Al-Haq takes the occasion of Land Day to highlight the intrinsic link between land and the exercise of the right to self-determination. Over nearly 40 years of occupation, Israel’s pervasive policies of land expropriation and confiscation, settlement construction and movement restrictions have severely damaged the access of the Palestinian people to their land in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), thereby rendering the meaningful exercise of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination all but impossible.

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BBC News: Israel was criticised for bombing Lebanese civilian centres

A former top American diplomat says the US deliberately resisted calls for a immediate ceasefire during the conflict in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

Former ambassador to the UN John Bolton told the BBC that before any ceasefire Washington wanted Israel to eliminate Hezbollah’s military capability.

Mr Bolton said an early ceasefire would have been “dangerous and misguided”.

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Prosthetic limb-fitting centers in southern Lebanon are struggling to cope with the rising toll from the one million unexploded munitions left over from last year’s war with Israel.

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New York Times, March 13th, 2007

TODAY more than three-quarters of the world’s oil is owned and controlled by governments. It wasn’t always this way.

Until about 35 years ago, the world’s oil was largely in the hands of seven corporations based in the United States and Europe. Those seven have since merged into four: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP. They are among the world’s largest and most powerful financial empires. But ever since they lost their exclusive control of the oil to the governments, the companies have been trying to get it back.

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Introduction: Writing five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, US military expert Anthony Cordesman published an account of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. “Preliminary Lessons of the Israeli-Hezbollah War” created enormous interest in the Pentagon, where it was studied by planners for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and passed hand-to-hand among military experts in Washington. Cordesman made no secret of his modest conclusions, rightly recognizing that his study was not only “preliminary”, but that it took no account of how Hezbollah fought the conflict or judged its results.

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A refugee sits near the fence of Rweished camp, 50 km off the Jordanian / Iraqi border.

On the border between Iraq/Jordan and Iraq/Syria today live hundreds of Palestinian families who fled the US war to find themselves stranded in no-mans land. These families live in tents, in squalor, with little certainty or hope for the future, like their parents and grandparents did after their expulsion from their own homeland in the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) by the Israelis. The Al-Hol, Al-Tanaf, Al-Ruweished and Al-Walid refugee camps in the Iraqi desert are examples of the on-going Nakba that Palestinian refugees face. The fate of the 34,000 Palestinian refugees who once lived in Iraq can be added to the many tragic stories of the US invasion and occupation of that country.

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In a low profile lecture at the Faculty of Law at McGill University last Thursday, Irwin Cotler articulated a biased, view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and presented a vision for its future that not only fails to address the root causes of the conflict, but intentionally distorts them.

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BEIRUT: “We have the bombs,” jokes hip-hop MC and occasional graffiti artist RGB, aka Rajab Abdul Rahman (RGB refers to the root letters of his first name). He shakes the plastic bag he is holding in his hands so the spray cans inside clang and echo hollowly in an otherwise empty parking lot. RGB and his colleagues – 6K, Fish and Rat – empty the contents of the bag on the ground, distribute the cans, pull their scarves up to mask their faces and begin. Bands of silver and black paint spread across a bullet-scarred wall. Hours later, they step back to survey the night’s labor. Boldly emblazoned across the wall are graffiti letters taller than their creators, proclaiming in capital letters: “Beirut Never Dies.”

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A United Nations committee has called on Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their property and land in Israel and to ensure that the bodies responsible for distributing property, such as the Jewish National Fund, not discriminate against the Arab population.

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Hizbullah’s claims that the 34 day war waged on Lebanon in 2006 was pre-planned appear to have been validated by the Israeli Prime Minister. The Israeli Government has, until now, stuck firmly to the line that the war was not anticipated before the kidnapping of two of its soldiers by Hizbullah. However Israeli daily Haaretz revealed last Thursday that PM Ehud Olmert has admitted otherwise to Israel’s Winograd Commission.