Violence at Gaza protest in Yemen
UPDATED ON:
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
19:11 Mecca time, 16:11 GMT
Demonstrators in Beirut, Lebanon – angry over Egypt’s response to Israel’s raids on Gaza – attacked the Egyptian embassy, throwing stones before police used tear gas to disperse them.
Protests have also been held outside the Egyptian embassy in Amman, the capital of Jordan.
Egypt has come under heavy criticism from Arab and Muslim countries over its refusal to re-open its border crossing with the Gaza Strip at Rafah over the past year, thereby aiding Israel’s blockade of the territory.
Mubarak announced on Egyptian television on Tuesday that the Rafah crossing will not be fully re-opened until Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, regains authority in the territory.
Spokesman: Egypt “displeased” with consulate attack in Yemen
Ahmadinejad, Gul emphasize complete reopening of Rafah border crossing
Egypt’s National Powers Denounce Gaza Holocaust
Updated @1324 on 30/12/2008
Before Our Very Eyes
Israel’s Attempted Endgame in Gaza
By Jennifer Loewenstein, CounterPunch, 29 December 2008
From the 7th floor of his high-rise apartment building looking out over Gaza City on Saturday night, S. describes the view as “a sea of blackness”. The familiar twinkling of lights that defines the contours of a city after dark is missing, as if the place itself had been erased from the earth. Without electricity, without cooking gas or automobile fuel; without heat to warm the winter-chilled flats across this stretch of land, or generators to back up the hospitals and clinics; without supplies for schools and universities, for personal and collective health and hygiene, or for repairing any part of this broken down hovel of a strip; without water to drink or cook with or bathe in, without reading lamps and, lately, without the candles or other substitutes used for light, people are making haste to adjust yet again to the latest set of conditions imposed upon them as the US-backed siege of Gaza closes in on another dying December day.
Their resilience is inspirational but painful. Tomorrow S. will head down to Rafah, to the border city, where kerosene is still available albeit for quadruple the normal price –or more: A system of nearly 800 smuggling tunnels running from Rafah, Gaza to Rafah, Egypt, controlled by a few savvy black-marketeer families and up to now tacitly supported by Israel, appears to be nearing collapse as well as everything else. Rumors of an Israeli Air Force strike that would doom the last remaining big business venture in the Strip have helped shut them down, even the ones licensed by the Hamas government, which got its share of goods for the best prices as the once-illegal smuggling industry turned for a brief period of time into Gaza’s only reliable all-purpose supply-line. On Sunday the rumors caved in on the tunnels as bulldozers and bomber jets blasted them flat. Now the supply line has been cut, the siege persists, the US condemns Hamas, refusing to ask for Israeli restraint. In Rafah, the demise of the tunnels – like the recently re-fortified border closure on the Egyptian side of the Crossing—has an ominous finality about it that should give us pause before we turn our faces away.