Conflict Blotter

Yediot Ahranot reminds us of the grim history of Sharm al Sheikh summits:
1996: Sharm summit attended by Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, Jacques Chirac, John Major, Helmut Kohl, Jordan’s King Hussein, Morocco’s King Hassan, Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres. The summit aimed to stop Hamas’ bombing campaign and save Peres from electoral defeat to Netanyahu. […]

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Khaled Amayreh, a Hebron-based writer who tends to sympathize with Hamas and reflect their point of view and always provides sage analysis, has a nice overview of the problems facing the Fayad government going forward, including the daunting task of reigning in the many rogue Fatah militias in the West Bank. You can read the […]

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Heads have started rolling after Gaza debacle as Abbas dismisses Rashid Abu Shibak as head of the Preventative Security service and ordered the Palestinian national security council dissolved. Mohammad Dahlan’s job looks secure. Shibak, Dahlan, and Samir Masharawi, another powerful Fatah leader in Gaza, were all out of Gaza in the runup to and during […]

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I spent the last two days running around doing interviews in the West Bank, in Ramallah, Hebron and Nablus. Hamas has definitely gone to ground and seems to be on the run, more so in the north than in the south. In the village of Shiyoukh, south of Hebron, the Hamas dominated town council is […]

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There’s been some buzz about the latest poll from the Ramallah-based Near East Consulting:
Who do Palestinians trust more?
Abbas: 62% up from 59% in May.
Haniya: 38% down from 41% in May.

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I spoke with a new minister in Abbas’ emergency government of technocrats yesterday. Transportation Minister Mashhour Abu Daka is a balding and bespectacled mechanical engineer with a PhD from the Imperial College in London. Like most of the newly appointed government in Ramallah he is apolitical and little known to most Palestinians.
The thrust of […]

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The Army of Islam and other fringe radical groups in Gaza are reportedly seizing on Hamas’ rise to power to exploit their own agendas. Last week there was an attack on a church school in Gaza City in which the attackers decapitated Jesus on the crucifix, burnt icons, and looted computers. Today there were reports […]

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Seven thousand policemen, and 20 arrested rioters later, the Jerusalem gay pride parade went off (mostly) without a hitch today and I thought it was a good opportunity to publish this important picture, by my friend Eyal Dor-Ofer, about social struggle in Israel.

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