Bill Clinton: Mideast peace would undercut terror
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Yahoo News
by Paul Schemm - October 5, 2010 - 12:00am

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said Tuesday that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would take away much of the motivation for terrorism around the world. He described the long-running conflict as the key problem in the region and said resolving it would have a knock on effect that could result in Syria ending its support for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Iran turning back its controversial nuclear program.

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U.S. envoy speeds to Mideast in effort salvage peace talks
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz
September 28, 2010 - 12:00am

Washington's special Mideast envoy, using a slim lifeline from the Palestinians, rushed to the region on Tuesday on an emergency mission to keep peace talks from collapsing just weeks after they began. Israel's decision to resume new West Bank settlement construction after a 10-month moratorium expired on midnight Sunday has provoked Palestinian threats to walk out of the talks. It has also caused new friction between Israel and its powerful U.S. patron, which said it was disappointed with Israel's refusal to relent.

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Settlers make renewed attempt on Jlem home
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Ma'an News Agency
September 17, 2010 - 12:00am

Jerusalem's Qeresh family said friends and neighbors helped them resist what witnesses described as an attempted home take over on Wednesday. The event reportedly began in the early morning in the As-Sa’diyah neighborhood in the old city of Jerusalem, as Israeli settlers entered a wing of the family home and allegedly began removing furniture. Family members said young men from the neighborhood came to the scene, and forcibly prevented the settlers from taking the furniture out of the home.

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Peace talks highlight internal tensions in Hamas
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jerusalem Post
by Ehud Yaari - (Analysis) September 17, 2010 - 12:00am

Unsurprisingly, the Hamas leadership – both in Gaza and Damascus, and less so in the West Bank – has greeted the resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian talks with a flood of contrarian rhetoric. Characterizing the process as a “sellout” of the Palestinian “cause,” the movement argues that President Mahmoud Abbas lacks the necessary “mandate” to represent his people. Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal went so far as to call Abbas “a zero,” amid accusations of “treason” and “betrayal.”

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Hamas Isn't the IRA
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Slate
by Michael Weiss - September 17, 2010 - 12:00am

With the resumption of Arab-Israeli direct talks comes the regurgitation of a minority view that these talks are destined to fail because Hamas is excluded. The first salvo in this ongoing campaign came from Palestinian-American blogger Ali Abunimah, an advocate of the one-state solution, who expounded upon the need for recognizing Hamas in the New York Times. Peter Beinart made the same case in a broader Daily Beast column about Obama's failed foreign policy.

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Hamas stuck between peace talks and the IDF
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz
by Yaakov Katz - (Analysis) September 16, 2010 - 12:00am

Hamas is on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand it has made a strategic decision to increase its terror attacks against Israel – 10 rockets were fired into Israel on Wednesday – in order to torpedo the peace talks between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. On the other hand, Hamas does not want to go too far with its attacks, to the point that Israel will feel compelled to send two IDF divisions into Gaza and carry out Operation Cast Lead II.

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How the Palestinian Authority is fighting Hamas attacks
In Print by Hussein Ibish - The Washington Post (Opinion) - September 11, 2010 - 12:00am

The Sept. 8 editorial "The Hamas murders," on the drive-by attacks against Israeli settlers in the West Bank by Hamas, was exceptionally unfair to the Palestinian Authority. Demanding that the authority "fight terrorism," the editorial ignored the fact that the shootings occurred in an area under full Israeli security control.

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PA committed 'treason' in W.Bank terror suspects' arrests
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jerusalem Post
September 9, 2010 - 12:00am

Hamas accused the Palestinian Authority of "direct cooperation with the enemy" after it arrested Hamas members in conjunction with recent West Bank terrorist attacks that left four Israelis dead and two others injured last week, Army Radio reported Thursday. Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum likened the arrests to "treason" and warned the Fatah run authority not to hand the men over to Israel. "The continuation of this criminal campaign crosses all red lines and is direct cooperation with the enemy in the clear light of day," Barhum continued.

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Another War Zone: Social Media in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Middle East Report
by Adi Kuntsman, Rebecca L. Stein - September 9, 2010 - 12:00am

In late May 2010, the convoy known as the Freedom Flotilla met off of Cyprus and headed south, carrying humanitarian aid and hundreds of international activists who aimed to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. The organizers used social media extensively: tweeting updates from the boats; webcasting live with cameras uplinked to the Internet and a satellite, enabling simultaneous rebroadcasting; employing Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other social networking websites to allow interested parties to see and hear them in real time; and using Google Maps to chart their location at sea.

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Hamas militia's secret West Bank stronghold
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from BBC News
by Jon Donnison - September 8, 2010 - 12:00am

Amid the dust at the side of the road at the Bani Nayim junction in the southern West Bank there is a small makeshift shrine - a pile of rocks covered with Israeli flags. It was here, just over a week ago, that four Israeli settlers were shot dead - their car riddled with bullets - in a drive-by attack by Hamas militants. That attack and another the following day at Ramallah, in which two Israeli settlers were injured, were together a message from Hamas: "You can't ignore us." Secret army Both attacks were carried out by the al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing.

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