Tutu: Gaza blockade illegal
| Tutu: Gaza blockade illegal |
 GAZA (Agencies) |
US academic deported and banned for criticising Israel
Norman Finkelstein, the controversial Jewish American academic and fierce critic of Israel, has been deported from the country and banned from the Jewish state for 10 years, it emerged yesterday.
Finkelstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor who has accused Israel of using the genocidal Nazi campaign against Jews to justify its actions against the Palestinians, was detained by the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, when he landed at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport on Friday.
Shin Bet interrogated him for around 24 hours about his contact with the Lebanese Islamic militia, Hizbullah, when he travelled to Lebanon earlier this year and expressed solidarity with the group which waged war against Israel in 2006. He was also accused of having contact with al-Qaida. But Finkelstein rejected the accusations, saying he had travelled to Israel to visit an old friend.
"I did my best to provide absolutely candid and comprehensive answers to all the questions put to me," he told an Israeli newspaper in an email exchange.
"I am confident that I have nothing to hide. Apart from my political views, and the supporting scholarship, there isn't much more to say for myself: alas, no suicide missions or secret rendezvous with terrorist organisations. I've always supported a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. I'm not an enemy of Israel."
Finkelstein is one of several scholars rejected by Israel in the increasingly bitter divide in academic circles, between those who support and those who criticise its treatment of Palestinians.
Last year, Israel's most contentious "new historian", Ilan Pappe, left his job as senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa after he endorsed the international academic boycott of Israeli institutions, provoking the university president to call for his resignation.
Finkelstein was also refused tenure last year at Chicago's DePaul University for attacking several staunch Israel supporters and academics such as Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said the deportation of Finkelstein was an assault on free speech.
"The decision to prevent someone from voicing their opinions by arresting and deporting them is typical of a totalitarian regime," said the association's lawyer, Oded Peler.
"A democratic state, where freedom of expression is the highest principle, does not shut out criticism or ideas just because they are uncomfortable for its authorities to hear. It confronts those ideas in public debate."
Finkelstein said he was held in a cell and encountered "several unpleasant moments with the guards" and that eventually he borrowed the mobile phone of another detainee and called a friend who in turn called a lawyer.
Although entitled to appeal against the entry ban, Finkelstein said he would not contest it.
VIDEO: Jerusalem camera catches brutal attack by Jewish teens on Arab youths
Dozens of Jewish teens were caught on camera outside a Jerusalem mall carrying out a brutal attack on two Arab youths on Holocaust Remembrance Day earlier this month.
Some two weeks ago, indictments were filed against 11 youths, eight of them minors, suspected of having perpetrated the attack in the Pisgat Ze'ev neighborhood. According to the indictment, the boys responded to a message on the ICQ instant messaging internet program calling for "Jewish blood" to "put an end to Arabs running around the Pisga." According to the indictment, the Jewish teens gathered outside the local shopping center armed with knives, sticks and bats and attacked two Arab teens, aged 16 and 18, from the nearby Shuafat refugee camp.
One of the Arab youths, Ahmed Abu Camal, was stabbed in the back, but managed to escape. His friend was described by one of the suspects during questioning as a "trampoline and a punching bag." The suspect recounted how "everyone jumped, kicked and stepped on him."
In the video footage, a group of teens can be seen waiting outside the shopping mall. At around 11 P.M. the two victims can be seen walking past the group. After a short dialogue, the video shows one of the victims being hurled into the street, pushed toward the railing and then viciously attacked.
In his testimony, the victim told police officers that "a group of children, numbering more than 80, pounced on us and they had bats and knives in their hands and they attacked us. All I remember now is that I passed out and woke up in the hospital."
The video shows Abu Camal fleeing the scene chased by a number of Jewish teens. In a recent conversation, he said "when I passed by the entrance there was a large crowd of young men who just stood there while I walked between them on the shoulder of the street. I heard them talking among themselves and they said something like 'are those them? Are they them?' and then someone stuck a knife in my back and knocked me down and continued to beat me. One guy bit my ear. I don't know how I managed to get up, but I got up and ran away."
The video footage shows the Jewish teens fleeing the area after a car passes by. The unconscious Arab teen can be seen left on the side of the road until he is taken away by what appears to be shopping mall security staff.
On Sunday, the Supreme Court decided to release all the suspects that remained in custody to house arrest. Attorney Yehuda Shushan, who represented three of the suspects, said "there is no doubt that this incident must be dealt with from an educational point of view, but at the same time each suspect should be judged according to his individual level of involvement. It is doubtful that those who were present but did nothing should be charged, otherwise 200 indictments should be filed against each child that was at the scene."
MK Eldad: Anyone ceding Israeli territory should be sentenced to death
MK Arieh Eldad (National Union-National Religious Party) said Monday that "anyone who gives away Israeli territory, under Israel's law, deserves the death penalty."
Eldad spoke after Israel and Syria announced last week that Jerusalem and Damascus had renewed indirect peace talks via Turkey, which sparked speculations that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised Syria an Israeli pullout from the Golan Heights in the run-up to the announcement.
Eldad, speaking at the first meeting of the Golan Lobby at the Knesset Monday, quoted the chapter of the penal code applying to treason, saying "he who purposefully causes any territory to cease being under Israel's sovereignty or to be under the sovereignty of a foreign country, or any act that results in this, must be sentenced to death or life imprisonment."
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Fellow National Union-National Religious Party member MK Effie Eitam responded to Eldad's comments, saying that the remark could be interpreted as incitement to act against the prime minister. Eldad explained that he intended only to act within the confines of the justice system.
Acting coalition leader MK Yoel Hasson said in response that Eldad is a provocateur of the basest variety, and that he had turned into an unacceptable person.
Meretz MK Ran Cohen submitted an official incitement complaint against Eldad to Attorney General Menachem Mzuz. According to Cohen, Eldad's remarks were reminiscent of the days leading up to the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, which must never again be heard.
The Prime Minister's Bureau issued an official response, saying "the man and the remark are not worthy of a response."
Big Brother Is Watching You...
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The Holocaust Industry
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FBI files indict Bush, Cheney and Co. as war criminals
The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department Inspector General’s report released this week was that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a “War Crimes” file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the Guantánamo Bay US prison camp, before being ordered by the administration to stop writing their reports.
The World Socialist Web Site, together with human rights groups and other opponents of US militarism and repression, has long insisted that the actions of the Bush administration—the launching of wars of aggression, assassinations, the abduction and detention of civilians without trial and, most repugnant of all, torture—constitute war crimes under any legitimate interpretation of longstanding international statutes and treaties.
To have this assessment confirmed, however, by the IG of the Justice Department, the only senior official there not answerable directly to the White House, and by agents of the FBI, an agency not known for its sensitivity to questions of democratic rights, is an indication of the rampant character of these crimes as well as the crisis they have engendered within the US government and America’s ruling elite as a whole.
The report makes it absolutely clear that torture was ordered and planned in detail at the highest levels of the government—including the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Justice Department. Attempts to stop it on legal or pragmatic grounds by individuals within the government were systematically suppressed, and evidence of this criminal activity covered up.
There was no immediate reaction from the White House on these new revelations. Responses from other agencies directly implicated in the crimes at Guantánamo were indicative of the general atmosphere of impunity in which the torture detailed in the IG’s report continues to this day.
“There’s nothing new here,” said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. A State Department spokesman, meanwhile, described the charges contained in the report as “pretty vague.”
Pretty vague? One can’t help but wonder what the spokesman would consider explicit. The report contains page after page of testimony by FBI agents on the sadistic and sickening practices carried out at Guantánamo.
In one section, the report states: “[An FBI Agent] recalled that, at some point during the interrogation, the military officer ‘put water down’ a seated detainee’s throat. He said he guessed that the purpose of the water was to give the detainee the sensation that he was drowning, so that he would provide the information that the interrogator wanted. [The agent] stated that the detainee was gagging and spitting out water. He said that the detainee appeared to be uncomfortable, and assumed that he had trouble breathing.”
Consider the account of the interrogation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national who was arrested by his own government, turned over to US forces and brought to Guantánamo in 2002:
“He was left alone in a cold room known as ‘the freezer,’ where guards would prevent him from sleeping by putting ice or cold water on him...
“He was subjected to sleep deprivation for a period of 70 days by means of prolonged interrogations, strobe lights, threatening music, forced intake of water, and forced standing.
“He was deprived of clothing by a female interrogator;
“Two female interrogators touched him sexually and made sexual statements to him;
“Prior to and during the boat ride incident, he was severely beaten.”
In addition, the document says, he was “led to believe he was going to be executed, and urinated on himself,” and was told that his mother and family would be detained and harmed.
Hundreds of FBI agents witnessed torture
Similar episodes were described, according to the IG report, by literally hundreds of FBI agents, who witnessed CIA, military and private contractor interrogators carry out illegal acts of torture and abuse against detainees.
In addition, the report cites: several agents who reported instances of beatings, 30 agents who reported witnessing prolonged shackling of detainees in stress positions, 70 agents who reported detainees being subjected to sleep deprivation, 29 agents who had information on the use of extreme temperatures in order to “break the detainees’ resolve to resist cooperating” and 50 agents reporting the use of extended isolation to “wear down a detainee’s resistance.”
In addition, four agents reported the kicking and beating to death of two detainees in Afghanistan who had been subjected to prolonged shackling in a standing position.
The episodes of torture detailed in this report are the tip of the iceberg.
They do not include the treatment of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born in Germany, who was arrested during a trip to Pakistan in the fall of 2001 and was handed over to US officials for a $3,000 bounty. First taken to the US base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, he was then transferred to Guantánamo. While by 2002 the US authorities concluded that Kurnaz had nothing to do with terrorism, he was imprisoned until the middle of 2006 and released only because of pressure from the German government.
Barred from entry to the US, he testified via video link to a sparsely attended hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week.
“I did nothing wrong and I was treated like a monster,” he said. He told how he was subjected to electric shocks, being suspended by his wrists for hours and subjected to the ‘water treatment,’ in which his head was stuck into a bucket of water and he was punched in the stomach, forcing him to inhale the liquid. (The Justice Department Inspector General’s report, it bears noting, affirmed that this last form of torture did not constitute “waterboarding,” but did represent “an effort to intimidate the detainees and increase their feelings of helplessness.”)
“I know others have died from this kind of treatment,” said Kurnaz. “I suffered from sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, religious and sexual humiliations. I was beaten multiple times.”
“There was no law in Guantánamo,” Kurnaz concluded. “I didn’t think this could happen in the 21st century.... I could never have imagined that this place was created by the United States.”
The inmates held at Guantánamo represent barely 1 percent of those detained at US prison camps and secret jails run by the military and the CIA in Iraq, Afghanistan and other points around the world. An estimated 27,000 people are being held without charges, much less trials, many of them simply having disappeared into Washington’s global gulag. Some are held on prison ships, others in secret dungeons run jointly by the CIA and regimes to which it “outsources” detainees, like Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, where other, cruder forms of torture—being buried alive, given electric shocks or slashed with scalpels—are employed.
The report also reconfirms that the revolting scenes captured in the photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that came to light four years ago—naked and hooded men being subjected to torture and sexual humiliation by US guards—were no aberration. The methods described in the report—forced nudity, the use of attack dogs in interrogations, chaining detainees in “stress” positions, leading them around on dog leashes, draping them in women’s underwear—were identical to those officially blamed on a “few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib.
Sadistic torture “orchestrated” from the White House
The uniformity of abuse at these widely separated facilities is evidence that the psychopathic and criminal sadism inflicted upon those detained by US forces was planned and orchestrated from the top.
Indeed, as ABC News revealed last month, top administration officials on the so-called Principals’ Committee—Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft and National Security Council Adviser Condoleezza Rice—conducted detailed discussions on “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which, according to ABC, “were almost choreographed—down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.”
Bush subsequently told ABC that he was “aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”
The report establishes that FBI and Justice Department officials advised the White House National Security Council of their concern that the practices witnessed by the agents were “gravely damaging ... the rule of law” at Guantánamo.
In the end, however, they were told to back off, and they complied, thereby becoming accomplices in this criminality and its cover-up.
The revelations in the FBI report have provoked no significant protests or demands for action from the Democrats in Congress, or for that matter from the party’s presidential contenders, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, neither of whom have made torture an issue in their campaigns.
The New York Times Tuesday carried a lead editorial titled, “What the FBI agents saw,” which laid out the details of the report and stated that it “shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners.”
The paper’s conclusion: “The Democrats must press for full disclosure” through hearings to uncover “the extent of President Bush’s disregard for the law and the Geneva Conventions.” This, they tell their readers, “is the only way to get this country back to being a defender, not a violator, of human rights.”
Such is the impotence of erstwhile American establishment liberalism. The extent of the Bush administration’s outright criminality has been thoroughly exposed over the course of several years.
The wholesale and deliberate violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture are, under international law, war crimes—just as the FBI recognized they were. What is demanded is not another toothless congressional hearing, but rather the constitution of a war crimes tribunal. Those responsible must be held accountable.
Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft should be placed on trial. Those like former White House counsel and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington and Justice Department deputy assistant secretary John Yoo, who crafted the pseudo-legal arguments legitimizing torture, should be prosecuted as well, together with those military and intelligence officials who directed the criminal practices at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other CIA and military camps and prisons.
The Democratic leadership has no desire or intention to fight for such a reckoning. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders have repeatedly insisted that impeachment of the president and vice president is “off the table.” They have no interest in pursuing the administration on the issue of torture because they themselves are complicit, with Pelosi and other senior congressional Democrats having been briefed extensively on the criminal methods employed at Guantánamo, which they approved and concealed from the American people.
On a more fundamental level, the Democrats have been complicit in a policy of global militarism and aggression—carried out under the mantle of a “global war on terrorism”—which is directed at using armed force to further the interests of America’s ruling oligarchy. It is this criminal strategy—resulting in the loss of over 1 million Iraqi lives—that has given rise to the crime of torture itself.
Nonetheless, the deepening crisis of American capitalism is creating the conditions for profound shocks and changes in political and social relations that may well result in Bush, Cheney and Co. standing in the dock as war criminals.
Such a trial is vitally necessary from the standpoint of halting these ongoing crimes, preventing the use of similar methods against political opposition within the US itself and politically educating the American people.
Palestinians reject Israeli offer to hand over 91.5% of W. Bank
Palestinian officials close to peace talks said Sunday that Israel has offered a West Bank withdrawal map that leaves about 8.5 percent of the territory in Israeli hands, less than a previous plan but still more than the Palestinians are ready to accept.
Also Sunday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was quoted as telling backers that the negotiations have achieved no progress since they were restarted last November with a pledge to U.S. President George W. Bush to try for a full peace treaty by the end of the year.
The Palestinian officials said Israel presented its new map three days ago in a negotiating session. The last map Israel offered had 12 percent of the West Bank remaining in Israel. Israel wants to keep West Bank land with its main settlement blocs, offering land inside Israel in exchange. The land would be between Hebron in the southern West Bank and Gaza - at least part of a route through Israel to link the two territories.
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The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the negotiations are being conducted behind closed doors, said Palestinians were ready to trade only 1.8 percent of the West Bank for Israeli land.
Israeli officials refused to comment.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that progress has been made in several areas, but he refused to give details out of concern for harming the negotiations.
The differences in evaluations have a wide range of possible explanations.
Abbas needs to show quick concrete results from the talks to persuade his skeptical people that the negotiations are worthwhile - but he complained that while the talks drag on, Israel continues construction in its West Bank settlements and maintains its network of security roadblocks and checkpoints that have choked off economic and social life there.
On the Israeli side, Olmert needs success to shore up his sagging domestic popularity, stung by his inconclusive war in Lebanon in 2006 and harmed further by a string of corruption cases. He was interrogated in the latest one on Friday. Olmert insists that at least a declaration of principles is attainable by the target date.
One of the Palestinian officials said the 8.5 percent figure of West Bank land Israel would retain with its new map does not include east Jerusalem, where Israel has built a string of Jewish neighborhoods it intends to keep. Israel wants to put off dealing with Jerusalem, possibly the touchiest issue on the table, until the end of the process. Israel's previous proposal to keep 12 percent did not include east Jerusalem, either.
Abbas indicated skepticism about the prospects of the renewed talks.
Nothing has been achieved in the negotiations with Israel yet, Abbas told a meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, according to a report Sunday in the Fatah-associated al-Ayyam daily and confirmed by meeting participants.
"Domestic issues in both Israel and the U.S. are diverting attention from peacemaking," Abbas told Fatah leaders.
"I fear the (corruption) probe against Olmert and the American preoccupation with the (presidential) elections will negatively affect the negotiations," Abbas said, according to a member of the council, Salah Taameri
Jimmy Carter says Israel had 150 nuclear weapons
Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.
His remark, made at the Hay-on-Wye festival which promotes current affairs books and literature, is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line. Carter, who has immersed himself since his presidency in Israeli-Palestinian relations, was highly critical of Israeli settlers on the West Bank, and of Israel's refusal to talk to elected officials of the Islamic party Hamas, although he said that Israel's security was his prime concern.
Carter, whose presidency was dominated by the 444-day siege in which Iran held 52 American diplomats hostage, said "my advice to the US would be to start talking to Iran now" to persuade it to drop its nuclear work. But he cited Israel's nuclear arsenal - and those of the US, Russia, China, Britain and France - in arguing that Iran would find it almost impossible to develop, in secret, many weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
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Israeli army ‘exonerated’ in Gaza family deaths
B'Tselem's probe raised doubt on Israeli army's investigation
Israeli army ‘exonerated' in Gaza family deaths
Internal probe claims Palestinian woman, her four children killed by ammunition blast carried by militants.
JERUSALEM - A military inquiry into the deaths of a Gaza woman and her four children claimed on Friday they were killed by the explosion of ammunition carried by militants targeted by an Israeli missile.
"The family was hit during the explosion of the second missile that ignited secondary explosions or from objects that flew towards them because of the force of the blast," the army said in a statement on the conclusions of the full investigation.
The military also released aerial footage of Monday's incident in the town of Beit Hanun in the north of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, which showed several large explosions which the army said were secondary detonations.
According to the statement, an Israeli aircraft fired a first missile at four militants it identified as "carrying backpacks loaded with ammunition."
One gunman was hit in the strike, which was followed by a strong secondary explosion.
"Immediately after the explosion a second gunman was targeted and hit as well, causing an even bigger explosion.
"Both explosions were significantly stronger than those caused by the IDF attacks against them," the Israel Defence Forces statement said.
On Wednesday the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said its own investigation cast doubt on the army's initial account of the killing of Meissar Abu Maateq and four of her children, aged one to five.
"The material (B'Tselem) has collected, including an analysis of the area, photographs of bodies, and eyewitness accounts, raise doubt about the IDF spokesperson's contention that a secondary explosion is what killed the family," the group said.
Palestinian witnesses also disputed the Israeli account, insisting that the house was more than a kilometre from the scene of the clashes and that the explosion was caused by an Israeli missile fired by an aerial drone.
No armed men were killed or wounded in the explosion at the house, and an AFP correspondent who arrived at the scene shortly after the strike saw shrapnel from an Israeli missile amid the wreckage inside.
At least 444 people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed since the restart of formal peace talks under US auspices at an international conference in November.
Israel minister rejects Gaza truce as Hamas chief killed
JERUSALEM (AFP) - A senior Israeli minister rejected on Thursday a proposed truce in the Gaza Strip, as the air force killed a Hamas commander suspected of involvement in the 2006 capture of an Israeli soldier.
Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit insisted that Israel could not accept an Egyptian-brokered proposal on Gaza, claiming it would only give the Islamist movement Hamas the opportunity to boost its military capabilities.
"No deal whatsoever should be reached with Hamas because this terrorist movement would exploit any truce to gain strength, perfect its weapons and prepare for the next confrontation," the security cabinet member told public radio.
Sheetrit's comments came as the air force "targeted and identified hitting Nafiz Mansur, a Hamas terror operative who was involved in terror attacks against Israel," the military said.
The military said Mansur had been involved in the capture of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit, seized by Palestinian militants in a cross-border raid from Gaza claimed by Hamas and two other militant groups.
It said Mansur was also responsible for the killing of two Israeli soldiers in a July 2006 attack, and took part in setting up a suicide assault on a border post on April 19.
Hamas confirmed Mansur's death and said it would "respond to this crime at the appropriate time and place."
Mansur, 40, was killed near his home in Rafah, according to Muawiyah Hassanein, who heads the Gaza emergency services. Three more people, including a child, were wounded in the air strike, he said.
Following the strike, Gaza militants retaliated, firing at least eight rockets and three mortar rounds at southern Israel. The attacks caused some damage to property but no casualties, a military spokeswoman said.
Sheetrit, who is also a deputy prime minister, said Israel's goal should be to break up Hamas, which European Union and the United States join with Israel in blacklisting as a terror group.
"We must break Hamas, not hold negotiations with them, because their demands are unacceptable," he said. "The armed forces must attack those terrorists night and day to break their arms and their legs."
Public radio said several other ministers had also opposed a Gaza truce at Wednesday's security cabinet meeting.
In the face of the near-daily violence on its doorstep, Egypt has again stepped in as a mediator in the impoverished Palestinian territory.
It brought together Hamas, the Fatah party of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and nearly a dozen other factions, hammering out with them a proposal for a "comprehensive, simultaneous and reciprocal period of calm to be applied progressively, first in Gaza and then in the West Bank."
The pointman in the talks, intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, is expected to deliver the offer to Israel in the coming days.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev has already said that "to be sustainable and real, the calm must contain three vital elements -- total absence of fire from Gaza against Israel, complete cessation of terrorist attacks and the end of arms smuggling into the Gaza Strip."
Hamas has insisted that, as part of any truce, Israel must lift the blockade it imposed after the Islamists seized power in Gaza in June.
Israel allows only very limited humanitarian supplies to enter Gaza. It says the blockade is intended to put pressure on the Hamas authorities to stop militants firing rockets on its territory.
In another Israeli military operation in Gaza on Thursday, a Palestinian civilian in his sixties, Mohammed Abu Daqqa, was killed and three other people wounded, Palestinian medics said.
The deaths brought to 447 the number of people killed since Israel and the Palestinians relaunched peace negotiations at a US-hosted conference in November, according to an AFP tally.
'Israel must be decisive'
'Israel must be decisive'
Opposition Chairman Netanyahu tells local press in southern Israel ‘government's blindness' to blame for Israel's inability to curtail incessant Qassam barrages
Tova Dadon
"There will be no choice but to overthrow Hamas. They are essentially Iranian offshoots sitting within us. It's intolerable that Israel allows its cities to be fired upon; we must move from a war of attrition to a war of decisivness," said Opposition Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday in a meeting with local journalists in Netivot as he addressed Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza.
Netanyahu asserted that less than 500 Qassams were fired towards Israel prior to the disengagement in 2005, whereas since the pullout there have been over 4,000 rockets.
"This is a result of the government's blindness and erroneous political decisions, which led to the strengthening of the Hizbullah in the North," added Netanyah. Netanyahu also criticized Israel's conduct during the Second Lebanon War, saying that the forces were scattered and that therefore the outcome of the campaign was not as expected. "Both the Arab world and the West expected focus - and for us to prevail, but it has become apparent that Israel failed to defeat Hizbullah because our efforts were not focused."
Netanyahu also discussed the situation in southern Israel, saying that there was no room in so small a nation for any part to be disregarded as simply 'the periphery.'
"We will make sure this happens and it will prove beneficiary to the Negev and its underprivileged residents in particular."
Netanyahu confirmed the Likud has decided to conserve its funds for a time of national elections rather than the upcoming municipal ones, saying he prefers one more Knesset member to one more councilmember in any given community.
Israel is suppressing a secret it must face
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