Palestina

There is an air of relief blowing in with the hot sea breeze over the Gaza Strip these days, but it’s one salted with worry that factional warfare which ended in victory for Hamas two weeks ago could swiftly return.

Relief workers on Saturday accused the Lebanese army of using “excessive force” to disperse a protest in which dozens of displaced refugees in northern Lebanon were killed or wounded.

The trucks are there, piled high with foreign foodstuffs. There’s a grinding of gears, dust, hand signals and a man with a clipboard, waving load after load through the heavy frontier gate.

Israel launched two air strikes in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, killing six Palestinians, including three senior Islamic Jihad fighters it long sought for firing rockets and orchestrating other attacks.

Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Western-backed emergency government in Ramallah, has been acting lately as if he were the head of a free government of a sovereign state.

Former Mossad head Zvi Zamir has said that reports in Israel about Dr. Ashraf Marwan, Israel’s Egyptian agent who warned of the pending outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, led to his death.

THE HARD-LINE regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been frightening neighbors with its meddling-by-proxy in Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza.

One of the biggest challenges Tony Blair will face as a Middle East envoy of the international community is Arab anger over the wars in Iraq and Lebanon, and the suspicion that he is a lackey of US President George W. Bush.

A possible rape charge against disgraced President Moshe Katsav has been dropped after he accepted a plea bargain for sexual offences on Thursday, in the worst scandal involving an Israeli leader.

Lebanese troops raided a cave hideout of Islamic gunmen in the hills of northern Lebanon on Thursday and killed six fighters, as the violence continued to spread from a Palestinian refugee camp where the military has been battling an Al Qaeda-inspired group.