Hamas agrees truce, announcement within 48 hrs »
Posted By tehranchik 10 months, 2 weeks ago in Political NewsHamas has accepted an Egyptian-brokered 18-month truce with Israel in the Gaza Strip which Egypt will announce in 48 hours, state news agency MENA quoted a senior Hamas official as saying on Thursday.
Mussa Abu Marzuk, the Islamist movement's deputy leader, said after meeting with Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman that Hamas had accepted the truce in return for the lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
"We have agreed to the truce with the Israeli side for one year and a half (in return) for the opening of all six passages between the Gaza Strip and Israel," MENA quoted him as saying.
Egypt will announce the agreement after contacting Israel and Palestinian factions, he said.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev told AFP in Jerusalem that he did not wish to comment.
Abu Marzuk, who headed a senior Hamas delegation in Cairo, said difficulties that had prevented an agreement have been resolved, especially the issue of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Israel had insisted that Hamas release Shalit, captured by Palestinian militants more than two years ago, as a condition for ending its blockade of Gaza, which it imposed after Hamas violently seized the enclave in June 2007.
Marzuk said that Shalit has been removed from the Gaza truce deal and that he will be released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
Osama Hamdan, Hamas's representative in Lebanon, told AFP that that "we have surpassed the Shalit issue," adding that Hamas did not want to hold Shalit indefinitely but wanted to exchange him for Palestinian prisoners.
"There are ongoing efforts for the Shalit issue but they are separate from the truce," he said.
Hamas officials have said that Israel offered to open its crossings into Gaza to allow between 70 and 80 percent of goods into the coastal enclave, barring those it says could be used to make weapons.
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tehranchik
Well, I'm from and live in the Pacific Northwest. I did live in the middle east during the late 70's and early 80 ...
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Thinker2210 months, 2 weeks ago
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> Hamas had accepted the truce in return for the lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
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Does it mean that Israel is supposed to "lift the blockade of Gaza" IN ADDITION or rather INSTEAD OF cease fire? Further, will launching missiles or other terrorist activities by Palestinian militants be considered a 'violation' of the truce or (as it happened so many times in the past) ONLY Israeli response to such actions will?
> Osama Hamdan, Hamas's representative in Lebanon, told AFP that that "we have surpassed the Shalit issue," adding that Hamas did not want to hold Shalit indefinitely but wanted to exchange him for Palestinian prisoners.
This suggest that Israel is allowed to kidnap a Hamas official (possibly, Mr. Hamdan himself) and then exchange him for Gilad Shalit, correct?-
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hyperbola10 months, 2 weeks ago
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Hypocritical assertions again thinker. Here is an israeli jew from whom you can learn.
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Gilad Shalit: Grand Illusions of Israelis
Gilad Shalit saga is no doubt an exemplary case-study of Israeli identity. In spite of the fact that Gilad Shailt is a soldier who was directly involved in the Israeli military crime against a civilian population, the Israelis and Jewish lobbies around the world insist upon presenting him as an ‘innocent victim’. The leading slogan of the Shalit campaign reads ‘Gilad Shalit, Human being, JEW’. And I ask myself is he really just an ordinary a ‘human being’ as the slogan suggests or rather a chosen one as implied by the ‘Jew’ predicate? And if he is just a human being, why exactly did they add the ‘Jew’ in? What is there in the ‘Jew’ title that serves the Free Shalit campaign?
Apparently the usage of the predicates ‘Human being’ and ‘Jew’ in such a proximity is rather informative and meaningful. Within the post-holocaust Jewish and liberal discourses ‘human being’ stands for ‘innocence’ and ‘Jew’ stands for ‘victim’. Accordingly, the Shalit’ campaign slogan should be grasped as ‘FREE Gilad Shalit the innocent victim’.
...In their deluded mindset the Israelis are pushed into ‘no choice’ wars ‘against their will’ in spite of the fact that they are ‘innocent victims’. In fact, this delusion or rather cognitive dissonance stands at the very core of the Israeli unethical existence. The Israeli is submerged in a self-notion of blamelessness, it is somehow always the other who carries the guilt and the fault (i). This total discrepancy between Israeli self-perception i.e., ‘innocence’ and Israeli manifested practice i.e., barbarism beyond comparison, can be realized as a severe form of detachment on the verge of collective psychosis.
The case of Shalit embodies this discrepancy very well. Time after time we are asked by Israeli officials and Jewish lobbies to show our compassion to a combatant soldier that was serving as post guard in the biggest jail in history. An American right-winger, for instance, would probably have enough decency in him not to demand our compassionate empathy towards a USA marine that was injured while serving as a post guard in Guantànamo Bay. Similarly, not many would dare demand our compassionate empathy towards a German platoon who performed a role similar to Gilad Shalit’s in an East European concentration camp in the early 1940’s. Moreover, could anyone imagine the kind of Jewish outrage that would be evoked by an imaginary campaign by a right-wing, white supremacist slogan that reads “Free Wolfgang Heim, Human Being, Aryan”?
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Commodore110 months, 2 weeks ago
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Big deal. I'm sure this one will last the usual 5 minutes or until a another Palestinian psycho decides to fire another rocket. Whichever comes first. Hamas and the Palestinians are not capable of peace. Peace is a word probably not even in the Koran unless of course Islam has dominated the world. Israel should just drive Hamas out of the Gaza strip and let them roam the world for 2000 years or more. Perhaps they might learn something from this. Ha! What a joke.
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hyperbola10 months, 2 weeks ago
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Do you still believe that zionist propaganda?
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Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State
What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora is historically wrong?
What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very "children of Israel" described in the Old Testament?
And what if most modern Israelis aren't descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn't "return" to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?
What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora -- the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews' exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh's clutches -- is all wrong?
That's the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.
...As Israeli journalist Tom Segev summarized, in a review of the book in Ha'aretz:
There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened -- hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. ...
...Zand's second assertion. He argues that the story of the Jewish nation -- the transformation of the Jewish people from a group with a shared cultural identity and religious faith into a vanquished "people" -- was a relatively recent invention, hatched in the 19th century by Zionist scholars and advanced by the Israeli academic establishment. It was, argues Zand, an intellectual conspiracy of sorts. Segev says, "It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel." -
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Teech10 months, 2 weeks ago
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"Big deal. I'm sure this one will last the usual 5 minutes or until another Palestinian psycho decides to fire another rocket. Whichever comes first."
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Sad, but probably true. Hopefully, this truce will NOT be used for Hamas to rearm with more rockets. Hopefully, when some psycho does fire a rocket off into Israel, the response will be tempered. How much control does Hamas really have over the Palestinians who actually shoot those rockets?
I'm not optimistic.
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