JERUSALEM - Detailed evidence has emerged of Israel's extensive use of US-made weaponry during its war in Gaza last month, including white phosphorus artillery shells, 500lb bombs and Hellfire missiles.
In a report released today, Amnesty International detailed the weapons used and called for an immediate arms embargo on Israel and all Palestinian armed groups. It called on the Obama administration to suspend military aid to Israel.
GAZA - A top U.S. senator and two other lawmakers made a rare visit to the Gaza Strip on Thursday but insisted a boycott of its Hamas Islamist rulers remained intact.
It was the highest-profile visit by U.S. legislators to the Gaza Strip since before the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising against Israel in 2000, U.S. officials said.
JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Saturday Israel would not agree to any truce with the Islamist Hamas movement without the release of an Israeli soldier seized by Palestinian militants in 2006.
"The position of the prime minister is that Israel won't reach any arrangement on a truce before the release of Gilad Shalit," Olmert's office said in a statement.
No doubt some of President Obama's initial foreign policy moves are
an undeniable advance over his predecessor's way of dealing with the
world. What's very welcome is the lifting of the "Global Gag Rule," a
U.S. law that forbade family planning groups receiving U.S. funding
from even mentioning abortion. And after eight years of
head-in-the-oil-well denial, the United States is all set to join
forces with the rest of the planet in combating global warming.
The Gaza War of
2009 is a final and eloquent testimony to the complete failure of the
neoconservative movement in United States foreign policy. For over a
decade, the leading figures in this school of thought saw the violent
overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the institution of a parliamentary
regime in Iraq as the magic solution to all the problems in the Middle
East.
BEIRUT - Former US President Jimmy Carter met with President Michel Sleiman Wednesday, before being flown to Naqoura in South Lebanon for a meeting with United Nations peacekeepers. The presidential visit and trip to the South came as Hizbullah reportedly declined an invitation to meet with the former head of state.
WASHINGTON - As the United States waded ever deeper into the Indochinese quagmire in the early 1960s, the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara called for "two, three, many Vietnams" to bog down the superpower in unwinnable Third World conflicts that would drain its treasury and overstretch its military.
With one deadly strike, the Bush administration has offered a fitting epitaph to its "might makes right" policy towards Syria — and the rest of the Middle East.
On October 26, nine days before the election, American Special Operations forces, allegedly pursuing a "top operative" of Al Qaeda in Iraq, carried out a helicopter attack on Sukkariyah, a small Syrian village six miles from the Iraqi border. U.S. officials claim the "successful operation" raid killed Abu Ghadiya, an Iraqi suspected of heading an insurgent cell.
Syria has protested angrily to both the US and Iraq after what it said was a US helicopter raid inside its territory that killed eight civilians.
Syria summoned US and Iraqi envoys to condemn the "aggressive act". Iraq said the area targeted was used by militants to launch cross-border attacks in Iraq.
See the video.
The US has neither confirmed nor denied the incident. It has previously accused Syria of allowing militants into Iraq.
