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03/10/2006:

"UN: Israel wall forcing Palestinians out"

A UN expert has said that East Jerusalem is undergoing major changes because of a new wall through Palestinian neighbourhoods aimed at reducing the number of Palestinians in the city.

John Dugard, special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, said in a report to the UN Human Rights Commission on Wednesday that the Israeli-built separation wall was causing major humanitarian problems.

"The character of East Jerusalem is undergoing a major change as a result of the construction of the wall through Palestinian neighbourhoods," Dugard said.

"The clear purpose of the wall in the Jerusalem area is to reduce the number of Palestinians in the city by transferring them to the West Bank.

"This causes major humanitarian problems: Families are separated and access to hospitals, schools and the workplace are denied."

Dugard recalled that the wall between Israel and Palestinian territories - described by Israel as a security measure - had gone ahead despite a 2004 ruling by the International Court of Justice.

The report to the UN was immediately condemned by the Israeli UN envoy to the UN rights panel, who said the document was pursuing "manifest political ends".

Meanwhile, a report by the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, said the Israeli army had increased the number of roadblocks and barriers in the West Bank by 25% since last summer.

The number of road obstacles rose to 471 in January, from 376 last August at the time of Israel's Gaza pullout, OCHA said, and they tightened travel restrictions for Palestinians and made it harder for them to reach properties, markets and medical services.
aljazeera.net


The two state solution, a cruel joke
Israel’s current delusional, myopic policies in the occupied territories will render its people even more profoundly insecure, for a state cannot live in peace and security by denying it to others.

The interminable torment inflicted on the Palestinian people by Zionism is in the active phase of yet another disastrous historical culmination. The Palestinians’ role in this karmic dialectic is as the obscenely oppressed victims who progressively lose land, life, and livelihood. 1948 represents the mega catastrophe, preceded by decades of unrelenting militant Zionist intrusion protected by the reigning colonial power of the time. 1967 was of much lesser proportions in terms of its collective consequences, but the decades since have led to that singular Zionist goal supported by the superpower of the day: dispossession of Palestine.

Today, we are witness to an unfolding disaster of gigantic proportions in what is left of historic Palestine and its people. The Israeli goal under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his successors, short of another 1948 or 1967-like event that would provide cover for further mass expulsions, is the complete political and social annihilation of Palestinian will and society, leaving it fragmented, pauperized, disoriented, and demoralized, severely dividing it along geographical, local, factional, and ideological fault lines, destroying its social cohesion, its demographic and geographic continuity, its national identity, its nationalist response.


Death of two boys in airstrike stirs anger in Gaza, soul-searching in Israel
An Israeli missile obliterated a vehicle in crowded Gaza City, killing two Palestinian militants inside — a common sight these days. But the attack also killed three boys, provoking grief and rage among Palestinians and criticism from Israelis.


Second Historic Mission to Iran
Anti-Zionist Orthodox Rabbis visited Iran

A delegation of of Anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish Rabbis visited the Islamic Republic of Iran, March 2006, where they met with clerics, Imams, and Government Officials.

"...Orthodox Jews the world over, are saddened by the hysteria which has greeted the recent stated desire of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to see a world free of Zionism. This desire is nothing more than a yearning for a better, more peaceful world. It is a hope that with the elimination of Zionism, Jews and Muslims will live in harmony as they have throughout the ages, in Palestine and throughout the world."