Agence France-Presse AFP – December 27th, 2009.

Photo: Smoke over Gaza rises during Israeli bombing last winter.

French protesters camped out in front of the their embassy in Cairo to protest a ban on them from travelling from Egypt to Gaza for a march in support of the blockaded Palestinian enclave.

About 300 protesters set up tents and blocked a road in front of the mission after buses they had rented to take them to El-Arish, a town close to the border with Gaza, never came.

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report written by Luciana Coconi from Palestina al Cor in Catalonia

Photo: Smoke rises over the Gaza Strip after Israeli bombing raid.

The aim of this report is to determine whether or not a crime of apartheid is being committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. It adopts an outside, non preconceived side whatsoever and it analyses, on the one hand, international human rights legislation and international humanitarian law and, on the other hand, internal legislation and its application, both in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Throughout the study, we shall observe what is understood to be the crime of apartheid. We know what happened in South Africa, we suspect it could be occurring in Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but little has been researched about why apartheid arose and became a crime against humanity and exactly what its legal content is.

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Al Jazeera by Nisreen El-Shamayleh in Mafraq, northern Jordan.

Photo Urban landscape in northern Jordan.

Jordan has stood at the front-line of the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948, and in the six decades since has been de-mining battlefields where opposing armies once roamed.

Many of the country’s land mines date back to the 1948 partition of Palestine, the 1967 Six Day War, and hostilities with Syria in the 1970’s.

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photo by ActiveStills

Photo: ActiveStills. Poet Saul Williams visiting Bil’in, Palestine.

Celebrated US poet and performer Saul Williams visited Bilin, Palestine in November 2009, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid while touring near the apartheid wall build on Bil’in village lands and visiting with the residences in Bil’in about life under the Israeli occupation.

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New York Times by Mustafa Barghouthi December 16th, 2009.

Photo: Palestinian youth in the Israeli occupied West Bank.

I have lived my entire adult life under occupation, with Israelis holding ultimate control over my movement and daily life.

When young Israeli police officers force me to sit on the cold ground and soldiers beat me during a peaceful protest, I smolder. No human being should be compelled to sit on the ground while exercising rights taken for granted throughout the West.

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Free Palestinian political prisoner Abdallah Abu Rahmah!

Friday, December 18th 12h00
Indigo Bookstore
corner of St. Catherine & McGill college
(metro McGill)
Montreal, Canada

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guardian.co.uk Monday 14 December 2009

Photo: Young Palestinian dead within buildings destroyed by Israel in Gaza.

A British court issued an unprecedented arrest warrant for Israel’s former foreign minister over war crimes allegedly committed in Gaza this year – only to withdraw it when it was discovered that she was not in the UK, it emerged today .

Tzipi Livni, a member of the war cabinet during Operation Cast Lead, had been due to address a meeting in London on Sunday but cancelled her attendance in advance. The Guardian has established that Westminster magistrates court issued the warrant at the request of lawyers acting for some of the Palestinian victims of the fighting, but it was later dropped.

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by Mohammed Omer, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

Photo: Palestinian youth in the Gaza Strip.

Although ignored by much of the Western media, a battle which echoes the biblical story of David and Goliath is taking place in The Hague. In the modern-day version, young David is personified by a soft-spoken 15-year-old girl named Amira Alqerem. Goliath takes the form of the world’s fourth most powerful, nuclear-armed military state: Israel.

At stake is victims’ rights the world over and the international commitment to “never again.” It is this commitment—as well as to international law, as laid down in the Fourth Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—that Amira is asking the International Criminal Court (ICC) to recognize and uphold.

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by Ray Smith Inter Press Service November 25 2009

Photo: Mary Ellen Davis Sky over destroyed street in Nahr al-Bared.

Nahr al-Bared, Lebanon – More than two years after their refugee camp was destroyed in a war between the Lebanese army and the Islamist militant group Fatah al-Islam, Nahr al-Bared refugees Wednesday witnessed the start of the camp’s reconstruction. Their relief is mixed with scepticism, however.

Established in 1949, the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in north Lebanon’s Akkar region has become home to more than 30,000 residents. In the summer of 2007, the camp was totally destroyed as the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) fought a group of well-equipped, mostly non-Palestinian militants who had taken over the camp.

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Gamal Nkrumah Al-Ahram 10 – 16 December 2009.

Photo Skyline from the sea coast in Alexandria, Egypt.

Mustafa Tolba, president of the International Centre for Environment and Development and a key participant at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, warned that even though the Arab world produces a mere five per cent of global carbon emissions, several Arab countries are in disproportionate danger from the negative impacts of global warming.

At the Copenhagen Environmental Summit the overriding concern seems to be who is responsible for global warming instead of what to do about the negative impact of climate change.

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