News stories by Mel Frykberg, page 9

A former captain in the Israeli Air Force, previously an ardent Zionist who lost many members of his family in the Holocaust, has been labelled a psychopath and denounced by many Israelis for the moral stand he has taken against the Israeli occupation.

Crossing through the metal-caged tunnel that leads from the Israeli side of the border into northern Gaza towards the Palestinian checkpoint, several groups of young Palestinian men and boys can be seen scavenging through piles of rubble.

A peaceful morning is interrupted by the sounds of an Israeli helicopter circling overhead -- often a sign of trouble on the ground. Later Sunday the news broke -- a Palestinian man was shot dead in the village of Issawiya by Israeli paramilitary border police as he tried to enter Israel in search of work.

Irish Nobel Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire was deported from Israel Tuesday after spending more than a week in detention at Tel Aviv Airport as she attempted to fight the deportation order.

Tension, the twisted carcasses of gutted vehicles, buses with smashed windows, smouldering dumpsters, streets riddled with rubber-coated steel bullets and empty cartridge cases, teargas, and air thickened with black soot from burning tyres marked the beginning of the fifth day Monday of continuous rioting in East Jerusalem.

Controversy is building up over a 91-year-old man, his 17-year-old grandson and a 20-year-old neighbour, all farmers, who were killed by Israeli shelling and gunfire as they tried to tend their land 700 metres from northern Gaza's border with Israel.

A thin Palestinian boy, no older than ten, darts between the piles of garbage and the congested lines of traffic which converge at the Qalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem.

Palestinians and Israelis are using the media as a new battleground in their war to win hearts and minds across the globe, even as the protracted conflict in the Mideast drags on with no apparent end in sight.

Cancer patient Ahmed Abu Fuad needs chemotherapy to survive. Muhammad Subeh needs an eye-transplant while paramedic Alaa Sarhan desperately needs surgery to remove shrapnel from his body. But these Gazans are unable to leave the area to seek the required medical treatment elsewhere, and it is not because of the Israeli siege.

Just off Omar Al-Mukhtar Street, Gaza City's main thoroughfare, in a narrow, sandy alley way is a little second-hand clothing shop. In the dimly lit store, with only intermittent electricity for some hours a day at best, sits a single battered and aging sewing machine.