Gaza wall

With Israel having blocked supplies from reaching the Gaza Strip,the desparate Palestinians, starved for essential food supplies, medicines and fuel tore down the Gaza wall separating Gaza and the Egyptian town of Rafah, by blasts and with bulldozers.Some 200,000 Palestinians poured out of Gaza and into Egypt through this breach. The Egyptian police patrol were supposedly overwhelmed after an initial retaliation.

Palestinians walked unhindered over the toppled metal plates that once made up the border wall, carrying goats, chickens and crates of Coke. There were some who even brought back televisions,car tires, and even a motorcycle!

The Guardian has a short write up on the walled barrier which is seven miles in length,eight to nine feet high and made of corrugated sheet metal, with short stretches of concrete blocks and of barbed wire.

Operation Clear Skies

A platoon of ten thousand cops are to guard President George Bush on his historic visit to Isreal tomorrow. It will be the first visit by a US president in more than a decade. The huge security exercise has been aptly named Operation Clear Skies.

So, what exactly is the purpose of this visit? Is he going to broker a deal between the increasingly isolated Fatah and Israel or peace between the katyusha-firing Lebanese Hezbollah and the Israelis? No one is sure.

Meanwhile Iran has denied that five Iranian boats made aggressive manoeuvers and showed hostile intent against three U.S. Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping route in the Gulf. It is also reported that the Iranian vessels dropped small white boxes into the water.

Israel - Big on Environmental Pollution

Coastal waters of Israel is supposed to be one of the worst polluted water bodies of the world. Heavy metals and pesticides are discharged into the sea under government licenses and the company responsible for the sewage of the area is the biggest polluter in the eastern Mediterranean.

Of the heavy metals and pesticides discharged into the sea under government licenses, are 130 tons of pesticides, 5 tons of arsenic, 1,300 tons of ammonia and a ton of cyanide.

The most recent United Nations report on the Mediterranean ranked the greater Tel Aviv area as one of the 10 most polluting urban centers in the Mediterranean.

Seems like the country is busy only with its security concerns.

Gaza economy collapsing

War and strife has brought no one anything other than misery. And Palestine history has been one long period of suffering for its citizenry. With Fatah and Hamas at each others' throat, the general populace of Gaza, whose problems are only escalating with Isreal pushing in their might, are a harried lot.

Israel has completely closed commercial and travel crossings following the Hamas-dominated government's takeover of the Gaza Strip in June.This closure of the Rafah crossing has all but stopped the trade supplies from entering Gaza strip.The economic siege has resulted in high prices and very low incomes. And rising unemployment is not helping the cause.With no natural resources and all industries paralyzed by Israel's closures,the population has become increasingly dependant on the UN and other foreign agencies' handouts.

Secret Israeli nuclear compound

The Israelis are intolerant of Iran's growing nuclear capabilities. But if what this video shows is true, then Israel is the one that its neighbours have to be worried about. It details a huge nuclear compound with multiple facilities for building atomic and thermo-nuclear bombs. According to the video, Israel has been producing around 10 atom bombs a year from a long time now.

Mordechai Vanunu, who is mentioned in the video as the one providing the information, is an Israeli former nuclear technician who was convicted of treason as he revealed details of Israel's nuclear weapons programme to the British press in 1986.He spent 18 years in prison and was released in 2004 and since then he has been briefly arrested several times for multiple violations of restrictions placed by the Israeli Government,including giving various interviews to foreign journalists and attempting to leave Israel. In July 2007, Vanunu was sentenced to a further six months imprisonment for speaking to foreigners and travelling to Bethlehem.

CNN interviews Hamas Leader

Hamas is now ruling in Gaza strip after a showdown with Fatah,the Palestinian political party which runs the West Bank. Hamas' leader, Khaled Meshaal lives in hiding in Damascus, Syria. CNN correspondents interviewed him in his secret hideout .

Meshaal is a complicated, calculating man. To his people, he is seen as a humanitarian and as the leader of Hamas. To Israel, the United States and a list of other nations, he is seen as a terrorist.

Next month will mark the 10-year anniversary of an assassination attempt on Meshaal's life by the Israeli intelligence organization Mossad.

While Meshaal was living in Jordan in 1997, Mossad agents breached the building in which he was sleeping. They injected poison into his ear. The Jordanian authorities quickly discovered what had happened and through pressure from both the Jordanian king and some U.S. officials, Israel eventually provided Meshaal with the antidote he needed to survive.

"I am 51 years old, and the past 10 years have been a gift from above," he told CNN.

Long Distance Praying !

The prayer supplications that fill the air in Israel's holy sites are coming not just from those standing at the Western wall,the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth and other shrines but from worshippers thousands of miles away.
A unique Prayer Delivery Service enables one to send recorded audio and video prayers across to the Holy Land. Send your prayer for Health, matchmaking and livelihood-directly to holy sites in Israel- claims this unique Israeli startup called POIP(Pray Over Internet Protocol)
The company sells phone cards that let customers record personal prayers in any language, which are then transmitted in their own voice to the site of their choice (there are at present eight Jewish and Christian holy sites selected by the site)via embedded webcams and Internet phone speakers. Visitors to POIP's site can also watch live video streams of the various sites reports The Wall Street Journal.
Got to hand it to the Israelis who come up with novel ways of making money.As long as there are suckers who go in for such things, the world is full of such proselytisers.