Conflict Blotter

Careful readers will remember that I predicted 10 days ago that some senior Fatah leaders, including Hani al Hassan, may turn on the Fatah wing that is seen as standing too close to the US and Israel.

Hani al Hassan
In an interview with Al Jazeera on Wednesday that has been generating a lot of buzz, Hassan […]

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Martin Indyk, twice the US ambassador to Israel, writes in this month’s Foreign Affairs that an international trusteeship for the West Bank and Gaza is the only way out of the current quagmire. He made the same argument in 2003 and sums up that argument at the top of his latest essay:
Despairing that Palestinians […]

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I’m back in Gaza for a couple of days and the story here is law and order under Hamas. Gazans of all political stripes seem to be enjoying a sort of blissful honeymoon with the new regime here. Families are sitting in cafes and wandering the streets until well past dark. Everybody is talking about […]

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The basic line on Tony Blair as the Quartet’s new Middle East envoy is that the Palestinians and Arab world are angry about the decision because Blair has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with George W. Bush for six years. He invaded Iraq and he backed Israel’s 34-day war against Hezbollah. Palestinians by and large seem to back […]

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Did you know our troops in Iraq shave their legs? This note from a Lieutenant stationed north of Baghdad:
It gets a little bit hot here. After wearing body armor for a few hours our clothes are drenched… There are rumors among the locals here in some parts of the country that we have cold pills […]

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Yediot Ahranot ran a piece today by Ilan Hamra, an expert at analyzing voice recordings. It’s an interesting window into how tapes, like the one Hamas just released of Gilad Shalit, are analyzed.
It is clear that the statements made by Gilad Shalit were dictated by the people holding him. The recording was edited in at […]

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Israeli PM Ehud Olmert’s decision to release 250 prisoners is no service to Abbas. The number is paltry compared with the 12,000 Palestinian prisoners currently languishing in Israeli jails. And why were only Fatah prisoners included in the release? It’s one thing to ignore Hamas for the time being, but what about the PFLP or […]

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This from today’s Maariv newspaper:
While hundreds of refugees are abandoning their homes and fleeing the Gaza Strip, their house pets and farm animals are being left behind to die of hunger and thirst. Hedva, from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Jerusalem, said she had heard […]

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Israel’s Maariv newspaper recounts yesterday’s cabinet meeting:
Director of Military Intelligence Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin and GSS Director Yuval Diskin said Fatah could also lose control of the West Bank to Hamas. “Contrary to what you may think, Fatah is not soundly based in Judea and Samaria at all. The Fatah agencies […]

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At today’s summit in Sharm al Sheikh look for Israel to make a number of minor concessions to Abbas, such as increased security cooperation, shipments of armoured cars and bulletproof vests to West Bank security forces, issuing more VIP permits to Palestinian businessmen, and the release of more Palestinian tax dollars.
But Olmert has already indicated […]

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