News stories by Mel Frykberg, page 11

Under intense international pressure Israel declared last week that it would ease its crippling blockade on Gaza by permitting an additional but limited number of daily items, including food, into the coastal enclave.

Although Israel successfully controlled news of its deadly commando raid on the Free Gaza (FG) flotilla during the first crucial 48 hours of media coverage, emerging evidence from witnesses and survivors is challenging the Israeli government's version of events.

Attempts by media to interview some of the hundreds of Free Gaza (FG) members, who were being deported from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, Wednesday, were thwarted by Israeli authorities.

The Israeli government’s spin machine has launched into full-throttle as the country faces yet another diplomatic crisis and harsh international criticism for Monday’s raid on the Free Gaza (FG) humanitarian aid flotilla that left 19 people dead and about 50 injured.

On Sunday approximately 150 Palestinians from 20 families were driven out of their homes in Rafah, in the southern Gaza strip, by heavily armed police and soldiers who menaced them with clubs.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is helping Israel to construct an apartheid road infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian West Bank by financing nearly a quarter of the segregated road system primarily for the benefit of Israeli settlers.

Israeli settlers are beginning to feel the bite of an economic boycott campaign launched by the Palestinian Authority (PA) against goods produced in the illegal Israeli settlements dotting the occupied West Bank.

When internationally renowned linguist, philosopher and political analyst Noam Chomsky was barred from entering the West Bank, he joined a chorus of Jewish intellectuals savaged by the Israeli government for outspoken criticism.

Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu has been sentenced to another three months imprisonment for allegedly refusing to perform community service in West Jerusalem.

'There is immense anger as well as a feeling of vulnerability and fear when a place of sanctuary and holiness is subject to indiscriminate violence,' says Issa Hussein.