Jan. 31st 2007, IRIN [Integrated Regional Information Networks]:

Israel may have violated agreements regarding the use of American-made cluster bombs during its war in Lebanon in July 2006, the US State Department said on Monday.

Spokesman Sean McCormack did not give details about the possible violations but said the results of a preliminary investigation were being forwarded to Congress.

During the war, Israel used cluster munitions, possibly dropping one million such bombs, including in civilian areas.

Many of the munitions – according to the United Nations, up to 40 percent – did not explode and now pose a hazard to residents of south Lebanon. Unexploded ordnance has killed at least 27 people and injured more than 143 since the war ended.

Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons that spray bomblets over a wide area, in an intentionally imprecise manner, when they explode.

(more…)

What the Canadian Foreign Minister did not see or discuss during his visit

GAZA CITY, GAZA: Despite the impression cast by corporate news coverage, there is never anything like “calm” here in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The casualty count for 2006 released by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports that Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, while 17 Israeli civilians were killed, 13 of them in the West Bank. The violence is often spectacular, as during the summer and fall siege operations in Gaza that killed more than 450 Palestinians under withering aerial bombardment, artillery barrages and two major ground invasions. But, as an unusually frank headline in the current edition of the Economist rightly stated, “It’s the little things that make an occupation.”

When Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay visited Israel this week, it was these “little things” that he missed–like the more than 530 fixed checkpoints and roadblocks identified in a joint UN-IDF count in the occupied West Bank. These obstacles make simple travel between neighbouring Palestinian villages often impossible, particularly when added to the more than 7,000 “flying checkpoints” that spring up at the whim of the Israeli army, anywhere and at anytime. As the Economist pointed out, “arbitrariness is one of the most crippling features of these rules.”
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Act Now to Fight the Deportation of Palestinian Refugees!

One Week call/fax/email Campaign to Demand Status Now.
from the Coalition Against the Deportation of Palestinian Refugees, Montreal.

As we enter 2007, the Coalition Against the Deportation of Palestinian Refugees marks its fourth year of fighting against the deportation of Palestinian refugees from Canada. We have, since early 2003, been publicly organizing to reverse the efforts of Immigration Canada to deport Palestinian refugees and for them instead to be granted permanent residency in Canada.

The year 2006 provided numerous examples of the arbitrariness and injustice with which Immigration Canada has treated the cases of the stateless Palestinian refugees in Canada. While two members of the Coalition received positive decisions on their applications for permanent residence on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, others were unjustly refused, and still more have been left in wait for years. Despite promises by Immigration Canada in November 2005 that their applications would be studied within weeks, more than 10 of those applications remain undecided and the lives of those affected continue in suspense, causing immeasurable anxiety and insecurity.

Montreal Mirror: by Stefan Christoff

Almost four months have passed since Montrealer Hassan El Akhras lost 11 family members to an Israeli air strike in the south Lebanese village of Aitaroun. Currently, legal representatives of the family are pressing the Conservative government for action on the case.

Despite existing legal efforts, Hassan El Akhras holds little faith in the current government. “The government has done nothing,” says El Akhras. “Our family wants the Canadian government to launch an international investigation on the war crime committed against my family, but we have gotten no phone call, nothing.”
(more…)

Ghassan Makarem, a Lebanese activist, speaks from Beirut about the huge protests that have rocked the Lebanese capital

Beirut has become the focus of a new movement that is challenging the US-backed government and the political system that put them in power.

This movement was launched by the biggest ever demonstration in the country’s history. Over one million people – out of a population of 4 million – converged on the Lebanese capital on Friday of last week to demand the formation of a government of national unity. (more…)

US prosecutor charges 2 for helping air Al-Manar

NEW YORK: Two men have been charged with terrorist offences in New York for allegedly providing access to a television station banned in the United States and linked to Hizbullah, prosecutors said Monday. Pakistani-born Javed Iqbal, 42, and US citizen Saleh Elahwal, 53, are accused of conspiring to provide viewers with satellite broadcasts by Al-Manar, considered the mouthpiece for the Lebanese resistance party.

They face a sentence of up to 110 years in jail if convicted on the charges of providing material support or resources to a foreign “terrorist” organization. (more…)

Film Screening with filmmaker David Martinez visiting from San Francisco.

SATURDAY, November, 18th, 7pm
School of Community & Public Affairs
2149 MacKay [above de Maisonneuve]
Metro Guy-Concordia
Suggested Donations 5$.

Join filmmaker David Martinez for an intimate screening of 500 Miles to Babylon a one-hour documentary film currently in post-production about Iraq under U.S. occupation. Narrated by the filmmaker, using footage shot in Iraq during the past years threaded with graphically animated archival sequences to provide historic context, the film will address the current war not simply is a conflict over petroleum profits or a scheme to fill a company’s coffers, but as part of a larger American imperial project.
(more…)

From International Socialist Review (ISR), Issue 50, November – December 2006.

By HADAS THEIR

It looked as if a tornado had torn through the residential building and partments, ripping off balconies and roof supports, tearing down massive walls and collapsing whole blocks inwards upon their occupants. Many of the dead were sandwiched inside these ruins. In the streets, where Israeli bulldozers had swept away the rubble with military briskness, the people of Sidon walked in a daze.
    – Journalist Robert Fisk describes the scene at Sidon, where many Lebanese and Palestinian refugees had fled to, trying to escape Israeli raids.(1)

They are all terrorists.
    – An army officer when asked why bulldozers were destroying houses in which women and children lived.(2)

I was not even six when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, too young to be conscious of war and politics. My only memory of the war is the day that my uncle, then thirty-one, serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), died – my mother wailing in agony, the shattered expressions on my grandparents’ faces. I would sit with my grandparents for hours in the living room, gently stroking their arms, attempting to ease their pain. For the conquering army, death and suffering is an unavoidable consequence of resistance to occupation. In this case, the six hundred or so IDF deaths, led to a rare development of a peace movement in Israel. But for the conquered, their only crime was to be, by their very existence, in the way of the occupier’s ambition.
    – The author

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IDF commander: We fired more than a million cluster bombs in Lebanon

Meron Rappaport (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/761781.html)

“What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,” the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.

Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets.

Cluster bomblets on the ground outside Nabatiyeh.

(more…)

The following letter was sent by Hassan El Akhras to the National Post in response to an article about the killing of the El Akhras family published in that newspaper. The Post has refused to publish this letter.

23 August 2006

Sunday July 16 was the darkest day of my life. I lost 12 members of my family. They include my father, Ali El Akhras, my cousin, Ali Al-Akhrass, and his wife, Amira, and their four children, aged 1 to 8: Salam (which means ‘Peace’), Ahmad, Zeinab and Saja as well as the children’s grandmother Haniya Al-Akhrass.

Their bodies were crushed under the rubble of our house in the southern Lebanese village of Aytaroun. Their lives were cut short by the Israeli shelling of their hideout from the bombs. (more…)