Photo: Palestinians sit on Gaza wall after brief liberation from confinement in 2008.

AMMAN: Gaza faces a humanitarian “catastrophe” if Israel continues to prevent aid reaching the territory by blocking crossing points, the head of the main U.N. aid agency for the Palestinians said on Friday.

Karen AbuZayd, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said the human toll of this month’s sealing of Gaza’s goods crossings was the gravest since the early days of a Palestinian uprising eight years ago.

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United States President-elect Barack Obama’s election victory has revived hopes that stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations could finally lead to a two-state solution. Few new presidents have been greeted with such optimism and associated high expectations.

However, the chances for progress depend on more than a new American president. There are several interrelated factors: US engagement, the availability of a viable peace agreement, Israeli and Palestinian internal politics and the broader international situation.

An examination of these factors indicates that the optimism is unjustified and that President Obama will not be more successful in bringing about a two-state solution to the conflict. This does not however mean that the situation will remain static or that those pursuing a just peace have no recourse for action.

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DIMANCHE 7 DECEMBRE 2008
20h00. 5-10$
La Sala Rossa, 4848 St. Laurent
Montreal, Quebec

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Interview with Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch. Broadcasts from Beirut VIII.

In Lebanon, between 150,000 to 300,000 women work as migrant domestic workers, with approximately 100,000 having legal status in the country. In August 2008, Human Rights Watch released a report covering the period of January 1, 2007 to August 15, 2008 revealing migrant domestic workers had extremely high death tolls due to unnatural causes.

Migrant domestic workers experience harsh working conditions and consistent workplace abuse, and currently many migrant domestic workers can be found sleeping under cars or on the ground surrounding their respective countries’ embassies in Lebanon, searching for assistance for their situations. Nadim Houry is the senior researcher at Human Rights Watch covering Lebanon and Lillian Boctor from Tadamon spoke with Houry about the situation.

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The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is deeply concerned over continued policies of collective punishment imposed by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip. These policies have included ban on delivery of food supplies and basic goods, including energy fuel required for electricity generation, grains and wheat. Following the halt of fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip in the past six days, more than 30 percent of the population of Gaza was in complete darkness last night, and people lined up in front of bakeries to buy flour and bread. Although IOF allowed the delivery of 427,410 liters of energy fuel this morning, which is enough to operate Gaza’s power plant for a single day, PCHR in concerned that humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip may further deteriorate.

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Photo: Israeli soldier holds Palestinian IDs at checkpoint in the occupied West Bank.

During this year’s U.S. presidential election campaign, there was almost no mention made of Israel and the Palestinians by either of the major candidates. That is, until the waning days of the race, when John McCain made a last-ditch attempt to cast aspersions upon Barack Obama by highlighting a connection to respected Palestinian-American academic and Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. “It was shameful for them to try and paint Professor Khalidi as anything but an esteemed scholar and academic,” says lawyer and Palestinian-American activist Noura Erakat. “It was reprehensible.”

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A former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, has told the BBC she was taken aback by the “terrible” conditions in Gaza on a recent visit.

Mrs Robinson said it was “almost unbelievable” that the world did not care about what she called “a shocking violation of so many human rights”.

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Photos capturing a fantastic global hip-hop concert in Montreal on Sunday, November 2nd, co-presented by the Festival du Monde Arabe and Tadamon!, featuring Aks’ser (Arabic for ‘against the traffic’) a Lebanese hip-hop duo from Beirut and the international rhythms from Nomadic Massive from Montreal. Upwards of two-hundred people attended the concert at La Sala Rossa, bringing together people for an evening featuring hip-hop expressions from Montreal to the Middle East rooted in conscience expression and social justice.

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Une initiative d’éducation populaire faisant suite à la proposition de soutien à la campagne internationale de boycott, désinvestissement et sanctions contre l’apartheid israélien adoptée par l’ASSÉ. L’ASSÉ a été la première association étudiante d’envergure au Canada à appuyer la campagne internationale contre l’apartheid israélien et pour l’égalité en Palestine.

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BEIRUT: The Israeli military is “making preparations” for a strike against Hizbullah that “appears inevitable” and will be “decisive,” a former top Israeli diplomat has written in a report for a US-based think tank with strong links to America’s Jewish lobby. Oded Eran, Israel’s former ambassador to the European Union and now director of the Institute for Security Studies in Tel Aviv, published a report for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) entitled “UN Resolution 1701: A view from Israel.”

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