Word: damascus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cave under a house in the area surrounding Rafah, a teeming city of refugee camps of some 250,000 people. Three separate groups claimed responsibility for the abduction, including the military wing of Hamas, which Israel charged was acting on the directions of Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas supremo in Damascus (see box). Two days into the Gaza incursion, Olmert ordered Israeli forces to halt their advance to allow for a mediation push by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On Friday, Mubarak claimed that Hamas had agreed to release Shalit, but Shalit's captors demanded the release of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners...
Mashaal, who lives in Damascus under Syrian protection, is suspected by the Israelis of having ordered militants to kidnap Corporal Gilad Shalit and take him to the Gaza Strip, although Hamas and other Arab officials insist Mashaal was not directly involved. The Israelis believe he ordered the high-stakes hostage taking to scupper attempts by the Hamas-led government to join in unity talks with moderate Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that would implicitly recognize Israel's right to exist...
...hierarchy on the other side. Numerous Palestinian leaders, led by President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas' political leader, have been working to secure the soldier's release, but the militants holding Shalit apparently do not answer to them. Israeli officials are saying directions are coming from Damascus, from Hamas' leader in exile Khaled Meshal, who is pushing a much harder line than Haniyeh and his camp. "He is definitely in our sights," Justice Minister Haim Ramon told a local radio station...
...officials said, to halt Qassam rocket fire from the area into Israel - and seemed poised to cross into the territory. The Israeli Air Force also buzzed the summer home of Syria's president, a brazen, none-too-subtle message conveying Israel's feelings about Meshal's ongoing residency in Damascus. Potentially further complicating matters is the fact that a militant group in the West Bank has claimed to have kidnapped an Israeli civilian, a claim not yet verified but being taken very seriously by Israeli security forces - as is the threat that more kidnappings could follow...
...fact and if she didn't leak a real secret about the prisons, for example. I ran into all sorts of journalists, and I usually said I was whatever my cover was. But you were not obligated to write back and say, "I ran into X journalist in Damascus, and we were at a cocktail party, and we are going to get together for lunch." It was not something you had to report. Unauthorized contact with a journalist is a new standard. You cannot be assigned overseas and not run into a U.S. journalist. You're just completely isolating...