The Quartet has met in Germany this week and issued another statement — and UNSG BAN Ki-Moon got to read it, again. Joint Statement of the Quartet – 30 May 2007: The Quartet expressed its deep concern over recent factional violence in Gaza. It called for all Palestinians to immediately renounce all acts of violence [...]
No Comments »
Filed under: BAN Ki-Moon, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians, Quartet, UN Secretary-General
A spate of articles has appeared, reflecting on the forty (40) years that have passed since the Six-Day War in June (5-10), 196z, during which Israel occupied the rest of the former British Mandate of Palestine (East Jerusalem plus the West Bank, which had been occupied by Jordan since the 1948 Mid-East war; and the [...]
No Comments »
Filed under: Israel, Palestine & Palestinians
The UN News Centre [the UN uses British English spelling] has put out a little story reporting that UN USG for Peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, has told journalists: “Troop-contributing countries must accept the introduction of formal discipline standards for United Nations peacekeepers or risk jeopardizing the world body’s entire recent campaign to improve the actions of [...]
No Comments »
Filed under: UN Peacekeeping
Only a handful of people ever have a good time working for the UN. Bernard Kouchner is one of them. Now that he has been named as the next French Foreign Minister, Ian Williams has dusted off his amusing profile, published in the FT on 15 September 2000, of Kouchner in Kosovo. Here is an [...]
No Comments »
Filed under: UN Security Council
Both Israel and Palestinians are violating international humanitarial law, a UN human rights expert said Tuesday. Professor John Dugard, an expert in human rights and international law from South Africa, who was an activist against the now-fallen apartheid regime in his own country, said that :”The indiscriminate [Palestinian] firing of rockets into Sderot violates international [...]
No Comments »
Filed under: Human Rights, International Law, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians, Quartet
From this week’s edition of Bitterlemons, a weekly forum of two Israelis and two Palestinians, organized by the hard-working and talented Ghassan Khatib, is this right-on-the-mark article, “More fraud than friend“, by Akram Baker: “My sister’s hamster recently dropped another round of babies. Just when she thought life had returned to normal, a new batch [...]
No Comments »
Filed under: Donors, Palestine & Palestinians
This photo is published in today’s Jerusalem Post: “Police sappers check the body of a 19-year-old Palestinian bystander killed in the crossfire between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli security men…” What is particularly shocking about this incident is that it took place basically in Jerusalem — and that the reaction has been so muted. Is that [...]
No Comments »
Filed under: Israel, Palestine & Palestinians, Register of damages due to The Wall
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has put out a press release today saying that “The plight of civilians inside the Nahr el-Bared camp in northern Lebanon remains a source of great concern for the ICRC. The fragile truce in the camp held on Saturday and Sunday, though tensions ran very high. There [...]
No Comments »
Filed under: Lebanon, Palestine & Palestinians
We might have thought we were beyond all this, that we were modern, post-modern, certainly enlightened, and good guys. But here in a little corner of north-west Lebanon, at the Nahr Al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, we are all watching another terrible drama unfold. As many of the refugees fleeing the siege have already told journalists, [...]
No Comments »
Filed under: Lebanon
Tonight, the Associated Press is reporting that Lebanese “Defense Minister Elias Murr said he was ‘leaving room for political negotiations’, which he said must lead to the surrender of the fighters from the Fatah Islam militant group inside the [Nahr Al-Bared Palestinian refugee] camp. ‘If the political negotiations fail, I leave it to the military [...]
No Comments »
Filed under: Lebanon