Posted on 07/02/2007 7:27:40 AM PDT by Bahbah
” . No injuries or damage were reported “
I sometimes think that the only reason that Gaza isn’t a gravel parking lot already is that the Palis are rotten shots.....
President Musharraf sticks to his guns
Sunday March 02, 2008 (1003 PST)
ISLAMABAD: President Pervez Musharraf Saturday said that he was elected for five years by the parliament under the constitution and he would not allow anybody to create anarchy.
He was talking to the PML-Q’s newly elected members of the Punjab Assembly at the Presidential Camp Office.
The MPAs-elect met the president under the leadership of former Punjab chief minister Pervaiz Elahi. They discussed the strategy to counter the PML-N drive against the president.
Musharraf said he had served the nation for eight years, strengthened economy and taken measures against terrorism.
He said he had fulfilled the promise of fair polls and he was ready to work with the government of any party at the Centre.
He stressed the need for national consensus to confront the challenges being faced by the country.
Ch Pervaiz Elahi said that the PML-Q and its allied parties would continue their support to the president. He said only the PML-N was trying to make the president controversial. He said all the parties should cooperate with the president in the interest of the country.
End.
Oh, wow...
I’m thinking that this may be interpreted as a ‘crossing-the-line’ escalation....
Israeli Aircraft Target Haniyeh’s Office
AP via brietbart ^ | Mar 2, 2008 | IBRAHIM BARZAK
Posted on 03/02/2008 5:15:36 AM CST by Jet Jaguar
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Israeli aircraft sent missiles slamming into the office of the prime minister of Hamas-ruled Gaza before dawn on Sunday, pressing forward with an offensive that has killed nearly 70 Palestinians in two days of fighting. A 21-month-old girl was among the dead in new violence.
Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh’s office was empty at the time of Sunday’s airstrike, but the raid was seen as a tough message to the Hamas leadership, which Israel holds responsible for repeated rocket barrages launched from Gaza.
A total of 54 Palestinians, roughly half of them civilians, were killed in fighting Saturday, the highest single-day death toll in more than seven years of violence. Two Israeli soldiers also were killed.
Responding to the bloodletting, the moderate Palestinian leadership based in the West Bank suspended U.S.-sponsored peace talks with Israel. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due to arrive this week, but instead of promoting peace talks, she likely will try to put out the latest fire.
The bloodshed also drew condemnations internationally, including from U.N. chief Ban Ki-Moon, who accused Israel of “disproportionate and excessive use of force.”
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday rejected the international criticism and vowed to continue the Gaza offensive. “With all due respect, nothing will prevent us from continuing operations to protect our citizens,” he told his Cabinet.
Olmert’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said an even broader Gaza operation was in the cards, aimed at crushing militant rocket squads but also to “weaken the Hamas rule, in the right circumstances, even to bring it down.”
Israel regularly clashes with Gaza rocket squads, but intensified its operations after militants fired salvos last week into Ashkelon, a city of 120,000. By targeting Ashkelon, some 11 miles north of Gaza, Hamas added pressure on Israeli leaders to exact a high price for the increasing sense of insecurity felt in southern Israel.
Haniyeh’s office was just one of about a dozen targets Israeli aircraft and ground troops struck before dawn.
Overnight, a 14-year-old Palestinian girl and five militants died of their wounds, and four Palestinians were killed in Israeli raids, including the baby girl, who died from shrapnel wounds.
The bodies of two women also were unearthed from the rubble of an earlier Israeli airstrike, bringing the total death toll from the operation to 66 since late Friday.
At least half were militants. Gaza health officials said about 200 people were wounded, 14 critically.
The normally bustling streets of Gaza City, the coastal strip’s largest town, were eerily empty Sunday.
Schools and universities were closed. The sound of verses from the Muslim holy book, the Quran, pouring forth from mosque loudspeakers mingled with the roar of Israeli warplanes and unmanned drones in the sky. Hamas blocked off roads to government buildings and security installations to protect civilians from possible Israeli strikes.
Hundreds gathered outside hospitals in Gaza City and northern Gaza waiting for bodies to be brought forth from morgues for burial. Many, like schoolteacher Tawfek Shaban, a 44-year-old father of five, were holding small radios, listening to the news.
“Shame on the Arabs, shame on the Muslims, shame on humanity ... When they will act to stop Israel?” Shaban asked. “There is no safe place in Gaza.”
The Israeli onslaught failed to stop rockets from battering southern Israel. Nine were fired at southern Israel by midday Sunday, including one that struck a house in the rocket-scarred town of Sderot, the military said. No one was injured. About 50 rockets and mortars were fired Saturday, wounding six Israelis.
“The Zionists will not enjoy security in ... all the colonies around Gaza as long as their crimes continue,” said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’ military wing.
The Saturday toll was by far the highest since the second Palestinian uprising erupted in late 2000. The highest previous Palestinian death toll was 38 in March 2002.
The moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, which is locked in a fierce rivalry with Hamas, called Israel’s assault a “holocaust” and “genocide” and suspended peace talks.
“For the time being, the negotiations are suspended because we have so many funerals,” Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Sunday. It was unclear when the talks, relaunched last November at a U.S.-hosted summit, would resume.
But Olmert said “attacking Hamas strengthens the chance for peace.”
“I’m sure that beyond certain statements, the Palestinian leadership, the one with whom we want to achieve peace, also understands that,” he said.
Olmert and the moderate Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, have set a year-end target for reaching an accord.
Abbas has ruled from the West Bank since his Hamas rivals violently seized control of Gaza last June. But the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza has threatened to unleash a backlash against him in the West Bank.
In Ramallah, home to Abbas’ government, thousands of schoolchildren demonstrated against Israel. Some accused Abbas of being an Israeli agent, and protesters threw stones and cars, burned tires and forced shopkeepers to close their stores.
And in the West Bank city of Hebron, several hundred Palestinian youths threw stones and bottles at an Israeli checkpoint in the city center. Israeli troops responded with rubber bullets and gas, slightly wounding two people.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1979124/posts
They hit his office?
hmmmmmmm - I wonder what floor and room number ;)
And I wanted to start off the day with something to be glad about. Oh, well....
Be of good cheer Ike, you may not yet be disappointed ;)
Good morning, Bahbah...
(Sorry it took so long to acknowledge your presence — Just got back from Wallyworld...)
A few posts ago, I made a halfway smarta$$ comment about the Palis being poor shots —
Welllll....
Validation is a wonderful thing, sometimes.. ;~)
The next Mideast war is a rocket away
SLT ^ | Last Updated: 03/01/2008 12:49:33 PM MST | Michael B. Oren
Posted on 03/02/2008 5:48:20 AM CST by maquiladora
It begins with a single Qassam rocket, one of the thousands of homemade projectiles fired in recent years by the Islamic radicals of Hamas from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel. The rockets have made life nightmarish for many Israelis but have largely missed their targets. But this one gets “lucky”: It smashes into an elementary school, wounding 40 children and killing 15.
The Israeli government, which had heretofore responded to the Qassams with airstrikes and small ground raids, cannot resist the nationwide demand for action. Within hours, tens of thousands of Israeli troops and hundreds of tanks are rushing into Gaza, battling house-to-house in teeming refugee camps. Just as swiftly, Palestinian officials accuse Israel of perpetrating a massacre and invite the foreign press to photograph the corpse-strewn rubble. The images flash around the Middle East on al-Jazeera TV and trigger violent demonstrations in Arab capitals.
Hezbollah, the radical Lebanese Shiite militia, then gets into the act, raining Katyusha rockets on northern Israel. But when Israeli warplanes bomb the Katyusha batteries, Syria leaps in, sending its commandos to retaliate by capturing key Israeli bunkers atop the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel’s counterattack succeeds only in precipitating a hailstorm of Syrian Scud-D missiles, some armed with chemical warheads, into Israeli cities.
Then, just as Israeli planes are incinerating the main electrical plant in Damascus, the first of hundreds of Shehab-3 rockets, pre-targeted at Tel Aviv, lift off from Tehran.
Sound fantastical or too horrific to ponder? Not to Israeli intelligence analysts it doesn’t. The Israeli military recently conducted a round of large-scale war games based precisely on this scenario. In some rounds, Israel managed to humble Hamas and Hezbollah while shooting down most of the Iranian and Syrian rockets with its own Arrow and Patriot antimissile systems. But other forecasts went far less well: Israel survives but barely, with its cities devastated and countless civilians killed.
This is the mess that will soon land in the lap of President Clinton, President Obama or President McCain. Despite the shadows of 9/11 and Iraq, the U.S. primary season thus far has been dominated by the economy. But it’s a mistake to assume that the next presidency will be. Instead of a honeymoon, the new president could inherit a brush fire raging out of control in a volatile region where U.S. involvement has never been deeper. Would he or she merely convene the U.N. Security Council, or rush to Israel’s defense? And how, in the event of a general Middle East war, would the president safeguard the woefully exposed U.S. forces in Iraq?
The Middle East will continue to be the source the gravest threats to U.S. security, whether in the long-term form of a nuclear-armed Iran or the short-term one of an unforeseen multistate war. So the candidates must be pressed about how they would handle a chain reaction in which events in Gaza suddenly engulf the entire region. To borrow an old slogan: It’s the Middle East, stupid.
The possibility that a border scrap between Israelis and Palestinians could ignite a regional conflagration should not be too surprising. A very similar concatenation of events led to the most volcanic eruption in the region’s modern history, irreparably convulsing the Middle East and carving many of the furrows that still destabilize it.
That conflict, too, began with Palestinian attacks into Israel, a series of Israeli reprisals and a mass clamoring for revenge. The countdown began just over 44 years ago, on New Year’s Eve, 1964, when Palestinian guerrillas belonging to the Fatah faction crossed the Lebanese border to attack Israel. Though the infiltrators were intercepted, Fatah’s leader, Yasser Arafat, declared the raid a heroic victory and dared Arab rulers to match his audacity.
Few could. The Arab world at the time was split between two warring camps: the socialist, pro-Soviet dictators in Egypt, Syria and Iraq and the conservative, pro-Western monarchs in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and elsewhere. Egypt’s fiery leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, gleefully branded King Hussein of Jordan a Zionist “whore,” ratcheting up the tension by hinting that the kings were American lackeys. Despite the rhetoric, Arab rulers did not really want war with Israel. But Arafat’s challenge left them little choice.
Nasser responded by ordering the Palestine Liberation Organization, originally established as an Egyptian propaganda tool, to launch its own cross-border attacks. The Israelis lashed back, blowing up Fatah’s West Bank headquarters. Jordan accused Nasser of “hiding behind the skirts” of the U.N. peacekeepers deployed in the Sinai to separate Egypt and Israel. Mortified, Nasser ousted the U.N. forces on May 15, 1967, and closed a strategic Red Sea shipping route to Israeli vessels. Suddenly, Nasser was the champion of the Arab “street,” hailed by huge demonstrations that demanded Israel’s destruction. The Arab world closed ranks behind him. Shorn of international allies, Israelis were convinced they faced annihilation.
But then Israel struck first. On the morning of June 5, Israeli warplanes obliterated almost the entire Egyptian air force, and Israeli tanks rumbled through Gaza and Sinai. At the end of six days of fighting, Israel had nearly quadrupled the territories under its control, among them the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Gaza. A new era - and new sources of Middle East bloodshed - had emerged.
Much has since changed in the Middle East. The Cold War is largely forgotten, as is the 1960s enmity among most Arab regimes. Israel remains a powerhouse, with more high-tech companies than Western Europe, an ironclad alliance with the United States and (it’s widely assumed) a nuclear arsenal. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, now rules the West Bank as the head of a Palestinian Authority publicly committed to coexistence with the Jewish state.
But for all these transformations, the Middle East remains the same explosive context of conflict it was in the 1960s. The region is still bitterly divided - not between Arab nationalism and conservatism but between religious moderation and the surge of Islamist extremism spurred, in part, by the Six-Day War. Backed by Syria and Iran, a phalanx of terrorist groups threatens Israeli and Arab societies alike. Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and is engaged again in peace talks with the Palestinians, but it is still an object of abomination for the overwhelming majority of Middle Easterners. And violence in Gaza - now run by a democratically elected Hamas government - can still spark turbulent demonstrations throughout the region’s streets.
If anything, the Middle East is even more flammable today than in the 1960s because of the countless thousands of short- and long-range missiles in its armies’ arsenals. These weapons vastly amplify the potential destruction of any military confrontation while slashing the amount of decision-making time that might be needed to avert all-out war. And modern weapons, including unconventional ones, make everything scarier. A conflict between Israel and Iran might not last six days but six hours, unleashing shock waves even more seismic than those of 1967.
Contemporary Middle Eastern leaders cannot afford to ignore these lessons. Neither can decision-makers - and would-be ones - in the United States. Though the waning Bush administration is focused on trying to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, shore up Iraq and flex its muscles at Iran, it should not downplay the danger that a seemingly limited border skirmish could rapidly escalate into a regional catastrophe.
Nor should Bush’s heir. The next commander in chief may have to proceed directly from the inauguration to the Situation Room to try to defuse a Middle Eastern crisis of monumental dimensions. That moment could be a single Qassam away.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1979127/posts
Bubble bubble -
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Abbas halts contacts with Israel over Gaza
20 minutes ago
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AFP) - Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas formally suspended all contacts with Israel on Sunday in protest at the blitz on the Gaza Strip that has killed nearly 70 people, his spokesman said.
“The negotiations are suspended, as are all contacts on all levels, because in light of the Israeli aggression such communication has no meaning,” Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina said in a statement.
“The Israeli government has decided to prosecute an unjust war and the open slaughter of our people. It bears sole responsibility for the hindering the peace process and all the effects and consequences of this decision,” he said.
He added that Abbas had ordered the negotiating team to suspend all contacts with Israel “until the aggression stops”.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080302/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictpeaceabbas
By the bye — is it just me, or did they make some changes to the formatting of the FR ‘Main’ Page??
(Or was it always just like that, and I just arrived from some alternate universe??)
Nope - I see it too - I wonder whats up?
Glad you brought it up. What is the RSS thing?
Good morning Bahbah - apologies for confusing you with Ike a bit ago.
I dunno about the RSS feed Bahbah - but I subscribed to it.
PS
In case you want to know about RSS or don’t know what RSS is -
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.
I use it for browsing the new really quickly - it is how I can collect so many news pieces really really fast.
Thanks, Workerbee —
I’ve seen references to RSS, but it sounded so much like one of them new-info-age mega-bandwidth deals that I’ve never taken the time to look into it...
(Being bandwidth-challenged, and all)
Okay, Workerbee, I see you are my go to expert on this RSS thing.
So what will happen if I click on it?
Not so, RSS is not bandwidth intensive.
RSS amounts to nothing more that a bookmark that refreshes from time to time.
Under the bookmark, you will see the headlines ONLY - not the content :)
All the headlines from the sites you want are now a bookmark.
Sometimes, puters can be of use.
The RSS link will take you a screen that allows you to select how you want the feed delivered - choose “Bookmark”
after that, a little window will pop up and ask you where you want it I have a special bookmark I created labeled “news feeds” that I use for them.
Cool. I’m going to go try it.
I’m back, WB. Do I have to click on “Subscribe to this feed?”
I also use RSS for weather reports - especially during cane season.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.