The Associated Press reports: Palestinian militants barraged Israel with nearly 150 rockets on Thursday, killing three people as Israel pressed a punishing campaign of airstrikes on militant targets across the Gaza Strip. Three rockets struck the densely populated Tel Aviv area, and air raid sirens blared in the city as night fell.

The fighting, which has also killed 15 Palestinians in two days, showed no signs of slowing after dark. The attacks in the Tel Aviv area, some of the deepest rocket strikes on record, raised the likelihood of an even tougher Israeli response. Gaza militants launched the rocket barrage in retaliation for Israel’s killing of the Hamas military chief in an airstrike on Gaza Wednesday.

Israeli Channel 2 TV showed panicked Tel Aviv residents running for cover and lying down on the ground after the air-raid sirens began sounding. The military said two rockets had been fired at the city, and residents heard an explosion. But there was no word on where they landed or reports of injuries. Police were exploring the possibility that the rockets landed in the sea.

The Independent reports: Israeli troops massed on the Gaza border last night, poised for a possible ground invasion as Israel launched a major military operation it said was designed “to severely impair the command and control chain of the Hamas leadership, as well as its terrorist infrastructure.”

Military sources told The Independent that a ground invasion was “a distinct possibility”. The army has deployed extra infantry units near the Gaza border, halted major exercises, cancelled soldiers’ leave and mobilised some reserve forces.

Jerry Haber writes: All military actions, indeed, all actions having to do with Gaza, have one goal in mind: the subjugation of the Palestinian people there with minimum cost to Israel. In hasbara speak this is called “protecting Israelis,” “defeating terror,” “defending national security,” even “protecting national honor,” but it boils down to the same thing — Israel cannot be secure if the Palestinians have real independence. That is why Israelis are divided into those who want to subjugate Palestinians by giving them no self-determination and those who want to subjugate them by giving them quasi self-determination in a quasi-state.

I spoke with an expert on the Israeli military shortly after “Operation Cast Lead,” and when I told him that many argued that the operation was a reaction to Hamas rocket-fire, he laughed. He said that Hamas rocket-fire was deliberately provoked when Israel broke the cease-fire so that Israel could do a little “spring cleaning,” deplete Hamas’s arsenal of weapons. He told me that this happens every few years, and that I should expect it to happen in another few years. Israel will assassinate a Hamas leader, Hamas will have to respond (wouldn’t Israel, under those circumstances?) and Israel will perform a “clean up” operation. If Hamas is smart and doesn’t play into Israel’s hands, then Israel will also come out ahead, because it will be weakened in the eyes of the Palestinian public. It’s win-win for Israel. That’s what having control means.

Ynet reports: On Wednesday, US President Barack Obama spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and reiterated US support for Israel’s right to self-defense in light of rocket attacks from Gaza, the White House said.

“The President urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to make every effort to avoid civilian casualties. The two agreed that Hamas needs to stop its attacks on Israel to allow the situation to de-escalate,” the statement said.

“The two leaders agreed to stay in close touch in the coming days. Earlier today, Vice President Biden received a briefing from Prime Minister Netanyahu on the events in Gaza,” the statement noted.

“The President also spoke with President Morsi given Egypt’s central role in preserving regional security. In their conversation, President Obama condemned the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel and reiterated Israel’s right to self-defense,” it said.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for an “immediate de-escalation of tensions.” In a statement, Ban said that “Both sides should do everything to avoid further escalation and they must respect their obligations under international humanitarian law to ensure the protection of civilians at all times.”

MENA reports: The Muslim Brotherhood called for protests before major mosques nationwide on Thursday afternoon to demand that the Egyptian government sever diplomatic and trade ties with Israel.

The group also called for a rally at Al-Azhar Mosque following Friday prayers.

In a press release on Thursday, the Brotherhood described the Israeli assaults on Gaza as “crimes” and said the aggression threatens regional stability. It also criticized the US for supporting Israel and blamed Arab countries for “doing nothing while watching the bloodshed in Palestine.”

DPA reports: Egyptian authorities opened the Rafah border crossing following the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip.

An Egyptian security source told the German news agency DPA that the Egyptian authorities decided Wednesday evening to open the Rafah border crossing on Thursday and Friday. Border workers’ holiday vacations were canceled.

“Work would resume on both sides of the border in order to be ready for the arrival of any injured Palestinians so they could be transferred to Arish Public Hospital, which is ready to receive them,” the source said.

IMEU provides a timeline on Israel’s latest escalation in Gaza.

Haaretz reports: A senior government official in Jerusalem said during a press briefing late Wednesday that Israel is preparing for “a significant expansion of the operation, including a ground incursion into the Gaza Strip, and summoning the reservists.”

The official said that until now, the operation has already achieved several goals, including severe damage to Hamas’ long-range Fajr missiles, which can reach Tel Aviv and the Gush Dan area.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on the phone Wednesday with U.S. President Obama adn thanks him for hi support. “I appreciate you backing Israel’s right to defend itself,” Netanyahu told Obama. The prime minister also spoke with Vice President Joe Biden and EU foreign policy chief Catherine AshtonCatherine Ashton. Netanyahu is also expected to speak with UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. “The prime minister will continue diplomatic efforts and explain that Israel will operate to change the reality in the Gaza Strip and to stop the fire,” the official said.

Tony Karon writes: A repeat of the inconclusive 2008 invasion that killed hundreds of Palestinians and destroyed much of Gaza, traumatized Israelis and left their country diplomatically isolated is unlikely to be what the preternaturally cautious Netanyahu has in mind. “The Israelis are not specifying an ambitious end game in terms of clearing out Hamas as [then-Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert did in 2008,” says Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator now at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Instead, they’re talking about ‘reestablishing Israel’s deterrence’, which is a vaguely defined goal. You can claim success whenever you choose to.” Even then, precisely because Hamas has a say in the matter, Netanyahu may not necessarily be able to manage the escalation to his own specifications.

Hamas, meanwhile, has had to reconcile the pragmatic needs of governing in Gaza with those of being a resistance movement, and to navigate the regional political shifts of the past two years. The movement’s leadership is being contested by the Cairo-based Abu Musa Marzook and the Gaza-based prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, who may represent somewhat different orientations. Marzook is part of the exiled leadership that has moved to reposition the movement as part of the regionally ascendant Islamist mainstream, breaking its alliance of convenience with Iran and taking advantage of the emergence of its parent organization, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, as the ruling party in Cairo — as well as the willingness of Turkey and Qatar to strongly back a more pragmatic Hamas. Haniyeh is based in Gaza, where the outlook in the movement has been somewhat more hardline, and where its military wing has more influence than it does in exile. It also faces a constant challenge on the ground from the more radical Salafists eating into its base.

So, while Hamas may have no interest in a sustained confrontation that brings renewed industrial-scale death and destruction upon Gaza’s civilian population, it may find it politically challenging to prevent the sort of retaliation that would require even tougher action according to the Israeli narrative of “deterrence.” Preventing a cycle of escalation is that much more difficult, today, when the politics of the wider Middle East are in flux. Operation Cast Lead in late December 2008 was the beginning of a major rupture in relations with Israel’s longtime strategic ally Turkey, as that country’s moderate Islamist government channeled public rage at the Israeli campaign. Hopes of repairing that relationship remain remote if the Gaza confrontation becomes a sustained one.

Nor can Israel rely, this time, on President Hosni Mubarak serving as the wall at Hamas’ back in Gaza, tacitly supporting Israel’s efforts to break the grip of a movement aligned with his own Muslim Brotherhood nemesis. Egypt today is governed by leaders from Hamas’ parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, and is far more responsive to Egyptian public opinion which is innately hostile to Israeli military action in Gaza. Responding to the strikes, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party demanded “swift Arab and international action” to stop the Israeli attacks, warning that Israel to “take into account the changes in the Arab region and especially Egypt,” vowing that the new Egyptian government “will not allow the Palestinians to be subjected to Israeli aggression, as in the past.” Egypt is highly unlikely to respond in any way that contravenes the Camp David agreements, but has called for an economic boycott of Israel and summoned its ambassador back from Tel Aviv. Qatar, a key U.S. ally on Syria, has committed a half-billion dollars in reconstruction aid to Gaza, and is unlikely to take kindly to Israeli President Shimon Peres’ exhortation, in a speech Wednesday, to cut ties with Hamas.

Al Jazeera reports: The killing of Jabari sparked furious protests in Gaza City, with hundreds of members of Hamas and the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades chanting for revenge inside Shifa hospital.

Outside, armed men fired weapons into the air, and mosques throughout the city called prayers to mourn the commander’s death.

Osama Hamdan, a Hamas representative in based in Lebanon, talking to Al Jazeera in Doha, confirmed that Jabari’s son was also killed in the targeted air strike that killed the military chief.

“We will respond [to the assassination], this I have to say clearly.”

“The Israelis are working to target the local leaders and political leaders in Gaza. We are expecting acts and reactions from the Palestinians.”

Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian negotiator based in the West Bank, told Al Jazeera: “We condemn this Israeli crime and assassination of Ahmad Jabari.

“We are witnessing a major escalation against our people in Gaza, and it seems to me the Israeli agenda is war, not truce or a ceasefire. We hold the Israeli government responsible.”

Noam Chomsky writes: Even a single night in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force.

And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where some 1.5 million people on a roughly 140-square-mile strip of land are subject to random terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade.

Such cruelty is to ensure that Palestinian hopes for a decent future will be crushed, and that the overwhelming global support for a diplomatic settlement granting basic human rights will be nullified. The Israeli political leadership has dramatically illustrated this commitment in the past few days, warning that they will “go crazy” if Palestinian rights are given even limited recognition by the U.N.

This threat to “go crazy” (“nishtagea”)–that is, launch a tough response–is deeply rooted, stretching back to the Labor governments of the 1950s, along with the related “Samson Complex”: If crossed, we will bring down the Temple walls around us.

Thirty years ago, Israeli political leaders, including some noted hawks, submitted to Prime Minister Menachem Begin a shocking report on how settlers on the West Bank regularly committed “terrorist acts” against Arabs there, with total impunity.

Disgusted, the prominent military-political analyst Yoram Peri wrote that the Israeli army’s task, it seemed, was not to defend the state, but “to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim (a harsh racial epithet) living in territories that God promised to us.”

Gazans have been singled out for particularly cruel punishment. Thirty years ago, in his memoir “The Third Way,” Raja Shehadeh, a lawyer, described the hopeless task of trying to protect fundamental human rights within a legal system designed to ensure failure, and his personal experience as a Samid, “a steadfast one,” who watched his home turned into a prison by brutal occupiers and could do nothing but somehow “endure.”

Since then, the situation has become much worse. The Oslo Accords, celebrated with much pomp in 1993, determined that Gaza and the West Bank are a single territorial entity. By that time, the U.S. and Israel had already initiated their program to separate Gaza and the West Bank, so as to block a diplomatic settlement and punish the Araboushim in both territories.

Punishment of Gazans became still more severe in January 2006, when they committed a major crime: They voted the “wrong way” in the first free election in the Arab world, electing Hamas. [Continue reading…]

Nicolas Pelham writes: This week’s arrival in Gaza of the Emir of Qatar and his entourage of fifty Mercedes revived the frenetic pace of activity in the coastal enclave, which has been uncommonly quiet in recent months. On his day-trip spent laying foundation stones for cities, hospitals, and schools all bearing his name, the Emir, Sheikh Hamad Al Thani, came pledging gifts of $400 million in reconstruction, and promised to end the political and economic isolation Gaza has endured since the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas took power six years ago.

For Hamas leaders the trip, the first by a head of state since the siege on Gaza began, heralds their latest attempt to escape political pariahdom, after their hopes of deliverance by the new Muslim Brotherhood–led Egypt ran aground this summer. On August 5, sixteen Egyptian soldiers were gunned down by militants just across Gaza’s borders from Egypt; Egypt suspected the killers had crossed over from Gaza. Fearing the ire of its powerful neighbor, Hamas temporarily barred access to the border, including the vast tunnel complex connecting Gaza with Egypt that serves as Gaza’s economic lifeline. The trucks that cart thousands of tons of raw materials and fuel every day lay silent, and a few of the Gazan government officials and 9,000 tunnel workers who had bothered to make an appearance sat on stools disconsolately counting the lost revenue, which they estimated in the tens of millions of dollars.

The tunnels symbolize Hamas’s paradox: on the one hand, they have enabled Palestine’s main Islamist movement to thrive amid an external siege, and despite a Western boycott to take their place amongst the Islamist parties that have gained or strengthened their hold on power in many parts of the Middle East. Thanks to Gaza’s supply lines to Egypt, its GDP outpaced by a factor of five that of Hamas’s Western-funded rival, the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. Further propelling Gaza’s economy, Arab governments across the region, like Qatar’s, have been shifting hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money from the PA to Hamas, signaling what may be a historic shift in Palestinian politics.

Yet the tunnels are also a reminder of just how much of a clandestine underground authority Hamas still is, and how fragile the territory’s recovery may be. Gaza continues to rely on smuggling for even basic goods, and the underground trade can be turned on and off as easily as a tap. The current restrictions, if they continue, could have devastating effects not only on the economy, but on Hamas’s own longevity. “We can’t keep ourselves imprisoned much longer,” a Hamas commander tells me as he and his patrol slouch bootless on mattresses under a makeshift tent erected between the tunnel mouths. [Continue reading…]

BBC News reports: An Israeli court has forced the release of government research detailing the number of calories Palestinians in Gaza need to consume to avoid malnutrition.

The study was commissioned after Israel tightened its blockade of the territory after Hamas came to power in June 2007.

The UN said if the research reflected a policy intended to cap food imports, it went against humanitarian principles.

But the Israeli government said the study was only ever a draft and was never used to determine policy.
‘Daily humanitarian portion’

The Israeli human rights group Gisha, which campaigns against Israel’s Gaza blockade, fought a long legal battle to get the Israeli ministry of defence to release this document.

Dated from 2008 and entitled, “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – The Red Lines“, it is a detailed study of how many calories Palestinians needed to eat to avoid malnutrition.

The Associated Press reports: Amal Ashour, 18, loves Shakespeare and American pop music. One of the brightest students in the Gaza Strip, she studied her senior year of high school in Minnesota through a U.S.-government funded program.

She had planned to study English literature this fall at a university in the West Bank through another U.S.-sponsored program, but just a month before school started, she was informed the scholarship was no longer available.

“When you live in Gaza, you’re a pawn in a greater political game,” she said in a telephone interview. “There’s nothing we can do about it.” She is now enrolled at Islamic University, a stronghold of Gaza’s ruling Islamic militant Hamas.

Under Israeli pressure, U.S. officials have quietly canceled a two-year-old scholarship program for students in the Gaza Strip, undercutting one of the few American outreach programs to people in the Hamas-ruled territory. The program now faces an uncertain future, just two years after being launched with great fanfare by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during a visit to the region. [Continue reading…]

NPR reports: Gaza’s statistics make grim reading. A recent report by the United Nations says the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by 2020 if nothing is done to alleviate the situation in the tiny coastal territory.

According to the report, despite a recent pickup in the economy, by almost every indicator, Palestinians in Gaza are worse off than they were in the 1990s.

Even as the infrastructure is crumbling, the population is booming. That, coupled with dwindling resources and restrictions on trade and travel by neighbors Egypt and Israel, has meant the situation for the 1.8 million Palestinians who live in Gaza is increasingly desperate.

Donald MacIntyre writes: The front office of Kamal Ashour’s small family clothing factory in Gaza City opens on to Izzedine al-Qassam Street, named, like Hamas’s military wing, in honour of the Islamist mujahid who led the anti-Zionist, anti-Mandate, Black Hand gang and was shot dead by British police in 1935.

Which makes it serendipitous to see the mannequins on one of its shelves triumphantly displaying four samples of the 2,000 acrylic cardigans and polo sweaters Ashour has just shipped off to the UK firm of JD Williams in the first clothing exports to leave Gaza for five years. And a lot more so to be talking on Ashour’s landline to a Jewish-Israeli clothier in Tel Aviv about how fast, if he had half a chance, he would revert to buying his goods from here, as he once did.

Having made the call, Ashour, a short, spry septuagenarian who used to export at least 80 per cent of his clothing to Israel, has thrust the phone into my hand to demonstrate just how highly his most favoured customer values his business. Sure enough, the Israeli trader explains that, since the blockade imposed in Gaza by his own government in 2007, he has been forced to find a Chinese supplier instead of Ashour; that, yes, the sweaters may be slightly –though “not much”– cheaper, but that he would still prefer Ashour every time. “Look, I’ve been working with Gaza for 30 years and with this guy for 11 or 12. The overall quality is high, better than China. He’s very, very good to work with. I trust him completely. If he says he will do something, he does it. He never changes his mind.”

Such is his nervousness about discussing a politically sensitive topic that, unlike Mr Ashour, his Israeli client, whose name we know, begs us not to use it. For this is a conversation across enemy lines. Gaza is still officially classified by the Israeli Cabinet as a “hostile entity” and since the turbulent events that unfolded in June 2007 the exports to Israel and the West Bank on which its economy depended have been prohibited.

Five years ago this week, Gaza was in chaos. The BBC correspondent Alan Johnston was being held as a hostage by the criminal jihadists who had kidnapped him in March. The Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, seized by militants on the Gaza border, had already been in captivity for a year. But in the streets outside, a brief but bloody civil war was raging between militants in the two biggest Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah.

Two years earlier, Ariel Sharon had pulled Israeli troops and the 8,000 settlers they had been protecting out of Gaza. Then, in January 2006, Hamas unexpectedly beat Fatah in notably clean parliamentary elections held throughout the occupied territories. The victory was not primarily because of ideology. (Fatah was committed to a two-state solution with Palestine, consisting of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem living side by side with Israel, while Hamas had always refused to recognise Israel.) Rather, it was because Palestinians were fed up with Fatah’s corruption, the failure of negotiations to bring any results, and perhaps because some, at least in Gaza, initially bought into Hamas’s extravagant boasts that its militants had “liberated” the territory from Israel.

Finding itself leading the new Palestinian Authority in uneasy co-habitation with a Fatah president in Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas was faced with a boycott by a US-led international community which effectively refused to recognise the results of the election it had sanctioned in the first place. The outcome was a coalition with Fatah; but it was a shotgun marriage that quickly degenerated into civil conflict.

Hamas, despite partially covert American help for the Fatah forces, was victorious. When the bloodshed ended on 14 June 2007 Hamas was left in charge of Gaza, Fatah of the West Bank. And Israel responded with its blockade of Gaza – central elements of which are still in force today – which the senior UN official Filippo Grandi said 12 days ago had “completely obliterated” the territory’s economy, and which leaves a deeply puzzling question: why is Israel still maintaining an export ban which, in Grandi’s words, has “penalised” the “common people” and the “business community” of Gaza but has left its Hamas rulers intact and unscathed? [Continue reading…]