Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Newsweek replaces Israel with Palestine

In an interactive map on religious freedom in the Islamic world, Newsweek illustrates "Palestinian territories" with a picture of pre-1967 Israel.

(h/t DMartyr at Snapped Shot)

Interestingly, their picture of Egypt is also pre-1967 - it includes Gaza.

The most charitable explanation I can come up with is abject ignorance.

Perhaps we could clear all of this up if they had a report of Jordan's religious freedom, so we could check out whether the West Bank is considered Jordanian territory, thus proving that Israel really doesn't exist. But I guess they consider that Judenrein kingdom to be as liberal as Norway.

UPDATE: Newsweek fixed it.

The Gaza money immediately goes to terrorists

Yesterday's "donor's conference" may have been a bonanza for Hamas, but it was also a win for the Palestinian Authority.

A percentage of the $4.4 billion raised - it is unclear exactly how much - is not going directly towards Gaza at all, but to help prop up the PA. $600m of the American pledge of $900m is going to the PA to help its own budget woes as well as for new West Bank projects.

Did the PA rush to announce the building of new hospitals, or schools? Perhaps a new R&D facility or industrial park?

Not quite. The first press release following the donors conference announced that the PLO will give an extra bonus of to known terrorists:

Nablus – Ma’an – An extra 800 shekels (190 US dollars) will be added to the stipend’s given to Palestinians in Israeli prisons this month, Head of Palestinian Prisoner Society in Nablus Ra’ed Amer confirmed on Tuesday.

Each prisoner receives 1000 shekels (238 US dollars) per month, plus an extra 300 shekels (71 US dollars) if they are married, and an extra 50 shekels (12 US dollars) for each child. The stipend is paid by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) each month.

There are currently 4,500 men and women registered as prisoners in Israeli prisons. The increase will be applied to February’s payment, set to go through banks this week.

Amer explained that the increase was made following the instructions of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Yes, every terrorist in an Israeli jail - people who drove suicide bombers to blow up women and children, people who ordered "martyrdom operations," people who attacked any Jew they could find - gets thousands of dollars annually from the cash-strapped PA, which of course gets its money from successful donors conferences like yesterday's. Every year they get about $16 million, assuming an average of $300 per prisoner per month. And in February alone, they get an additional $855,000.

This is money only for living terrorists. It does not count the stipend that the families of suicide bombers and other "martyrs" get in perpetuity, which together with the prisoner money was estimated in 2005 at being up to $100 million annually.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia pledged $1 billion. In the past, Gulf nations have been big on pledges for their Palestinian Arab brethren and very bad at actually paying up. They don't trust the PA to spend the money wisely. If they trust Hamas more, they cannot quite say that out loud. In this case, the Saudis want to spend the money however they see fit:

Prince Saud said “Saudi Arabia has set up a mechanism to submit its share via the Saudi Development Fund in cooperation with the Islamic Development Bank and Gaza-based international organizations, to send the required materials, and to choose the projects which will be implemented.”

On Sunday, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, which pledged a total of $1.6 billion on Sunday, decided to set up an office in Gaza to carry out reconstruction over five years, by deciding on and implementing projects.

“In this context, we hope that the GCC-launched Gaza reconstruction program would contribute to coordination and follow-up of execution by its funded projects,” Prince Saud said.

Will this money go directly towards terror groups? Well, one hint comes from the one guarantee that the Saudis seek before giving the money:

The foreign minister called upon the international community to guarantee the reconstruction effort by making Israel “bear the legal and financial consequences of any aggression, and not to view the situation with double standards.”

In other words, if Hamas shoots a few thousand more rockets at Israel, Saudi Arabia is demanding that Israel cannot defend itself - period. Hamas, however, has no limitations on its own behavior - they get the money for free.

And what do the residents of Sderot get from the international community for damage to their town and millions of cumulative sleepless nights? So far, one very generous donation of - Legos.

Puzzled in Gaza (Yvonne Green, JPost)

Amazing:

I'm a poet, an English Jew and a frequent visitor to Israel. Deeply disturbed by the reports of wanton slaughter and destruction during Operation Cast Lead, I felt I had to see for myself. I flew to Tel Aviv and on Wednesday, January 28, using my press card to cross the Erez checkpoint, I walked across the border into Gaza where I was met by my guide, a Palestinian journalist. He asked if I wanted to meet with Hamas officials. I explained that I'd come to bear witness to the damage and civilian suffering, not to talk politics.
What I saw was that there had been precision attacks made on all of Hamas' infrastructure. Does UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon criticize the surgical destruction of the explosives cache in the Imad Akhel Mosque, of the National Forces compound, of the Shi Jaya police station, of the Ministry of Prisoners? The Gazans I met weren't mourning the police state. Neither were they radicalized. As Hamas blackshirts menaced the street corners, I witnessed how passersby ignored them.
THERE WERE empty beds at Shifa Hospital and a threatening atmosphere. Hamas is reduced to wielding its unchallengeable authority from extensive air raid shelters which, together with the hospital, were built by Israel 30 years ago. Terrorized Gazans used doublespeak when they told me most of the alleged 5,500 wounded were being treated in Egypt and Jordan. They want it known that the figure is a lie, and showed me that the wounded weren't in Gaza. No evidence exists of their presence in foreign hospitals, or of how they might have gotten there.
From the mansions of the Abu Ayida family at Jebala Rayes to Tallel Howa (Gaza City's densest residential area), Gazans contradicted allegations that Israel had murderously attacked civilians. They told me again and again that both civilians and Hamas fighters had evacuated safely from areas of Hamas activity in response to Israeli telephone calls, leaflets and megaphone warnings.
Seeing Al-Fakhora made it impossible to understand how UN and press reports could ever have alleged that the UNWRA school had been hit by Israeli shells....
...
THE GAZA I saw was societally intact. There were no homeless, walking wounded, hungry or underdressed people. The streets were busy, shops were hung with embroidered dresses and gigantic cooking pots, the markets were full of fresh meat and beautiful produce - the red radishes were bigger than grapefruits. Mothers accompanied by a 13-year-old boy told me they were bored of leaving home to sit on rubble all day to tell the press how they'd survived. Women graduates I met in Shijaya spoke of education as power as old men watched over them.
No one praised their government as they showed me the sites of tunnels where fighters had melted away. No one declared Hamas victorious for creating a forced civilian front line as they showed me the remains of booby trapped homes and schools.
From what I saw and was told in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead pinpointed a totalitarian regime's power bases and largely neutralized Hamas's plans to make Israel its tool for the sacrifice of civilian life.
Corroboration of my account may be found in tardy and piecemeal retractions of claims concerning the UNWRA school at Al-Fakhora; an isolated acknowledgment that Gaza is substantially intact by The New York Times; Internet media watch corrections; and the unresolved discrepancy between the alleged wounded and their unreported whereabouts.

And the nations of the world was so taken in by the staged testimonies and photos of Gaza that they have just pledged many more billions of dollars to help Hamas build their next generations of weapons and kidnapping tunnels. It is indirect aid to terrorists, but any way you look at it, Hamas is the winner.

A brief demolition of Roger Cohen

by Michael Rubin in NRO:

I came across this column by the New York Times's Roger Cohen entitled "What Iran's Jews Say" and his defense of it, here. What to say? I'm familiar with the synagogue and attended it when I lived in Isfahan. I chatted with some of the university-aged students who had taken shelter in an attached guesthouse because, as Jews, they were beat up in the university dormitories. Men and women both referred to the Jews' representative in the Parliament as a flunky for the regime, and would not discuss problems or issues when he was around. Several would say one thing in the synagogue, but when we went to parks on took walks through the city, they would bend over backwards to make clear that they cannot talk freely in the synagogue since the walls have ears. The same sentiment was expressed at synagogues in Tehran and Shiraz. Cohen, however, talks to him as the authority and takes his word that he is not a quisling. True, Jews are better of in Iran than in many neighboring countries, but there is a reason why their number has dropped by 80% over the last three decades. Cohen simply appears on a propaganda tour; parachuting in, an eager receptacle for his regime minders. It should not surprise that his column now graces the pages of the regime's mouth piece, The Tehran Times.

As others have noted, this is a lot like Walter Duranty, Herbert Matthews and Mike Wallace credulously believing the words of dictators and their quislings.

Someone noticed a double standard

From Comment Is Free, Elizabeth Jay:

You could be forgiven for thinking that Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party came in first, rather than third, and that it garnered 90% of the Israeli public's vote, rather than 12%. You could also be forgiven for thinking that the prospect of a Likud-led coalition ought to be as feared as the prospect of Armageddon. After all, Israel's Likud party, combined with Yisrael Beiteinu, is surely a recipe for the most extreme political force ever to emerge in that liberal haven that is the Middle East.
In any case, the outcome got a unanimous thumbs-down, with the Guardian even claiming that it threatened to ruin Obama's entire foreign policy in the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This caused me to cast my mind back to another election altogether – the Palestinian parliamentary election in January 2006. Hamas won a decisive victory over Fatah in Gaza, leaving the international community to ponder how it was going to sit around the table with a party whose signature policy is indiscriminate suicide bombing in public places.
How did the media respond back then? Did editorials predict the end of all things good and bemoan the state of Palestinian politics? Not really. The Guardian, while somewhat apprehensive, said that the Hamas victory "may bring new opportunities to the immense task of building peace between two peoples who have been fighting for far too long in the same small country". The Independent was adamant that "The democratic voice of the Palestinian people has been heard. And now we must deal with the new reality." The Daily Telegraph's editorial was titled, "The west and Hamas must talk to each other" and opined, "there is much to be said for engaging with Hamas." Only the Times exhibited extreme caution, claiming that the outcome was, "a huge blow to the peace process".
So, when radicals come third in Israel, it puts everything in jeopardy and Israeli society 'has to take a hard look at itself" (Jonathan Freedland). But when extremists win by a landslide in Gaza, then there are still signs of hope; besides, the Palestinian people have spoken loud and clear and who are we in the west to question them?
I also noticed that journalists covering the Israeli election have seemed very concerned about Lieberman and his party being "fascist" and "racist". But this is not terminology I recall them applying three years ago to Hamas, which, unquestionably, has its fair share of fascists and racists. A case of such a journalist in point is Ali Abunimah: in his response to the Israeli election, he lambasted the "proto-fascist Yisrael Beiteinu" and its "racist" leader. And yet, if you scour his article from three years ago about Hamas' electoral victory, you won't find a single word critical of the group, let alone accusations of fascism or racism. The mainstream media followed a similar pattern, labelling Hamas merely as "hard line" (The Independent) and even "increasingly pragmatic" (Financial Times, January 27) in 2006.

This is excellent, but I also want to note that even this writer, attuned to how language is used differently when referring to Israelis and Arabs, suffers from the same problem herself.

She considers someone who wants all Israeli citizens, Jew and Arab, to take a "loyalty oath," and who has publicly advocated a Palestinian Arab state that includes part of what is within Green Line Israel, to be "radical."

(h/t Just Journalism mailing list)

The back door to "Palestinian unity"

Even if the Hamas/PA negotiations are successful, and even if Hamas agrees in some symbolic way to avoid explicit support for terror attacks, and even if they manage to convince the EU and the UN that the combined entity is willing to adhere to existing PA commitments...

...there is still an easy way for terrorists to continue to attack Israel with impunity.

Today, Islamic Jihad announced that they will not take part in any potential "national unity" government. Similarly we have supposedly new organizations like Palestinian Hizbollah Brigades whose entire stated purpose is to continue terror when the more mainstream groups have public truces.

We have seen in the past that members freely go between the terror groups and that attacks are often jointly executed. Similarly, we have seen Palestinian Arab leaders pretend to be helpless when these "rogue" groups continue their attacks, as they aim to gain Western sympathy and aid while they can clandestinely support the all-important "resistance." Hamas might have had little patience for the Al Aqsa Brigades after their Gaza coup, but they are quite happy to allow Islamic Jihad to control many dunams of land in the densely-populated Strip purely for terror training.

It is an old playbook, and it is one we can expect to see again and again as long as gullible Westerners continue to believe their own wishful thinking more than the ugly facts.

Would you call this...disproportionate?

Representatives of dozens of countries are meeting in Egypt to donate billions of dollars to rebuild Gaza.

At exactly the same time, none of them seem to have a problem with the fact that rockets continue to be shot from Gaza every day, and it is only a matter of time before these billions of dollars get destroyed in a new Israeli operation.

One would think that perhaps they would notice that billions of dollars would be better spent on disarming Hamas, or relocating Gazans to other Arab countries, or pressuring Egypt to annex Gaza and paying them to take care of Hamas, or any other solution that would:

a) Be permanent
b) Actually help people for longer than a few months

Yet somehow they are fixated on the idea that Hamas' existence as an entity singlemindedly dedicated to Israel's destruction is only a minor problem that can be papered over with cash.

Stealth Conflicts has a neat graphic representing the relative death tolls of recent conflicts in the world. I modified it to show three conflicts at once: (h/t Backspin)

Yet if a similar graphic would be shown on how much money the world has spent on these three conflicts, you could probably just swap the Israel-Palestine and DRC labels and it would still be pretty accurate.

In the case of Palestinian Arabs, history shows that throwing money at the issue is the best way to perpetuate it. Right now in Gaza all the parties are jockeying for position to control the huge influx that is forthcoming from well-meaning and ultimately stupid Westerners.

One thing is certain: all that money will not help a single Gazan for more than a short period of time, but it will help the Gaza terror groups hold onto their power.

Evil Zionist Settler Pigs - part 5

Ma'an breathlessly reports:

Dozens of pigs belonging to Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian young man from the village of An-Nasarieyah, north of the West Bank city of Nablus, on Sunday.

Palestinian medical sources said that Ayman Ibrahim Hamdan, 25, was transferred to Rafidia Hospital in the city after being bitten by one of the pigs.

Hamadan told Ma’an that dozens of pigs unleashed by the Israeli settlers of the illegal settlement of Al-Hamra adjacent to the village had attacked him while he was in his farm in the village.

Once again, the diabolical and fanatically Jewish settlers have been shown to raise and domesticate wild pigs for one reason and one reason only - to attack Palestinian Arabs. Apparently, their hatred for Arabs is so all-consuming that they will spend years breeding animals that have no value whatsoever in a Jewish state, just to have them cause slight damage to Arab crops every few months.

Now, that's dedication!

We have previously seen these highly intelligent and trained pigs selectively attack Arab tomatoes, farmers, and garbagemen. We have also seen that the Jews managed to herd the pigs onto the Arab side of the West Bank fence.

Stop Lindsay Lohan's Conversion!

No!!!!

Lindsay Lohan is converting to Judaism in a bid to prove her devotion to Jewish girlfriend Samantha Ronson.
Although raised a Catholic, the 22-year-old star announced she was planning to change her faith on her Facebook page.
After jetting into London last week, Lindsay joined girlfriend Samantha at the Bar Mitzvah of the DJ's half-brother Joshua Ronson at the Westminster Synagogue on Saturday.
Showing her seriousness about converting, Lindsay had also visited the synagogue the day before with Samantha and her designer sister Charlotte.
Entering the synagogue, a photographer asked Lindsay if she was switching religions, to which she replied: 'I'm trying.'
Updating her Facebook status this week, Lindsay wrote 'I'm converting'.

No. G-d Almighty, no. On behalf of all right-thinking Jews everywhere, we must do everything necessary to stop this spoiled, bubbleheaded, moronic bimbo from becoming anything like what a Martian could accidentally and fleetingly think was close to something vaguely similar to a religion barely resembling Judaism.

In the name of all that is holy, this must be stopped.

We don't want her. We don't want to see any newspaper articles that mention "Lohan" and "Jewish" in the same paragraph. Hell, we don't want those terms mentioned in the same encyclopedia. Jews don't need to see the inevitable 2010 article saying "The hard-partying 'Freaky Friday' star who recently converted to Judaism was arrested for reckless driving, disorderly conduct and cocaine possession."

It is time to act.

I am hereby announcing the formation of the Please Stay a Shiksa fund.

I am kicking off a fundraiser to pay any cleric from any other religion a significant amount of money if you can convince Lohan to join your religion instead of Judaism. That's right - you make her a Confucian or a Rastafarian, and you can get big bucks.

Bonuses if you can take all the shallow, airhead Hollywood Kabbalists along with her. Once one goes, the rest should be pretty easy, as their capacity for independent thought was never too high to begin with.

I'm seeding the Please Stay a Shiksa fund with my own pledge of $250.

For those who agree, I implore you to contribute what you can to this vital cause.

UPDATE: From LGF:
Iron Bill:

As the self appointed spokesman for sane Catholics, I would like to convey the following message to my Jewish brothers and sisters: You are welcome to take her.

(As we speak the Vatican is appropriating money from the "Take The Shiksa Fund." This fund was previously used to direct Madonna towards Kabbalah)

EoZ:

Vatican, huh?

Perhaps we can pool our resources....

Jones:

First Madonna, now LL. Haven't the Jews suffered enough?

"Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse"

It is no secret that in the Holy Land, rain is a blessing from God and has been that way since Biblical times. But this year this blessing seems to be peculiarly biased.

In Israel, the torrential rains and even snow that is pouring down this weekend is being greeted with great joy. The parched Kinneret rose eight inches so far with much needed fresh water, and farmers finally have reason to smile after a very dry winter.

But this weekend's rain has not been such a blessing for Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. Five were killed as a smuggling tunnel collapsed on their heads; 170 homes were flooded in the West Bank; Gazan officials were concerned about residents in tents being exposed to the rain.

Even more remarkably, a rocket that was fired from Gaza to Israel this evening did not cause any damage to the house it landed next to - because it landed in mud from the rain.

But far be it for me to say that Palestinian Arabs don't also have Allah on their side. After all, last week an Arab carpenter from Tulkarem found a piece of wood whose damage by beetles formed the word Mohammed at the angle he cut it.

The Lord indeed seems to work in mysterious ways.

Update on "City Wire" hate speech

I had mentioned some pure anti-semitism on The City Wire, a news site indexed by Google News, by someone named "Terrible Tommy." It appears that those specific articles have been removed, both from Google and from City Wire. City Wire seems also to have removed Terrible Tommy's blog on the site, although some of his hate is still there - including Holocaust denial and justification for Holocaust denial.

It appears that TT found out about this "censorship" because he tried to post an article called "CENSORED!!! - POWER OF THE JEW MEDIA" an hour ago, only to see it removed immediately from the website. Google's cache still has the headline. If I am the JEW MEDIA he is referring to, then I am honored!

Mission (partially) accomplished!

Roger Cohen calling a kettle black

Nuance is wonderful - when you get to choose what is nuanced and what is absolute.

Roger Cohen responds to critics of his column about how wonderful life is for the Jews of Iran. (I can't say he actually answers any of the questions those critics brought up, but he has plenty of indignation for them.) He lets us know that it is wrong, very wrong, to see things as being black and white:

But the equating of Iran with terror today is simplistic. Hamas and Hezbollah have evolved into broad political movements widely seen as resisting an Israel over-ready to use crushing force. It is essential to think again about them, just as it is essential to toss out Iran caricatures.

I return to this subject because behind the Jewish issue in Iran lies a critical one - the U.S. propensity to fixate on and demonize a country through a one-dimensional lens, with a sometimes disastrous chain of results.

Does anyone find it the slightest bit disingenuous to see Cohen blaming the US for being "one dimensional" on Iran, when Iranian newspapers and officials openly wish for the destruction of America?

But Cohen's clear lens to the world, of moral relativism and shades of grey, gets strangely distorted when the topic comes up of whom he considers truly evil:

It's worth recalling that hateful, ultra-nationalist rhetoric is no Iranian preserve. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's race-baiting anti-Arab firebrand, may find a place in a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Funny how all the nuance so suddenly disappears!

Cohen doesn't manage in his column to find an answer to this letter in the NYT:

To the Editor:
I was a 9-year-old girl living in Tehran when my family fled to America as a result of the Islamic Revolution. We didn’t leave Iran because of the weather, but because of a second-class existence transformed into a nightmare of religious persecution, which the few remaining Jews that Roger Cohen found have sadly internalized and accepted.
For Mr. Cohen to suggest that Iranian Jews have anything close to religious freedom or free expression in Iran is to discredit the long history of Muslim oppression and to deny the experience of generations of Jews who locked themselves in their homes during the Ashura holidays lest they become the target of the frenzied Shiite masses who filled the streets, or who cringed when they were called a word meaning dirty and impure and told to wait at the end of the line to draw water.
What about the Jewish schools and institutions that were systematically shut down after the Islamic Revolution? Or the fact that while Palestinians and Israeli Arabs are free to shout “Death to Israel,” Iranian Jews are forced to?
We must never forget the true history of Jews under Muslim regimes — my history.

Double-Dealing Durban

From Anne Bayefsky in Forbes:

Barack Obama just added double-dealing to his foreign policy repertoire. On Friday, administration officials led many Jewish leaders to believe that it had decided to boycott the United Nation's "anti-racism" conference known as Durban II. At the same time, however, human rights organizations were being led to believe that the administration was not pulling out and was looking for a way to "re-engage."

Durban II, scheduled for Geneva in April, is the U.N.'s attempt at a rerun of the 2001 global anti-Semitic hate fest held in Durban, South Africa.

After sowing confusion over the phone lines, the State Department chose late Friday night to put the real deal in print. Their release reads: "the current text of the draft outcome document is not salvageable," and "the United States will not ... participate in a conference based on this text," but we will "re-engage if a document that meets [our] criteria becomes the basis for deliberations." A new version must be: "shorter," "not reaffirm in toto the flawed 2001 Durban Declaration," "not single out any one country or conflict," and "not embrace the troubling concept of "defamation of religion."

And by the way, it continued, the U.S. will "participate" for the first time in the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Thus giving legitimacy to the most prominent anti-Israel NGO in the world.

All of this leaves the American people not knowing whether they're coming or going.

It does open a window, however, into Obama's gerrymandering. On one phone line with Assistant Secretary of State Karen Stewart were Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.N. Foundation, the UNA-USA Association and the Arab American Institute, among others. On the other line with National Security Council member Samantha Power were Jewish organizations. The dangerous message was that an Arab advocacy group does human rights, while Jewish organizations do Jews.

It also shows that "human rights" organizations would prefer to see the US participate in a festival of hate against Jews.

Read the whole thing. It is beyond scary.

Garden-variety anti-semitism

Citizen journalism definitely has its downsides.

I just came across an article in something called The City Wire where the Jewish ownership of media companies is detailed. It was written by an anonymous writer called "Terrible Tommy" who, by sheer coincidence, also is big on pushing the USS Liberty as an Israeli conspiracy to kill Americans.

The article looked familiar to me. Sure enough, it was actually written by none other than David Duke, even though it was presented as original.

This sort of thing has been increasing a great deal lately. It used to be relatively rare to see outright anti-semitism in "news" sites indexed by Google - The People's Voice and Uruknet were exceptions. But now, this sort of thing is visible more and more.

Clearly, Jew-hatred is becoming more fashionable and more acceptable. The haters are no longer embarrassed to spout their vitriol in public, and they don't find the need to hide behind "anti-Zionism" as much as they did only a year ago.

UPDATE: It looks like that article and some other of Terrible Tommy's hate has been deleted from City Wire.

Another Hamas front group, plus other PalArab news

Two rockets fired this morning were claimed by the "Palestine Hizbollah" group. That group started in October, about a month before the "lull" ended, claiming that they would not respect any cease fire and castigating the groups that "abandoned resistance." Interestingly, they refrained from firing rockets until the lull ended in November. And now that there are daily rocket attacks against Israel, they have been the only group to claim responsibility for any of them.

Clearly, this group is a front. Their first operation was jointly claimed with Islamic Jihad - when Hamas was claiming that they were still holding by the "lull." But during the Gaza operation, it became clear that Islamic Jihad and the other major terror groups in Gaza had strong operational ties with Hamas, so it became harder for Hamas to claim that any rocket fire after the "unilateral cease fire" had nothing to do with them.

Hence, a new terror group pops up, at a very convenient time for Hamas. It is clear that rockets such as the improved Grads fired yesterday - that penetrated a fortified school in Ashkelon, and in all likelihood was aimed at exactly that target - were smuggled in by Hamas, which owns the weapons tunnels and which rules Gaza pretty comprehensively. Yet credulous people believe that Hamas is holding its end of the cease fire bargain.

In other news, a 40 year old man was abducted, tortured and killed in Gaza.

5 were killed in another tunnel collapse. Recent rains were blamed.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 46.