Militarisation

Nick Kristof observes ethnic cleansing and collective punishment first-hand: On one side of a barbed-wire fence here in the southern Hebron hills is the Bedouin village of Umm al-Kheir, where Palestinians live in ramshackle tents and huts. They aren’t allowed to connect to the electrical grid, and Israel won’t permit them to build homes, barns for their animals or even toilets. When the villagers build permanent structures, the Israeli authorities come and demolish them, according to villagers and Israeli human rights organizations.

This is getting damned strange. The Obama administration and Israel have been haggling for a week over the nature and composition of the supposedly independent commission which will investigate the Gaza flotilla disaster. We hear that the U.S. demanded that someone of judicial “stature” like a Supreme Court justice be appointed as chair. Bibi finally acquiesced and appointed Justice Yaakov Tirkel. But there’s one problem. The incoming panel chair doesn’t seem to believe in the panel.

On a side street off Mogadishu's Wadnaha Road frontline a young officer is explaining the unwritten rules of the city's intractable civil war as his men exchange fire with an unseen enemy. The fighters shooting at him are from the Hizb al-Islam, he explains. He knows this because they fight longer than al-Shabab, the other main Islamist group besieging Somalia's tiny government-held enclave, but also because they told him. "We have friends there. They tell us before they leave their base that they are going to attack. When they want to fire mortars they tells us so we can take cover." If the conflict that has turned Mogadishu into a virtual no-go zone for 19 years occasionally resembles a grim farce, there is nothing farcical about the scene around us.

The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies called upon the United Nations to conduct immediate investigations that would comply by international law standards in relation to the appalling attacks that Israel committed against the humanitarian aid flotilla.