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.

(Lire la suite…)

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.”
(Lire la suite…)

Agissons dés maintenant pour lutter contre l’explusion des réfugiés Palestiniens!

Une semaine de campagne par téléphone, télécopieur et courriel pour
exiger le statut de résident permanent dès maintenant.

Alors que s’amorce 2007, la Coalition contre la déportation des réfugiés palestiniens souligne sa quatrième année de lutte contre l’expulsion de réfugiés palestiniens du Canada. Depuis le début de 2003, nous avons organisé de nombreuses initiatives publiques visant à contrer la politique du ministère de la Citoyenneté et de l¹Immigration du Canada consistant à expulser les réfugiés palestiniens au lieu de leur accorder la résidence permanente au Canada.

L’année 2006 a fourni de nombreux exemples de la manière injuste et arbitraire dont Citoyenneté et Immigration Canada a traité les cas des réfugiés palestiniens apatrides dans ce pays. Si deux membres de la Coalition ont obtenu la résidence permanente pour des raisons humanitaires et compassionnelles, d’autres candidatures ont été injustement rejetées, et de nombreuses autres sont en attente depuis des années. Malgré les promesses qu’a faites Citoyenneté et Immigration Canada en novembre 2005, selon lesquelles ces demandes seraient étudiées dans un délai de quelques semaines, plus de 10 de ces demandes sont restées en suspens, de même que les vies des réfugiées concernés, marquées par une anxiété et une insécurité constantes.
(Lire la suite…)

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.”
(Lire la suite…)

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. (Lire la suite…)

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. (Lire la suite…)

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.
(Lire la suite…)

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

(Lire la suite…)

Meron Rappaport revient dans le quotidien Haaretz sur l’utilsation par l’armée israélienne de bombes au phosphore et du grand nombre d’obus “à retardement” qui minent actuellement le sol libanais et vont nécessairement tuer encore plus de civils

« Nous avons tiré plus d’un million de sous-munitons. Ce que nous avons fait était fou et monstrueux. Nous avons arrosé des villes entières de bombes », déclare le commandant israélien d’une unité de missiles au Liban en parlant de l’usage des bombes à sous-munitions (ou fragmentation) et de l’utilisation des obus à phosphore pendant la guerre..

(Lire la suite…)

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. (Lire la suite…)