Yehuda Brown, a former Israeli soldier turned artist known as The White Soldier, performed in central Jerusalem as Israelis observed two minutes of silence across the country to remember some 23,000 fallen soldiers and victims of terrorist attacks. (Hat tip to BBC news).
The siren seemed to summon this ghost. These fallen are not really equivalent to shaheed, we are told.
The grandmother of 29-year-old wounded Palestinian Hana Mabhoh cares for her as she lies in the bed in the Kamal Adwan hospital, December 31, 2008, in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip. Mabhoh was injured when an Israeli shell struck a government building where she was working in Gaza city. (Photo by Abid Katib/Getty Images for CARE International)
Once again, precious fuel is spared to crank up the family's mini-generator, Safa is able to send dispatches from Gaza City to Israelity Bites and other friends. There's a vile sense of deja vu about this invasion, recalling the military campaigns in 2006. One crucial difference is that international journalists are no longer allowed to enter the Strip, as they could back then, so witnesses are fewer. Without brave writers like Safa, all of us would be "Eyeless in Gaza". Already, we see that most Palestinian residents there have "No Exit." While researching psychological treatment programs for child victims of post-traumantic stress syndrome last year, Izzy spoke to many north Gazan families who had been herded into one room by Israeli army tank crews and snipers who took over their homes during incursions. Tearful women told me how soldiers had advanced across the neighbourhood, using teenage Gazan boys as shields. And for survivors, the ultimate indignity was having to pick up the squalid waste after the Israeli soldiers left. These IDF snipers in diapers were so vigilant that they did not abandon their rifle scopes long enough to take a dump. War is shit.
Safa tells us:
Last night (January 3rd), we realized that if there is any truth to Israeli WAR minister, Ehud Barak's words, it's that this invasion will be a long one. At approximately 9:15 pm local time Israeli Forces entered the strip from 3 Locations. From the east of Gaza city and the northern town of Jabalia and Beit Lahia, tanks rolled into the Palestinian residential areas while Israeli F16 created a cover from the sky. At the same time, Israeli tanks and infantry troops entered Rafah from the south east, while tanks shelling and artillery fire rained on the Mintar area of Gaza city. Israeli warships were simultaneously barraging Gaza city from the sea. The entire strip was surrounded and being heavily pounded by Israeli missiles and artillery fire.
Many people were not even aware that the invasion had begun, thinking the whole time that Israel had intensified its air raids. The city of Gaza has been without power for a few days now and radio batteries were running out. Almost all the residents of Gaza city have been confined to their homes for over a week and all of the stores have been closed. People rely mostly on word of mouth to get the news, a very small few are lucky enough to have generators and leftover fuel.
These attacks, this war is being waged against an unarmed civilian population at the most desperate and bleak time of times. Israel has been systematically and indiscriminately using its most advanced of military capabilities against a defenseless population, 3 quarters of which is women and children for 8 days prior to the invasion. People are weak, physically and morally, and dealing with a great amount of loss and frustration. This is to speak nothing of the 18 month siege that Gaza is currently barely able to hold up under.
For the past few days we have seen over ten mosques, holy places of worship, bombed, frequently while people were praying inside. We have seen children being pulled out from under the rubble looking like there was not a single bone unbroken in their small bodies. We have seen hospitals overflowing with bloody corpses and people taking their last breaths. We have seen friends on television being resuscitated at sites of Israeli air raids. We have seen entire families swept of the face of the earth in one blow, and we have seen our streets, homes, neighborhoods become unrecognizable ruins from the amount of destruction.
And yet Israel continues to blatantly and insistently affirm that the offensive is not aimed at the civilians and that its war is against political and military wings of Hamas. Meanwhile we, the people of Gaza, are collectively experiencing a kind of terror and violence no human being should ever endure One almost begins to suspect that the Israeli WAR forces are acting on a delusion that they created and that they have come to believe. Otherwise, they would have expected what would happen during their invasion of the Strip. Then again, it came as a surprise (a pleasant one) even to us, and that, should we have been in a right state of mind, we would have undoubtedly anticipated
Israel has come into our homes, is fighting us in our streets and is expressing its brutality against us in full force. How do we react?
All Palestinian factions have united and are out facing the enemy, using all the military capabilities that they collectively have. Although these capabilities are incomparable to the military strength exerted by Israel, yet it has made us more certain than ever that Palestinians will fight to the very end to protect their own. It has shown us that resistance, courage and love are an integral part of the Palestinian identity that will never change despite all the hardships we endure. It has given us a moral boost, which comes at a time when we need it most.
The Abu Ali Mustafa brigades, of The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Alquds brigades of the Islamic Jihad movement. The Al qassam brigades of the Hamas movement. The Salah el Din Brigades of the Popular Resistance Committees, Al Aqsa Martyrs brigades of Fatah, all have come together as one united front and at a high, almost affirmed risk of peril are out protecting our streets and our homes, all ready to die if that means preventing the death of one more helpless child. We are united and we have accepted our fate recurrently, but Gaza's almost 80% refugees will NOT be massacred and displaced yet again by people from the outside guided by tyranny and greed.
There are estimations out there as to the collective count of the united military resistance fighters from the Palestinian factions, the number is thought to be a few thousand. The Israeli troops within and around Gaza at this moment are approximately 33 thousand, with more reservists being called in within the next day. The disparity is not only in troop numbers however. The Israeli forces are supported by the Israeli Navy and the Israeli air force. The ground forces include artillery, tanks, engineering forces and intelligence agency support. The Israeli soldiers are equipped with the most modern weaponry and intelligence devices.
Palestinian fighters, on the other hand, have to make do with their home made projectiles and a bare minimum of basic weaponry in order to defend themselves and their people against the Israeli military might.
At the moment, and in the midst of the aggression it is hard to make sense of the current situation or make future predictions. It's hard to come to grips with the numbers and the extent of our losses. It's hard even to remember a time when basic necessities such as food, water, warmth and daylight weren't a luxury. At this point, bare human instinct is at work, the need to protect your loved ones, the need to ensure shelter and the instinct of fight or flight. We have fled for too long, Gaza is our last refuge and our home after we were displaced from what is now called Israel. All this happened but 60 years ago. What more could they want? We have nowhere left to go. Now is a time when all forms of resistance are legitimate. They have disregarded every single international law there is. So now is the time to fight.
The A-plant in Dimona (above) is secure.
A suicide bomber on Monday morning blew himself up in the southern town that houses Israel's secretive nuclear reactor, killing an Israeli woman and wounding seven other people, Israeli authorities said. Police said they killed a second attacker before he had a chance to detonate his explosives belt. Both of the perpetrators were killed and there was no damage to the reactor, which was miles from the blast.
It was the first suicide attack in Israel in a year, and officials were investigating whether the attackers came in through Egypt after Palestinian militants breached the Gaza-Egypt border last month, according to the Associated Press.
An offshoot of moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement claimed responsibility, complicating recently renewed peace efforts. The attackers, they said, came from the West Bank, though the claim could not immediately be verified.
Hours after the suicide bombing, Israeli aircraft struck a car in the northern Gaza Strip, killing a top wanted man.
Israeli government officials dismissed the notion that the heavily guarded Dimona nuclear reactor was the suicide attackers' target. The explosion took place in a shopping area about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the reactor site.
«We heard a large explosion and people started to run. I saw pieces of flesh flying in the air,» a witness identified only by her first name, Revital, told Army Radio.
Ambulances and a large contingent of soldiers, rescue workers and police rushed to the scene of the bombing, the first in the working class town of 37,000.
Police said one attacker managed to detonate his explosives belt, but the second was shot dead by police before he could set off his bomb. A police bomb squad was on the scene defusing the explosives.
Dr. Baruch Mandelzweig said he was at his clinic nearby when he heard the blast. He and his nurses rushed out to the street to see what had happened, and saw body parts «strewn around everywhere.
They spotted a critically injured man whose head was moving, and began to treat him before realizing he was the second attacker.
«We saw an explosive belt,» he said. «We ran away,» and later we heard he had been shot, Mandelzweig said.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said, «the terror organizations have shown again who they are and what they are.
«Their goal was and continues to be to kill Israeli citizens in their homes and their schools and in their shopping centers,» he added. «Israel will continue to fight against this murderous terror.
Shortly after the attack, Israeli aircraft killed a senior commander in the Hamas-affiliated Popular Resistance Committees in the Gaza Strip, the group said. The military confirmed an attack against a PRC activist in Beit Lahiya, a town Palestinian militants frequently use to fire rockets into southern Israel.
At Sunday's Cabinet meeting, Israeli security chiefs warned that because of the anarchy on the Gaza-Egypt frontier, Palestinian militants might enter Israel through Gaza's Sinai desert to attack a civilian Israeli target, a government official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the Cabinet meeting was closed.
Southern Israel has been on alert against militant attacks since the Gaza Strip's Islamic Hamas rulers breached the border with Egypt on Jan. 23. Egypt managed to reseal the border only on Sunday.
The breach made Israel's Negev desert, where Dimona is located, more vulnerable to penetration by Palestinian militants who could enter through Egypt's porous border. Dimona is about 60 kilometers (40 miles) northeast of Egypt.
In an e-mail to The Associated Press, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, a Fatah offshoot, said it sent attackers from the West Bank town of Ramallah, Abbas' base, to carry out the «heroic martyrdom bombing in Dimona.
The faction said it carried out the attack with the small Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Although Abbas' government has claimed to have dismantled Al Aqsa forces in the West Bank, a group spokesman, Abu Fouad, said Monday that «nobody has given up weapons.
The bombing came at a critical juncture. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators relaunched peace talks after a seven-year break just two months ago, and Israel has made it clear it won't implement any accord until militant groups in the West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza are disarmed.
Abbas' office denounced the attack. But it denied Al Aqsa was involved and linked the bombing to an Israeli raid in the West Bank that killed two Islamic Jihad militants before dawn Monday.
«The Palestinian Authority expresses its full condemnation of the Israeli operation in the northern West Bank and it condemns the attack in the commercial center in the city of Dimona, which targeted Israeli civilians,» his office said.
«Fatah has confirmed that the Al Aqsa Brigades has nothing to do with this attack,» it added, saying that a «well known group opposed to the peace process» was responsible. It did not elaborate.
In the southern Gaza town of Rafah, gunmen fired their weapons into the air to celebrate the bombing.
Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha said he did not know whether his group was involved, but praised the attack. He also rejected suggestions that the bombing would hurt Hamas' chances of reopening the border with Egypt.
«The suicide bombings were there before the closures and the resistance used every opportunity to make these glorious acts,» he said. «They show the Palestinians can respond to the enemy and their crimes.
The previous suicide bombing in Israel occurred on Jan. 29, 2007, when a Palestinian attacker entered Israel from Egypt, killing three Israelis at a bakery in the southern Israeli city of Eilat.
After Israeli-Palestinian peace talks broke down in 2000, Palestinian militants killed hundreds of people in dozens of suicide bombings.
Dimona is home to Israel's nuclear research center, and it is widely believed that atomic weapons were developed at the plant. Israel neither admits nor denies having nuclear arms.
The anti-drug abuse lobby here has come up with a disturbing spot, a mock suicide bomber video in which a slack-eyed Israeli druggie about to get wasted tells his mother "Don't worry, Mom. I am going to heaven."
Most broadcasters are refusing to air it because they feel it is in such bad taste. The heavy-handed public service ad is shot with all the stylistic hallmarks of a Palestinian suicide bomber's martyr video, down to the angle of the bottle, gripped like a gun.
Such shaheedi tapes and posters, as seen here, get plastered all over Gaza and the West Bank. 
For many, they are a visceral reminder of the second Al Aqsa intifada campaign, which targetted Israelis between 2000-2005. Around 430 Israeli civilians died in blasts on buses or in cafes, and 83 IDF troops died inside Israel. (Contrast this with the more than 3000 Palestinians killed by the IDF in Gaza or the West Bank during the same period, according to statistics from the Israeli NGO Bt'selem)
The anti-drug authority's advertisement ran in Maariv and Yedioth, big-circulation newspapers in Hebrew. It reads: "The hero Omer Kendel, 16 years old, mixed vodka and ecstasy and went to blow himself up at a party in Tel Aviv." Along the bottom, in a curly font that imitates Arab calligraphy, it says "Drugs and alcohol taken together is suicide," and lists a crisis phone number.
The video is even more tasteless. "My name is Omer Kendel, 16-year-old from Ra'anana," the boys says. "I bid goodbye to my parents Vered and Shmuel and my sister Karen and go to a party in Tel Aviv. There's only one way to be truly free: To get drunk, take drugs, get hammered. Don't cry, mother, I'm going to heaven."
At least seven young Israeli teenagers have died this year from a lethal hard liquor/soft drug combination and authorities want kids to heed the government warnings. Haim Messing, who directs Israel's anti-Drug Authority, said:
"None of the campaigns we've done in the past proved effective. We understand this is a difficult clip but if we save someone – we did our job. We were too subtle in the past, today's youth is not interested in stories and lectures. I don't care if they'll be angry at me."
It's not every day that a wanted terrorist is arrested en flagrante delicto while parked in his jeep near Arafat's graveside, making love and not war. He had been on the run for seven years.
Israeli forces in Ramallah countered little resistance when they approached the jeep of Khaled Shawish, a top Fatah militant caught in a compromising position, Aaron Klein reports on WorldNetDaily.
Israelis arrested the elusive militant in the West Bank, just a couple hundred feet from PLO leader Yasser Arafat's grave. Khaled Shawish, currently an officer in the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' presidential guard unit, was hauled off by the undercover cops and charged for involvement in the murders of at least 8 Israelis. Shawish happens to be the Ramallah chief of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and is thought to be behind the West Bank ambush in December 2000 that killed Israeli ultra-nationalist leader Benjamin Kahane and Kahane's wife, Talya, and injured their five daughters, the grandchildren of Rabbi Meir Kahane. He also is charged with helping implement several suicide bomb attacks inside Jerusalem, and, despite his injuries, is believed to be one of the top tacticians for The Brigades-- the "military wing" of Abbas's Fatah party.
Several years ago Shawish was struck by a bullet during a faceoff with the Israel Defense Forces and, although he escaped, he has been confined to a wheelchair. But he is still able to get behind a steering wheel and apparently has maintained his sex drive, too.
Klein writes piquantly:
According to Israeli security officials and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades sources in Ramallah, Shawish was arrested after the Israeli police stormed his jeep, which was parked in a lot outside the Muqata, about 200 feet from Arafat's grave. The sources said at the time of his arrest, Shawish was having intercourse in the back seat of his jeep with a Palestinian woman, who...was not his wife.
The Brigades, founded by Arafat, largely considers the late PLO leader's resting place to be a sacred site.
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