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→ 23 May 2018
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Rob Berg: Israel right to defend itself against Hamas terrorist attack in Gaza | NZ Herald

Rob Berg, President of the Zionist Federation of New Zealand

Despite the many conflicts around the world, there seems to be few as emotive, and that garner as much attention, as the Israeli-Palestinian one. And whenever there is a flare up, we see a rush to judgment against Israel before the full facts are known, an uncritical embrace of the Palestinian narrative, and a disregard for context and analysis.

This has been evident once again since the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza embarked over 6 weeks ago on their “Great March of Return”, a so-called peaceful march which last Monday resulted in the deaths of 62 of their number. Israel was condemned around much of the world, the Ambassador of Israel to New Zealand called into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and, linking it to the move of the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, the Prime Minister commented on “the devastating, one-sided loss of life”. She didn’t say how many Israeli deaths would have prevented her recrimination.

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→ 22 May 2018
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Gaza and the fallacy of moral equivalence | Algemeiner

Layla Ghandour’s body in her grandmother’s arms

Rarely does the photo, four columns wide, of a dead baby appear on page one of The New York Times as it did on May 17. The sorrowful death of Layla Ghandour became, for the Times, “fodder for competing narratives.” But, in fact, a dead Palestinian baby is grist for a newspaper eager to blame Israel first.

The accompanying article was written by Times Cairo bureau chief Declan Walsh. He told the poignant story of an eight-month-old Gaza girl with sparkling eyes that he actually never saw. Held “in the arms of her grandmother when a cloud of tear gas engulfed them” at Monday’s Gaza protest, when 50-plus Palestinians were killed as they attempted to breach the border with Israel, Layla supposedly inhaled “acrid gas.” Dying several hours later, her story “shot across the globe, providing an emotive focus for outrage” not directed at the politically zealous family members who brought her there but, predictably, at Israel.

Layla’s photo was taken by Gaza photographer Mahmud Hams, who described his specialty as “shots of children crushed in the rubble. Parents weeping beside lifeless little bodies. Death. Destruction. Funerals of men, women, children, sometimes very young children.” It is, by implication, always Israel’s fault. Walsh describes “the pressures of life” in Gaza under “an Israeli blockade” that contributed to Layla’s death.

But he inadvertently describes a family’s tragic, zealous dysfunction. Layla was dozing at home when the call sounded from a nearby mosque that a bus awaited passengers heading to the Gaza border fence. Her 12-year-old uncle, assuming that her mother was already on board, took Layla with him. Later that afternoon, when she began to cry, the boy carried her toward the border to find her grandmother, who was busy shouting at Israelis across the fence. Tear gas fell nearby, an hour later Layla died.

In Gaza, Walsh notes, “the rules of grief” transform private suffering, to say nothing of family history, into a political frenzy. An uncle who belonged to the terrorist Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, died fighting Israelis soldiers. Another uncle died while throwing stones at them. The day after Layla died her father marched to Hamas’s fiery tune, carrying her body wrapped in a Palestinian flag while leading a crowd chanting slogans about “Israeli blood lust.” Layla’s death parade, Walsh notes, was designed to win “international sympathy.” And the Times took the bait.

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→ 19 May 2018
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Hamas issues call for further violence along Gaza border | Jerusalem Online

After a week of deadly clashes along the Gaza border, Hamas is seeking to revive the violence with a massive march today.

Hamas is encouraging Gaza residents to protest along the border with Israel and clash with IDF forces today, the first Friday of Ramadan. On Thursday, the terrorist group issued a call for mass participation in the border protest, claiming that it would honor the 63 Palestinians who were killed this week in the area.

“We are calling on young people to participate in the Friday clashes with determination to honor the dead and strengthen the legitimacy of the resistance,” Hamas wrote on its official website. “It’s very important to participate in the ‘Friday Honoring the Dead’ protests in response to the massacre the occupation committed against freedom fighters.”

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→ 19 May 2018
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Egypt’s president announces Rafah crossing open for Ramadan | NZ Herald

Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi

…El-Sissi’s announcement is not expected to ease the lengthy, complicated security procedures that turn Palestinians’ trip to the Rafah crossing into a hardship. Egypt’s security and intelligence services haves lists of Palestinians allegedly involved in the Islamic insurgency and anti-government attacks during the 2011 uprising that forced longtime President Hosni Mubarak to step down.

Under the banner of combating terrorism, Egypt began razing the town of Rafah in 2014 and demolished most of the residential buildings nearby except for the southern section to curb underground tunnel smuggling of fighters and weapons. Tens of thousands of Rafah residents have been evacuated. Egypt blamed Hamas for smuggling fighters and weapons into Egypt from Gaza through underground tunnels.

The measures were meant to create a buffer zone as part of Egypt’s efforts to purge northeastern Sinai of Islamic militants following the 2014 Islamic State group bombings that left dozens of soldiers dead. So far, Egypt has created a 5-kilometer (3 mile) buffer zone and is in a process of expanding it to 7 kilometers (4.3 miles).

Besides the buffer zone, Egypt has declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew across northeastern Sinai including Rafah, which means travelers arriving after 7 p.m. at the crossing have to wait until 6 a.m. the next morning to leave.

The Egyptian army continues to fight Islamic insurgents in northern Sinai.

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→ 18 May 2018
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UN rights chief backs calls for inquiry over Gaza deaths | NZ Herald

Zeid al-Hussein

BERLIN (AP) — The U.N.’s top human rights official says there’s “little evidence” that Israel made an effort to minimalize casualties during protests by Palestinians earlier this week and is backing calls for an inquiry.

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→ 18 May 2018
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Dead baby strategy | Gatestone Institute

If this were the first time that Hamas deliberately provoked Israel into self-defense actions that resulted in the unintended deaths of Gaza civilians, the media could be excused for playing into the hands of Hamas. The most recent Hamas provocations — having 40,000 Gazans try to tear down the border fence and enter Israel with Molotov cocktails and other improvised weapons — are part of a repeated Hamas tactic that I have called the “dead baby strategy.” Hamas’ goal is to have Israel kill as many Gazans as possible so that the headlines always begin, and often end, with the body count. Hamas deliberately sends women and children to the front line, while their own fighters hide behind these human shields.

Hamas leaders have long acknowledged this tactic. Fathi Hammad, a Hamas Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, stated as far back as 2008:

“For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: ‘we desire death like you desire life.'”

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→ 18 May 2018
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Mideast conflicts connected by vying powerbrokers | NZ Herald

The modern Middle East has been plagued by ruinous wars: country versus country, civil wars with internecine and sectarian bloodletting, and numerous eruptions centered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But never in the last 70 years have they seemed as interconnected as now with Iran and Saudi Arabia vying for regional control, while Israel also seeks to maintain a military supremacy of its own.

Russia, the United States and Turkey make up the other powerbrokers in a region where not only wars but proxy battlefields within those wars are on a feverish and hostile footing.

The ongoing wars in Syria, Yemen, this week’s mass killing of Palestinians by Israel in Gaza, Turkish-Kurdish hostilities, and the potential for an all-encompassing war sparked by an Iranian-Israeli conflagration in Syria or Lebanon, all have tentacles that reach across borders and back again.

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→ 18 May 2018
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With little to lose, Gaza’s men drawn to border protests | NZ Herald

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Marwan Shtewi is poor, unemployed and at the age of 32 has never even left the Gaza Strip.

With few prospects and little to fear, Shtewi is among the crowds of young men who put themselves on the front lines of violent protests along the border with Israel, risking their lives in a weekly showdown meant to draw attention to the dire conditions of Gaza.

While protest organizers voice slogans of defending Jerusalem and returning to the lost homes of their forefathers in Israel, it is the desperation among young men like Shtewi that has been the driving force in the demonstrations. Recovering from a gunshot wound to his arm that sent shrapnel into his abdomen, Shtewi says his protest days are now behind him and he only dreams of finally finding a job.

“I want to see peace and hope and prosperity spread in Gaza when I get out of the hospital,” he said from his hospital bed.

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→ 18 May 2018
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New Zealand to call in Israeli ambassador over Gaza deaths | NZ Herald

Jacinda Adern, PM of New Zealand

The Israeli Ambassador will be called in again this week by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to raise concern about the deaths of more than 50 people in Gaza and wounding of 2700 while protesting the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said yesterday Mfat met with Ambassador Itzhak Gerberg in the past fortnight and would call him in again after Israeli forces killed more than 50 people.

The deaths were on the same day the US opened its embassy in Jerusalem after US President Donald Trump’s decision to move it from Te Aviv, recognising it as Israel’s capital.

Ardern said such a move was always going to inflame the situation given Jerusalem was critical for hopes of a “two-state” solution to succeed.

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→ 16 May 2018
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Eight-month-old Leila, Palestinian martyr and political poster child : Stuff

Leila al-Ghandour’s little face peeked out as her father carried her body from the mosque, wrapped in a white funeral shroud and the green, black and red Palestinian flag.
Her uncles and male cousins passed her small corpse between them as they marched through the streets of the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City towards the graveyard. With each step they chanted their praise of God and their defiance of Israel.
According to her family, the eight-month-old was killed after inhaling a cloud of Israeli tear gas during Monday’s bloody protests on the border. They said her 12-year-old uncle had become confused and accidentally brought the baby to within yards of the barbed wire fence that Israel has vowed to defend with tear gas and snipers’ bullets.

Read more:  https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/middle-east/103957480/eightmonthold-leila-palestinian-martyr-and-political-poster-child

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