Word: gaza
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...lost everything. I lost all my money and my false teeth. Even this head scarf I am wearing was given to me by a neighbor." Fatima Hussan, 75-year-old Palestinian resident of Rafah on the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, after the Israelis bulldozed her home...
...Israel's previous withdrawals from parts of the West Bank and Gaza, under Oslo, had been undertaken on the basis of painstakingly detailed security agreements reached with the Palestinian Authority. But Sharon's plan envisaged no such deal, partly because of his reluctance to resume negotiations with a body led by Yasser Arafat, and partly because there are good reasons to doubt whether the PA today has capability, much less the political will, to rein in those who would fire on Israelis. The leadership under Arafat is unlikely to see much to be gained in helping implement a plan designed...
...order to forestall that possibility, Israel has stepped up its campaign of assassination of top Hamas leaders and military actions to suppress the organization's capability to launch strikes inside Israel or indeed in Gaza itself. The result, however, has been an escalating cycle of violence in Gaza that shows no sign of abating. And absent any political incentive for making the plan work, it's unlikely that the Palestinian leadership will do much to tamp it down, even if they could. Absent a Palestinian structure taking charge of security in the wake of an Israeli withdrawal, the Israelis...
...basic security flaw in Sharon's plan is unlikely to be eliminated, even if Israel picks a brief lull in fighting as an opportunity to withdraw. That's because Sharon's plan requires the Israeli military to maintain control of a strip between Gaza and Egypt it calls the "Philadelphi Road." That would mean that like the Hezbollah gunners that target Israeli outposts in the disputed Shebaa Farms on the border, Palestinian gunners will continue have an immediate and accessible Israeli target in their sights even when the last settlers are gone...
...Having embraced Sharon as a bold steward of his own "peace vision," President Bush is caught in an even deeper bind by Gaza because of the impact of Israeli actions there on perceptions of the U.S. elsewhere in the Arab world, particularly Iraq. The Rafah killings, twinned as they were in Thursday's news reports with unconfirmed claims that U.S. missiles had killed forty Iraqis at a wedding party in western Iraq, has undercut the Bush administration's best efforts to recover from the Arab-world PR disaster of Abu Ghraib. Ironically, part of the Bush administration's emergency...