Hamas, in an official statement, confirmed over the weekend that long-time leader Khaled Meshaal has informed the movement he does not intend to run again for political bureau chief when elections are held in the 55-member shura (consultative) council during the coming months.

But tellingly, Hamas also said the council may not accept Mr. Meshaal’s stepping down, leaving the door open for him to continue in the post he has held since 1996. Since 2004, due to Israel’s assassination of Hamas spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin and his successor Abdel-Aziz Rantissi, Mr. Meshaal has been the overall leader of the organization.

The Damascus-based Mr. Meshaal’s threat to stand down stems from a deepening split in Hamas where his leadership, including his efforts to steer the group into a reconciliation with the rival Fatah movement, and other recent signs of relative pragmatism, are being challenged by the increasingly powerful Gaza Hamas leadership, embodied in Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and Hamas founder Mahmoud Zahar.

Saying he does not want to run again may be a recognition by Mr. Meshaal he would not get elected or it may be a ploy to attempt to rally support behind him.

”He wants to know if the Hamas movement wants him to continue,” says Talal Awkal, a Gaza-based columnist for al-Ayyam daily newspaper. In Mr. Awkal’s view, Mr. Meshaal is also keenly aware that in the aftermath of last year’s Arab Spring, which saw the toppling of long-standing dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, he cannot be seen to be clinging to his leadership position indefinitely and he must at least appear ready to step down. ”He has been continuing in his position a long while, at the same time that people everywhere in the Arab world are rising up against those leaders holding onto their authority for a long time.” Mr. Awkal said.

In the event of Mr. Meshaal’s not running, the leading candidates to replace him would be his deputy, Musa Abu Marzouk, Mr. Haniya or Mr. Zahar. Mr. Abu Marzouk would be expected to continue Mr. Meshaal’s efforts to reconcile with Fatah, while the Gaza based leaders could overturn the policy. All of the successors are expected to continue Hamas’s refusal to recognize Israel while perhaps voicing willingness for a conditional truce with it.

The relative strength of the Gaza leadership has increased in recent years, starting with Hamas’s armed takeover of Gaza from Fatah in 2007. With its own de facto government in place there that levies taxes and customs and garners revenues from tunnels through which goods are brought from Egypt, the Hamas leadership in Gaza is no longer dependent on Iranian money channeled through Damascus. Meanwhile, the unrest in Syria and President Bashar Assad’s brutal suppression of it has severely weakened its utility to Meshaal as an ally and made Damascus an unsafe base from which much of the Hamas leadership has relocated. Mr. Meshaal desperately needs another haven.

A reconciliation with the leader of Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas could bring his leadership back to the fore and help him achieve another base, possibly in Egypt, a strong backer of Fatah-Hamas unity. But much of the Gaza leadership is opposed to consummating a unity deal with Fatah. ”They don’t want to give up power or have a partner in the control of Gaza,” says Wadie Abu Nassar, head of the Haifa-based International Center for Consultations. Moreover, Gaza Hamas leaders harbor hopes that Mr. Abbas’s rule in the West Bank will collapse and they see no reason in propping up their rival.

Mr. Meshaal, survivor of a 1999 assassination attempt by the Mossad, has also touched off heated opposition from the Gazans through his stress in recent months that the struggle with Israel should be channeled into mass protests in the style of Tunisia and Egypt. Although Mr. Meshaal has not renounced violence, the Gazans see this stress as a betrayal of their venerated ”armed resistance” against Israel.

Inside Fatah, meanwhile, there are concerns that a new Hamas leader would be a negative development. ”Meshaal had a significant role in pursuing reconciliation,” Fatah leader Amin Makboul told the Associated Press. ”We hope his successor takes the same path particularly since there are some forces in Gaza who are not interested in reconciliation.”

The stabbing by three masked men Friday night of Mahmoud Abu Rahma, international affairs director of al-Mezan Human Rights Center, is seen as one of the more serious incidents of internal violence since the Islamic militant group’s armed takeover of Gaza in 2007. Hamas leaders have condemned the attack, which wounded Abu Rahma in the hand, back and leg, and insist it is not related to his criticism, human rights activists counter that the assault is the latest in a series of episodes undermining free expression for which the government bears ultimate responsibility.

”From what we have heard from Mahmoud and al-Mezan and according to the investigations they have made, this is a continuation of the attack on freedom of expression,” said Jaber Wishah, deputy director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR). ”As long as the authority is the responsible body, the full responsibility falls on its shoulders to stop such attacks.”

Abu Rahma had received numerous death threats since January 1. That was when he published an article on the Maan news agency website accusing resistance groups of causing death and injury by deploying and training next to schools and homes, a charge frequently leveled by Israel but until now not publicly voiced by Palestinians.

On January 3, Abu Rahma was roughed up by unarmed men, and on Friday he escaped being stabbed in the chest only because he was able to use his laptop as a shield, his brother Imad said, adding that the assailants shouted at him that he was a ”collaborator” with Israel.

In his article, Mr. Abu Rahma wrote:”Many citizens fall victim to the continuous negligence of the resistance groups, who show little or no care for people’s life and well being, or worse, fail to take responsibility for shocking acts by their members.Numerous people were injured by live fire coming from resistance group training sites including children, and at least one man lost an eye.”

He added that there is a training site in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya ”that threatens people every day including a girl who was injured inside her school when an explosion occurred in this site.”’

Abu Rahma also criticized the ”misfiring” of rockets aimed at Israel that ”fall on houses and kill [Gaza] civilians”
”Many children have been killed or maimed by explosive devices left in the streets or on farms,” he added. ”And there is the young man who was shot in the legs for daring to criticize a local resistance leader.”.

”Who will protect the people from the wrongful acts of the resistance and government?” Abu Rahma asked.
The assault on Abu Rahma follows a string of attacks against media outlets last year, including an attempt to set fire to the Maan offices in July and an incident in March, during which armed men entered the offices of Reuters and threatened employees with guns. According to Reuters account, the men struck one journalist on the arm with a metal bar and threatened to throw another out the window of the high rise. They took away a video camera apparently after they spotted a reporter filming a demonstration from a building. The group smashed a television set and other equipment before leaving and also seized videotapes from nearby offices of CNN and the Japanese station NHK. Reuters reported that the men said they came from Hamas internal security, but senior Hamas officials condemned the action and denied the group was involved in it.
”We are seeing a silencing of the press,” says Wishah, from PCHR.”These acts cause internal censorship which is even more harmful than external censorship.”

Salah Bardawil, a Hamas legislator, termed the attack against Abu Rahma ”a deplorable act.”

”Any attack on a Palestinian citizen is a crime and an attack on a human rights activist is a bigger crime,” he said. Bardawil stressed, however, that he thought the attack was the work of criminal elements and not political or related to Abu Rahma’s article.

He said Hamas works to uphold freedom of expression ”but on the ground there are some transgressions and we in the legislative council are working to correct this.” Bardawil took issue with Abu Rahma’s assertion that fighters endanger the lives of civilians by positioning themselves close to homes. ”These are the houses of our children and we don’t ever allow any resistance training that endangers civilians,” he said.

The 6 to 5 ruling late Wednesday comes after months of the court being under unprecedented attack from legislators in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party for—in their view—being too liberal and interventionist on human rights issues.

Citing security concerns, the justices upheld a 2003 provision that has led to draconian limits on family reunification and is believed to have prevented thousands of West Bank Palestinians from living with their spouses inside Israel. The provision was passed at the height of the second intifada uprising, when attacks on Israeli targets were frequent. It was later expanded to include spouses from enemy states such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.

”Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide,” wrote Asher Grunis, who is about to become president of the court, in his opinion. Mr. Grunis argued that striking down the law would bring about the entry of thousands of Palestinian spouses and that the state could not take the risk that some would engage in terrorism and cause loss of life.
Human rights groups argue that Israeli law grants all citizens the right to family life and equality and that few Palestinian spouses have been involved in violence. But upholding those rights goes against the current mood in the Knesset and public, explained liberal legislator Nitzan Horowitz. ”There is an ill wind blowing from the Knesset and the judges are influenced by the harsh public atmosphere,” he said.

The court decision makes life more precarious for couples already living in Israel in which one partner comes from the West Bank. In recent years, the Israeli interior ministry allowed West Bank spouses to stay if they were males over 35 or females over 25 and not considered a security threat. These spouses are not allowed to work or even drive, and have to renew their permits every few months.

The gnawing fear now is that in the wake of the supreme court decision, the spouses’ permits will not be renewed.”This would separate our family into two parts,” said Tayseer Khatib, an Israeli Arab anthropology professor whose wife, Lana, comes from the West Bank city of Jenin. ”I will take responsibility for the kids if we have to separate. Lana will go to Jenin and I will stay in Acre with the kids.” The two fell in love when Tayseer conducted academic research in Jenin and met Lana, who moved to Acre six years ago. They have a four year old boy, Adnan and a three year old girl, Yusra. Tayseer says his leaving Acre to join Lana in Jenin would be out of the question, since he does not want to repeat the events of 1948, when thousands of Palestinians fled Acre under Jewish military pressure at Israel’s establishment.

A dissenting justice, Edmund Levy, warned that upholding the law was a negative turning point in the history of Israeli democracy.

According to the court ruling, about 135,000 Palestinians were granted Israeli citizenship through marriage between 1994 and 2002. Twenty percent of Israel’s citizens are Arabs, descendants of Palestinians who did not flee or were not expelled during Israel’s establishment in 1948. They frequently intermarry with Palestinians from the West Bank.

So it was that right after the ouster of neighboring Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, with the risk of a revolt in Libya rising, Gaddafi last month issued a call on Palestinian refugees to mass at Israel’s borders holding olive branches in their hands.”In this context of Arab popular revolutionary movement, Palestinian refugees must walk on Palestine with women and children.” he said ”This is not a call to war,” he added. If Israel were to refuse admitting them, they should camp at the border, he said. ”We must create a problem for the world to move.”

He added that fleets of boats should take Palestinians and wait by the Palestinian shores ”until the problem is resolved.”
Indeed, over the years many of the world’s most notorious colonel’s pronouncements on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute have sounded almost as bizaare as his recent claims that al-Qaida is drugging Libya’s youth into rebelling. But they have also been calculated to project himself as a leading Arab nationalist worthy of support within and beyond Libya’s borders.
Libya, in Gaddafi’s view, remained true to Arab nationalism while other Arab regimes betrayed it. ”All Arab states which have relations with Israel are cowardly regimes,” he said in the same February 13 speech.

After leading a coup in 1969, Gaddafi, styling himself as a disciple of Egyptian pan-Arabist leader Gamal Abdul-Nasser, made it a point to be the most uncompromising of leaders vis-a-vis Israel. He did not call the Jewish state by name, but rather the ”Zionist enemy” Rhetorically at least, he espoused mobilisation of the entire Arab world to destroy Israel.
”When Nasser died in 1970, Gaddafi saw himself as his successor,” said Yehudit Ronen, a Libya specialist at the Dayan Center for Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University and political scientist at Bar Ilan University.” He raised the flag of the destruction of Israel. He understood the potential to coalesce the masses under his flag. Israel became a means for him to break down tribal loyalties in Libya and channel them to strengthen the legitimacy of the regime.”

When Egyptian President Anwar Sadat decided to make peace with Israel and traveled to Jerusalem in 1977, Gaddafi considered him a traitor and encouraged the idea of assassinating him, Ronen says.

In Palestinian politics, Gaddafi supported the most radical factions and splinter groups including Sabri al-Banna, the terrorist known as Abu Nidal, according to Atiyeh Jawabra, a political scientist at the West Bank’s al-Quds University. Abu Nidal waged assassinations against leaders of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement who espoused a political accomodation with Israel.

”He did not support our people, he was a supporter of Abu Nidal for a long time,” Jawabra said.”Everyone opposed to Arafat he supported.”

The sense that Gaddafi was not a true friend of the Palestinian cause was accentuated in 1982 when he did not lift a finger to help PLO fighters besieged by the Israeli military in Beirut. Instead, he advocated that they all become martyrs by committing suicide, Jawabra recalled.

At times, Gaddafi found it expedient to tone down his rhetoric, especially when he sought to bring to an end sanctions imposed on Libya for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland in which 270 people were killed.
And he eventually came up with his own solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict more palatable to western ears than simply calling for Israel’s destruction. The only way to end the strife, he says, is that Israel and Palestine merge into one state, Isratine.

”The region which lies between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is too small to accommodate two states,”he said in 2002.”It is like trying to put two bodies into one item of clothing or two men wearing the same pair of trousers. This is impossible.”

In 2003, to better his relations with the West he gave up Libya’s programs for weapons of mass destruction, earning a renewal of relations with the United States.

In recent years, Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam had tried to project a more moderate foreign policy image for Libya. As part of that he has stressed that he recognizes the Holocaust as a historical fact, in contrast to widespread Holocaust denial in the Arab world. Saif al-Islam has said if the Arab world recognizes the Holocaust, perhaps Israel will recognize the nakba, or Palestinain catastrophe that accompanied Israel’s creation in 1948.

But if and when Gaddafi falls, no tears will be shed for him by Palestinians or Israelis.”I hope he will go down,” Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak said in a recent CNN interview.

Jawabra, the Palestinian analyst, said: ”His history is full of positions against the Arab nation and human rights. The Libyan people are our brothers. We support the people, not Gaddafi, a dictator. From my point of view he must go.”

”People ask me why don’t you feel vengeful towards Jews? I say I feel the opposite. I’ve made my relations with Jews stronger since this happened in order to battle racism,” said Hussein Rawidi, whose son Hossam was stabbed to death in West Jerusalem two weeks ago.

According to the indictment filed on Sunday, Hossam Rawidi,24, was speaking in Arabic with a friend, when one of a group of four Jewish minors approached him calling out racist epithets including ”Death to Arabs.” The minors at first attacked the Palestinians with their fists, but at a certain stage one of them pulled out a barber shop razor and slashed Rawidi deeply in the face and neck, according to the indictment. He then attacked Rawidi’s friend, injuring him in the back of the neck, the indictment says. The minors,sixteen and seventeen year olds, continued afterwards to punch and kick Rawidi and his friend all over their bodies while voicing racist epithets, the indictment added. Rawidi died in hospital.
The youth who wielded the razor was indicted for manslaughter, while the other three were charged with ”assault causing harm in severe circumstances.”

The death of his son prompted Rawidi to reach out to left-wing Israelis. He spoke at a rally in West Jerusalem’s Zion Square against racism that drew about a thousand people last Saturday night. ”I am starting to keep in touch with every Jew who isn’t racist. Whoever supports me, I will support him. Whenver they invite me, I will speak” Rawidi said.
”What happened to Hossam is the heart of racism,” he said.

Hossam Rawidi worked with his father in a Jewish-owned beverage company in East Jerusalem’s Atarot Industrial Zone. ”I educated him to love human beings. He had many Jewish friends.” A few years ago, Hossam studied Hebrew for six months at the Hebrew University. ”He was not the type to throw stones or carry out attacks. He was a regular human being. He was just walking in the street when they killed him.”

Hussein Rawidi wants to see the manslaughter charge changed to murder. ”If an Arab did this to a Jew, they would say murder immediately and maybe even demolish his home,”he said.

He believes the change will not happen unless dovish Israeli organizations press the case. ”I am a simple human being. Perhaps the organizations can do something. Perhaps someone with the right tools can press on the government.”
Police held Hossam Rawidi’s body for five days out of concern his funeral would lead to disruption of public safety. Finally, they were forced to give it to the family by order of Israel’s high court of justice, acting on a petition from Rawidi.
Rabbi Arik Ascherman, of the dovish Rabbis for Human Rights, supports Rawidi. ”With a bit of caution I say that it seems there is one measurement for Jews and another for Arabs. If a Jew was murdered by an Arab it would be a different charge. This smells very bad.”

”There is always racism,” he added. ” The question is what the authorities do. If there had been clear messages against racism maybe this never would have happened and if the proper steps are taken now, it could prevent the next murder. The court and the authorities have the opportunity to send a strong message or a lukewarm message that makes the next murder more likely.”

A spokesman for the Justice Ministry said the razor wielding youth he was not indicted for murder because such an indictment requires prior intent. ” He did not intend to kill and it was during a brawl,”the spokesman said.

”Today the situation is awful and terrible such, that throughout the neighborhood those same people, some of them idle, cause not only harassment but even worse things,”the rabbis wrote of the asylum seekers. Among the signatories was rabbi Dov Domb, a justice in the Tel Aviv rabbinical court. Bnei Brak spokesman Avraham Tanenbaum said the African influx was causing ”nightmares for the residents of the neighborhood.”. ”I don’t want to generalize about everyone but there have been attacks and there have been cases of theft” he said. ”There are among them some people with problems. Not everyone.”

However, G., an asylum seeker from Eritrea who has lived in the area since 2007, says ”over 90 percent of the people are peaceful and respectful. In any society you can find individuals who aren’t. He says about a thousand African asylum seekers live in Bnei Brak, many of them ”people with children who want a peaceful place to live their lives.” G., who works in a shop in Tel Aviv, said that as a result of the rabbinical edict ”some landowners have informed people they must leave their apartments after two or three days without any preparation or chance to find alternatives.” He said that he personally is ”very worried” he will lose his apartment because of pressure on his landlord to evict asylum seekers. This, even though his landlord has always treated him well, he says. ”There is nowhere for the people to go. It’s disastrous.” he says.

The municipality last week decided on a series of steps against the asylum seekers. This included cracking down on landlords who divide up apartments so that up to ten people can live in a unit. The city says these landlords charge a rent of one hundred to two hundred dollars for each tenant. Henceforth landlords engaging in such behaviour will be taken to court in the hopes they will be forced to pay fines of up to 100,000 shekels (about 17,000 pounds sterling), the municipality said. Also, landlords will be required to obtain a business license in the event that they are renting to a large number of asylum seekers, the municipality decided.

Town leaders are also weighing up publishing the names of landlords who let to Sudanese so that the public knows ”the identities of those who prefer their personal and financial interests despite the severe and unfair blow to the general public.” This is no idle threat in the insular religious society where the rabbis edicts are seen as the application of divine law. Sanctions could include being shunned by neighbors commercially and socially and being excluded from participation in religious rituals.

In July, fifty Israeli liberal rabbis condemned a similar edict by a group of Tel Aviv rabbis, writing that banning rentals contradicted Jewish biblical values and was reminiscent of persecutions of Jews, including by Nazi Germany. ”The tradition of Israel comes out against the natural human tendency to hate the stranger and those who are different,”the rabbis wrote.

About 27,000 asylum seekers have crossed into Israel from Egypt since 2005, with Eritreans making up the largest group followed by Sudanese. While the asylum seekers say they fled persecution in their home countries and Egypt, the Israeli government has insisted they came for economic reasons. G. said he fled Eritrea because of its ”tyranical government violating all our rights and freedoms” including imposing unlimited military service on males.

”Perhaps the answer is to absorb them as refugees and give them what they need. But the government does nothing,” says Tanenbaum, the Bnai Brak spokesman. Interior Minister Eli Yishai of the ultraorthodox Shas party said Monday that asylum seekers will be denied the opportunity to work and authorities have already begun stamping their passports with notes to that effect to deter employers.

Johannes Bayu, director of the African Refugee Development Center in Tel Aviv says people move to Bnai Brak not by choice but rather because it and a few other areas are the only places they can afford. He says ”all the refugees there are eager to work and be productive” and that characterizations of violence and criminal activity ”are exaggerated by the police, the government, by anyone who wants hatred to spread.”

”If they don’t rent to them, where will they live?” he asked. Of the rabbis’ edict, he said, ”this is sad and scary. This is how things begin. It could lead to violent attacks if people decide they don’t want to see them on the street at all. Everyone [in power] is quiet now and that’s what scares me. The government, the municipality, those who are influential, they have to object to this hatred in the strongest means.”

The demolitions were the first carried out in the city in nine months, a lull dovish Israelis had attributed to international condemnation of the controversial policy. The Jerusalem municipality said the houses at various stages of construction and a storage facility were destroyed because they were built without permits. The demolitions were carried out in the Palestinian areas of Isawiya, Jebel Mukaber and Beit Hanina.

A municipality spokesman said that the city’s policy is to demolish illegal structures whether they are in Palestinian or Jewish areas of the city. However, Palestinian residents say it is virtually impossible for them to get building permits from the Israeli municipality.

Three of the houses had been inhabited, with one of them belonging to a family of sixteen, wothe Abu Rumelas, according to Palestinian reports. Two demolitions were carried out in an area overlooking the highway linking East Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim.There was no reported violence.

But moderate Palestinians said the resentment fueled by the demolitions will make it harder for the Palestinian Authority to continue the indirect peace talks with Israel that are being conducted by US special envoy George Mitchell.
”Israel is making it very difficult to have a negotiating process that will lead anywhere” said Bernard Sabella, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. ”People will say there is nothing to negotiate about.” ”When the municipality demolishes after not giving licenses and restricting the land it is not being fair or just,”Sabella added.

Andy David, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, said, however that the demolitions are a matter of law enforcement in Israel’s capital. ”We are speaking of residents of Israel and when they break the law there are consequences. If they followed the law, the demolitions would not take place.”

In another apparent setback for compromise in the city, a Jerusalem planning committee has given the green light for thirty two more housing units to be built for settlers in Pisgat Zeev, part of the occupied East Jerusalem area Israel captured and annexed in 1967. The annexation was never recognized internationally, and most of the world at least rhetorically She the Palestinians in viewing East Jerusalem as their future capital. The approval was to have been given last week,but was delayed apparently so as not to impinge on the meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama at the White House last Tuesday.

The US is calling for a resumption of direct Israeli peace talks with the Palestinians, but Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says he wants to first see progress in the indirect talks on borders and security. The dovish Israeli group Ir Amim condemned the demolitioins.”It is already very tense and more demolitions push Palestinians to the limits,”said its director Yehudit Oppenheimer.She voiced concern that Tuesday’s action might be the start of a surge in demolitions.

The apparent intervention of Major-General Doron Almog, then head of Israel’s southern command, is documented in testimony taken by Israeli military police from the commander of the bulldozer a day after Ms Corrie was killed on March 16, 2003. The hand written affidavit, seen by the Scotsman, has emerged during a civil suit currently being pursued by the Corrie family against the state of Israel with the aim of proving the latter bears responsibility for her death.
Ms Corrie, 23, was critically wounded when a D-9 bulldozer buried her with sandy soil near the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt, according to fellow volunteers with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement, who were with her. Ms Corrie died of her wounds after being evacuated by ambulance.Ms Corrie, wearing a fluorescent orange jacket and carrying a megaphone, was among a group of ISM volunteers that over a period of three hours sought to block two army bulldozers from demolishing Palestinian homes.

In death, Ms Corrie, from Olympia, Washington, became a symbol of idealism and self-sacrifice to many and an embarassment to Israel. Her correspondence from Gaza inspired the play My Name is Rachel Corrie, which debuted at the Royal Court theatre in 2005 but was cancelled at theaters in New York City and Toronto out of concern it would offend members of the Jewish communities there.

The Israeli military has maintained that its troops were not to blame for the killing of Corrie and that the driver had not seen her. It accused Corrie and the ISM of behaviour that was ”illegal, irresponsible and dangerous”.

In remarks this week, Maj-Gen Almog denied ordering the bulldozer commander to desist from testifying. In the affidavit, the commander of the D-9 tells military police investigators that he did not see Corrie before she was wounded. However, Alice Coy, now a nurse in Glasgow, and an ISM volunteer activist who was near Corrie during the incident, said in an affidavit to the court that ”to the best of my knowledge the bulldozer driver could see Rachel while pushing earth
over her body.”

The D-9 commander, who was a reservist named Edward Valermov, was in the middle of his testimony when a colonel dispatched by Maj-Gen Almog entered the room and ordered him to desist from speaking, according to the document. The military police investigator wrote ”At 18:12 reserve Colonel Baruch Kirhatu entered the room and informed the witness that he should not convey anything and should not write anything and this at the order of the general of southern command.”

On March 19, 2003 the US state department announced that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had promised US President George Bush that the Israeli government would undertake a ”thorough, credible and transparent investigation” of Rachel Corrie’s death.

Hussein Abu Hussein, lawyer for the Corrie family, says Almog’s intervention blocked the possible emergence of evidence that could have determined whether Valermov’s assertion that he did not see Corrie was reasonable. ”Do I believe him? Of course not. There is no doubt this was manslaughter,” Mr. Abu Hussein said. ”First of all we claim the state is responsible for the death of Rachel. And secondly we claim that the investigation was not professional.”
”When you, the state of Israel, fail as an authority to perform your function of having a credible investigation, when your standard falls from reasonable, objective standards than you have caused evidentiary damage,” Mr Abu Hussein said.
In his testimony before he was stopped, Valermov said that the bulldozers, manned by two people, were ordered by their company commander to continue their work despite the presence of the ISM protesters. He said that troops in an armored personnel carrier threw stun grenades, used tear gas and fired shots toward the ground in order to scare the protesters away. ”It didn’t help and therefore we decided to continue the work with all possible delicateness on the orders of the company commander.” Valermov testified that the protesters nearly touched the bulldozers, making it impossible to advance, but that after the company commander’s order ”we started mvoing with the D-9, we continued laying bare the area from all of the things that were”there.

The testimony was interrupted after Valermov, who was in the D-9 with its driver, named only as Yevgeny, said he did not know if Corrie had been harmed by the shovel of the D-9 ”It was only when we moved the D-9 backwards that I saw her. The woman was lying in a place where the instrument had not reached. As soon as we saw the harmed woman we returned to the central corridor , stood and waited for orders.”

Mr Valermov’s last statement before Almog’s interdiction was ”my job was to guide. The driver cannot guide himself because his field of vision is not large.”

Another army document makes clear Almog opposed the military police investigation. Dated March 18, 2003, a military police investigator petitioning a judge for permission to conduct an autopsy on Ms. Corrie’s body explains that ”we arrived only today because there was an argument between the general of southern command and the military advocate general about whether to open an investigation and under what circumstances.” The judge granted the request provided the autopsy would be done in the presence of a US diplomat as the Corrie family requested. But in the end, the inquest was carried out by Israel’s chief pathologist without any US official being there, in apparent violation of the judge’s ruling.
In a phone interview from Olympia, Washington Craig Corrie, Rachel’s father, termed Almog’s intervention in Valermov’s testimony ”outrageous”

”When you see someone in that position taking those steps you not only have to be outraged, you have to ask why is he covering up, what has he done that he needs to take these steps to cover it up?

Queried on Wednesday, Major-General Almog denied halting Valermov’s testimony. ”I never gave such an order, I don’t know such a document. I conducted my own investigation, I don’t remember what I found. There were 12,000 terrorist incidents when I was general in charge of southern command. I finished seven years ago, if they want to invite me [to testify] they know the address. I certainly didn’t disrupt an investigation, this is nonsense. In all of my service I never told anyone not to testify.”

Asked if he gave an order to harm foreign activists interfering with the army’s work, Major-General Almog responded: ”What are you talking about? You don’t know what a general in charge of command is. The general in charge of command has 100,000 soldiers. What are you talking about?”

Moshe Negbi, legal commentator for the state run Voice of Israel radio, said of Almog’s interdiction: ”If a commander prevents a witness from testifying than it is disruption of an investigation, a criminal offense whose penalty is three years imprisonment.”

Major-General Almog narrowly escaped arrest in Britain in 2005 on a war crimes charge for allegedly ordering the destruction in 2002 of fifty civilian homes in Rafah, where Ms. Corrie was later killed. Israel said the homes were being used to stage attacks. General Almog was tipped off to the arrest attempt and did not disembark at Heathrow, returning instead to Israel on the El Al flight.

Asked about Almog’s interdiction, the Israel Defense Forces spokesman said: ”Any military police investigations are completely independent and cannot be influenced by outside sources.”

The Israeli state attorneys handling the case, Irit Koren and Nir Gincharsky declined to be interviewed for this article. The trial is due to resume in September.

They are close the Palgei Mayim settlement, its white prefabricated homes spread out like toy boxes on the neighboring hill. “Every year there are problems,” he sighed after someone told him that seven Israeli settlers had been spotted nearby. “We can’t get to the trees.”

In recent years, fundamentalist settlers who believe the area belongs to them by divine will have attacked and shot Palestinians as they harvested near settlements. Three years ago farmers from this village south of Nablus had to be treated in hospital after being beaten by settlers wielding sticks, residents said.

Still, Mr. Khatib, a tall man with green eyes and a salt and pepper beard, needed to get to his trees Friday. He, like Palestinians in villages throughout the West Bank badly needs the income from the oil the olives produce.
The Friday sermon was echoing through the orchards from the village mosque’s loudspeaker. But Mr. Khatib’s would-be saviour came from another faith, surprisingly for him that of the Israeli enemy In a show of friendship to the Palestinian farmers, a dovish Israeli rabbi had come to Assawiya with ten rabbinical students to offer protection from settlers and show a kinder face of Judaism based on the bible’s teaching that all humans are created in god’s image.

“This is my first time meeting a rabbi, it’s great that he came,” Mr. Khatib said after meeting rabbi Arik Ascherman, the lanky, Arabic-speaking American-born head of Rabbis for Human Rights. Ascherman, considered by settlers and the army to be their number one nuisance during the harvest, has been bouncing from hilltop to hilltop this season as the army evicts him from one closed military area after another. “In recent years they have been keeping us out more and more because they do not want us checking on them from up close.” Rabbi Ascherman said.

Rabbi Ascherman says there has been less violence thus far this year compared to previous ones and credits the army with “doing a good job keeping peace” where it is deployed. But, he adds “in many places they have been telling Palestinians to hurry up and finish when farmers still had work to do.” David Ha’Ivri, a spokesman for settlers in the northern West Bank says RHR and other left-wing Israeli groups “come from outside to provoke violence between local Arabs and Jews. Their presence causes the problem.” He says

In a bid to help Mr. Khatib, rabbi Ascherman called an Israeli officer and asked whether troops could show a presence near his trees so that the Palestinian would feel safe from settler attack. The officer declined, so Ascherman himself decided to accompany Mr. Khatib. But very quickly the same officer, a member of Israel’s Druse Arab minority, pulled up in a khaki vehicle, alighted and called out: “Ascherman you’re in a closed military area. Get out of here. Allah be with you. You are looking for trouble.”

Soon a distraught Mr. Khatib also left, along with two relatives who had come to help him harvest. They said the officer had told them that if they wanted to be protected while they pick they should come again on Tuesday and do it in “coordination” with the army.
“It’s a lie. There will be no picking on Tuesday,” said Mr. Khatib.
“The coordination they mean is that between the army and the settlers,” a relative joked bitterly.

Over the years, Mr. Khatib said, he has lost half of his olive groves to expropriations for Jewish settlements. He did not apply for compensation because that would amount to selling his land to the Israelis, something considered high treason among Palestinians.

His cellphone rang. It was rabbi Ascherman, who said he had spoken to the officer and that the latter had told him that Mr. Khatib could pick today. The rabbi suggested Mr. Khatib call the officer and hear this for himself. But Mr. Khatib declined. He kept walking back to the village, further away from the trees he once picked alongside his grandfather.

The problem began on March 26, when hundreds of soldiers– their faces daubed with black camouflage paint– took over Hares with search and detain raids on houses at three in the morning. The stated purpose as told to troops: to stop stonethrowing at settler roads by youths from the village. Soldiers blindfolded Shamlawi, a soft spoken 25 year old university student, and fastened plastic hand restraints on him very tightly “I said they are too tight,but the soldier did not respond.” He recalled.

Palestinians begging to have their restraints loosened, the blows and kicks some endured while bound and blindfolded, being forced to stand in the sun for much of the 3 am to 3 pm operation, being cursed at by soldiers–these were the hallmarks of the Hares operation, according to testimonies of two soldiers whose accounts were made available by the anti-occupation soldiers’ and ex-soldiers group Breaking the Silence.

The Hares operation appears to have been one of the “daily humilitations-large and small” in the words of Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, that Palestinians endure and that, in Mr. Obama’s view, help make continuation of the status quo of occupation “intolerable.”

The Israeli army spokesman says an investigation has been opened after complaints from Palestinian residents of Hares and that soldiers have received clear instructions not to use violence against detainees.

One soldier, a sargeant, described how the severe hand-tying continued for seven hours despite pleas of Palestinians.

“There are people who think you need to tighten the restraints all the way, until no drop of blood will pass from here to there,” the soldier said.” It doesn’t take much time until the hands turn blue. Not everyone had a blue hand, but there were a lot of people that you know weren’t feeling anything,” A second soldier told Breaking the Silence that he loosened the restraints of some Palestinians.

The first soldier said about 150 Palestinians were bound, blindfolded and detained at the village school in the operation It was clear that many of the people detained had not done anything wrong but that they were held to gather intelligence from them, he said.

The worst beatings were in the bathrooms , he said.“The soldiers who took [detainees] to the toilet just exploded them with beatings, cursed them with no reason,” the first soldier said. “When they took one Arab to the toilet so that he could urinate, one of them gave him a slap that brought him to the ground. He had been handcuffed from behind with a nylon restraint and blindfolded, he wasn’t insolent, he didn’t do anything to get on anyone’s nerves, just like that, just because he’s an Arab. He was something like fifteen years old.” The first soldier said he saw a lot of soldiers “just knee [Palestinians] because it’s boring, because you stand there ten hours, you’re not doing anything, it’s boring so they beat people up.”

“There were a lot of reservists that participated, and they totally had a celebration on the Palestinians: curses, humiliation, pulling hair and ears, kicks, slaps. These things were the norm, this was the whole batallion. The incidents in the toilets were extreme. But slaps and curses, humiliation and kneeing and things like that were, like, the norm.”
The bathroom beatings were “not beatings that drew blood, they were dry beatings but still a beating.”he said

The soldiers’s testimonies are likely to add fuel to a controversy over remarks by the commander of their brigade, Colonel, Itai Virob, who testified in a military court case last month concerning a separate incident that hitting detained Palestinians is justified to accomplish missions. “Standing them against walls, pushing them, a blow that doesn’t cause injury. These are things that are certainly commonly used in an attempt to accomplish the mission.” He said. Despite a reprimand of Col. Virob by West Bank commander General Gad Shamni and a disavowal by army chief of staff Lt. Gen Gabi Ashkenazi, his remarks raise doubt about whether the abuses in Hares can be dismissed as an isolated occurrence or low-level improvisations. Gen Shamni issued a pamphlet recently stressing “when someone is detained stopped or held by IDF soldiers they are absolutely and clearly forbidden to use any force or violence towards them.”

Mr. Shamlawi’s blindfold was lifted when an interrogator from the Shin Bet intelligence agency tried to enlist him as a collaborator and offered him a rare permit to work in Israel, he recalled He declined. Afterwards, he watched as a high school student he knew, his hands bound and his blindfold slightly lifted, asked soldiers to go to the bathroom, and said he wanted water. “They put him on the floor, they kicked him on his legs and beat him,” he said. Ten or fifteen other soldiers were watching, Mr. Shamlawi recalled. “They all laughed,” he said.

“This was humiliation of him and of me,” he said. “ I couldn’t do or say anything because if you say anything they will hit you.”

Later he was brought into a room holding about fifty youths. “A soldier called out on a microphone: “You are all children of prostitutes.” He said an officer came in and removed the soldier. But another officer made jokes about several of the detained youths not being in the room anymore because they had been sent for five years to prison.

In the soldiers rest area the mood was upbeat after the operation, the second soldier told Breaking the Silence. He recalled hearing some soldiers voice disappointment that the villagers were so poor there was nothing to steal from them. “There was a lot of joy at other people’s misfortune,” the soldier said.