225
[18] http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction/national-religious-messianism-is-endangering-israel-1.436148
[19] http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=274371
[20] http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=274347
[21] http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=274325
[22] http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/editorial/mrsa-scare-in-gaza
[23] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2012/al-monitor/five-myths-about-the-us-israeli.html
[24] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/culture/2012/06/21-in-favor-of-the-settlers.html
[25] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/18/the-siren-call-of-israeli-unilateralism.html
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