Hamas ban on Western garments, hair styles criticized in Gaza

GAZA, April 6 (Xinhua) — The ban issued by the Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip on Western garments and stylish haircuts is criticized by rights groups and lawmakers in the Palestinian coastal enclave.

Parents in Gaza have recently said the police detained their sons for several hours and questioned them for wearing “low waist” jeans and having spiky haircuts.

Ayman Batniji, a police spokesman, told Xinhua that the police arrested some young men for violating the general morals and traditions. “They are alleged of disturbing young women in the streets and imitating aspects that contradict the Palestinian society’s habits.”

He said the recent measures were carried out after the police had received some public complaints, while stressing these measures “are not part of an organized campaign.”

However, in the last few days, witnesses said that more policemen and security vehicles were patrolling near schools, universities and public markets.

Also, Ihab al-Ghussein, head of the official media bureau of Hamas, said on his Facebook page that the measures “are part of an organized campaign to restore Islamic traditions and laws.”

Many young men in the Gaza Strip said they had been violently stopped by policemen and had been badly beaten during interrogation.

However, their testimonies were denied by Batniji. “The measures are basically advice without violence or punishment… The police ask the detainees to sign a paper promising not to wear this kind of jeans and having such kind of haircuts.”

Hamas government launched last year a campaign promoting Islamic virtue, which bars garment stores from displaying lingerie, short skirts or dresses in the front windows.

Witnesses said the police had recently intensified the campaign, mainly through surprise visits to garment stores located in commercial streets.

The witnesses said some of the stores owners were beaten and their garments burnt.

Mustafa Ibrahim, a Gaza-based activist of Human Rights, told Xinhua that these measures “are a direct intervention in the people’s personal life.”

“Forcing young men to sign a written commitment at police stations in Gaza is totally illegal,” said Ibrahim. “All these measures are imposing an Islamic vision on the public by force.”

He said Hamas has been imposing Islamic regulations since 2008, a campaign aiming to Islamizing the society and pleasing the radicals in Hamas.

Faisal Abu Shahla, a lawmaker in Fatah Party of President Mahmoud Abbas, told Xinhua that Hamas’ measures “are violating the logic of democracy and the public freedoms.”

Yahia Musa, a Hamas lawmaker, told Xinhua that he supports the public criticism of Hamas police measures, saying the Hamas parliamentary committee of human rights has received several complaints, which called on the government to immediately stop these measures.

Jan 12 2012 – SYD – Market Day Fundraiser for Syria and Gaza

MARKETDAY FUNDRAISER

FOR SYRIA AND GAZA

Jumping castle, Face painting and activities for kids and variety of stalls: food, fashion, accessories and much much more……….

All proceeds will be collected and distributed

By Muslim Aid Australia in Shaa Allah

When: Saturday 12^TH Jan, 2013 10:00am to 4:00pm

Where: 22 Water St. Cabrammata West

Ethnic Cleansing of Invented People

January 04, 2012 “Information Clearing House” – - Mostafa Tamimi from Nabi Saleh, Bahjat Zaalan and his son Ramdan from Gaza died on my fiftieth birthday and just a few days after Newt Gingrich declared them an invented people. They were murdered by the Israeli terrorist organization, the IDF, an organization that is supported and funded by the US.  One Israeli terrorist shot the invented Tamimi in the head with a tear gas canister, and another Israeli terrorist fired a rocket that murdered the invented Zaalan and his boy Ramadan.  Both terrorists were educated and trained by Israel, and armed by the US.  The Israeli terrorists are not invented but quite real, and they are safe, protected by the apartheid regime that trained and sent them on their missions, and the Israeli court system will make sure that they are never brought to justice. This is how Israel’s well-oiled ethnic cleansing machine operates.

The Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine is not a thing of the past but an ongoing campaign that is executed by three arms of the State of Israel: The education system, a dedicated bureaucracy and the security forces. The education system is dedicated to indoctrinating and producing soldiers and bureaucrats who will execute and enforce the ethnic cleansing. The bureaucracy is charged with making rules that make life unlivable for Palestinians.  Rules that restrict Palestinian access to their lands, and restrict their ability to travel freely to work and school. This same bureaucracy then demands that Palestinians pay for permits to be allowed do these very same basic things that they were denied. The security forces, the most obvious of which is the IDF, are charged with enforcing the restrictions, fighting off the resistance, armed or peaceful, and terrorizing the “invented” people of Palestine.

Since my father was a general and I served as a soldier in the IDF terrorist organization, people often ask me how is it that Israeli children who are raised in a Western style democracy become such monsters once they are in uniform?  The detailed answer can be found in my book, The General’s Son due out in February 2012, but the short answer is this: Education – Racism requires a mindset that is fashioned by education.  In order to rationalize and justify the ethnic cleansing the Israeli education system portrays Palestinians as culturally inferior, violent and bent on the annihilation of the Jews, and at the same time, void of a true national identity. Palestinian national identity is but a figment of some anti-Semitic imagination.

Israeli children are educated to see the Palestinians as a problem that must be solved and as a threat that must be eliminated. They can go through life, as I did growing up in Jerusalem, without ever meeting a Palestinian child. They know nothing of the life or culture of Palestinians who quite often live only several hundred meters from them.

Palestinians are portrayed as an existential threat through absurd comparisons like that of Yasser Arafat to Hitler, the Palestinians to Nazis, and the Palestinian resistance to Al Qaeda. Since Israeli kids never meet Palestinians what they learn in school, particularly in the school textbooks, is all that they know. In fact it is remarkable that even though they live so close to one another, much if not all of what Israelis know about their Palestinian neighbors comes from high school text books and popular racist stereotypes. Israelis don’t know that Palestinians never had an army, that they do not posses a single tank, a single warship or fighter jet, that they don’t have a single artillery battery and do not in fact pose a military threat at all.  According to a new book by Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, not a single photo of a person who is a Palestinian exists in Israeli textbooks and there are millions of Palestinians in and around Israel.  Israelis don’t learn about Palestinian doctors and teachers, engineers and writers. They don’t learn Palestinian poetry or prose and they don’t read the works of Palestinian historians.

At a recent lecture I mentioned the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and someone called out: “What ethnic cleansing?” People are unaware of the ethnic cleansing taking place in Palestine because Israel hides it well and the mainstream media doesn’t care enough to ask. In mainstream peace groups and dialogue groups that discuss Palestine/Israel, a basic Israeli condition is not to bring up issues like the ethnic cleansing because Israel doesn’t like to talk about it.

But for the past 64 years ethnic cleansing of Palestine is what drives the Zionist policies towards Palestinians. All Zionist governments and all Zionist political parties left right and center support the ethnic cleansing.  The Israeli judicial system lets the Israeli authorities get away with abuse, theft and murder as long as they are perpetuated against Palestinians. Had these same crimes been committed against Israeli Jews they would have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Zionist supporters like to bring up the fact that on November 29, 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish sate and an Arab state.  What is left out of the Zionist story is that within one year of the vote Israeli forces had managed to capture close to 80% of Palestine, destroy close to 500 Palestinian towns and villages, kill scores of unarmed civilians and force the exile of some 800,000 Palestinians.

Then, when the UN passed resolution194 in December of 1948, calling for the refugees to be allowed to return to their homes, Israel proceeded to build cities and towns, parks and highways for the use of Jewish Israelis on Palestinian land. Then the Knesset began passing laws that prohibit the return of the refugees and allow the new state to confiscate their lands.

After the war was over, the Palestinians who remained within the newly created Jewish state were forced to become citizens of a state that despised them and saw them as a “problem” and a “threat.” They were designated as “The Arabs of Israel” a designation that stripped them of a national identity and denied them any rights to the land and provided them very limited rights as citizens. From being the rightful owners of their lands and their country they now existed at the pleasure of the new owner of the land, the state of Israel. Palestinian refugees were forced into concentration camps, conveniently called refugee camps, and those that tried to return were shot.  A military unit was created for the purpose of punishing Palestinian refugee who “infiltrated” back into their homeland, now called Israel.  It was called Unit 101, the notorious Ariel Sharon led it and it made a name for itself as a murderous gang with a license to kill Palestinians.

So regardless of the myth, now perpetuated by Newt Gingrich among others, that says there was no forced ethnic cleansing, we know today that the creation of Israel was made possible through a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, conducted by the Jewish militia, involving massacres, terrorism, and the wholesale looting of an entire nation.

Newt Gingrich, being the history buff that he is, might be interested in a story I mention in my book The General’s Son, about my mother. She was born and raised in Jerusalem and she remembers the homes of Palestinians families in neighborhoods in West Jerusalem. She told me that when she was a child, on Saturday afternoons she would go for walks through these neighborhoods, admiring the beauty of the homes, watching families sit together in their beautiful gardens. In 1948 when the Palestinian families were forced out of West Jerusalem, my mother was offered one of those beautiful, spacious homes but she refused. At age 22, the wife of a young army officer with little means and with two small children, she refused a beautiful spacious home, offered to her completely free because she could not bear the thought of living in the home of a family that was forced out and now lives in a refugee camp. “The coffee was still warm on the tables as the soldiers came in and began the looting” she told me.  “Can you imagine how much those families, those mothers must miss their homes.” She would ask and she continued, “I remember seeing the truckloads of loot, taken by the Israeli soldiers from these homes. How were they not ashamed of themselves?” there are thousands upon thousands of homes in cities all over the country that were taken.

Moving forward now to 1967 and the myth that Israel was fighting for its existence as it was attacked by Arab armies from all directions.  Much was written about this but nothing is more revealing than the minutes of the meetings of the IDF general staff from June 1967, just prior to the war. According to the generals, one of whom was my father, Matti Peled, not only was there no existential threat but the generals clearly state that the Egyptian army needed at least a year and a half before it would be ready for war and therefore this was an opportune time to attack and destroy it.  The army pressured the cabinet to authorize an attack and indeed the cabinet approved an attack against Egypt.  The IDF destroyed the Egyptian army and then went on to attack Jordan and Syria. It took the IDF six days and 700 casualties to kill an estimated 15,000 Arab forces, take the West Bank, the Golan Heights and The Sinai Peninsula.  One may like to think this was a miracle but it was a well-planned, well-executed attack against countries that had no viable military force.  The Israeli army had thus fulfilled its goal of conquering the entire Land of Israel, and the De-Arabizing of Palestine could now proceed into the West Bank and Gaza.

Since the early days of the State of Israel the IDF made it its mission to be the most brutal bully in the region.  Today the IDF has one purpose: to conduct an all out war against Palestinians by terrorizing Palestinian civilians, kidnapping children from their homes and using brutal force against protesters. We are reminded of the intensity of IDF cruelty every so often, the latest major display being the three-week bloodbath in Gaza that began on December 27, 2008. Hundreds of tons of bombs were dropped by Israeli pilots on Gaza, followed by a massive invasion of land forces.  All this for the purpose of  terrorizing a defenseless civilian population that includes 800,000 children.

Now that Israel has been in control of the West Bank for over four decades it had built and invested there heavily.  But all of the investment and construction in the West Bank was made to bring Jews into the West Bank.  Palestinian lands are being taken at an alarming pace, their homes are destroyed and thousands are incarcerated, while industry, roads, malls, schools and gated communities with swimming pools are being built for Jews only.  Water, which is the scarcest resource of all, is controlled and distributed by the Israeli water authority, as follows: Per capita, Israelis receive 300 cubic meters of water per year.  In comparison, per capita Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza receive 35-85 cubic meters per year, while the World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 100 cubic meter of water per person per year. But what is even worse is that per capita, Israeli settlers in the West Bank are allocated 1500 cubic meters of water per year. Jews in the West Bank live with green lawns and swimming pools while Palestinians quite often get no water at all.  Perhaps invented people have no need for water.

De-Arabizing the history of Palestine is another crucial element of the ethnic cleansing. 1500 years of Arab and Muslim rule and culture in Palestine are trivialized, evidence of its existence is being destroyed and all this is done to make the absurd connection between the ancient Hebrew civilization and today’s Israel. The most glaring example of this today is in Silwan, (Wadi Hilwe) a town adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem with some 50,000 residents.  Israel is expelling families from Silwan and destroying their homes because it claims that king David built a city there some 3000 years ago. Thousands of families will be made homeless so that Israel can build a park to commemorate a king that may or may not have lived 3000 years ago. Not a shred of historical evidence exists that can prove King David ever lived yet Palestinian men, women, children and the elderly along with their schools and mosques, churches and ancient cemeteries and any evidence of their existence must be destroyed and then denied so that Zionist claims to exclusive rights to the land may be substantiated.

Once we connect the dots it is not hard to see that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is only a small part of the Israeli Palestinian issue. The greater issue is the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionist state.  The way forward for Israelis and Palestinians alike is to oppose the ethnic cleansing by opposing all its manifestations. This means supporting the movement to boycott, divest and place sanctions on Israel, or BDS for short, it means actively participating in the popular non-violent struggle in Palestine and it means challenging the racist laws that govern Israel by defying them. There has to be a clear and unequivocal call to recognize that the IDF is a terrorist organization and its officers are war criminals. Furthermore, the reprehensible discrimination against Palestinians, whether they live in Israel/Palestine or not, practiced by the security officials at Ben Gurion airport and other points of entry to Israel/Palestine must be challenged. The struggle for a democracy in our shared homeland is no different than the struggle at Tahrir square and can in fact be seen as part of the Arab Spring.

BBC admits to Israeli propaganda

One of the most consistent aspects of the BBC’s reporting of Gaza and Israel is the insistence of its journalists that any “outbreak of violence” is the fault of the Palestinians.

When Israel bombs or shells Gaza, this is unfailingly reported by the BBC as being in “response” or “retaliation” to rockets being fired from the blockaded territory. The unflinching regularity of this one-sided reporting by the UK’s state broadcaster is meticulously recorded in More Bad News from Israel, the book by Greg Philo and Mike Berry which contains research by the Glasgow Media Unit into the BBC’s reporting of the occupation.

The BBC’s coverage of Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza in November was no exception. An article published on the BBC’s website the day Hamas commander Ahmed al-Jabari was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City stated that the killing “follows a wave of rocket attacks against Israel from the territory” (“Israeli air strike kills Hamas military chief Jabari,” 14 November 2012).

The article went on to feature an Israeli army spokesperson’s claim that al-Jabari had “a lot of blood on his hands” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that a “clear message” had been sent to “Hamas and other terrorist organizations.” Netanyahu’s comments ended with the words: “We will continue to do everything to protect our citizens.”

All of Israel’s key propaganda messages were conveyed, while the reality was carefully hidden. There is, of course, the ongoing reality that Israel is an occupier and a serial violator of international law — facts which are buried under the credibility and authority the BBC accords to its politicians and spokespeople and what they say.

Ignoring reality

On an immediate level, another crucial reality was ignored. By assassinating al-Jabari — itself an illegal act of extrajudicial murder which the BBC failed to examine, even as it printed Netanyahu’s triumphal “clear message” — Israel had violated a ceasefire brokered three days earlier.

This information, so casually ditched by the BBC’s journalists — online, on television and on radio news — was absolutely crucial. It emboldened the lie, disseminated across the BBC’s media outlets, that al-Jabari’s killing and the eight-day onslaught that came next followed “a wave of rocket attacks” from Gaza.

It didn’t. Al-Jabari’s assassination and the ensuing attack on Gaza which killed more than 160 Palestinians, including more than 30 children, followed a ceasefire, which the Palestinian groups in Gaza had been observing and may well have carried on observing if Israel hadn’t broken it. Couple this with the fact that, in 2008, Israel broke another ceasefire to instigate a three-week massacre in Gaza, killing 1,400 Palestinians, including 352 children, and a picture builds of an aggressive Israeli state, regularly bombing and shelling a civilian population with no regard for agreed truce arrangements.

Uneasy pattern

Take into account that both attacks on Gaza, in 2008 and 2012, came just months before Israeli elections, and an uneasy pattern begins to emerge — one which responsible journalists would, presumably, want to question and investigate.

Moreover, al-Jabari was killed as he carried with him, in the car that was hit, a draft agreement for a permanent truce with Israel, raising yet another vital question: was Israel trying to sabotage a possible end to the violence?

Such facts and the questions they prompted appeared to be irrelevant to the BBC’s presenters. On 18 November, four days after al-Jabari was killed, Samira Ahmed hosted BBC One’s Sunday Morning Live program. This included a 15-minute debate entitled “Are Israeli military actions justified?” featuring Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the newspaperAl-Quds Al-Arabi, and right-wing political commentator Charlie Wolf.

The justification for military action put forward by Ahmed to start the debate was “Hamas rocket attacks.” And this is where the debate stuck. Any attempt by Atwan to give depth or context to the discussion, by mentioning the blockade, the occupation, or Israel’s year-round attacks on Gaza, were batted away by Ahmed who unfailingly came back with the rejoinder: “But wouldn’t it all stop if Hamas stopped firing rockets?” The implication of course was that Hamas starts violence, and Israel responds because it has to protect its citizens.

That Palestinian rocket attacks might be a response to 45 years of ongoing occupation, combined since 2006 with a crippling blockade, is not a possibility the BBC is willing to discuss on its airwaves.

In just 15 minutes, the former Channel 4 News presenter revealed how completely she has attuned herself to the BBC’s commitment to the Israeli narrative by referring to “Hamas rocket attacks” 15 times, and never once to Israel’s ceasefire violations and the complicated questions these violations raise.

Blaming the victims

This fits in with what would appear to be her employer’s editorial policy on Israel and Gaza. In an email sent on 21 November to a member of the UK-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and seen by this writer, the BBC Complaints Department explains in some detail how the broadcaster had gone out of its way to lay the blame for the violence of the previous eight days on the Palestinians.

The email, signed off “BBC Complaints,” states: “Since the news of Israeli air strikes in Gaza our coverage has pointed out on numerous occasions that the attacks are in response to recent rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip.”

It adds: “Our initial online report on 14 November pointed to how the attack on Ahmed Said Khalil al-Jabari and another Hamas official ‘follows a wave of rocket attacks against Israel from the territory’ and how ‘the United States said it supported Israel’s right to self-defense, and condemned militant rocket attacks on southern Israel.’”

Seemingly oblivious to or unfazed by the inaccuracy of its own reporting, the message goes on: “On the BBC’s News at Ten that same evening, the BBC’s Gaza and West Bank correspondent Jon Donnison’s report explained that ‘Israel says the strike followed a wave of rocket attacks from inside Gaza,’ before hearing directly from Israeli Army Spokeswoman Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich as she explained how ‘I can just elaborate that the target of the operation is to protect Israeli civilians. The same lives of Israelis that have been under constant rocket attack for the past year.’”

In a twist of almost comic absurdity, given eight days of reporting which squarely blamed Hamas for the violence and equated the fear caused by the 12-pound and 90-pound Palestinian rockets with the terror induced by Israel’s 500-pound to 2,000-pound bombs, the email ends with: “We will continue to report on developments from the region in a fair, accurate and impartial way.”

The email highlights the BBC’s willingness to ignore facts and important questions — for example, why did Israel really kill al-Jabari? — in favor of a narrative that, deliberately or not, echoes that of the Israeli government.

Child deaths unreported

Less than a week before al-Jabari’s execution, Israel had killed seven Palestinians in Gaza in the space of 48 hours. Of these, five were teenage boys (“New Israeli escalation against the Gaza Strip,” Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 11 November 2012).

The first to die, 13-year-old Ahmad Abu Daqqa, was shot in the abdomen by Israeli soldiers. Two days later, brothers 16-year-old Mohammed Harara and 17-year-old Ahmed Harara were killed playing football when Israeli forces fired shells at their playground. As people rushed to help, three more shells were fired, and an 18-year-old and 19-year-old were killed.

It is safe to assume that if five Israeli teenagers, including two brothers playing football and a 13-year-old, had been killed by Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza, it would be headline news for the BBC.

The Israeli killing of the Palestinian youngsters was ignored on BBC television and prime-time radio news. Even when al-Jabari was killed, four days after the Harara brothers lost their lives, and some kind of premeditated build-up to the eight-day assault began to emerge, the BBC still refused to mention Israel’s two-day killing spree in Gaza a few days earlier.

Official line

All BBC journalists stuck to Israel’s official line that the assassination of 14 November, and what followed, was in retaliation to Palestinian rockets — and conveniently omitted from their reports the fact that Israel had been engaged in killing Palestinian children in the days immediately preceding al-Jabari’s execution.

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign wrote to the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs program Today on 12 November to ask why it had not covered the killing of the five Palestinian teenagers on 8 and 10 November.

The program’s assistant editor, Dominic Groves, wrote back to say: “Even in the space of a three hour program it is not always possible to cover every development in a story — especially one as long running and complex as the one in the Middle East.”

And yet the killing of five young boys by Israel isn’t a “development in a story;” it is news in itself. When the Today program can give prominent coverage to a Palestinian rocket attack on a bus in April 2011, which killed a 16-year-old Israeli schoolboy, how can Groves claim the same program has no room to report on the slaughter of five Palestinian boys by the Israeli army? (“Israeli boy Daniel Viflic dies after rocket hits bus,” 18 April 2011).

Since the latest “ceasefire” came into effect on the evening of 21 November, Israel has been flying its F-16s over the skies of Gaza, 40 Gaza fishermen have been detained by Israeli forces, and a 20-year-old Palestinian has been shot and killed by Israeli fire, while 54 Palestinians, including six children have been injured (“Protection of civilians weekly report,” UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 28 November – 4 December 2012 [PDF]).

Like the everyday struggle of Palestinians in Gaza, currently dealing with power cuts lasting eight hours each day, this has gone unreported by the BBC and other mainstream media because no one, yet, is firing rockets back.

Gaza: Questions for Egypt and Hamas

Israel has dealt a harsh blow to the resistance in Palestine. Its assassination of the prominent Hamas military commander Ahmad al-Jaabari was a vengeful move, which will affect Hamas in several ways.

The immediate impact is on the running of the movement’s military apparatus. In the short term, it is on the command of that apparatus, given that its top commander, Mohammad al-Daif, was heavily reliant on his aide Jaabari. The long term impact relates to Jaabari’s official position in the Hamas leadership, the choice of his successor, and the considerations and outlook which govern that choice.

Regardless of how the Palestinian resistance responds on the ground, or whether Israel’s claim to have destroyed its strategic missile infrastructure in the Gaza Strip is true, the answers needed today are less about Palestine than Egypt.

No amount of evasion can prevent a succession of questions from being asked about the real strategy of the worldwide organization of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), and of its Egyptian and Palestinian branches, which control the Egyptian state and the Gaza Strip respectively.

Israel’s government – as well as its security and military establishments – has ample reason for wanting to unleash all kinds of aggression on Gaza. But Israel’s audacity in deciding to go after such a heavyweight target as Jaabari remains puzzling.

On the ground, Israel was relying on its intelligence and operational prowess to counter the Palestinian resistance’s improved capabilities. Its announcement that it destroyed some 20 key missile sites presents a challenge in this regard, after Israel tried the same thing in Lebanon in 2006, but fell into a trap that made its “operation” to establish decisive deterrence come to nothing, even after the “operation” turned into “war.”

The fact that Israel can reach Jaabari and other military commanders shows it has a massive advantage on the intelligence front. This made it easier for the political leadership to execute this blow, and also led it to the conclusion that it would not – at least for now – risk seeing the confrontation escalate into a broader war. Yet there is no guarantee against that since other battlefield-related factors were involved in the decision to embark on this adventure.

This leads to the more important question: Was Israel’s assessment based on accurate information reassuring that neither Egypt nor the MB leadership are prepared to take any radical action toward creating new realities in Palestine and the region?

The MB needs to be asked some fundamental questions here. Leaks from internal discussions by the worldwide MB leadership, described as the most important ever held, indicated a decision was made to give absolute priority at present to consolidating Islamist rule in some countries and acquiring power in others, and to avoid antagonizing foreign powers in the process. It has been widely said that the MB want a full term in power, meaning between four and six years, in which no other issue would be allowed to preoccupy them. The most viable way of ensuring that with regard to Palestine is through a long-term truce between Hamas and Israel.

The first Brotherhood-ruled Arab country, the MB as an organization, and the bereaved Hamas, are facing their toughest test. It will not be the last, but it is the toughest. Will the upshot of the Arab Spring be that Palestine is forgotten and Israel is left to ravage it undeterred? Or will the Arab Street in general, and the Palestinians in particular, sense that a positive change has occurred?

Lest anyone think this is about withdrawing ambassadors or issuing strongly worded statements of condemnation, or even about summoning the Arab League or UN Security Council into session – such steps are meaningless. Hosni Mubarak would have done the same thing if he had been confronted with a big demonstration in Tahrir Square.

The question for this group today is, simply: Are you in the heart of the struggle with Israel or not? While many Egyptians can say where they stand, the regime is facing a moral dilemma that could result in it being weakened more than many might expect.

But the real challenge is for the Hamas leadership. If it opts to go along with the line of the worldwide MB, it will court an explosion within its own ranks. This is a serious prospect. It has been raised in internal discussions which showed that differences between Hamas’ various factions are not superficial, with the military wing – and Jaabari in particular – opposed to any truce with the enemy.

This compounds the danger. The resistance in Palestine could face a major crisis. It knows, however, in line with its people’s instincts, that when the baton-carrier’s grip loosens, others pick it up and race forward.

25 mosques bombed in Gaza

GAZA CITY (Ma’an) –The minister of religious affairs in Gaza is claiming that Israel has damaged over 25 mosques in six days of heavy shelling across the enclave.

“The occupation (Israel) in their aggression did not only commit crimes against civilians, as happened to Salah, al-Dalou, and Azzam families, but targeted mosques, cemeteries and houses of worship,” Ismail Radwan said at a news conference outside Al-Abbas mosque.

“The enemy directly targeted Sheikh Shaban cemetery, the emergency cemetery, in addition to Mahatta, Tal Zatar, and Bani Suheil cemeteries which led to scattering the bodies of the dead and martyrs.

“They also targeted and destroyed completely the Ribat mosque in Gaza City and Al-Rahman mosque in the central Gaza Strip.”

Radwan called on Islamic scholars and imams in Palestine and around the world to pray for the injured and Palestinian fighters.

He called on the grand imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmad al-Tayeb, and all his counterparts to visit the Gaza Strip and stand by the Palestinian people.

The minister urged the international community and human rights organizations to put Israeli leaders on trial for war crimes and called on the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to fulfill their duties and support Palestinians in preserving their holy places.