November saw both an intensification of Israel’s low-level war on Ghazzah, and a further murderous tightening of its economic blockade. But hopes for healing the breach between Fatah and Hamas failed yet again, largely as a result of internal political pressures on Fatah and the Israelis. IQBAL SIDDIQUI reports.
The last couple of months have seen a sudden increase in Western attention on Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons programme. The campaign is being led by Israel, whose politicians have openly threatened military action against Iran if the UN agencies fail to pressurise it into stopping its nuclear programme.
In recent months, Muslims around the world have watched with consternation as Israel has tightened its economic blockade of Ghazzah, subjecting its people to intense hardship, while Western powers have done next to nothing to stop them, despite the fact that the use of starvation and deprivation as a weapon of war is explicitly forbidden by international law.
A month of Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets in Ghazzah and the West Bank, killing over 40 Palestinians, mostly civilians, culminated with Israeli troops moving into southern Ghazzah on June 28, as Crescent was going to press.
The state of insecurity and political conflict that occurred in the Ghazzah Strip last July is regarded by most observers as a dangerous development in the Palestinian situation, and as a threat to the international and regional status of the Palestinian cause...
Yasser Arafat survived the latest, and perhaps greatest, challenge to his authority in Ghazzah last month, when Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qurei withdrew his resignation on July 27...
While Palestinians across the world commemorated the 56th anniversary of the Nakba on May 15, Palestinians in Ghazzah were on the verge of another nakba as Israeli troops engaged in an orgy of violence in Ghazzah that left at least 45 dead and about 300 homes destroyed, rendering an estimated 3,000 people homeless...
Dr Abdul Aziz Rantisi, who was appointed head of Hamas in Ghazzah following the martyrdom of Shaikh Ahmed Yassin in March, was himself assassinated by the Israelis on April 17. His car was hit by seven missiles fired from Israeli helicopters near his home in Ghazzah...
Even by modern standards, the last month has been spectacularly bloody in the scale of the political violence seen. It opened with the Ashura killings in Iraq and Pakistan, in which several hundred Shi’a were slaughtered...
