Word: gaza
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...Palestinian death toll - and international outrage - continued to mount Thursday in response to Israel's offensive in the Rafah refugee camp along the Egypt-Gaza border. Eight Palestinians were killed Wednesday when Israeli forces fired on a crowd marching in protest toward a section of the camp where Israeli soldiers battled Palestinian fighters. Forty Palestinians have been killed since Tuesday in the course of Israel's campaign to clear the area of militants in preparation for a possible Israeli withdrawal from Gaza some time next year...
...Even the U.S., perhaps mindful now of the extent to which events in Gaza can imperil its own goals in Iraq, refrained from its customary veto of a UN Security Council resolution condemning the Israeli action. But the Israelis showed no sign of letting up on an offensive they say is essential to prepare the way for the pullout plan currently under consideration. The plan enthusiastically backed by President Bush involves Israel leaving all of Gaza and abandoning four isolated settlements in the West Bank, in exchange for U.S. endorsement of Israel's claim to hang on to the broad...
...idea of withdrawing first from Gaza was originally put forth by former Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who envisaged such an arrangement emerging in negotiations with the Palestinian Authority as a first step toward a comprehensive peace deal based on the 1967 borders. Sharon, however, developed his own version that cut the Palestinians out the equation altogether, and envisaged the Gaza withdrawal as an alternative to proceeding with the U.S.-backed "roadmap" toward a comprehensive settlement. Sharon has insisted that the Palestinian Authority, led by Yasser Arafat, is not an acceptable interlocutor, and therefore that there is no Palestinian partner with...
...Lebanon in 1999 was a dangerous mistake, because it was proclaimed throughout the Arab world as an epic victory for Hezbollah's armed struggle, and led Palestinian militants to launch the September 2000 intifada in the belief that violence could drive Israel out of the occupied West Bank and Gaza...
...Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld has written extensively on the corrosive effect on Israeli society of maintaining its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Citing the debilitating effect of Afghanistan on the Soviet Union and of Vietnam on the U.S., he argues that an occupation pits a sophisticated high-tech army not against an equivalent foe, but against lightly-armed insurgents hard to distinguish from the civilian population. "As Israel's own history clearly shows, fighting a stronger opponent will cause a society to unite," he writes, "but combating a weaker one will cause it to split...