It is only a beginning -- but it could open up a world of possibilities.
Last week's executive orders to close Guantánamo and end the use of torture were remarkable first steps towards a fundamentally different era for human rights here in our country and across the globe.
So, I want to stop and reflect with you about what's next -- what our vision for progress should be and what our efforts to advance human rights in this new climate have to entail. But, before looking forward with you, I want to express my deep appreciation for all you have done to stand up for human rights -- even at moments when others were all too willing to cast them aside.
Your actions, your persistence and your commitment helped shine a light on Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, waterboarding, secret CIA prisons and all the other human rights outrages of the last eight years. And, even when we stood little chance of immediate progress in ending those abuses, you understood your responsibility to speak out.
Now, we are in a different situation -- one where how quickly we act, how clearly we speak, and how vigorously we organize can result in substantial progress. Indeed, working together, we can make this a watershed year for the global human rights movement.
You and I have to approach the weeks ahead with the knowledge that our actions can change our country and our world.
Here’s what it will take to make this a year of dramatic progress on human rights:
We have to completely dismantle the ugly worldwide system of abuse constructed by our own government. The steps taken so far are only a beginning. Together, we need to make sure that as quickly as possible those who suffer at Guantánamo either receive a fair trial or are released. We need to make sure those individuals held in other parts of the world receive the same. And we need to create a mechanism to make sure the whole truth of what's been done in our name is known, that those responsible are held accountable.
We have to act to protect human rights all across the globe. People in every corner of the world are counting on Amnesty to act decisively in 2009. That means urging the passage of historic legislation to stop violence against women and end capital punishment around the world. It means pressing for more effective action to end the killing and displacement in Darfur, the Congo, Gaza and many other places. It means fighting against the unjust detention and other abuses directed against immigrants. And it calls on us to campaign for and win the release of prisoners of conscience and stop unfair trials and torture around the world.
We have to look to the future of the human rights movement. As a leader in the global effort to sustain and expand human rights, Amnesty must also work to broaden people’s understanding of human rights. That means exposing the global crisis in maternal mortality that finds its roots in global injustice. It means exposing and fighting the human rights violations that cause and deepen poverty. And it means building and strengthening a global human rights movement strong, robust and diverse enough to meet the most pressing challenges of the 21st century.
I am convinced that we can take on and meet these challenges, because long before “yes, we can” Amnesty supporters knew we could. Our movement is based on a powerful idea that is, once again, inspiring and challenging the world: the belief that individuals taking action and reaching out to protect one another can change the world. Indeed it is all that ever has really changed the world.
Let’s commit ourselves right now to moving forward to achieve all that is within our reach in 2009.
Sincerely,
Larry Cox
Executive Director, Amnesty International
If you are not already a part of the Amnesty International Action Network Check them out HERE!!
31 January 2009
27 January 2009
Obama Signals New Tone in Relations With Islamic World
January 28, 2009
By ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/world/middleeast/28arabiya.html?_r=1&hp
PARIS — In an interview with one of the Middle East’s major broadcasters, President Barack Obama struck a conciliatory tone toward the Islamic world, saying he wanted to persuade Muslims that “the Americans are not your enemy.” He also said “the moment is ripe” for negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
The interview with Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language news channel based in Dubai, signaled a shift — in style and manner at least — from the Bush administration, offering what he depicted as a new readiness to listen rather than dictate.
It was Mr. Obama’s first televised interview from the White House and the first with any foreign news outlet.
In a transcript published on Al Arabiya’s English language Web site, Mr. Obama said it is his job “to communicate to the Muslim world that the Americans are not your enemy.”
He added that “we sometimes make mistakes,” but said that America was not born as a colonial power and that he hoped for a restoration of “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.”
Mr. Obama spoke as his special Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell, arrived in Egypt to begin an eight-day tour that will include stops in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France and Britain. In Egypt, Mr. Mitchell planned to meet President Hosni Mubarak.
In discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Obama told Al Arabiya that “the most important thing is for the United States to get engaged right away.” He said that he told Mr. Mitchell to “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”
“Ultimately, we cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what’s best for them. They’re going to have to make some decisions,” Mr. Obama said. “But I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. And that, instead, it’s time to return to the negotiating table.”
Several hours after he spoke on Monday night, an explosion on the Israel-Gaza border killed an Israeli soldier and threatened new violence. The war in Gaza, which lasted three weeks, had stopped 10 days ago when both sides declared unilateral cease fires.
Mr. Obama said Israel “will not stop being a strong ally of the United States and I will continue to believe that Israel’s security is paramount. But I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace. They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side.”
He also said that although he would not put a time frame on it, he believed it was “possible for us to see a Palestinian state.” He described the state as one “that allows freedom of movement for its people, that allows for trade with other countries, that allows the creation of businesses and commerce so that people have a better life.”
But he also said the Israel-Palestine conflict should not be seen in isolation. “I do think it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what’s happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Mr. Obama said.
He spoke at length about America’s future relationship with the Muslim world, saying his “job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives.”
He drew a distinction between “extremist organizations” committed to violence and “people who may disagree with my administration and certain actions, or may have a particular viewpoint in terms of how their countries should develop.”
“We can have legitimate disagreements but still be respectful. I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down,” he said. “But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.”
He also said it was “important for us to be willing to talk to Iran, to express very clearly where our differences are, but where there are potential avenues for progress.”
“As I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us,” he said.
He was not asked whether he would continue the policy of former President George Bush in refusing to exclude military action in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
By ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/world/middleeast/28arabiya.html?_r=1&hp
PARIS — In an interview with one of the Middle East’s major broadcasters, President Barack Obama struck a conciliatory tone toward the Islamic world, saying he wanted to persuade Muslims that “the Americans are not your enemy.” He also said “the moment is ripe” for negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
The interview with Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language news channel based in Dubai, signaled a shift — in style and manner at least — from the Bush administration, offering what he depicted as a new readiness to listen rather than dictate.
It was Mr. Obama’s first televised interview from the White House and the first with any foreign news outlet.
In a transcript published on Al Arabiya’s English language Web site, Mr. Obama said it is his job “to communicate to the Muslim world that the Americans are not your enemy.”
He added that “we sometimes make mistakes,” but said that America was not born as a colonial power and that he hoped for a restoration of “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.”
Mr. Obama spoke as his special Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell, arrived in Egypt to begin an eight-day tour that will include stops in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France and Britain. In Egypt, Mr. Mitchell planned to meet President Hosni Mubarak.
In discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Obama told Al Arabiya that “the most important thing is for the United States to get engaged right away.” He said that he told Mr. Mitchell to “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”
“Ultimately, we cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what’s best for them. They’re going to have to make some decisions,” Mr. Obama said. “But I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. And that, instead, it’s time to return to the negotiating table.”
Several hours after he spoke on Monday night, an explosion on the Israel-Gaza border killed an Israeli soldier and threatened new violence. The war in Gaza, which lasted three weeks, had stopped 10 days ago when both sides declared unilateral cease fires.
Mr. Obama said Israel “will not stop being a strong ally of the United States and I will continue to believe that Israel’s security is paramount. But I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace. They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side.”
He also said that although he would not put a time frame on it, he believed it was “possible for us to see a Palestinian state.” He described the state as one “that allows freedom of movement for its people, that allows for trade with other countries, that allows the creation of businesses and commerce so that people have a better life.”
But he also said the Israel-Palestine conflict should not be seen in isolation. “I do think it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what’s happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Mr. Obama said.
He spoke at length about America’s future relationship with the Muslim world, saying his “job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives.”
He drew a distinction between “extremist organizations” committed to violence and “people who may disagree with my administration and certain actions, or may have a particular viewpoint in terms of how their countries should develop.”
“We can have legitimate disagreements but still be respectful. I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down,” he said. “But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.”
He also said it was “important for us to be willing to talk to Iran, to express very clearly where our differences are, but where there are potential avenues for progress.”
“As I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us,” he said.
He was not asked whether he would continue the policy of former President George Bush in refusing to exclude military action in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
24 January 2009
Breaking News: Repeal of Global Gag Rule!!
NOW Cheers Repeal of Global Gag Rule
As First Step toward Worldwide Reproductive Justice
January 23, 2009
"President Obama took the side of justice today," said NOW President Kim Gandy. "For eight years the Global Gag Rule has forced international family planning organizations to make an impossible choice between providing comprehensive reproductive health care, and receiving funds that enable them to help women in need. Women around the world have died as a result of this heartless policy."
President Ronald Reagan first instituted the rule, officially known as the Mexico City Policy, in 1984. The policy requires that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in other countries agree to strict limitations--including limits on how they can spend their own locally raised funds--before they can receive desperately needed U.S. family planning funds. These restrictive terms, which even limit the organizations' free speech rights, inspired the policy's more commonly-known name, the Global Gag Rule. Under the rule, NGOs are barred from performing or referring for abortion, even with their own home country's funds, and are prohibited from even discussing abortion with patients or with policymakers. President Bill Clinton reversed the policy at the beginning of his first term, a victory that lasted eight years until President George W. Bush reinstated the order in 2001.
"Women around the world deserve access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care services," said Gandy. "The Global Gag Rule has prevented that access for countless women over the past eight years. It is long past time for the government to untie the hands of NGOs, so they can fully serve women clients and receive the support they need."
"This is a strong start for President Obama, assuring the women of the U.S. and the women of the world that their health care needs will not be ignored or used as a political football by this administration. We look forward to additional progress from our new president, including full restoration of U.S. aid to the United Nations Population Fund, as well as revocation of the Department of Health and Human Services' midnight 'conscience' rule that further limits women's health care access," said Gandy.
As First Step toward Worldwide Reproductive Justice
January 23, 2009
"President Obama took the side of justice today," said NOW President Kim Gandy. "For eight years the Global Gag Rule has forced international family planning organizations to make an impossible choice between providing comprehensive reproductive health care, and receiving funds that enable them to help women in need. Women around the world have died as a result of this heartless policy."
President Ronald Reagan first instituted the rule, officially known as the Mexico City Policy, in 1984. The policy requires that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in other countries agree to strict limitations--including limits on how they can spend their own locally raised funds--before they can receive desperately needed U.S. family planning funds. These restrictive terms, which even limit the organizations' free speech rights, inspired the policy's more commonly-known name, the Global Gag Rule. Under the rule, NGOs are barred from performing or referring for abortion, even with their own home country's funds, and are prohibited from even discussing abortion with patients or with policymakers. President Bill Clinton reversed the policy at the beginning of his first term, a victory that lasted eight years until President George W. Bush reinstated the order in 2001.
"Women around the world deserve access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care services," said Gandy. "The Global Gag Rule has prevented that access for countless women over the past eight years. It is long past time for the government to untie the hands of NGOs, so they can fully serve women clients and receive the support they need."
"This is a strong start for President Obama, assuring the women of the U.S. and the women of the world that their health care needs will not be ignored or used as a political football by this administration. We look forward to additional progress from our new president, including full restoration of U.S. aid to the United Nations Population Fund, as well as revocation of the Department of Health and Human Services' midnight 'conscience' rule that further limits women's health care access," said Gandy.
23 January 2009
Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 (S. 181) PASSED!!
The Senate tonight passed by a strong majority the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 (S. 181) after defeating a series of Republican hostile amendments. The Senate floor debate for the Act was led by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Dean of the women Senators, for Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chair Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) after Majority Leader Senator Reid (D-NV) navigated the bill to the floor.
"President Obama and the Democratic Congress are keeping their pledge to women and all workers to reverse the Supreme Court decision that gutted the right of employees to fight wage discrimination," said Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority. "We're on a roll to rebuilding women's rights and civil rights taken away during the Bush era."
The Senate Act, which has already passed the House in a version coupled with the Paycheck Fairness Act, will go back to the House as a single bill. The House is expected to pass the Senate bill on Tuesday. President Obama is expected to sign it into law shortly thereafter. In almost straight party line votes the Senate kept the pledge of President Obama to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act almost immediately after being sworn in.
Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson's killer amendment was defeated 55-40 in a nearly straight party vote with Democrats voting against it - only Republican Olympia (ME) voted with Democrats. Several other debilitating Republican amendments also went down to defeat.
The Ledbetter Act corrects the Roberts Supreme Court decision that gutted the ability of women workers to sue for wage discrimination. The Act passed helps not only women, but all workers who are victims of wage discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, national origin, age, or disability.
"President Obama and the Democratic Congress are keeping their pledge to women and all workers to reverse the Supreme Court decision that gutted the right of employees to fight wage discrimination," said Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority. "We're on a roll to rebuilding women's rights and civil rights taken away during the Bush era."
The Senate Act, which has already passed the House in a version coupled with the Paycheck Fairness Act, will go back to the House as a single bill. The House is expected to pass the Senate bill on Tuesday. President Obama is expected to sign it into law shortly thereafter. In almost straight party line votes the Senate kept the pledge of President Obama to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act almost immediately after being sworn in.
Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson's killer amendment was defeated 55-40 in a nearly straight party vote with Democrats voting against it - only Republican Olympia (ME) voted with Democrats. Several other debilitating Republican amendments also went down to defeat.
The Ledbetter Act corrects the Roberts Supreme Court decision that gutted the ability of women workers to sue for wage discrimination. The Act passed helps not only women, but all workers who are victims of wage discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, national origin, age, or disability.
19 January 2009
Israel Continues Gaza Withdrawal as Cease-Fire Holds
January 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/world/middleeast/20mideast.html
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — Israeli troops and tanks continued to leave Gaza on Monday as a fragile cease-fire opened the way for intensified international efforts to build a more durable peace.
Small skirmishes broke out on Sunday but Gaza was largely quiet after Israel, then Hamas, announced unilateral cease-fires, ending a devastating 22-day battle in which more than 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died. Some news reports said Israeli forces planned to complete their withdrawal in time for the inauguration on Tuesday of Barack Obama as president of the United States.
But an Israeli military spokesman, speaking in return for customary anonymity, said there was “no official basis for that report but there’s a gradual thinning of troops going on.” He declined to discuss the timetable for the withdrawal to be completed. In Gaza, residents said police officers had returned to their posts and there had been no apparent renewal of hostilities.
European and Arab leaders met in Egypt, where they pledged support for rebuilding Gaza, and called for an end to arms smuggling, as Israel has demanded, and the opening of Gaza’s borders, as demanded by Hamas, the Islamic militant movement that rules Gaza.
Six European leaders went on to Jerusalem, where Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told them that Israel was interested in leaving Gaza “as quickly as possible,” as soon as the circumstances allowed. A military official confirmed on Sunday evening that a “gradual withdrawal” was under way.
When it embarked on the campaign, Israel said its main military objective was to significantly reduce the Hamas rocket fire out of Gaza and to fundamentally change the security situation in Israel’s south. The results so far seem inconclusive.
Palestinian militants in Gaza fired at least 19 rockets at southern Israel on Sunday, including some after Hamas and other militant groups had declared the cease-fire. Most landed without causing injury, but one struck a house in the Israeli port city of Ashdod, lightly wounding one woman, the military said.
Israel said it carried out three air strikes in Gaza on Sunday, one against a group of gunmen who opened fire on its forces and two against rocket-launching squads. There were conflicting reports of casualties, with either one man or one girl said to have been killed.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, cited a Gaza resident who had said that his brother, a farmer, was killed by Israeli fire.
In a speech broadcast Sunday night on Hamas’s Al Aqsa television, the Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, who has been in hiding for the past three weeks, claimed victory against Israel. He pledged to provide compensation to families who suffered damage during the war.
On Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called Khaled Meshal, Hamas’s senior exiled leader, in Damascus to tell him that: "Today is the beginning of victory and perseverance will complete the links of victory,” the Iranian IRNA news agency reported.
Gaza health officials increased the Palestinian death toll on Sunday to about 1,300 people, including 104 women and 410 children. The number is expected to rise as more bodies are found.
Israel’s cease-fire took effect early Sunday. About 12 hours later, Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza announced their immediate, weeklong cease-fire.
Hamas and its associates gave Israeli troops a week to leave the coastal enclave. Hamas had previously said it would continue fighting as long as Israeli forces remained.
Referring to the one-week deadline, Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Olmert, said Israel did not “take dictates from Hamas.” But he also insisted that Israel, which began an air offensive against Hamas on Dec. 27 and sent ground forces in a week later, had no desire to stay in Gaza for long. “If it is quiet, it will be easier for us to leave expeditiously,” he said.
Israeli military and political leaders have emphasized that Israel will respond to any attacks, but on Sunday the guns largely gave way to diplomacy.
Hamas demands the opening of the Gaza border crossings as a condition for a lasting truce. Israel’s primary condition is an internationally guaranteed mechanism to prevent weapons smuggling across Egypt’s border into Gaza.
At a summit meeting at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik on Sunday, European and moderate Arab leaders offered their support for both goals. “We are ready to offer technical, diplomatic, military and marine assistance to Israel and Egypt to stop the smuggling of weapons,” President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said at a news conference after the meeting.
Egypt also hopes to force Hamas into reconciliation talks with its rival, Fatah, as a means of unifying the Palestinian leadership and eventually returning Gaza to more moderate Palestinian Authority rule. Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, routing the Fatah forces loyal to the authority.
Hamas, which is classified by Israel, the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization, has been severely battered by the Israeli military operation in Gaza but remains in control.
From Sharm el Sheik, the French, British, German, Spanish, Italian and Czech leaders traveled to Jerusalem for dinner with Mr. Olmert, who told his guests that undermining Hamas rule in Gaza depended on strengthening the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, whose power is currently confined to the West Bank.
On Sunday, France also sent four planes carrying medical supplies, water treatment equipment and 80 aid workers including surgeons, doctors and bomb disposal experts to Egypt, the French Foreign Ministry said. The equipment and personnel were on standby on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border, ready to enter as soon as they could.
Meanwhile, competition for control of the reconstruction of Gaza seems to have begun.
Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, complained that European leaders and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, had proposed setting up an interim international committee to finance and organize the reconstruction. Such a committee would cut out Hamas, but it would also bypass the authority.
Robert F. Worth contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon,, and Ethan Bronner from Gaza City.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/world/middleeast/20mideast.html
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — Israeli troops and tanks continued to leave Gaza on Monday as a fragile cease-fire opened the way for intensified international efforts to build a more durable peace.
Small skirmishes broke out on Sunday but Gaza was largely quiet after Israel, then Hamas, announced unilateral cease-fires, ending a devastating 22-day battle in which more than 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died. Some news reports said Israeli forces planned to complete their withdrawal in time for the inauguration on Tuesday of Barack Obama as president of the United States.
But an Israeli military spokesman, speaking in return for customary anonymity, said there was “no official basis for that report but there’s a gradual thinning of troops going on.” He declined to discuss the timetable for the withdrawal to be completed. In Gaza, residents said police officers had returned to their posts and there had been no apparent renewal of hostilities.
European and Arab leaders met in Egypt, where they pledged support for rebuilding Gaza, and called for an end to arms smuggling, as Israel has demanded, and the opening of Gaza’s borders, as demanded by Hamas, the Islamic militant movement that rules Gaza.
Six European leaders went on to Jerusalem, where Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told them that Israel was interested in leaving Gaza “as quickly as possible,” as soon as the circumstances allowed. A military official confirmed on Sunday evening that a “gradual withdrawal” was under way.
When it embarked on the campaign, Israel said its main military objective was to significantly reduce the Hamas rocket fire out of Gaza and to fundamentally change the security situation in Israel’s south. The results so far seem inconclusive.
Palestinian militants in Gaza fired at least 19 rockets at southern Israel on Sunday, including some after Hamas and other militant groups had declared the cease-fire. Most landed without causing injury, but one struck a house in the Israeli port city of Ashdod, lightly wounding one woman, the military said.
Israel said it carried out three air strikes in Gaza on Sunday, one against a group of gunmen who opened fire on its forces and two against rocket-launching squads. There were conflicting reports of casualties, with either one man or one girl said to have been killed.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, cited a Gaza resident who had said that his brother, a farmer, was killed by Israeli fire.
In a speech broadcast Sunday night on Hamas’s Al Aqsa television, the Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, who has been in hiding for the past three weeks, claimed victory against Israel. He pledged to provide compensation to families who suffered damage during the war.
On Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called Khaled Meshal, Hamas’s senior exiled leader, in Damascus to tell him that: "Today is the beginning of victory and perseverance will complete the links of victory,” the Iranian IRNA news agency reported.
Gaza health officials increased the Palestinian death toll on Sunday to about 1,300 people, including 104 women and 410 children. The number is expected to rise as more bodies are found.
Israel’s cease-fire took effect early Sunday. About 12 hours later, Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza announced their immediate, weeklong cease-fire.
Hamas and its associates gave Israeli troops a week to leave the coastal enclave. Hamas had previously said it would continue fighting as long as Israeli forces remained.
Referring to the one-week deadline, Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Olmert, said Israel did not “take dictates from Hamas.” But he also insisted that Israel, which began an air offensive against Hamas on Dec. 27 and sent ground forces in a week later, had no desire to stay in Gaza for long. “If it is quiet, it will be easier for us to leave expeditiously,” he said.
Israeli military and political leaders have emphasized that Israel will respond to any attacks, but on Sunday the guns largely gave way to diplomacy.
Hamas demands the opening of the Gaza border crossings as a condition for a lasting truce. Israel’s primary condition is an internationally guaranteed mechanism to prevent weapons smuggling across Egypt’s border into Gaza.
At a summit meeting at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik on Sunday, European and moderate Arab leaders offered their support for both goals. “We are ready to offer technical, diplomatic, military and marine assistance to Israel and Egypt to stop the smuggling of weapons,” President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said at a news conference after the meeting.
Egypt also hopes to force Hamas into reconciliation talks with its rival, Fatah, as a means of unifying the Palestinian leadership and eventually returning Gaza to more moderate Palestinian Authority rule. Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, routing the Fatah forces loyal to the authority.
Hamas, which is classified by Israel, the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization, has been severely battered by the Israeli military operation in Gaza but remains in control.
From Sharm el Sheik, the French, British, German, Spanish, Italian and Czech leaders traveled to Jerusalem for dinner with Mr. Olmert, who told his guests that undermining Hamas rule in Gaza depended on strengthening the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, whose power is currently confined to the West Bank.
On Sunday, France also sent four planes carrying medical supplies, water treatment equipment and 80 aid workers including surgeons, doctors and bomb disposal experts to Egypt, the French Foreign Ministry said. The equipment and personnel were on standby on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border, ready to enter as soon as they could.
Meanwhile, competition for control of the reconstruction of Gaza seems to have begun.
Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, complained that European leaders and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, had proposed setting up an interim international committee to finance and organize the reconstruction. Such a committee would cut out Hamas, but it would also bypass the authority.
Robert F. Worth contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon,, and Ethan Bronner from Gaza City.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
White Like Me
January 18, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
By FRANK RICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/opinion/18rich.html?em#
I cannot testify to what black Americans feel as our nation celebrates the inauguration of our first African-American president. But I can speak for myself, as a white American who grew up in the segregated nation’s capital of the 1960s. Barack Obama’s day is one that I never thought would come, and one that I still can’t quite believe is here.
Last week I joined a group of journalists at an off-the-record conversation with the president-elect, a sort of preview of the administration’s coming attractions. But as I walked some desolate downtown blocks to the standard-issue federal office building serving as transition headquarters, ghosts of the past mingled with hopes for the future. The contrast between the unemployed men on Washington’s frigid streets and the buzzing executive-branch bees inside was, for me, as old as time.
My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy’s, I remember vividly. Even an 11-year-old could see that the sleepy Southern town of the Eisenhower era was waking up, electrified by youth, glamour and the prospect of change.
But some of that change I didn’t then understand. J.F.K.’s arrival coincided with Washington’s emergence as the first American city with a black majority. Many whites responded by fleeing to the suburbs. My parents did the opposite, moving our family from the enclave of Montgomery County, Md., into the city as I was about to enter the fifth grade.
Our new neighborhood included the Sidwell Friends School. My mother, a public school teacher, decreed that her children would instead enroll in the public system that had been desegregated a half-dozen years earlier, after Brown v. Board of Education. In reality de facto segregation remained in place. Though a few African-Americans and embassy Africans provided the window dressing of “integration,” my mostly white elementary, junior high and high schools had roughly the same diversity as, say, today’s G.O.P.
I wish I could say we were all outraged at this apartheid. But we were kids — privileged kids at that — and out of sight was out of mind. Except as household help, black Washington was generally as invisible to us as it was to the tourists who were rigidly segregated from the real Washington while visiting its many ivory marble shrines to democratic ideals.
Gradually we would learn more — from our parents and teachers, from televised incidents of violent racial confrontations far away, and from odd cultural phenomena like the 1961 best seller “Black Like Me.” In that book, a white novelist darkened his skin for undercover travels through deepest Dixie, whose bigotry he then described in morbid firsthand detail to shocked adolescents like me.
Surely such horrific injustices could not occur in our nation’s capital.
But as an unintended consequence of Washington’s particular brand of Jim Crow, white public school students got a tiny taste of what racially mandated second-class citizenship could mean. In those days, the city didn’t even have the bastardized form of “self-government” it has now; it was run as a plantation by Congressional District panels led by racist white Southerners (then Democrats). These overseers didn’t want to lavish money on an overwhelmingly black school system, and they didn’t. By the early 1960s, per-student spending in Washington was less than that of any state, impoverished West Virginia and Mississippi included.
If Washington’s white schools received a larger share of that meager budget, as they no doubt did, it was still obvious that our teachers had far fewer resources than their suburban and private school counterparts. Extracurricular activities could be curtailed by the costs of light and heat. The curriculum was also abridged, lest anyone get too agitated by America’s racial inequities. In my history class, the Civil War was downsized to a passing speed bump. In English, we read “Tom Sawyer,” not “Huckleberry Finn.”
Now that we were teenagers, we had both the curiosity and mobility to investigate the strangely undemocratic city that dealt us this hand. In the words of Constance McLaughlin Green, a Pulitzer Prize-winning urban historian, the District’s black population had long occupied “a secret city all but unknown to the white world round about.” We wanted in on the secrets.
There was so much we didn’t know, so much Americans still don’t know. Take the Lincoln Memorial, to which the Obama family paid so poignant a nocturnal visit this month. If you look up coverage of the memorial’s 1922 dedication ceremonies in The Times, you can read of President Harding’s forceful oration commemorating the demise of slavery. You also learn that Dr. Robert R. Moton, the president of the Tuskegee Institute, was invited to pay tribute to Lincoln “in the name of 12,000,000 Negroes.”
Here’s what The Times did not report about Moton: “Instead of being placed on the speaker’s platform, he was relegated along with other distinguished colored people to an all-Negro section separated by a road from the rest of the audience.” So wrote Green in “The Secret City,” her landmark history of race relations in Washington. This was no anomaly. A local Ku Klux Klan had been formed months earlier, with no protests from either Congress or the white press, and the young Harding administration had toughened the exclusion of blacks from the city’s public recreation facilities.
The eye-opening “Secret City” recounting this secret history was not published until 1967, some four years after the Lincoln Memorial served as a backdrop for “I Have a Dream.” It was also in 1967 that I graduated from Woodrow Wilson High. As a valedictory, a bunch of us on the school paper voted to publish an editorial in favor of home rule for D.C. “Washingtonians have to beg, plead and cajole members of Congress for funds to renovate slums and slum schools,” it read. That was putting it mildly; we still had much to learn. But the editorial was enough of an irritant that our principal tried to censor it, which prompted a brief civic kerfuffle (“Student Editorial Banned at Wilson” read the headline in The Washington Post) and jump-started a few starry-eyed careers in journalism and political activism.
It was one year later that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and Washington’s secret city exploded. The fires and riotscame within a block of the building where the Obama transition set up shop.
One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.
Looking back at my high school years, I’m struck by how slowly history can move. The great civil rights legislation of the Johnson administration had been accomplished in 1964 and 1965, but by the time of my graduation the impact was minimal — even in the city where the laws were written and passed. Today the nation’s capital still has no voting representation in Congress and is still a ward of the federal government, reduced to begging, pleading and cajoling for basic needs. Some 19 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and that 19 percent remains a secret city to many who work within the Beltway.
Washington is its own special American case, but only up to a point. For all our huge progress, we are not “post-racial,” whatever that means. The world doesn’t change in a day, and the racial frictions that emerged in both the Democratic primary campaign and the general election didn’t end on Nov. 4. As Obama himself said in his great speech on race, liberals couldn’t “purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap” simply by voting for him. And conservatives? The so-called party of Lincoln has spent much of the past month in spirited debate about whether a white candidate for the party’s chairmanship did the right thing by sending out a “humorous” recording of “Barack the Magic Negro” as a holiday gift.
Next to much of our history, this is small stuff. And yet: Of all the coverage of Obama’s victory, the most accurate take may still be the piquant morning-after summation of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Under the headline “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job,” it reported that our new president will have “to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.”
Those messes are enormous, bigger than Washington, bigger than race, bigger than anything most of us have ever seen. Nearly three months after Election Day, it remains astonishing that the American people have entrusted the job to a young black man who seemed to come out of nowhere looking for that kind of work just as we most needed him.
“In no other country on earth is my story even possible,” Obama is fond of saying. That is true, and that is what the country celebrates this week. But it is all the tragic American stories that came before him, some of them still playing out in chilly streets just blocks from the White House, that throw both his remarkable triumph and the huge challenge ahead of him into such heart-stopping relief.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Op-Ed Columnist
By FRANK RICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/opinion/18rich.html?em#
I cannot testify to what black Americans feel as our nation celebrates the inauguration of our first African-American president. But I can speak for myself, as a white American who grew up in the segregated nation’s capital of the 1960s. Barack Obama’s day is one that I never thought would come, and one that I still can’t quite believe is here.
Last week I joined a group of journalists at an off-the-record conversation with the president-elect, a sort of preview of the administration’s coming attractions. But as I walked some desolate downtown blocks to the standard-issue federal office building serving as transition headquarters, ghosts of the past mingled with hopes for the future. The contrast between the unemployed men on Washington’s frigid streets and the buzzing executive-branch bees inside was, for me, as old as time.
My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy’s, I remember vividly. Even an 11-year-old could see that the sleepy Southern town of the Eisenhower era was waking up, electrified by youth, glamour and the prospect of change.
But some of that change I didn’t then understand. J.F.K.’s arrival coincided with Washington’s emergence as the first American city with a black majority. Many whites responded by fleeing to the suburbs. My parents did the opposite, moving our family from the enclave of Montgomery County, Md., into the city as I was about to enter the fifth grade.
Our new neighborhood included the Sidwell Friends School. My mother, a public school teacher, decreed that her children would instead enroll in the public system that had been desegregated a half-dozen years earlier, after Brown v. Board of Education. In reality de facto segregation remained in place. Though a few African-Americans and embassy Africans provided the window dressing of “integration,” my mostly white elementary, junior high and high schools had roughly the same diversity as, say, today’s G.O.P.
I wish I could say we were all outraged at this apartheid. But we were kids — privileged kids at that — and out of sight was out of mind. Except as household help, black Washington was generally as invisible to us as it was to the tourists who were rigidly segregated from the real Washington while visiting its many ivory marble shrines to democratic ideals.
Gradually we would learn more — from our parents and teachers, from televised incidents of violent racial confrontations far away, and from odd cultural phenomena like the 1961 best seller “Black Like Me.” In that book, a white novelist darkened his skin for undercover travels through deepest Dixie, whose bigotry he then described in morbid firsthand detail to shocked adolescents like me.
Surely such horrific injustices could not occur in our nation’s capital.
But as an unintended consequence of Washington’s particular brand of Jim Crow, white public school students got a tiny taste of what racially mandated second-class citizenship could mean. In those days, the city didn’t even have the bastardized form of “self-government” it has now; it was run as a plantation by Congressional District panels led by racist white Southerners (then Democrats). These overseers didn’t want to lavish money on an overwhelmingly black school system, and they didn’t. By the early 1960s, per-student spending in Washington was less than that of any state, impoverished West Virginia and Mississippi included.
If Washington’s white schools received a larger share of that meager budget, as they no doubt did, it was still obvious that our teachers had far fewer resources than their suburban and private school counterparts. Extracurricular activities could be curtailed by the costs of light and heat. The curriculum was also abridged, lest anyone get too agitated by America’s racial inequities. In my history class, the Civil War was downsized to a passing speed bump. In English, we read “Tom Sawyer,” not “Huckleberry Finn.”
Now that we were teenagers, we had both the curiosity and mobility to investigate the strangely undemocratic city that dealt us this hand. In the words of Constance McLaughlin Green, a Pulitzer Prize-winning urban historian, the District’s black population had long occupied “a secret city all but unknown to the white world round about.” We wanted in on the secrets.
There was so much we didn’t know, so much Americans still don’t know. Take the Lincoln Memorial, to which the Obama family paid so poignant a nocturnal visit this month. If you look up coverage of the memorial’s 1922 dedication ceremonies in The Times, you can read of President Harding’s forceful oration commemorating the demise of slavery. You also learn that Dr. Robert R. Moton, the president of the Tuskegee Institute, was invited to pay tribute to Lincoln “in the name of 12,000,000 Negroes.”
Here’s what The Times did not report about Moton: “Instead of being placed on the speaker’s platform, he was relegated along with other distinguished colored people to an all-Negro section separated by a road from the rest of the audience.” So wrote Green in “The Secret City,” her landmark history of race relations in Washington. This was no anomaly. A local Ku Klux Klan had been formed months earlier, with no protests from either Congress or the white press, and the young Harding administration had toughened the exclusion of blacks from the city’s public recreation facilities.
The eye-opening “Secret City” recounting this secret history was not published until 1967, some four years after the Lincoln Memorial served as a backdrop for “I Have a Dream.” It was also in 1967 that I graduated from Woodrow Wilson High. As a valedictory, a bunch of us on the school paper voted to publish an editorial in favor of home rule for D.C. “Washingtonians have to beg, plead and cajole members of Congress for funds to renovate slums and slum schools,” it read. That was putting it mildly; we still had much to learn. But the editorial was enough of an irritant that our principal tried to censor it, which prompted a brief civic kerfuffle (“Student Editorial Banned at Wilson” read the headline in The Washington Post) and jump-started a few starry-eyed careers in journalism and political activism.
It was one year later that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and Washington’s secret city exploded. The fires and riotscame within a block of the building where the Obama transition set up shop.
One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.
Looking back at my high school years, I’m struck by how slowly history can move. The great civil rights legislation of the Johnson administration had been accomplished in 1964 and 1965, but by the time of my graduation the impact was minimal — even in the city where the laws were written and passed. Today the nation’s capital still has no voting representation in Congress and is still a ward of the federal government, reduced to begging, pleading and cajoling for basic needs. Some 19 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and that 19 percent remains a secret city to many who work within the Beltway.
Washington is its own special American case, but only up to a point. For all our huge progress, we are not “post-racial,” whatever that means. The world doesn’t change in a day, and the racial frictions that emerged in both the Democratic primary campaign and the general election didn’t end on Nov. 4. As Obama himself said in his great speech on race, liberals couldn’t “purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap” simply by voting for him. And conservatives? The so-called party of Lincoln has spent much of the past month in spirited debate about whether a white candidate for the party’s chairmanship did the right thing by sending out a “humorous” recording of “Barack the Magic Negro” as a holiday gift.
Next to much of our history, this is small stuff. And yet: Of all the coverage of Obama’s victory, the most accurate take may still be the piquant morning-after summation of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Under the headline “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job,” it reported that our new president will have “to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.”
Those messes are enormous, bigger than Washington, bigger than race, bigger than anything most of us have ever seen. Nearly three months after Election Day, it remains astonishing that the American people have entrusted the job to a young black man who seemed to come out of nowhere looking for that kind of work just as we most needed him.
“In no other country on earth is my story even possible,” Obama is fond of saying. That is true, and that is what the country celebrates this week. But it is all the tragic American stories that came before him, some of them still playing out in chilly streets just blocks from the White House, that throw both his remarkable triumph and the huge challenge ahead of him into such heart-stopping relief.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
14 January 2009
Hillary's Secretary of State Speech
I was fairly impressed by this speech - Now if they stick to the goals of security based on mutual humanitarian efforts I'll be even more impressed, but I thought it was a good speech!
http://www.observer.com/2009/politics/hillarys-secretary-state-speech
by Jason Horowitz | 11:55 AM January 13, 2009 | Tags: PoliticsHillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton's opening remarks to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stressed what she called a new policy of "smart power" to bring about change after a Bush administration sub-optimal engagement with the rest of the world. In a bone to the committee, she also emphasized the point that, for her, "consultation is not a catch word, it is a commitment."
Here are her remarks, as prepared for delivery:
Thank you, Senator Schumer, for your generous introduction, and even more for your support and our partnership over so many years. You are a valued and trusted colleague, a friend, and a tribute to the people of New York whom you have served with such distinction throughout your career.
Mr. Chairman, I offer my congratulations as you take on this new role. You certainly have traveled quite a distance from that day in 1971 when you testified here as a young Vietnam veteran. You have never faltered in your care and concern for our nation, its foreign policy or its future, and America is in good hands with you leading this committee.
Senator Lugar, I look forward to working with you on a wide range of issues, especially those of greatest concern to you, including the Nunn-Lugar initiative.
And Senator Voinovich, I want to commend you for your service to the people of Ohio and ask for your help in the next two years on the management issues you champion.
It is an honor and a privilege to be here this morning as President-elect Obama’s nominee for Secretary of State. I am deeply grateful for the trust – and keenly aware of the responsibility – that the President-elect has placed in me to serve our country and our people at a time of such grave dangers, and great possibilities. If confirmed, I will accept the duties of the office with gratitude, humility, and firm determination to represent the United States as energetically and faithfully as I can.
At the same time I must confess that sitting across the table from so many colleagues brings me sadness too. I love the Senate. And if you confirm me for this new role, it will be hard to say good-bye to so many members, Republicans and Democrats, whom I have come to know, admire, and respect deeply, and to the institution where I have been so proud to sere on behalf of the people of New York for the past eight years.
But I assure you that I will be in frequent consultation and conversation with the members of this committee, with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the appropriations committees, and with Congress as a whole. And I look forward to working with my good friend, Vice President-elect Biden, who has been a valued colleague in the Senate and valued chairman of this committee.
For me, consultation is not a catch-word. It is a commitment. The President-elect and I believe that we must return to the time-honored principle of bipartisanship in our foreign policy – an approach that past Presidents of both parties, as well as members of this committee, have
subscribed to and that has served our nation well. I look forward to working with all of you to renew America’s leadership through diplomacy that enhances our security, advances our interests, and reflects our values.
Today, nine years into a new century, Americans know that our nation and our world face great perils: from ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the continuing threat posed by terrorist extremists, to the spread of weapons of mass destruction; from the dangers of climate change to pandemic disease; from financial meltdown to worldwide poverty.
The seventy days since the presidential election offer fresh evidence of the urgency of these challenges. New conflict in Gaza; terrorist attacks in Mumbai; mass killings and rapes in the Congo; cholera in Zimbabwe; reports of record high greenhouse gasses and rapidly melting glaciers; and even an ancient form of terror – piracy – asserting itself in modern form off
the Horn of Africa.
Always, and especially in the crucible of these global challenges, our overriding duty is to protect and advance America’s security, interests, and values: First, we must keep our people, our nation, and our allies secure. Second, we must promote economic growth and shared prosperity at home and abroad. Finally, we must strengthen America’s position of global leadership – ensuring that we remain a positive force in the world, whether in working to preserve the health of our planet or expanding dignity and opportunity for people on the margins whose progress and prosperity will add to our own.
Our world has undergone an extraordinary transformation in the last two decades. In 1989, a wall fell and old barriers began to crumble after 40 years of a Cold War that had influenced every aspect of our foreign policy. By 1999, the rise of more democratic and open societies, the expanding reach of world markets, and the explosion of information technology had made “globalization” the word of the day. For most people, it had primarily an economic connotation, but in fact, we were already living in a profoundly interdependent world in which old rules and boundaries no longer held fast—one in which both the promise and the peril of the 21st century could not be contained by national borders or vast distances.
Economic growth has lifted more people out of poverty faster than at any time in history, but economic crises can sweep across the globe even more quickly. A coalition of nations stopped ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, but the conflict in the Middle East continues to inflame tensions from Asia to Africa. Non-state actors fight poverty, improve health, and expand education in the poorest parts of the world, while other non-state actors traffic in drugs, children, and women and kill innocent civilians across the globe.
Now, in 2009, the clear lesson of the last twenty years is that we must both combat the threats and seize the opportunities of our interdependence. And to be effective in doing so we must build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries.
America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America. The best way to advance America’s interest in reducing global threats and seizing global opportunities is to design and implement global solutions. This isn’t a philosophical point. This is our reality.
The President-Elect and I believe that foreign policy must be based on a marriage of principles and pragmatism, not rigid ideology. On facts and evidence, not emotion or prejudice. Our security, our vitality, and our ability to lead in today’s world oblige us to recognize the overwhelming fact of our interdependence.
I believe that American leadership has been wanting, but is still wanted. We must use what has been called “smart power,” the full range of tools at our disposal -- diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural -- picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy. This is not a radical idea. The ancient Roman poet Terence, who was born a slave and rose to become one of the great voices of his time, declared that “in every endeavor, the seemly course for wise men is to try persuasion first.” The same truth binds wise women as well.
The President-Elect has made it clear that in the Obama Administration there will be no doubt about the leading role of diplomacy. One need only look to North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, and the Balkans to appreciate the absolute necessity of tough-minded, intelligent diplomacy – and the failures that result when that kind of diplomatic effort is absent. And one need only consider the assortment of problems we must tackle in 2009 – from fighting terrorism to climate change to global financial crises – to understand the importance of cooperative engagement.
I assure you that, if I am confirmed, the State Department will be firing on all cylinders to provide forward-thinking, sustained diplomacy in every part of the world; applying pressure and exerting leverage; cooperating with our military partners and other agencies of government; partnering effectively with NGOs, the private sector, and international organizations; using modern technologies for public outreach; empowering negotiators who can protect our interests while understanding those of our negotiating partners. There will be thousands of separate interactions, all strategically linked and coordinated to defend American security and prosperity. Diplomacy is hard work; but when we work hard, diplomacy can work, and not just to defuse tensions, but to achieve results that advance our security, interests and values.
Secretary Gates has been particularly eloquent in articulating the importance of diplomacy in pursuit of our national security and foreign policy objectives. As he notes, it’s not often that a Secretary of Defense makes the case for adding resources to the State Department and elevating the role of the diplomatic corps. Thankfully, Secretary Gates is more concerned about having a unified, agile, and effective U.S. strategy than in spending our precious time and energy on petty turf wars. As he has stated, “our civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long,” both relative to military spending and to “the responsibilities and challenges our nation has around the world.” And to that, I say, “Amen!”
President-elect Obama has emphasized that the State Department must be fully empowered and funded to confront multi-dimensional challenges – from working with allies to thwart terrorism, to spreading health and prosperity in places of human suffering. I will speak in greater detail about that in a moment.
We should also use the United Nations and other international institutions whenever appropriate and possible. Both Democratic and Republican presidents have understood for decades that these institutions, when they work well, enhance our influence. And when they don’t work well – as in the cases of Darfur and the farce of Sudan’s election to the former UN Commission on Human Rights, for example – we should work with likeminded friends to make sure that these institutions reflect the values that motivated their creation in the first place.
We will lead with diplomacy because it’s the smart approach. But we also know that military force will sometimes be necessary, and we will rely on it to protect our people and our interests when and where needed, as a last resort.
All the while, we must remember that to promote our interests around the world, America must be an exemplar of our values. Senator Isakson made the point to me the other day that our nation must lead by example rather than edict. Our history has shown that we are most effective when we see the harmony between our interests abroad and our values at home. And I takegreat comfort in knowing that our first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, also subscribed to that view, reminding us across the centuries: “The interests of a nation, when well understood, will be found to coincide with their moral duties.”
So while our democracy continues to inspire people around the world, we know that its influence is greatest when we live up to its teachings ourselves. Senator Lugar, I’m going to borrow your words here, because you have made this point so eloquently: You once said that “the United States cannot feed every person, lift every person out of poverty, cure every disease, or stop every conflict. But our power and status have conferred upon us a tremendous responsibility to humanity.”
Of course, we must be realistic about achieving our goals. Even under the best of circumstances, our nation cannot solve every problem or meet every global need. We don’t have unlimited time, treasure, or manpower. And we certainly don’t face the best of circumstances today, with our economy faltering and our budget deficits growing.
So to fulfill our responsibility to our children, to protect and defend our nation while honoring our values, we have to establish priorities. Now, I’m not trying to mince words here. As my colleagues in the Senate know, “establishing priorities” means making tough choices. Because those choices are so important to the American people, we must be disciplined in evaluating them -- weighing the costs and consequences of our action or inaction; gauging the probability of success; and insisting on measurable results.
Right after I was nominated a friend told me: “The world has so many problems. You’ve got your work cut out for you.” Well, I agree that the problems are many and they are big. But I don’t get up every morning thinking only about the threats and dangers we face. With every challenge comes an opportunity to find promise and possibility in the face of adversity and complexity. Today’s world calls forth the optimism and can-do spirit that has marked our progress for more than two centuries.
Too often we see the ills that plague us more clearly than the possibilities in front of us. We see threats that must be thwarted; wrongs that must be righted; conflicts that must be calmed. But not the partnerships that can be promoted; the rights that can be reinforced; the innovations that can be fostered; the people who can be empowered.
After all, it is the real possibility of progress—of that better life, free from fear and want and discord—that offers our most compelling message to the rest of the world.
I’ve had the chance to lay out and submit my views on a broad array of issues in written responses to questions from the committee, so in this statement I will outline some of the major challenges we face and some of the major opportunities we see.
First, President-Elect Obama is committed to responsibly ending the war in Iraq and employing a broad strategy in Afghanistan that reduces threats to our safety and enhances the prospect of stability and peace.
Right now, our men and women in uniform, our diplomats, and our aid workers are risking their lives in those two countries. They have done everything we have asked of them and more. But, over time we have seen that our larger interests will be best served by safely and responsibly withdrawing our troops from Iraq, supporting a transition to full Iraqi responsibility for their sovereign nation, rebuilding our overtaxed military, and reaching out to other nations to help stabilize the region and to employ a broader arsenal of tools to fight terrorism.
Equally important will be a comprehensive plan using all elements of our power – diplomacy, development, and defense – to work with those in Afghanistan and Pakistan who want to root out al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other violent extremists who threaten them as well as us in what President- Elect Obama has called the central front in the fight against terrorism. We need to deepen our engagement with these and other countries in the region and pursue policies that improve the lives of the Afghan and Pakistani people.
As we focus on Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, we must also actively pursue a strategy of smart power in the Middle East that addresses the security needs of Israel and the legitimate political and economic aspirations of the Palestinians; that effectively challenges Iran to end its nuclear weapons program and sponsorship of terror, and persuades both Iran and Syria to abandon their dangerous behavior and become constructive regional actors; that strengthens our relationships with Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, other Arab states, with Turkey, and with our partners in the Gulf to involve them in securing a lasting peace in the region.
As intractable as the Middle East’s problems may seem – and many Presidents, including my husband, have spent years trying to help work out a resolution – we cannot give up on peace. The President-Elect and I understand and are deeply sympathetic to Israel’s desire to defend itself under the current conditions, and to be free of shelling by Hamas rockets.
However, we have also been reminded of the tragic humanitarian costs of conflict in the Middle East, and pained by the suffering of Palestinian and Israeli civilians. This must only increase our determination to seek a just and lasting peace agreement that brings real security to Israel; normal and positive relations with its neighbors; and independence, economic progress, and security to the Palestinians in their own state.
We will exert every effort to support the work of Israelis and Palestinians who seek that result. It is critical not only to the parties involved but to our profound interests in undermining the forces of alienation and violent extremism across our world.
Terrorism remains a serious threat and we must have a comprehensive strategy, leveraging intelligence, diplomacy, and military assets to defeat al- Qaeda and like-minded terrorists by rooting out their networks and drying up support for their violent and nihilistic extremism. The gravest threat that America faces is the danger that weapons of mass destruction will fall into the hands of terrorists. To ensure our future security, we must curb the biological, chemical, or cyber – while we take the lead in working with others to reduce current nuclear stockpiles and prevent the development and use of dangerous new weaponry.
Therefore, while defending against the threat of terrorism, we will also seize the parallel opportunity to get America back in the business of engaging other nations to reduce stockpiles of nuclear weapons. We will work with Russia to secure their agreement to extend essential monitoring and verification provisions of the START Treaty before it expires in December 2009, and we will work toward agreements for further reductions in nuclear weapons. We will also work with Russia to take U.S. and Russian missiles off hair-trigger alert, act with urgency to prevent proliferation in North Korea and Iran, secure loose nuclear weapons and materials, and shut down the market for selling them – as Senator Lugar has done for so many years. The Non Proliferation Treaty is the cornerstone of the nonproliferation regime, and the United States must exercise the leadership needed to shore up the regime. So, we will work with this committee and the Senate toward ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and reviving negotiations on a verifiable Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty.
Today’s security threats cannot be addressed in isolation. Smart power requires reaching out to both friends and adversaries, to bolster old alliances and to forge new ones.
That means strengthening the alliances that have stood the test of time— especially with our NATO partners and our allies in Asia. Our alliance with Japan is a cornerstone of American policy in Asia, essential to maintaining peace and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region, and based on shared values and mutual interests. We also have crucial economic and security partnerships with South Korea, Australia, and other friends in ASEAN. We will build on our economic and political partnership with India, the world’s most populous democracy and a nation with growing influence in the world.
Our traditional relationships of confidence and trust with Europe will be deepened. Disagreements are inevitable, even among the closest friends, but on most global issues we have no more trusted allies. The new administration will have a chance to reach out across the Atlantic to leaders in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and others across the continent, including the new democracies. When America and Europe work together, global objectives are well within our means.
President-Elect Obama and I seek a future of cooperative engagement with the Russian government on matters of strategic importance, while standing up strongly for American values and international norms. China is a critically important actor in a changing global landscape. We want a positive and cooperative relationship with China, one where we deepen and strengthen our ties on a number of issues, and candidly address differences where they persist.
But this a not one-way effort – much of what we will do depends on the choices China makes about its future at home and abroad. With both Russia and China, we should work together on vital security and economic issues like terrorism, proliferation, climate change, and reforming financial markets.
The world is now in the cross currents of the most severe global economic contraction since the Great Depression. The history of that crisis teaches us the consequences of diplomatic failures and uncoordinated reactions. Yet history alone is an insufficient guide; the world has changed too much. We have already seen that this crisis extends beyond the housing and banking sectors, and our solutions will have to be as wide in scope as the causes themselves, taking into account the complexities of the global economy, the geopolitics involved, and the likelihood of continued political and economic repercussions from the damage already done.
But here again, as we work to repair the damage, we can find new ways of working together. For too long, we have merely talked about the need to engage emerging powers in global economic governance; the time to take action is upon us. The recent G-20 meeting was a first step, but developing patterns of sustained engagement will take hard work and careful negotiation. We know that emerging markets like China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia are feeling the effects of the current crisis. We all stand to benefit in both the short and long term if they are part of the solution, and become partners in maintaining global economic stability.
In our efforts to return to economic growth here in the United States, we have an especially critical need to work more closely with Canada, our largest trading partner, and Mexico, our third largest. Canada and Mexico are also our biggest suppliers of imported energy. More broadly, we must build a deeper partnership with Mexico to address the shared danger arising from drug-trafficking and the challenges of our border, an effort begun this week with a meeting between President-elect Obama and President Calderon.
Throughout our hemisphere we have opportunities to enhance cooperation to meet common economic, security and environmental objectives that affect us all. We will return to a policy of vigorous engagement throughout Latin America, seeking deeper understanding and broader engagement with nations from the Caribbean to Central to South America. Not only do we share common political, economic and strategic interests with our friends to the south, our relationship is also enhanced by many shared ancestral and cultural legacies. We are looking forward to working on many issues during the Summit of the Americas in April and taking up the President-Elect’s call for a new energy partnership of the Americas built around shared technology and new investments in renewable energy.
In Africa, the foreign policy objectives of the Obama administration are rooted in security, political, economic, and humanitarian interests, including: combating al Qaeda's efforts to seek safe havens in failed states in the Horn of Africa; helping African nations to conserve their natural resources and reap fair benefits from them; stopping war in Congo; ending autocracy in Zimbabwe and human devastation in Darfur; supporting African democracies like South Africa and Ghana--which just had its second change of power in democratic elections; and working aggressively to reach the Millennium Development Goals in health, education, and economic opportunity.
Many significant problems we face challenge not just the United States, but all nations and peoples. You, Mr. Chairman, were among the first, in a growing chorus from both parties, to recognize that climate change is an unambiguous security threat. At the extreme it threatens our very existence, but well before that point, it could very well incite new wars of an old kind—over basic resources like food, water, and arable land. The world is in need of an urgent, coordinated response to climate change and, as President- Elect Obama has said, America must be a leader in developing and implementing it. We can lead abroad through participation in international efforts like the upcoming UN Copenhagen Climate Conference and a Global Energy Forum. We can lead at home by pursuing an energy policy that reduces our carbon emissions while reducing our dependence on foreign oil and gas—which will benefit the fight against climate change and enhance our economy and security.
The great statesman and general George Marshall noted that our gravest enemies are often not nations or doctrines, but “hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” To create more friends and fewer enemies, we can’t just win wars. We must find common ground and common purpose with other peoples and nations so that together we can overcome hatred, violence, lawlessness, and despair.
The Obama administration recognizes that, even when we cannot fully agree with some governments, we share a bond of humanity with their people. By investing in that common humanity we advance our common security because we pave the way for a more peaceful, prosperous world.
Mr. Chairman, you were one of the first to underscore the importance of our involvement in the global AIDS fight. And you have worked very hard on this issue for many years. Now, thanks to a variety of efforts—including President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief as well as the work of NGOs and foundations—the United States enjoys widespread support in public opinion polls in many African countries. This is true even among Muslim populations in Tanzania and Kenya, where America is seen as a leader in the fight against AIDS, malaria, and TB.
We have an opportunity to build on this success by partnering with NGOs to help expand the infrastructure of health clinics in Africa so that more people can have access to life-saving drugs, fewer mothers transmit HIV to their children, and fewer lives are lost.
And we can generate even more goodwill through other kinds of social investment, by working effectively with international organizations and NGO partners to build schools and train teachers, and by ensuring that children are free from hunger and exploitation so that they can attend those schools and pursue their dreams for the future. This is why the President- Elect supports a Global Education Fund to bolster secular education around the world.
I want to take a moment to emphasize the importance of a “bottom-up” approach to ensuring that America remains a positive force in the world. The President-elect and I believe in this strongly. Investing in our common humanity through social development is not marginal to our foreign policy but integral to accomplishing our goals.
Today more than two billion people worldwide live on less than $2 a day. They are facing rising food prices and widespread hunger. Calls for expanding civil and political rights in countries plagued by mass hunger and disease will fall on deaf ears unless democracy actually delivers material benefits that improve people’s lives while weeding out the corruption that too often stands in the way of progress.
Our foreign policy must reflect our deep commitment to the cause of making human rights a reality for millions of oppressed people around the world. Of particular concern to me is the plight of women and girls, who comprise the majority of the world’s unhealthy, unschooled, unfed, and unpaid. If half of the world’s population remains vulnerable to economic, political, legal, and social marginalization, our hope of advancing democracy and prosperity will remain in serious jeopardy. We still have a long way to go and the United States must remain an unambiguous and unequivocal voice in support of women’s rights in every country, every region, on every continent.
As a personal aside, I want to mention that President-elect Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was a pioneer in microfinance in Indonesia. In my own work on microfinance around the world – from Bangladesh to Chile to Vietnam to South Africa and many other countries -- I’ve seen firsthand how small loans given to poor women to start small businesses can raise standards of living and transform local economies. President-elect Obama’s mother had planned to attend a microfinance forum at the Beijing women’s conference in 1995 that I participated in. Unfortunately, she was very ill and couldn’t travel and sadly passed away a few months later. But I think it’s fair to say that her work in international development, the care and concern she showed for women and for poor people around the world, mattered greatly to her son, and certainly has informed his views and his vision. We will be honored to carry on Ann Dunham’s work in the months and years ahead.
I’ve discussed a few of our top priorities and I know we’ll address many more in the question-and-answer session. But I suspect that even this brief overview offers a glimpse of the daunting, and crucial, challenges we face, as well as the opportunities before us. President-elect Obama and I pledge to work closely with this Committee and the Congress to forge a bipartisan,
integrated, results-oriented sustainable foreign policy that will restore American leadership to confront these challenges, serve our interests, and advance our values.
Ensuring that our State Department is functioning at its best will be absolutely essential to America’s success. This is a top priority of mine, of my colleagues’ on the national security team, and of the President-elect’s. He believes strongly that we need to invest in our civilian capacity to conduct vigorous American diplomacy, provide the kind of foreign assistance I’ve mentioned, reach out to the world, and operate effectively alongside our military.
I realize that the entire State Department bureaucracy in Thomas Jefferson’s day consisted of a chief clerk, three regular clerks, and a messenger – and his entire budget was $56,000 a year. But over the past 219 years the world, and the times, have certainly changed. Now the department consists of foreign service officers, the civil service, and locally engaged staff working at Foggy Bottom, in offices across our country, and at some 260 posts around the world. And today, USAID carries out a critical development mission that is essential to representing our values across the globe.
These public servants are too often unsung heroes. They are in the trenches putting our policies and values to work in an increasingly complicated and dangerous world. Many risk their lives, and some lose their lives, in service to our nation. And they need and deserve the resources, training, and support to succeed.
I know this committee, and I hope the American public, understand that right now foreign service officers, civil service professionals, and development experts are doing work essential to our nation’s strength – whether helping American businesses make inroads in new markets; being on the other end of the phone at a United States embassy when an American citizen needs help beyond our shores; doing the delicate work of diplomacy and development with foreign governments that leads to arms control and trade agreements, peace treaties and post-conflict reconstruction, greater human rights and empowerment, broader cultural understanding and
stronger alliances.
The State Department is a large, multi-dimensional organization. But it is not a placid or idle bureaucracy, as some would like to paint it. It is an outpost for American values that protects our citizens and safeguards our democratic institutions in times both turbulent and tame. State Department employees also offer a lifeline of hope and help – often the only lifeline – for people in foreign lands who are oppressed, silenced, and marginalized.
Whether they are an economic officer in a large embassy, or an aid worker in the field, or a clerk in a distant consulate or a country officer working late in Washington, they do their work so that we may all live in peace and security. We must not shortchange them, or ourselves, by denying them the resources they need.
One of my first priorities is to make sure that the State Department and USAID have the resources they need, and I will be back to make the case to Congress for full funding of the President’s budget request. At the same time, I will work just as hard to make sure that we manage those resources prudently so that we fulfill our mission efficiently and effectively.
In concluding, I hope you will indulge me one final observation. Like most Americans, I never had the chance to travel widely outside our country as a child or young adult. Most of my early professional career was as a lawyer and advocate for children and who found themselves on society’s margins here at home. But during the eight years of my husband’s presidency, and then in my eight years as a Senator, I have been privileged to travel on behalf of the United States to more than 80 countries.
I’ve had the opportunity to get to know many world leaders. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee I’ve spent time with our military commanders, as well as our brave troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I have immersed myself in an array of military issues. I’ve spent many hours with American and non-American aid workers, businessmen and women, religious leaders, teachers, doctors, nurses, students, volunteers and others who have made it their mission to help people across the world. I have also learned invaluable lessons from countless ordinary citizens in foreign capitals, small towns, and rural villages whose lives offered a glimpse into a world far removed from what many of us experience on a daily basis here in America.
In recent years, as other nations have risen to compete for military, economic, and political influence, some have argued that we have reached the end of the “American moment” in world history. I disagree. Yes, the conventional paradigms have shifted. But America’s success has never been solely a function of our power; it has always been inspired by our values.
With so many troubles here at home and across the world, millions of peopleare still trying to come to our country -- legally and illegally. Why? Because we are guided by unchanging truths: that all people are created equal; that each person has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And in these truths we will find, as we have for more than two centuries, the
courage, the discipline, and the creativity to meet the challenges of this everchanging world.
I am humbled to be a public servant, and honored by the responsibility placed on me by our President-Elect, who embodies the American Dream not only here at home but far beyond our shores.
No matter how daunting our challenges may be, I have a steadfast faith in our country and our people, and I am proud to be an American at the dawning of this new American moment.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for granting me your time and attention today. I know there is a lot more territory to cover and I’d be delighted to answer your questions.
http://www.observer.com/2009/politics/hillarys-secretary-state-speech
by Jason Horowitz | 11:55 AM January 13, 2009 | Tags: PoliticsHillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton's opening remarks to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stressed what she called a new policy of "smart power" to bring about change after a Bush administration sub-optimal engagement with the rest of the world. In a bone to the committee, she also emphasized the point that, for her, "consultation is not a catch word, it is a commitment."
Here are her remarks, as prepared for delivery:
Thank you, Senator Schumer, for your generous introduction, and even more for your support and our partnership over so many years. You are a valued and trusted colleague, a friend, and a tribute to the people of New York whom you have served with such distinction throughout your career.
Mr. Chairman, I offer my congratulations as you take on this new role. You certainly have traveled quite a distance from that day in 1971 when you testified here as a young Vietnam veteran. You have never faltered in your care and concern for our nation, its foreign policy or its future, and America is in good hands with you leading this committee.
Senator Lugar, I look forward to working with you on a wide range of issues, especially those of greatest concern to you, including the Nunn-Lugar initiative.
And Senator Voinovich, I want to commend you for your service to the people of Ohio and ask for your help in the next two years on the management issues you champion.
It is an honor and a privilege to be here this morning as President-elect Obama’s nominee for Secretary of State. I am deeply grateful for the trust – and keenly aware of the responsibility – that the President-elect has placed in me to serve our country and our people at a time of such grave dangers, and great possibilities. If confirmed, I will accept the duties of the office with gratitude, humility, and firm determination to represent the United States as energetically and faithfully as I can.
At the same time I must confess that sitting across the table from so many colleagues brings me sadness too. I love the Senate. And if you confirm me for this new role, it will be hard to say good-bye to so many members, Republicans and Democrats, whom I have come to know, admire, and respect deeply, and to the institution where I have been so proud to sere on behalf of the people of New York for the past eight years.
But I assure you that I will be in frequent consultation and conversation with the members of this committee, with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the appropriations committees, and with Congress as a whole. And I look forward to working with my good friend, Vice President-elect Biden, who has been a valued colleague in the Senate and valued chairman of this committee.
For me, consultation is not a catch-word. It is a commitment. The President-elect and I believe that we must return to the time-honored principle of bipartisanship in our foreign policy – an approach that past Presidents of both parties, as well as members of this committee, have
subscribed to and that has served our nation well. I look forward to working with all of you to renew America’s leadership through diplomacy that enhances our security, advances our interests, and reflects our values.
Today, nine years into a new century, Americans know that our nation and our world face great perils: from ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the continuing threat posed by terrorist extremists, to the spread of weapons of mass destruction; from the dangers of climate change to pandemic disease; from financial meltdown to worldwide poverty.
The seventy days since the presidential election offer fresh evidence of the urgency of these challenges. New conflict in Gaza; terrorist attacks in Mumbai; mass killings and rapes in the Congo; cholera in Zimbabwe; reports of record high greenhouse gasses and rapidly melting glaciers; and even an ancient form of terror – piracy – asserting itself in modern form off
the Horn of Africa.
Always, and especially in the crucible of these global challenges, our overriding duty is to protect and advance America’s security, interests, and values: First, we must keep our people, our nation, and our allies secure. Second, we must promote economic growth and shared prosperity at home and abroad. Finally, we must strengthen America’s position of global leadership – ensuring that we remain a positive force in the world, whether in working to preserve the health of our planet or expanding dignity and opportunity for people on the margins whose progress and prosperity will add to our own.
Our world has undergone an extraordinary transformation in the last two decades. In 1989, a wall fell and old barriers began to crumble after 40 years of a Cold War that had influenced every aspect of our foreign policy. By 1999, the rise of more democratic and open societies, the expanding reach of world markets, and the explosion of information technology had made “globalization” the word of the day. For most people, it had primarily an economic connotation, but in fact, we were already living in a profoundly interdependent world in which old rules and boundaries no longer held fast—one in which both the promise and the peril of the 21st century could not be contained by national borders or vast distances.
Economic growth has lifted more people out of poverty faster than at any time in history, but economic crises can sweep across the globe even more quickly. A coalition of nations stopped ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, but the conflict in the Middle East continues to inflame tensions from Asia to Africa. Non-state actors fight poverty, improve health, and expand education in the poorest parts of the world, while other non-state actors traffic in drugs, children, and women and kill innocent civilians across the globe.
Now, in 2009, the clear lesson of the last twenty years is that we must both combat the threats and seize the opportunities of our interdependence. And to be effective in doing so we must build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries.
America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America. The best way to advance America’s interest in reducing global threats and seizing global opportunities is to design and implement global solutions. This isn’t a philosophical point. This is our reality.
The President-Elect and I believe that foreign policy must be based on a marriage of principles and pragmatism, not rigid ideology. On facts and evidence, not emotion or prejudice. Our security, our vitality, and our ability to lead in today’s world oblige us to recognize the overwhelming fact of our interdependence.
I believe that American leadership has been wanting, but is still wanted. We must use what has been called “smart power,” the full range of tools at our disposal -- diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural -- picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy. This is not a radical idea. The ancient Roman poet Terence, who was born a slave and rose to become one of the great voices of his time, declared that “in every endeavor, the seemly course for wise men is to try persuasion first.” The same truth binds wise women as well.
The President-Elect has made it clear that in the Obama Administration there will be no doubt about the leading role of diplomacy. One need only look to North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, and the Balkans to appreciate the absolute necessity of tough-minded, intelligent diplomacy – and the failures that result when that kind of diplomatic effort is absent. And one need only consider the assortment of problems we must tackle in 2009 – from fighting terrorism to climate change to global financial crises – to understand the importance of cooperative engagement.
I assure you that, if I am confirmed, the State Department will be firing on all cylinders to provide forward-thinking, sustained diplomacy in every part of the world; applying pressure and exerting leverage; cooperating with our military partners and other agencies of government; partnering effectively with NGOs, the private sector, and international organizations; using modern technologies for public outreach; empowering negotiators who can protect our interests while understanding those of our negotiating partners. There will be thousands of separate interactions, all strategically linked and coordinated to defend American security and prosperity. Diplomacy is hard work; but when we work hard, diplomacy can work, and not just to defuse tensions, but to achieve results that advance our security, interests and values.
Secretary Gates has been particularly eloquent in articulating the importance of diplomacy in pursuit of our national security and foreign policy objectives. As he notes, it’s not often that a Secretary of Defense makes the case for adding resources to the State Department and elevating the role of the diplomatic corps. Thankfully, Secretary Gates is more concerned about having a unified, agile, and effective U.S. strategy than in spending our precious time and energy on petty turf wars. As he has stated, “our civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long,” both relative to military spending and to “the responsibilities and challenges our nation has around the world.” And to that, I say, “Amen!”
President-elect Obama has emphasized that the State Department must be fully empowered and funded to confront multi-dimensional challenges – from working with allies to thwart terrorism, to spreading health and prosperity in places of human suffering. I will speak in greater detail about that in a moment.
We should also use the United Nations and other international institutions whenever appropriate and possible. Both Democratic and Republican presidents have understood for decades that these institutions, when they work well, enhance our influence. And when they don’t work well – as in the cases of Darfur and the farce of Sudan’s election to the former UN Commission on Human Rights, for example – we should work with likeminded friends to make sure that these institutions reflect the values that motivated their creation in the first place.
We will lead with diplomacy because it’s the smart approach. But we also know that military force will sometimes be necessary, and we will rely on it to protect our people and our interests when and where needed, as a last resort.
All the while, we must remember that to promote our interests around the world, America must be an exemplar of our values. Senator Isakson made the point to me the other day that our nation must lead by example rather than edict. Our history has shown that we are most effective when we see the harmony between our interests abroad and our values at home. And I takegreat comfort in knowing that our first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, also subscribed to that view, reminding us across the centuries: “The interests of a nation, when well understood, will be found to coincide with their moral duties.”
So while our democracy continues to inspire people around the world, we know that its influence is greatest when we live up to its teachings ourselves. Senator Lugar, I’m going to borrow your words here, because you have made this point so eloquently: You once said that “the United States cannot feed every person, lift every person out of poverty, cure every disease, or stop every conflict. But our power and status have conferred upon us a tremendous responsibility to humanity.”
Of course, we must be realistic about achieving our goals. Even under the best of circumstances, our nation cannot solve every problem or meet every global need. We don’t have unlimited time, treasure, or manpower. And we certainly don’t face the best of circumstances today, with our economy faltering and our budget deficits growing.
So to fulfill our responsibility to our children, to protect and defend our nation while honoring our values, we have to establish priorities. Now, I’m not trying to mince words here. As my colleagues in the Senate know, “establishing priorities” means making tough choices. Because those choices are so important to the American people, we must be disciplined in evaluating them -- weighing the costs and consequences of our action or inaction; gauging the probability of success; and insisting on measurable results.
Right after I was nominated a friend told me: “The world has so many problems. You’ve got your work cut out for you.” Well, I agree that the problems are many and they are big. But I don’t get up every morning thinking only about the threats and dangers we face. With every challenge comes an opportunity to find promise and possibility in the face of adversity and complexity. Today’s world calls forth the optimism and can-do spirit that has marked our progress for more than two centuries.
Too often we see the ills that plague us more clearly than the possibilities in front of us. We see threats that must be thwarted; wrongs that must be righted; conflicts that must be calmed. But not the partnerships that can be promoted; the rights that can be reinforced; the innovations that can be fostered; the people who can be empowered.
After all, it is the real possibility of progress—of that better life, free from fear and want and discord—that offers our most compelling message to the rest of the world.
I’ve had the chance to lay out and submit my views on a broad array of issues in written responses to questions from the committee, so in this statement I will outline some of the major challenges we face and some of the major opportunities we see.
First, President-Elect Obama is committed to responsibly ending the war in Iraq and employing a broad strategy in Afghanistan that reduces threats to our safety and enhances the prospect of stability and peace.
Right now, our men and women in uniform, our diplomats, and our aid workers are risking their lives in those two countries. They have done everything we have asked of them and more. But, over time we have seen that our larger interests will be best served by safely and responsibly withdrawing our troops from Iraq, supporting a transition to full Iraqi responsibility for their sovereign nation, rebuilding our overtaxed military, and reaching out to other nations to help stabilize the region and to employ a broader arsenal of tools to fight terrorism.
Equally important will be a comprehensive plan using all elements of our power – diplomacy, development, and defense – to work with those in Afghanistan and Pakistan who want to root out al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other violent extremists who threaten them as well as us in what President- Elect Obama has called the central front in the fight against terrorism. We need to deepen our engagement with these and other countries in the region and pursue policies that improve the lives of the Afghan and Pakistani people.
As we focus on Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, we must also actively pursue a strategy of smart power in the Middle East that addresses the security needs of Israel and the legitimate political and economic aspirations of the Palestinians; that effectively challenges Iran to end its nuclear weapons program and sponsorship of terror, and persuades both Iran and Syria to abandon their dangerous behavior and become constructive regional actors; that strengthens our relationships with Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, other Arab states, with Turkey, and with our partners in the Gulf to involve them in securing a lasting peace in the region.
As intractable as the Middle East’s problems may seem – and many Presidents, including my husband, have spent years trying to help work out a resolution – we cannot give up on peace. The President-Elect and I understand and are deeply sympathetic to Israel’s desire to defend itself under the current conditions, and to be free of shelling by Hamas rockets.
However, we have also been reminded of the tragic humanitarian costs of conflict in the Middle East, and pained by the suffering of Palestinian and Israeli civilians. This must only increase our determination to seek a just and lasting peace agreement that brings real security to Israel; normal and positive relations with its neighbors; and independence, economic progress, and security to the Palestinians in their own state.
We will exert every effort to support the work of Israelis and Palestinians who seek that result. It is critical not only to the parties involved but to our profound interests in undermining the forces of alienation and violent extremism across our world.
Terrorism remains a serious threat and we must have a comprehensive strategy, leveraging intelligence, diplomacy, and military assets to defeat al- Qaeda and like-minded terrorists by rooting out their networks and drying up support for their violent and nihilistic extremism. The gravest threat that America faces is the danger that weapons of mass destruction will fall into the hands of terrorists. To ensure our future security, we must curb the biological, chemical, or cyber – while we take the lead in working with others to reduce current nuclear stockpiles and prevent the development and use of dangerous new weaponry.
Therefore, while defending against the threat of terrorism, we will also seize the parallel opportunity to get America back in the business of engaging other nations to reduce stockpiles of nuclear weapons. We will work with Russia to secure their agreement to extend essential monitoring and verification provisions of the START Treaty before it expires in December 2009, and we will work toward agreements for further reductions in nuclear weapons. We will also work with Russia to take U.S. and Russian missiles off hair-trigger alert, act with urgency to prevent proliferation in North Korea and Iran, secure loose nuclear weapons and materials, and shut down the market for selling them – as Senator Lugar has done for so many years. The Non Proliferation Treaty is the cornerstone of the nonproliferation regime, and the United States must exercise the leadership needed to shore up the regime. So, we will work with this committee and the Senate toward ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and reviving negotiations on a verifiable Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty.
Today’s security threats cannot be addressed in isolation. Smart power requires reaching out to both friends and adversaries, to bolster old alliances and to forge new ones.
That means strengthening the alliances that have stood the test of time— especially with our NATO partners and our allies in Asia. Our alliance with Japan is a cornerstone of American policy in Asia, essential to maintaining peace and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region, and based on shared values and mutual interests. We also have crucial economic and security partnerships with South Korea, Australia, and other friends in ASEAN. We will build on our economic and political partnership with India, the world’s most populous democracy and a nation with growing influence in the world.
Our traditional relationships of confidence and trust with Europe will be deepened. Disagreements are inevitable, even among the closest friends, but on most global issues we have no more trusted allies. The new administration will have a chance to reach out across the Atlantic to leaders in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and others across the continent, including the new democracies. When America and Europe work together, global objectives are well within our means.
President-Elect Obama and I seek a future of cooperative engagement with the Russian government on matters of strategic importance, while standing up strongly for American values and international norms. China is a critically important actor in a changing global landscape. We want a positive and cooperative relationship with China, one where we deepen and strengthen our ties on a number of issues, and candidly address differences where they persist.
But this a not one-way effort – much of what we will do depends on the choices China makes about its future at home and abroad. With both Russia and China, we should work together on vital security and economic issues like terrorism, proliferation, climate change, and reforming financial markets.
The world is now in the cross currents of the most severe global economic contraction since the Great Depression. The history of that crisis teaches us the consequences of diplomatic failures and uncoordinated reactions. Yet history alone is an insufficient guide; the world has changed too much. We have already seen that this crisis extends beyond the housing and banking sectors, and our solutions will have to be as wide in scope as the causes themselves, taking into account the complexities of the global economy, the geopolitics involved, and the likelihood of continued political and economic repercussions from the damage already done.
But here again, as we work to repair the damage, we can find new ways of working together. For too long, we have merely talked about the need to engage emerging powers in global economic governance; the time to take action is upon us. The recent G-20 meeting was a first step, but developing patterns of sustained engagement will take hard work and careful negotiation. We know that emerging markets like China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia are feeling the effects of the current crisis. We all stand to benefit in both the short and long term if they are part of the solution, and become partners in maintaining global economic stability.
In our efforts to return to economic growth here in the United States, we have an especially critical need to work more closely with Canada, our largest trading partner, and Mexico, our third largest. Canada and Mexico are also our biggest suppliers of imported energy. More broadly, we must build a deeper partnership with Mexico to address the shared danger arising from drug-trafficking and the challenges of our border, an effort begun this week with a meeting between President-elect Obama and President Calderon.
Throughout our hemisphere we have opportunities to enhance cooperation to meet common economic, security and environmental objectives that affect us all. We will return to a policy of vigorous engagement throughout Latin America, seeking deeper understanding and broader engagement with nations from the Caribbean to Central to South America. Not only do we share common political, economic and strategic interests with our friends to the south, our relationship is also enhanced by many shared ancestral and cultural legacies. We are looking forward to working on many issues during the Summit of the Americas in April and taking up the President-Elect’s call for a new energy partnership of the Americas built around shared technology and new investments in renewable energy.
In Africa, the foreign policy objectives of the Obama administration are rooted in security, political, economic, and humanitarian interests, including: combating al Qaeda's efforts to seek safe havens in failed states in the Horn of Africa; helping African nations to conserve their natural resources and reap fair benefits from them; stopping war in Congo; ending autocracy in Zimbabwe and human devastation in Darfur; supporting African democracies like South Africa and Ghana--which just had its second change of power in democratic elections; and working aggressively to reach the Millennium Development Goals in health, education, and economic opportunity.
Many significant problems we face challenge not just the United States, but all nations and peoples. You, Mr. Chairman, were among the first, in a growing chorus from both parties, to recognize that climate change is an unambiguous security threat. At the extreme it threatens our very existence, but well before that point, it could very well incite new wars of an old kind—over basic resources like food, water, and arable land. The world is in need of an urgent, coordinated response to climate change and, as President- Elect Obama has said, America must be a leader in developing and implementing it. We can lead abroad through participation in international efforts like the upcoming UN Copenhagen Climate Conference and a Global Energy Forum. We can lead at home by pursuing an energy policy that reduces our carbon emissions while reducing our dependence on foreign oil and gas—which will benefit the fight against climate change and enhance our economy and security.
The great statesman and general George Marshall noted that our gravest enemies are often not nations or doctrines, but “hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” To create more friends and fewer enemies, we can’t just win wars. We must find common ground and common purpose with other peoples and nations so that together we can overcome hatred, violence, lawlessness, and despair.
The Obama administration recognizes that, even when we cannot fully agree with some governments, we share a bond of humanity with their people. By investing in that common humanity we advance our common security because we pave the way for a more peaceful, prosperous world.
Mr. Chairman, you were one of the first to underscore the importance of our involvement in the global AIDS fight. And you have worked very hard on this issue for many years. Now, thanks to a variety of efforts—including President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief as well as the work of NGOs and foundations—the United States enjoys widespread support in public opinion polls in many African countries. This is true even among Muslim populations in Tanzania and Kenya, where America is seen as a leader in the fight against AIDS, malaria, and TB.
We have an opportunity to build on this success by partnering with NGOs to help expand the infrastructure of health clinics in Africa so that more people can have access to life-saving drugs, fewer mothers transmit HIV to their children, and fewer lives are lost.
And we can generate even more goodwill through other kinds of social investment, by working effectively with international organizations and NGO partners to build schools and train teachers, and by ensuring that children are free from hunger and exploitation so that they can attend those schools and pursue their dreams for the future. This is why the President- Elect supports a Global Education Fund to bolster secular education around the world.
I want to take a moment to emphasize the importance of a “bottom-up” approach to ensuring that America remains a positive force in the world. The President-elect and I believe in this strongly. Investing in our common humanity through social development is not marginal to our foreign policy but integral to accomplishing our goals.
Today more than two billion people worldwide live on less than $2 a day. They are facing rising food prices and widespread hunger. Calls for expanding civil and political rights in countries plagued by mass hunger and disease will fall on deaf ears unless democracy actually delivers material benefits that improve people’s lives while weeding out the corruption that too often stands in the way of progress.
Our foreign policy must reflect our deep commitment to the cause of making human rights a reality for millions of oppressed people around the world. Of particular concern to me is the plight of women and girls, who comprise the majority of the world’s unhealthy, unschooled, unfed, and unpaid. If half of the world’s population remains vulnerable to economic, political, legal, and social marginalization, our hope of advancing democracy and prosperity will remain in serious jeopardy. We still have a long way to go and the United States must remain an unambiguous and unequivocal voice in support of women’s rights in every country, every region, on every continent.
As a personal aside, I want to mention that President-elect Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was a pioneer in microfinance in Indonesia. In my own work on microfinance around the world – from Bangladesh to Chile to Vietnam to South Africa and many other countries -- I’ve seen firsthand how small loans given to poor women to start small businesses can raise standards of living and transform local economies. President-elect Obama’s mother had planned to attend a microfinance forum at the Beijing women’s conference in 1995 that I participated in. Unfortunately, she was very ill and couldn’t travel and sadly passed away a few months later. But I think it’s fair to say that her work in international development, the care and concern she showed for women and for poor people around the world, mattered greatly to her son, and certainly has informed his views and his vision. We will be honored to carry on Ann Dunham’s work in the months and years ahead.
I’ve discussed a few of our top priorities and I know we’ll address many more in the question-and-answer session. But I suspect that even this brief overview offers a glimpse of the daunting, and crucial, challenges we face, as well as the opportunities before us. President-elect Obama and I pledge to work closely with this Committee and the Congress to forge a bipartisan,
integrated, results-oriented sustainable foreign policy that will restore American leadership to confront these challenges, serve our interests, and advance our values.
Ensuring that our State Department is functioning at its best will be absolutely essential to America’s success. This is a top priority of mine, of my colleagues’ on the national security team, and of the President-elect’s. He believes strongly that we need to invest in our civilian capacity to conduct vigorous American diplomacy, provide the kind of foreign assistance I’ve mentioned, reach out to the world, and operate effectively alongside our military.
I realize that the entire State Department bureaucracy in Thomas Jefferson’s day consisted of a chief clerk, three regular clerks, and a messenger – and his entire budget was $56,000 a year. But over the past 219 years the world, and the times, have certainly changed. Now the department consists of foreign service officers, the civil service, and locally engaged staff working at Foggy Bottom, in offices across our country, and at some 260 posts around the world. And today, USAID carries out a critical development mission that is essential to representing our values across the globe.
These public servants are too often unsung heroes. They are in the trenches putting our policies and values to work in an increasingly complicated and dangerous world. Many risk their lives, and some lose their lives, in service to our nation. And they need and deserve the resources, training, and support to succeed.
I know this committee, and I hope the American public, understand that right now foreign service officers, civil service professionals, and development experts are doing work essential to our nation’s strength – whether helping American businesses make inroads in new markets; being on the other end of the phone at a United States embassy when an American citizen needs help beyond our shores; doing the delicate work of diplomacy and development with foreign governments that leads to arms control and trade agreements, peace treaties and post-conflict reconstruction, greater human rights and empowerment, broader cultural understanding and
stronger alliances.
The State Department is a large, multi-dimensional organization. But it is not a placid or idle bureaucracy, as some would like to paint it. It is an outpost for American values that protects our citizens and safeguards our democratic institutions in times both turbulent and tame. State Department employees also offer a lifeline of hope and help – often the only lifeline – for people in foreign lands who are oppressed, silenced, and marginalized.
Whether they are an economic officer in a large embassy, or an aid worker in the field, or a clerk in a distant consulate or a country officer working late in Washington, they do their work so that we may all live in peace and security. We must not shortchange them, or ourselves, by denying them the resources they need.
One of my first priorities is to make sure that the State Department and USAID have the resources they need, and I will be back to make the case to Congress for full funding of the President’s budget request. At the same time, I will work just as hard to make sure that we manage those resources prudently so that we fulfill our mission efficiently and effectively.
In concluding, I hope you will indulge me one final observation. Like most Americans, I never had the chance to travel widely outside our country as a child or young adult. Most of my early professional career was as a lawyer and advocate for children and who found themselves on society’s margins here at home. But during the eight years of my husband’s presidency, and then in my eight years as a Senator, I have been privileged to travel on behalf of the United States to more than 80 countries.
I’ve had the opportunity to get to know many world leaders. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee I’ve spent time with our military commanders, as well as our brave troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I have immersed myself in an array of military issues. I’ve spent many hours with American and non-American aid workers, businessmen and women, religious leaders, teachers, doctors, nurses, students, volunteers and others who have made it their mission to help people across the world. I have also learned invaluable lessons from countless ordinary citizens in foreign capitals, small towns, and rural villages whose lives offered a glimpse into a world far removed from what many of us experience on a daily basis here in America.
In recent years, as other nations have risen to compete for military, economic, and political influence, some have argued that we have reached the end of the “American moment” in world history. I disagree. Yes, the conventional paradigms have shifted. But America’s success has never been solely a function of our power; it has always been inspired by our values.
With so many troubles here at home and across the world, millions of peopleare still trying to come to our country -- legally and illegally. Why? Because we are guided by unchanging truths: that all people are created equal; that each person has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And in these truths we will find, as we have for more than two centuries, the
courage, the discipline, and the creativity to meet the challenges of this everchanging world.
I am humbled to be a public servant, and honored by the responsibility placed on me by our President-Elect, who embodies the American Dream not only here at home but far beyond our shores.
No matter how daunting our challenges may be, I have a steadfast faith in our country and our people, and I am proud to be an American at the dawning of this new American moment.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for granting me your time and attention today. I know there is a lot more territory to cover and I’d be delighted to answer your questions.
12 January 2009
Hamas Defiant as Israeli Forces Push Into Gaza City
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/world/middleeast/13mideast.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig
January 13, 2009
By STEVEN ERLANGER and ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — Israeli ground forces called in a series of air strikes as fierce fighting continued in Gaza on Monday, the 17th day of Israel’s war against Hamas.
On Sunday, Israeli troops pushed into a heavily populated area of Gaza City from the south, and senior Israeli officials said for the first time in the war that they believed that the Hamas military wing was beginning to crack and that Hamas leaders inside Gaza were “eager” for a cease-fire.
Hamas leaders in Gaza, however, said Monday that the organization would continue to fight until the siege was ended and the crossings to Israel and Egypt were reopened. News agencies reported Monday that militants fired as many as 10 missiles out of Gaza into southern Israel, causing no casualties.
"We confirm to our people that victory is closer than ever," the Hamas cabinet in Gaza said in a statement distributed to journalists, according to a Reuters translation.
The Israeli military said that warplanes attacked five Hamas operatives along with weapons caches, tunnels and other targets, while Israeli gunboats fired from the sea. By midday, the Israeli military said its warplanes had struck 25 targets, including, it said, a mosque where Hamas stored rockets and mortars.
During a three-hour lull in fighting on Monday, the military said 165 truckloads of aid had been allowed into Gaza.
Egypt allowed at least two delegations into Gaza from its Rafah border crossing on Monday, relenting on a policy of blocking aid to the area, because of its relationship with Israel. A group of 38 Arab doctors passed through, after being held at the border for four days, and made their way to hospitals to help treat the thousands of wounded. Also, a group of European diplomats entered, returning later in the day.
Overnight, the Israeli military said, its warplanes carried out fewer strikes than on some previous nights.
Israel is facing intensifying accusations from around the world that its offensive is disproportionate to the damage caused by Hamas rocket fire into Israel, and that it has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The Gaza medical authorities are reporting 908 deaths, including at least 380 civilians. The Israeli military says it has killed at least several hundred Hamas fighters. Hamas has said it is not taking its wounded to public hospitals.
Thirteen Israelis have been killed, Israel has said.
Growing numbers of Palestinians are reporting being injured from burns by a phosphorous-type gas used by Israel to obscure its moves from Hamas fighters and render their infrared detectors useless. The substance is legal under international law, but its use is discouraged by Human Rights Watch, whose ballistics expert Mark Garlasco, said causes fires and serious burns in crowded civilian areas.
In Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council broadly condemned Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, saying it “resulted in massive violations of human rights of the Palestinian people.” The council voted 33 to 1 for the resolution, with Canada the only opposing vote. The United States is not a member.
President Bush, a strong supporter of Israel, said Monday at his final White House news conference that the solution to ending the war in Gaza was for Hamas to “stop firing rockets into Israel.”
“There will not be a sustainable cease-fire if they continue firing rockets,” he said in response to a question. “Israel has a right to defend herself.”
Israel has remained unwavering in pressing its campaign. On Sunday, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told the nation that Israel was “getting close to achieving the goals it set for itself,” but that “more patience, determination and effort are still demanded.”
Mr. Olmert was speaking in the public part of the regular weekly cabinet meeting, and his words were broadcast to an Israeli populace that supports the war against Hamas in Gaza but is nervous about how and when it will end.
Mr. Olmert gave no time frame, but said Israel “must not miss out, at the last moment, on what has been achieved through an unprecedented national effort.”
Israeli officials also said Sunday that the military had been sending reserve units into Gaza since Thursday. They did not specify the number of reservists.
The announcement that additional forces had joined the fight in Gaza appeared aimed at adding pressure on Hamas, and raised the possibility of an expansion in the conflict, which began Dec. 27.
Cease-fire discussions were held on Monday in Cairo, where Hamas leaders met over the weekend with Egypt’s intelligence service chief, Omar Suleiman. Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and now an international envoy to the Palestinians, met with the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, following talks with Israeli leaders on Sunday.
But a senior Israeli Defense Ministry official who was to arrive in Cairo on Monday, Amos Gilad, postponed his trip, in a sign a truce was not on the immediate horizon.
Hamas officials who were in Cairo traveled to Damascus, where the group’s political director, Khaled Meshal, lives in exile. They were due to return Monday evening to continue talks, a Mubarak spokesman for told Bloomberg.
The Israeli cabinet secretary, Oved Yehezkel, told reporters that in the Sunday cabinet meeting the heads of army intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, and of the Shin Bet security service, Yuval Diskin, said, “It is the inclination within Hamas to agree to a cease-fire, given the harsh blow it received and given the absence of accomplishment on the ground.”
The Israelis said this view inside Gaza was a contrast to the “unyielding stands” of Mr. Meshal. But Hamas “is not expected to wave a white flag” and is reserving rockets and weaponry to fire at the end of the conflict, the intelligence chiefs said.
Another senior Israeli security official said that Israeli soldiers had “confirmed through their sights” the killing of 300 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters on the ground in Gaza, and that Hamas units were making mistakes and fighting without clear direction.
“I can say with a high level of confidence that for two days, what we have been hearing repeatedly is that Hamas inside Gaza is eager — eager — to achieve a cease-fire,” said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s delicate nature. “This is as opposed to the leadership in Damascus that is willing to fight to the last Palestinian.”
The Israelis were clearly all pushing a concerted message, but no official provided details on how Israel supported its assertion. It was impossible to get a response from Hamas leaders in Gaza, because they were in hiding from Israeli military strikes.
On Saturday, Mr. Meshal said in Damascus that Hamas would not consider a cease-fire until Israel ended the assault and opened all crossings into Gaza. He said that the ferocity of the Israeli campaign had crossed the line and called it a “holocaust,” adding, “You have destroyed the last chance for negotiations.”
Israel and the United States are trying to secure agreement on a deal brokered by Egypt that would mean a Hamas commitment to stop all rocket firing into Israel and an Egyptian commitment to block smuggling tunnels into Gaza, to stop the resupplying of Hamas with weaponry and cash. In return, Israel would agree to a cease-fire and the opening of its crossings into Gaza for goods and fuel and the opening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, with European Union supervision.
If the Egyptian effort fails, Israeli officials said, the military is likely to go to a “third stage” of the war against Hamas in Gaza, with the reserve troops thrown into the battle.
An expansion of the war would most likely mean Israeli troops moving into southern Gaza, to take a strip of land at least 500 yards wide inside Gaza at the Egyptian border. Israel has been bombing the area to try to destroy smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt.
Mr. Olmert and his two top cabinet ministers, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, were reported to disagree about the best way to win the war and consolidate Israeli gains. But they are under pressure from the army to decide on whether to expand the war or end it, in part because the soldiers become easier targets unless they are constantly moving.
There was a new development on Sunday in the investigation into one of the deadliest attacks so far — an Israeli mortar strike near a United Nations school on Tuesday that killed up to 43 Palestinians. The newspaper Haaretz reported that a military investigation had concluded that two Israeli shells hit a Hamas mortar unit that had fired first, but that an errant Israeli shell hit near the school.
The army later rebutted the article, saying its initial inquiry showed “mortars were fired from within the school” at Israeli forces nearby, “and those forces returned fire.”
United Nations officials have denied that any Palestinian fighters were in the school grounds and called for an independent international investigation, and the army had earlier gone back and forth about whether the Hamas mortars were fired within the school or near it.
Steven Erlanger and Ethan Bronner reported from Jerusalem. Taghreed El-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza City, Sabrina Tavernise from Jerusalem. and Alan Cowell from London.
January 13, 2009
By STEVEN ERLANGER and ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — Israeli ground forces called in a series of air strikes as fierce fighting continued in Gaza on Monday, the 17th day of Israel’s war against Hamas.
On Sunday, Israeli troops pushed into a heavily populated area of Gaza City from the south, and senior Israeli officials said for the first time in the war that they believed that the Hamas military wing was beginning to crack and that Hamas leaders inside Gaza were “eager” for a cease-fire.
Hamas leaders in Gaza, however, said Monday that the organization would continue to fight until the siege was ended and the crossings to Israel and Egypt were reopened. News agencies reported Monday that militants fired as many as 10 missiles out of Gaza into southern Israel, causing no casualties.
"We confirm to our people that victory is closer than ever," the Hamas cabinet in Gaza said in a statement distributed to journalists, according to a Reuters translation.
The Israeli military said that warplanes attacked five Hamas operatives along with weapons caches, tunnels and other targets, while Israeli gunboats fired from the sea. By midday, the Israeli military said its warplanes had struck 25 targets, including, it said, a mosque where Hamas stored rockets and mortars.
During a three-hour lull in fighting on Monday, the military said 165 truckloads of aid had been allowed into Gaza.
Egypt allowed at least two delegations into Gaza from its Rafah border crossing on Monday, relenting on a policy of blocking aid to the area, because of its relationship with Israel. A group of 38 Arab doctors passed through, after being held at the border for four days, and made their way to hospitals to help treat the thousands of wounded. Also, a group of European diplomats entered, returning later in the day.
Overnight, the Israeli military said, its warplanes carried out fewer strikes than on some previous nights.
Israel is facing intensifying accusations from around the world that its offensive is disproportionate to the damage caused by Hamas rocket fire into Israel, and that it has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The Gaza medical authorities are reporting 908 deaths, including at least 380 civilians. The Israeli military says it has killed at least several hundred Hamas fighters. Hamas has said it is not taking its wounded to public hospitals.
Thirteen Israelis have been killed, Israel has said.
Growing numbers of Palestinians are reporting being injured from burns by a phosphorous-type gas used by Israel to obscure its moves from Hamas fighters and render their infrared detectors useless. The substance is legal under international law, but its use is discouraged by Human Rights Watch, whose ballistics expert Mark Garlasco, said causes fires and serious burns in crowded civilian areas.
In Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council broadly condemned Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, saying it “resulted in massive violations of human rights of the Palestinian people.” The council voted 33 to 1 for the resolution, with Canada the only opposing vote. The United States is not a member.
President Bush, a strong supporter of Israel, said Monday at his final White House news conference that the solution to ending the war in Gaza was for Hamas to “stop firing rockets into Israel.”
“There will not be a sustainable cease-fire if they continue firing rockets,” he said in response to a question. “Israel has a right to defend herself.”
Israel has remained unwavering in pressing its campaign. On Sunday, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told the nation that Israel was “getting close to achieving the goals it set for itself,” but that “more patience, determination and effort are still demanded.”
Mr. Olmert was speaking in the public part of the regular weekly cabinet meeting, and his words were broadcast to an Israeli populace that supports the war against Hamas in Gaza but is nervous about how and when it will end.
Mr. Olmert gave no time frame, but said Israel “must not miss out, at the last moment, on what has been achieved through an unprecedented national effort.”
Israeli officials also said Sunday that the military had been sending reserve units into Gaza since Thursday. They did not specify the number of reservists.
The announcement that additional forces had joined the fight in Gaza appeared aimed at adding pressure on Hamas, and raised the possibility of an expansion in the conflict, which began Dec. 27.
Cease-fire discussions were held on Monday in Cairo, where Hamas leaders met over the weekend with Egypt’s intelligence service chief, Omar Suleiman. Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and now an international envoy to the Palestinians, met with the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, following talks with Israeli leaders on Sunday.
But a senior Israeli Defense Ministry official who was to arrive in Cairo on Monday, Amos Gilad, postponed his trip, in a sign a truce was not on the immediate horizon.
Hamas officials who were in Cairo traveled to Damascus, where the group’s political director, Khaled Meshal, lives in exile. They were due to return Monday evening to continue talks, a Mubarak spokesman for told Bloomberg.
The Israeli cabinet secretary, Oved Yehezkel, told reporters that in the Sunday cabinet meeting the heads of army intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, and of the Shin Bet security service, Yuval Diskin, said, “It is the inclination within Hamas to agree to a cease-fire, given the harsh blow it received and given the absence of accomplishment on the ground.”
The Israelis said this view inside Gaza was a contrast to the “unyielding stands” of Mr. Meshal. But Hamas “is not expected to wave a white flag” and is reserving rockets and weaponry to fire at the end of the conflict, the intelligence chiefs said.
Another senior Israeli security official said that Israeli soldiers had “confirmed through their sights” the killing of 300 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters on the ground in Gaza, and that Hamas units were making mistakes and fighting without clear direction.
“I can say with a high level of confidence that for two days, what we have been hearing repeatedly is that Hamas inside Gaza is eager — eager — to achieve a cease-fire,” said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s delicate nature. “This is as opposed to the leadership in Damascus that is willing to fight to the last Palestinian.”
The Israelis were clearly all pushing a concerted message, but no official provided details on how Israel supported its assertion. It was impossible to get a response from Hamas leaders in Gaza, because they were in hiding from Israeli military strikes.
On Saturday, Mr. Meshal said in Damascus that Hamas would not consider a cease-fire until Israel ended the assault and opened all crossings into Gaza. He said that the ferocity of the Israeli campaign had crossed the line and called it a “holocaust,” adding, “You have destroyed the last chance for negotiations.”
Israel and the United States are trying to secure agreement on a deal brokered by Egypt that would mean a Hamas commitment to stop all rocket firing into Israel and an Egyptian commitment to block smuggling tunnels into Gaza, to stop the resupplying of Hamas with weaponry and cash. In return, Israel would agree to a cease-fire and the opening of its crossings into Gaza for goods and fuel and the opening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, with European Union supervision.
If the Egyptian effort fails, Israeli officials said, the military is likely to go to a “third stage” of the war against Hamas in Gaza, with the reserve troops thrown into the battle.
An expansion of the war would most likely mean Israeli troops moving into southern Gaza, to take a strip of land at least 500 yards wide inside Gaza at the Egyptian border. Israel has been bombing the area to try to destroy smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt.
Mr. Olmert and his two top cabinet ministers, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, were reported to disagree about the best way to win the war and consolidate Israeli gains. But they are under pressure from the army to decide on whether to expand the war or end it, in part because the soldiers become easier targets unless they are constantly moving.
There was a new development on Sunday in the investigation into one of the deadliest attacks so far — an Israeli mortar strike near a United Nations school on Tuesday that killed up to 43 Palestinians. The newspaper Haaretz reported that a military investigation had concluded that two Israeli shells hit a Hamas mortar unit that had fired first, but that an errant Israeli shell hit near the school.
The army later rebutted the article, saying its initial inquiry showed “mortars were fired from within the school” at Israeli forces nearby, “and those forces returned fire.”
United Nations officials have denied that any Palestinian fighters were in the school grounds and called for an independent international investigation, and the army had earlier gone back and forth about whether the Hamas mortars were fired within the school or near it.
Steven Erlanger and Ethan Bronner reported from Jerusalem. Taghreed El-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza City, Sabrina Tavernise from Jerusalem. and Alan Cowell from London.
08 January 2009
Red Cross Reports Grisly Find in Gaza
Israel Accused of Blocking Aid to Wounded
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/08/AR2009010800842.html?nav=igoogle
By Craig Whitlock and Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 8, 2009; 8:14 AM
JERUSALEM, Jan. 8 -- The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it had found at least 15 bodies and several children -- emaciated but alive -- in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for four days.
Israel's offensive against militants in Gaza continued with intense bombing in the southern part of the territory, near the border with Egypt. There was also a brief exchange of fire across Israel's northern border with Lebanon.
In the Lebanon incident, militants in the southern part of that country lobbed several rockets into Israeli territory, and the Israeli military responded with fire of its own. Though the exchange harkened to the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese-based militant group Hezbollah, Lebanese officials promptly condemned the fire from their side and said they were taking steps to more closely patrol the area.
Lebanese information minister Tareq Mitri released a statement saying that the government had been assured by Hezbollah -- which serves as a political party in the Lebanese government and is particularly influential in the southern part of the country -- that it was not responsible for the Katyusha rockets that landed near the Israeli town of Nahariya. Only minor injuries were reported.
The Israeli strikes in southern Gaza were focused on the area around Rafah, a border crossing town that is also the site of a network of smuggling tunnels used by the militant group Hamas.
Under an agreement announced on Wednesday, Israel was to pause attacks beginning at 1 p.m. local time so that Gaza residents could emerge for food and other basic supplies.
But humanitarian criticism of the ongoing operation intensified after the Red Cross announced its discovery of several underfed children in a house with a number of dead adults.
Red Cross officials said rescue crews had received specific reports of casualties in the houses and had been trying since Saturday to send ambulances to the area, located in Zaytoun, a neighborhood south of Gaza City. They said the Israeli military did not grant permission until Wednesday afternoon.
In an unusual public statement issued by its Geneva headquarters, the Red Cross called the episode "unacceptable" and said the Israeli military had "failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded."
When rescue workers from the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent arrived at the site, they found 12 corpses lying on mattresses in one home, along with four young children lying next to their dead mothers, the Red Cross said. The children were too weak to stand and were rushed to a hospital, the agency said.
A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment early Thursday on the specific allegations made by the Red Cross but said in a statement that the military "has demonstrated its willingness to abort operations to save civilian lives and to risk injury in order to assist innocent civilians."
"Any serious allegations made against the IDF's conduct will need to be investigated properly, once such a complaint is received formally," the statement added.
The Red Cross said its workers evacuated 18 wounded survivors from the houses in donkey carts. They said ambulances could not reach the site because of earthen barriers erected around the neighborhood by the Israeli military. Red Cross officials said that Israeli soldiers posted nearby tried to chase rescue workers away from the site but that the rescuers refused to leave.
"This is a shocking incident," Pierre Wettach, the Red Cross's head of delegation for Israel and the Palestinian territories, said in a statement. "The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded."
The Geneva Conventions provide that parties to a conflict "at all times" should "without delay" take "all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled." The conventions also say that wounded "shall not willfully be left without medical assistance and care."
The Red Cross said it was able to remove only three of the bodies and had received reports of other casualties in the neighborhood. The agency said that it was trying to return to the site but that negotiations with the Israeli military to guarantee safe passage were ongoing.
Palestinian journalists confirmed that large numbers of wounded survivors, including children, had arrived at Red Cross hospitals in Gaza from Zaytoun on Wednesday. Other details could not be independently corroborated; the Israeli military has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza.
There have been other reports of wounded Gazans who have been forced to wait many hours or even days for ambulances since the Israeli offensive began Dec. 27, including several in the Zaytoun neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Israel said Wednesday it was in "fundamental agreement" with a cease-fire proposal offered by Egypt and France, but fighting continued in the Gaza Strip as diplomats from more than a dozen countries haggled over details in a bid to stop the conflict.
Israeli officials said they would send emissaries to Egypt on Thursday to hold talks on a potential truce proposed by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Parallel diplomatic efforts were underway in New York at the United Nations. But many sticking points remained. The French-Egyptian proposal calls for an immediate cease-fire, followed by talks on securing Gaza's borders and ending an economic blockade that Israel has imposed since June 2007, when Hamas expelled rival Fatah forces from Gaza to seize sole control of the strip.
U.S. officials have supported the French-Egyptian effort but said the basic issues that led to the conflict need to be resolved upfront. "It has to be a cease-fire that will not allow a return to the status quo," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.
Israel has vowed to continue its 12-day military campaign until it is satisfied that Hamas will be unable to rearm itself by smuggling weaponry through cross-border tunnels from Egypt. Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets, most of them crude and unguided, into southern Israel since a six-month truce between the group and Israel expired Dec. 19.
The Netherlands, Denmark and Turkey said Wednesday they would be willing to contribute to an international force that would patrol the Gaza-Egypt border to prevent smuggling. Israeli officials said they wanted to ensure that any such force would have the authority to stop arms trafficking.
Hamas officials, who have been involved separately in negotiations with Egypt, reacted coolly to the cease-fire plan.
Ahmed Youssef, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said the group would not stop firing rockets into southern Israel until the Israeli military withdrew from the Palestinian territory and ended the economic blockade, which has left Gaza's 1.5 million people dependent on smugglers and relief organizations for their basic needs. About 25 rockets landed in southern Israel on Wednesday, wounding two people, the Israeli military said.
The Israeli military observed a three-hour cessation in the fighting Wednesday afternoon to allow relief agencies to deliver about 80 truckloads of emergency supplies. The lull in the violence also gave besieged Gaza residents an opportunity to emerge briefly from their homes and seek food, fuel and medical care.
Gazan medical officials said the pause in fighting led to a drop in casualties compared with other days since Israel launched its ground offensive Saturday. Twenty-nine Palestinians were reported killed Wednesday, bringing the toll to more than 680 since the fighting began, Palestinian health officials said. U.N. officials estimate that about one-third of those killed have been women and children, including three youngsters killed Wednesday when a shell struck a car.
Seven Israeli soldiers and three civilians have died in the conflict. Four of the soldiers were killed by errant shells fired by Israeli forces.
Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/08/AR2009010800842.html?nav=igoogle
By Craig Whitlock and Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 8, 2009; 8:14 AM
JERUSALEM, Jan. 8 -- The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it had found at least 15 bodies and several children -- emaciated but alive -- in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for four days.
Israel's offensive against militants in Gaza continued with intense bombing in the southern part of the territory, near the border with Egypt. There was also a brief exchange of fire across Israel's northern border with Lebanon.
In the Lebanon incident, militants in the southern part of that country lobbed several rockets into Israeli territory, and the Israeli military responded with fire of its own. Though the exchange harkened to the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese-based militant group Hezbollah, Lebanese officials promptly condemned the fire from their side and said they were taking steps to more closely patrol the area.
Lebanese information minister Tareq Mitri released a statement saying that the government had been assured by Hezbollah -- which serves as a political party in the Lebanese government and is particularly influential in the southern part of the country -- that it was not responsible for the Katyusha rockets that landed near the Israeli town of Nahariya. Only minor injuries were reported.
The Israeli strikes in southern Gaza were focused on the area around Rafah, a border crossing town that is also the site of a network of smuggling tunnels used by the militant group Hamas.
Under an agreement announced on Wednesday, Israel was to pause attacks beginning at 1 p.m. local time so that Gaza residents could emerge for food and other basic supplies.
But humanitarian criticism of the ongoing operation intensified after the Red Cross announced its discovery of several underfed children in a house with a number of dead adults.
Red Cross officials said rescue crews had received specific reports of casualties in the houses and had been trying since Saturday to send ambulances to the area, located in Zaytoun, a neighborhood south of Gaza City. They said the Israeli military did not grant permission until Wednesday afternoon.
In an unusual public statement issued by its Geneva headquarters, the Red Cross called the episode "unacceptable" and said the Israeli military had "failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded."
When rescue workers from the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent arrived at the site, they found 12 corpses lying on mattresses in one home, along with four young children lying next to their dead mothers, the Red Cross said. The children were too weak to stand and were rushed to a hospital, the agency said.
A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment early Thursday on the specific allegations made by the Red Cross but said in a statement that the military "has demonstrated its willingness to abort operations to save civilian lives and to risk injury in order to assist innocent civilians."
"Any serious allegations made against the IDF's conduct will need to be investigated properly, once such a complaint is received formally," the statement added.
The Red Cross said its workers evacuated 18 wounded survivors from the houses in donkey carts. They said ambulances could not reach the site because of earthen barriers erected around the neighborhood by the Israeli military. Red Cross officials said that Israeli soldiers posted nearby tried to chase rescue workers away from the site but that the rescuers refused to leave.
"This is a shocking incident," Pierre Wettach, the Red Cross's head of delegation for Israel and the Palestinian territories, said in a statement. "The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded."
The Geneva Conventions provide that parties to a conflict "at all times" should "without delay" take "all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled." The conventions also say that wounded "shall not willfully be left without medical assistance and care."
The Red Cross said it was able to remove only three of the bodies and had received reports of other casualties in the neighborhood. The agency said that it was trying to return to the site but that negotiations with the Israeli military to guarantee safe passage were ongoing.
Palestinian journalists confirmed that large numbers of wounded survivors, including children, had arrived at Red Cross hospitals in Gaza from Zaytoun on Wednesday. Other details could not be independently corroborated; the Israeli military has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza.
There have been other reports of wounded Gazans who have been forced to wait many hours or even days for ambulances since the Israeli offensive began Dec. 27, including several in the Zaytoun neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Israel said Wednesday it was in "fundamental agreement" with a cease-fire proposal offered by Egypt and France, but fighting continued in the Gaza Strip as diplomats from more than a dozen countries haggled over details in a bid to stop the conflict.
Israeli officials said they would send emissaries to Egypt on Thursday to hold talks on a potential truce proposed by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Parallel diplomatic efforts were underway in New York at the United Nations. But many sticking points remained. The French-Egyptian proposal calls for an immediate cease-fire, followed by talks on securing Gaza's borders and ending an economic blockade that Israel has imposed since June 2007, when Hamas expelled rival Fatah forces from Gaza to seize sole control of the strip.
U.S. officials have supported the French-Egyptian effort but said the basic issues that led to the conflict need to be resolved upfront. "It has to be a cease-fire that will not allow a return to the status quo," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.
Israel has vowed to continue its 12-day military campaign until it is satisfied that Hamas will be unable to rearm itself by smuggling weaponry through cross-border tunnels from Egypt. Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets, most of them crude and unguided, into southern Israel since a six-month truce between the group and Israel expired Dec. 19.
The Netherlands, Denmark and Turkey said Wednesday they would be willing to contribute to an international force that would patrol the Gaza-Egypt border to prevent smuggling. Israeli officials said they wanted to ensure that any such force would have the authority to stop arms trafficking.
Hamas officials, who have been involved separately in negotiations with Egypt, reacted coolly to the cease-fire plan.
Ahmed Youssef, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said the group would not stop firing rockets into southern Israel until the Israeli military withdrew from the Palestinian territory and ended the economic blockade, which has left Gaza's 1.5 million people dependent on smugglers and relief organizations for their basic needs. About 25 rockets landed in southern Israel on Wednesday, wounding two people, the Israeli military said.
The Israeli military observed a three-hour cessation in the fighting Wednesday afternoon to allow relief agencies to deliver about 80 truckloads of emergency supplies. The lull in the violence also gave besieged Gaza residents an opportunity to emerge briefly from their homes and seek food, fuel and medical care.
Gazan medical officials said the pause in fighting led to a drop in casualties compared with other days since Israel launched its ground offensive Saturday. Twenty-nine Palestinians were reported killed Wednesday, bringing the toll to more than 680 since the fighting began, Palestinian health officials said. U.N. officials estimate that about one-third of those killed have been women and children, including three youngsters killed Wednesday when a shell struck a car.
Seven Israeli soldiers and three civilians have died in the conflict. Four of the soldiers were killed by errant shells fired by Israeli forces.
Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
Rockets Fired From Lebanon Into Israel
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: January 8, 2009
JERUSALEM — Rockets fired from Lebanon landed in northern Israel on Thursday, raising concerns they could represent a broadening of the conflict, but both governments played down their significance. International efforts to end the 13-day war in the Gaza Strip continued with the arrival of Israeli negotiators in Cairo.
Israeli shells hit Jabaliya. A Hamas rocket struck Gadera. More Photos »
Egyptian officials said the Israeli officials were meeting with the head of Egyptian military intelligence, Omar Suleiman, to explore a proposal devised by Egypt and France as what officials in Paris called a road map to a cease-fire. There was no immediate word on the outcome of the talks.
As Israel’s offensive in Gaza continued with tanks on the ground in the beleaguered coastal strip and bombardment from the air, Israel again ordered a temporary lull in the fighting on Thursday to give the 1.5 million population a three-hour opportunity to seek medical help and buy supplies.
A similar pause yesterday enabled rescue teams from the International Committee of the Red Cross to enter some areas for the first time since Israel’s ground offensive began last weekend after days of air-strikes. In one area, the Committee reported Thursday, its representatives discovered “shocking” scenes including four children next to their mother’s corpses. The children were too weak to stand on their own, the aid organization said.
The discussions in Cairo got underway hours after at least three missiles from Lebanon landed near the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, slightly injuring two Israelis, and the Israeli army responded with fire. The rockets from Lebanon raised concern that they could presage a second front in the conflict that would complicate peace efforts and revive memories of the bloody war between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006.
But the Israeli Army later dismissed the rockets on Thursday as “a minor event” and, in Lebanon, the government said Hezbollah had distanced itself from the attack. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of Lebanon immediately condemned the rocket-fire. In a statement, Lebanese Information Minister Tarek Mitri said: “Hezbollah assured the Lebanese government that it remains engaged in preserving the stability in Lebanon and respects Security Council resolution 1701.”
United Nations Security Council resolution 1701 laid out the terms of the ceasefire that ended the war between Israel and Lebanon in August 2006.
The Israeli Army said it “responded with fire against the source of the rockets,” which landed near the town of Nahariya. Two Israelis were slightly wounded, the police said.
The rockets from Lebanon fell in residential areas. Shimon Koren, head of the northern district police, instructed residents of Nahariya and Kabri to enter bomb shelters and he instructed residents in nearby localities to open their shelters. School was canceled in Nahariya and nearby Shlomi.
So far there has been no claim of responsibility.
The lull Thursday coincided with news from Cairo that the Israeli delegation had arrived to open talks. Israeli officials said on Wednesday that their country would be represented at the Cairo talks by two officials — a senior aide to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Shalom Turgeman, and a senior defense official, Amos Gilad.
International pressure for a negotiated cease-fire intensified after Israeli shells killed some 40 people at a United Nations school in Gaza on Tuesday. Israel said Hamas militants had fired mortar shells from the school compound prior to Israel’s shelling.
The Israeli government said Wednesday that it welcomed the efforts of France and Egypt to work out a durable cease-fire. It said it would end its assault if Hamas stopped firing rockets into Israel and ended the smuggling of weapons from Egypt. It said that if a durable cease-fire took hold, it would reopen border crossings into Gaza for goods and people. But Israeli and Hamas officials both denied an assertion on Wednesday by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, that a cease-fire had been agreed upon.
“There is an agreement on general principles, that Hamas should stop rocket fire and mustn’t rearm,” a senior Israeli official said Wednesday evening. “But that’s like agreeing that motherhood is a good thing. We have to transform those agreed principles into working procedures on the ground, and that’s barely begun.”
The United States has been involved behind the scenes, senior Israeli and French officials said, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “constantly on the phone” with Mr. Olmert, according to one Israeli official.
In Washington, the White House spokeswoman, Dana M. Perino, said of talks about a cease-fire: “As I understand, the Israelis are open to the concept, but they want to learn more about the details; so do we.”
At the United Nations, several Arab delegates said Wednesday night that they thought they now had enough votes to approve a Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire. That would likely put the United States and other Western powers, which oppose a binding resolution, in the awkward position of having to veto a cease-fire.
A senior French official in Paris said that Mr. Sarkozy’s earlier comment about an agreement on a cease-fire was misunderstood: “The plan is not a cease-fire; the plan is a road map toward a cease-fire.” One crucial aspect of any deal is how to prevent new smuggling tunnels from being built under Egypt’s border with Gaza.
The senior Israeli official raised the possibility of reaching “tacit agreements” with Hamas to end rocket fire, while also persuading Egypt to allow American and perhaps European army engineers to help seal its border with Gaza above and below ground.
Hamas is insisting that any new arrangement include the reopening of border crossings for trade with Israel and the reopening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt for people.
Casualty figures in the Gaza war are hard to verify, but officials at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and the Gazan Ministry of Health said 683 Palestinians had died since the conflict began Dec. 27, including 218 children and 90 women. They said 3,085 had been wounded. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza said 130 children age 16 or under had died. The United Nations estimated a few days ago that a quarter of the dead were civilians.
But Palestinian residents and Israeli officials say that Hamas is tending its own wounded in separate medical centers, not in public hospitals, and that it is difficult to know the number of dead Hamas fighters, many of whom were not wearing uniforms.
Israel says it has killed at least 130 Hamas fighters. Ten Israelis have been killed during the offensive, including three civilians. Most of the seven dead Israeli soldiers were killed in so-called friendly fire.
Thanassis Cambanis contributed reporting from Beirut, and Michael Slackman from Cairo. Alan Cowell and Katrin Bennhold contributed from Paris.
Published: January 8, 2009
JERUSALEM — Rockets fired from Lebanon landed in northern Israel on Thursday, raising concerns they could represent a broadening of the conflict, but both governments played down their significance. International efforts to end the 13-day war in the Gaza Strip continued with the arrival of Israeli negotiators in Cairo.
Israeli shells hit Jabaliya. A Hamas rocket struck Gadera. More Photos »
Egyptian officials said the Israeli officials were meeting with the head of Egyptian military intelligence, Omar Suleiman, to explore a proposal devised by Egypt and France as what officials in Paris called a road map to a cease-fire. There was no immediate word on the outcome of the talks.
As Israel’s offensive in Gaza continued with tanks on the ground in the beleaguered coastal strip and bombardment from the air, Israel again ordered a temporary lull in the fighting on Thursday to give the 1.5 million population a three-hour opportunity to seek medical help and buy supplies.
A similar pause yesterday enabled rescue teams from the International Committee of the Red Cross to enter some areas for the first time since Israel’s ground offensive began last weekend after days of air-strikes. In one area, the Committee reported Thursday, its representatives discovered “shocking” scenes including four children next to their mother’s corpses. The children were too weak to stand on their own, the aid organization said.
The discussions in Cairo got underway hours after at least three missiles from Lebanon landed near the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, slightly injuring two Israelis, and the Israeli army responded with fire. The rockets from Lebanon raised concern that they could presage a second front in the conflict that would complicate peace efforts and revive memories of the bloody war between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006.
But the Israeli Army later dismissed the rockets on Thursday as “a minor event” and, in Lebanon, the government said Hezbollah had distanced itself from the attack. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of Lebanon immediately condemned the rocket-fire. In a statement, Lebanese Information Minister Tarek Mitri said: “Hezbollah assured the Lebanese government that it remains engaged in preserving the stability in Lebanon and respects Security Council resolution 1701.”
United Nations Security Council resolution 1701 laid out the terms of the ceasefire that ended the war between Israel and Lebanon in August 2006.
The Israeli Army said it “responded with fire against the source of the rockets,” which landed near the town of Nahariya. Two Israelis were slightly wounded, the police said.
The rockets from Lebanon fell in residential areas. Shimon Koren, head of the northern district police, instructed residents of Nahariya and Kabri to enter bomb shelters and he instructed residents in nearby localities to open their shelters. School was canceled in Nahariya and nearby Shlomi.
So far there has been no claim of responsibility.
The lull Thursday coincided with news from Cairo that the Israeli delegation had arrived to open talks. Israeli officials said on Wednesday that their country would be represented at the Cairo talks by two officials — a senior aide to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Shalom Turgeman, and a senior defense official, Amos Gilad.
International pressure for a negotiated cease-fire intensified after Israeli shells killed some 40 people at a United Nations school in Gaza on Tuesday. Israel said Hamas militants had fired mortar shells from the school compound prior to Israel’s shelling.
The Israeli government said Wednesday that it welcomed the efforts of France and Egypt to work out a durable cease-fire. It said it would end its assault if Hamas stopped firing rockets into Israel and ended the smuggling of weapons from Egypt. It said that if a durable cease-fire took hold, it would reopen border crossings into Gaza for goods and people. But Israeli and Hamas officials both denied an assertion on Wednesday by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, that a cease-fire had been agreed upon.
“There is an agreement on general principles, that Hamas should stop rocket fire and mustn’t rearm,” a senior Israeli official said Wednesday evening. “But that’s like agreeing that motherhood is a good thing. We have to transform those agreed principles into working procedures on the ground, and that’s barely begun.”
The United States has been involved behind the scenes, senior Israeli and French officials said, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “constantly on the phone” with Mr. Olmert, according to one Israeli official.
In Washington, the White House spokeswoman, Dana M. Perino, said of talks about a cease-fire: “As I understand, the Israelis are open to the concept, but they want to learn more about the details; so do we.”
At the United Nations, several Arab delegates said Wednesday night that they thought they now had enough votes to approve a Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire. That would likely put the United States and other Western powers, which oppose a binding resolution, in the awkward position of having to veto a cease-fire.
A senior French official in Paris said that Mr. Sarkozy’s earlier comment about an agreement on a cease-fire was misunderstood: “The plan is not a cease-fire; the plan is a road map toward a cease-fire.” One crucial aspect of any deal is how to prevent new smuggling tunnels from being built under Egypt’s border with Gaza.
The senior Israeli official raised the possibility of reaching “tacit agreements” with Hamas to end rocket fire, while also persuading Egypt to allow American and perhaps European army engineers to help seal its border with Gaza above and below ground.
Hamas is insisting that any new arrangement include the reopening of border crossings for trade with Israel and the reopening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt for people.
Casualty figures in the Gaza war are hard to verify, but officials at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and the Gazan Ministry of Health said 683 Palestinians had died since the conflict began Dec. 27, including 218 children and 90 women. They said 3,085 had been wounded. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza said 130 children age 16 or under had died. The United Nations estimated a few days ago that a quarter of the dead were civilians.
But Palestinian residents and Israeli officials say that Hamas is tending its own wounded in separate medical centers, not in public hospitals, and that it is difficult to know the number of dead Hamas fighters, many of whom were not wearing uniforms.
Israel says it has killed at least 130 Hamas fighters. Ten Israelis have been killed during the offensive, including three civilians. Most of the seven dead Israeli soldiers were killed in so-called friendly fire.
Thanassis Cambanis contributed reporting from Beirut, and Michael Slackman from Cairo. Alan Cowell and Katrin Bennhold contributed from Paris.
07 January 2009
Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza
January 7, 2009
By ETHAN BRONNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/world/middleeast/07media.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig
JERUSALEM — Three times in recent days, a small group of foreign correspondents was told to appear at the border crossing to Gaza. The reporters were to be permitted in to cover firsthand the Israeli war on Hamas in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling against the two-month-old Israeli ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza.
Each time, they were turned back on security grounds, even as relief workers and other foreign citizens were permitted to cross the border. On Tuesday the reporters were told to not even bother going to the border.
And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it waited in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.
Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one the government is seeking to entirely control the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military strategy.
“This is the result of what happened in the 2006 Lebanon war against Hezbollah,” said Nachman Shai, a former army spokesman who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Israel’s public diplomacy. “Then, the media were everywhere. Their cameras and tapes picked up discussions between commanders. People talked on live television. It helped the enemy and confused and destabilized the home front. Today, Israel is trying to control the information much more closely.”
The government-commissioned investigation into the war with Hezbollah reported that the army had found that when reporters were allowed on the battlefield in Lebanon, they got in the way of military operations by posing risks and asking questions.
Maj. Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman, said, “If a journalist gets injured or killed, then it is Central Command’s responsibility.” She said the government was trying to protect Israel from rocket fire and “not deal with the media.”
Beyond such tactical considerations, there is a political one. Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s Government Press Office, said, “Any journalist who enters Gaza becomes a fig leaf and front for the Hamas terror organization, and I see no reason why we should help that.”
Foreign reporters deny that their work in Gaza has been subject to Hamas censorship or control. Unable to send foreign reporters into Gaza, the international news media have relied on Palestinian journalists based there for coverage.
But it seems that many Israelis accept Mr. Seaman’s assessment and shed no tears over the restrictions, despite repeated protests by the Foreign Press Association of Israel, including on Tuesday.
A headline in Tuesday’s issue of Yediot Aharonot, the country’s largest selling daily newspaper, expressed well the popular view of the issue. Over a news article describing the generally negative coverage so far, especially in the European media, an intentional misspelling of a Hebrew word turned the headline “World Media” into “World Liars.”
This attitude has been helped by supportive Israeli news media whose articles have been filled with “feelings of self-righteousness and a sense of catharsis following what was felt to be undue restraint in the face of attacks by the enemy,” according to a study of the first days of media coverage of the war by a liberal but nonpartisan group called Keshev, the Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel.
The Foreign Press Association has been fighting for weeks to get its members into Gaza, first appealing to senior government officials and ultimately taking its case to the country’s highest court. Last week the justices worked out an arrangement with the organization whereby small groups would be permitted into Gaza when it was deemed safe enough for the crossings to be opened for other reasons.
So far, every time the border has been opened, journalists have not been permitted to go in.
On Tuesday, the press association released a statement saying, “The unprecedented denial of access to Gaza for the world’s media amounts to a severe violation of press freedom and puts the state of Israel in the company of a handful of regimes around the world which regularly keep journalists from doing their jobs.”
At the same time that reporters have been given less access to Gaza, the government has created a new structure for shaping its public message, ensuring that spokesmen of the major government branches meet daily to make sure all are singing from the same sheet.
“We are trying to coordinate everything that has to do with the image and content of what we are doing and to make sure that whoever goes on the air, whether a minister or professor or ex-ambassador, knows what he is saying,” said Aviv Shir-On, deputy director general for media in the Foreign Ministry. “We have talking points and we try to disseminate our ideas and message.”
Israelis say the war is being reduced on television screens around the world to a simplistic story: an American-backed country with awesome military machine fighting a third-world guerrilla force leading to a handful of Israelis dead versus 600 Gazans dead.
Israelis and their supporters think that such quick descriptions fail to explain the vital context of what has been happening — years of terrorist rocket fire on civilians have gone largely unanswered, and a message had to be sent to Israel’s enemies that this would go on no longer, they say. The issue of proportionality, they add, is a false construct because comparing death tolls offers no help in measuring justice and legitimacy.
There are other ways to construe the context of this conflict, of course. But no matter what, Israel’s diplomats know that if journalists are given a choice between covering death and covering context, death wins. So in a war that they consider necessary but poorly understood, they have decided to keep the news media far away from the death.
John Ging, an Irishman who directs operations in Gaza for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, entered Gaza on Monday as journalists were kept out. He told Palestinian reporters in Gaza that the policy was a problem.
“For the truth to get out, journalists have to get in,” he said.
By ETHAN BRONNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/world/middleeast/07media.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig
JERUSALEM — Three times in recent days, a small group of foreign correspondents was told to appear at the border crossing to Gaza. The reporters were to be permitted in to cover firsthand the Israeli war on Hamas in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling against the two-month-old Israeli ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza.
Each time, they were turned back on security grounds, even as relief workers and other foreign citizens were permitted to cross the border. On Tuesday the reporters were told to not even bother going to the border.
And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it waited in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.
Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one the government is seeking to entirely control the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military strategy.
“This is the result of what happened in the 2006 Lebanon war against Hezbollah,” said Nachman Shai, a former army spokesman who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Israel’s public diplomacy. “Then, the media were everywhere. Their cameras and tapes picked up discussions between commanders. People talked on live television. It helped the enemy and confused and destabilized the home front. Today, Israel is trying to control the information much more closely.”
The government-commissioned investigation into the war with Hezbollah reported that the army had found that when reporters were allowed on the battlefield in Lebanon, they got in the way of military operations by posing risks and asking questions.
Maj. Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman, said, “If a journalist gets injured or killed, then it is Central Command’s responsibility.” She said the government was trying to protect Israel from rocket fire and “not deal with the media.”
Beyond such tactical considerations, there is a political one. Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s Government Press Office, said, “Any journalist who enters Gaza becomes a fig leaf and front for the Hamas terror organization, and I see no reason why we should help that.”
Foreign reporters deny that their work in Gaza has been subject to Hamas censorship or control. Unable to send foreign reporters into Gaza, the international news media have relied on Palestinian journalists based there for coverage.
But it seems that many Israelis accept Mr. Seaman’s assessment and shed no tears over the restrictions, despite repeated protests by the Foreign Press Association of Israel, including on Tuesday.
A headline in Tuesday’s issue of Yediot Aharonot, the country’s largest selling daily newspaper, expressed well the popular view of the issue. Over a news article describing the generally negative coverage so far, especially in the European media, an intentional misspelling of a Hebrew word turned the headline “World Media” into “World Liars.”
This attitude has been helped by supportive Israeli news media whose articles have been filled with “feelings of self-righteousness and a sense of catharsis following what was felt to be undue restraint in the face of attacks by the enemy,” according to a study of the first days of media coverage of the war by a liberal but nonpartisan group called Keshev, the Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel.
The Foreign Press Association has been fighting for weeks to get its members into Gaza, first appealing to senior government officials and ultimately taking its case to the country’s highest court. Last week the justices worked out an arrangement with the organization whereby small groups would be permitted into Gaza when it was deemed safe enough for the crossings to be opened for other reasons.
So far, every time the border has been opened, journalists have not been permitted to go in.
On Tuesday, the press association released a statement saying, “The unprecedented denial of access to Gaza for the world’s media amounts to a severe violation of press freedom and puts the state of Israel in the company of a handful of regimes around the world which regularly keep journalists from doing their jobs.”
At the same time that reporters have been given less access to Gaza, the government has created a new structure for shaping its public message, ensuring that spokesmen of the major government branches meet daily to make sure all are singing from the same sheet.
“We are trying to coordinate everything that has to do with the image and content of what we are doing and to make sure that whoever goes on the air, whether a minister or professor or ex-ambassador, knows what he is saying,” said Aviv Shir-On, deputy director general for media in the Foreign Ministry. “We have talking points and we try to disseminate our ideas and message.”
Israelis say the war is being reduced on television screens around the world to a simplistic story: an American-backed country with awesome military machine fighting a third-world guerrilla force leading to a handful of Israelis dead versus 600 Gazans dead.
Israelis and their supporters think that such quick descriptions fail to explain the vital context of what has been happening — years of terrorist rocket fire on civilians have gone largely unanswered, and a message had to be sent to Israel’s enemies that this would go on no longer, they say. The issue of proportionality, they add, is a false construct because comparing death tolls offers no help in measuring justice and legitimacy.
There are other ways to construe the context of this conflict, of course. But no matter what, Israel’s diplomats know that if journalists are given a choice between covering death and covering context, death wins. So in a war that they consider necessary but poorly understood, they have decided to keep the news media far away from the death.
John Ging, an Irishman who directs operations in Gaza for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, entered Gaza on Monday as journalists were kept out. He told Palestinian reporters in Gaza that the policy was a problem.
“For the truth to get out, journalists have to get in,” he said.
Israel Hits U.N.-Run School in Gaza
40 Die at Shelter That Military Says Hamas Was Firing From
By Griff Witte and Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 7, 2009; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/06/AR2009010603504.html?sid%3DST20090107http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/contenhttp://www.washingtonpost.com:80/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/registration/register&sub=AR
JERUSALEM, Jan. 6 -- Israeli soldiers battling Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday fired mortar shells at a U.N.-run school where Palestinians had sought refuge from the fighting, killing at least 40 people, many of them civilians, Palestinian medical officials said.
The Israeli military said its soldiers fired in self-defense after Hamas fighters launched mortar shells from the school. The United Nations condemned the attack and called for an independent investigation.
"We are completely devastated. There is nowhere safe in Gaza," said John Ging, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip.
The incident -- one of the single most deadly during Israel's 11-day offensive -- underscored the dangers Palestinian civilians face as thousands of Israeli soldiers fight their way across Gaza against an enemy that does not wear uniforms or operate from bases, but instead mingles with the population.
In all, at least 85 Palestinians died in attacks across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, said Mowaiya Hassanien, a senior Gaza hospital official. He said the Palestinian death toll since the start of Israel's massive military campaign stood at 625, with more than 2,900 injured. The United Nations says 30 percent of those killed have been women and children.
Tuesday's attack on the school came only hours after an Israeli missile struck a residential area in al-Bureij refugee camp, injuring seven U.N. workers in a nearby medical clinic, U.N. officials said. Late Monday, an Israeli airstrike on a U.N. school in Gaza City had killed three members of a family.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the attacks "totally unacceptable."
"After earlier strikes, the Israeli government was warned that its operations were endangering U.N. compounds," he said in a statement. "I am deeply dismayed that despite these repeated efforts, today's tragedies have ensued."
Since the fighting began, the United Nations has opened 23 of its schools as emergency shelters for the 1.5 million residents of Gaza, who are unable to leave the territory. By Tuesday night, the number of displaced Palestinians flooding into the schools had reached 15,000.
Ging, the U.N. official in Gaza, said that all U.N. facilities are clearly marked with flags and that the Israeli military has been given precise Global Positioning System coordinates.
Using unusually strong language for a body known for quiet diplomacy, Ging declared Tuesday that both Israeli and Hamas leaders, as well as the international community, are to blame for the mounting civilian death toll.
"The political leaders who are responsible on both sides have to call a halt," Ging said. "The civilian population is paying a horrific price. We need this right now. Not tomorrow. The civilians in Gaza have international rights to be protected not by verbal protection, but actual protection."
Both Hamas and Israel have rejected calls for a truce.
Speaking in Washington, President-elect Barack Obama commented for the first time on the Israeli offensive, saying that "the loss of civilian life in Gaza and in Israel is a source of deep concern to me, and after January 20th I'll have plenty to say about the issue."
The comments contrasted with statements from the Bush administration, which has focused its public remarks on condemning Hamas's role in initiating the violence. Bush has said that only after Hamas has stopped firing rockets should Israel be required to halt its military campaign.
Rockets continued to be launched from the strip Tuesday, with 35 landing in Israel, the military said. A 3-month-old child in Gedera, about 25 miles north of Gaza, was lightly wounded.
Israeli officials blamed Hamas, which has run Gaza for the past 18 months, for the deaths at the schools.
"Unfortunately, this is not the first time that Hamas has deliberately abused a U.N. installation," said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Israeli military officials said soldiers operating in the area around the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza came under mortar fire and responded by targeting the source: the U.N.-run al-Fakhora School.
"When you're fired at, you have to fight back," said reserve Brig. Gen. Ilan Tal, a military spokesman.
Tal said two known Hamas gunmen were killed in the Israeli strike just outside the school, in addition to members of a mortar squad.
U.N. officials said they did not know whether fighters had been in the school, and wanted the matter investigated.
At the local hospital where dozens of the injured were treated, physician Basam Warda said a large number of the casualties were women and children who had gathered at the school because they considered it a haven from the fighting. At the time of the attack, people were standing outside the gate of the school, where hundreds of families had sought shelter.
"The wounded arrived with multiple fractures, ripped stomachs, amputated limbs," he said. "The bodies were ripped apart."
Warda said many of the wounded had to be placed on the floor and treated there because of a bed shortage. Others were sent to another hospital, in Gaza City. "Some might have died on the way," he said.
Ging called the fighting "the product of political failure" and accused Israel of depriving Palestinians of critically needed infrastructure.
In a report, the U.N. humanitarian office in Gaza said Tuesday that water and sewage systems in the strip were on the verge of collapse because of power outages and that a third of Gaza's residents are completely cut off from running water.
As the sense of crisis in Gaza deepened, Israeli forces battled on both ends of the 40-mile-long strip, and reports from within the territory suggested the military was tightening its grip. Witnesses said that Israel made gains in Khan Younis, in the south, and that there was intense fighting around Gaza City, in the north.
One Israeli soldier was killed Tuesday, bringing to six the total dead since Israel launched its ground offensive Saturday night. Of those, four were killed in "friendly fire" incidents.
Three Israeli civilians and a soldier were killed by rocket fire earlier in the campaign.
In his remarks, Obama said he was "not backing away at all from what I said during the campaign. . . . Starting at the beginning of our administration, we're going to engage effectively and consistently in trying to resolve the conflict in the Middle East."
Leading the push for a truce in Gaza is French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been visiting Middle Eastern capitals this week, urging an immediate cease-fire.
Sarkozy said the deaths at the school illustrated the need for a nonmilitary solution. "This reinforces my determination for this to end as quickly as possible," Sarkozy told reporters in the southern Lebanese town of At Tiri after learning of the school attack. "Time works against us; that's why we must find a solution."
Sarkozy was also in Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday, in a bid to get President Bashar al-Assad to pressure Hamas into agreeing to a truce. Syria and Iran are two of Hamas's biggest backers.
Assad called Israel's offensive "a war crime." But he also urged a cease-fire.
Hamas, which has never recognized Israel, has vowed to fight on. Israel says it will not stop its offensive until it has international guarantees that Hamas can be prevented from continuing to fire rockets.
As Sarkozy visited Egypt late Tuesday, President Hosni Mubarak said he would propose an immediate cease-fire, followed by talks on the Israeli blockade of Gaza and on ways of keeping arms from being smuggled into Gaza via Egypt.
Egypt mediated a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel this summer. The expiration of that truce Dec. 19 precipitated the latest round of violence.
In New York, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Olmert had responded to Mubarak's initiative with an offer to open a humanitarian corridor into Gaza but did not say whether Israel would participate in talks with the Palestinians. "We are awaiting the Israeli response and we harbor hope that it will be a positive one," Kouchner said.
Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations and special correspondents Reyham Abdel Kareem in Gaza City and Samuel Sockol in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
By Griff Witte and Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 7, 2009; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/06/AR2009010603504.html?sid%3DST20090107http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/contenhttp://www.washingtonpost.com:80/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/registration/register&sub=AR
JERUSALEM, Jan. 6 -- Israeli soldiers battling Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday fired mortar shells at a U.N.-run school where Palestinians had sought refuge from the fighting, killing at least 40 people, many of them civilians, Palestinian medical officials said.
The Israeli military said its soldiers fired in self-defense after Hamas fighters launched mortar shells from the school. The United Nations condemned the attack and called for an independent investigation.
"We are completely devastated. There is nowhere safe in Gaza," said John Ging, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip.
The incident -- one of the single most deadly during Israel's 11-day offensive -- underscored the dangers Palestinian civilians face as thousands of Israeli soldiers fight their way across Gaza against an enemy that does not wear uniforms or operate from bases, but instead mingles with the population.
In all, at least 85 Palestinians died in attacks across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, said Mowaiya Hassanien, a senior Gaza hospital official. He said the Palestinian death toll since the start of Israel's massive military campaign stood at 625, with more than 2,900 injured. The United Nations says 30 percent of those killed have been women and children.
Tuesday's attack on the school came only hours after an Israeli missile struck a residential area in al-Bureij refugee camp, injuring seven U.N. workers in a nearby medical clinic, U.N. officials said. Late Monday, an Israeli airstrike on a U.N. school in Gaza City had killed three members of a family.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the attacks "totally unacceptable."
"After earlier strikes, the Israeli government was warned that its operations were endangering U.N. compounds," he said in a statement. "I am deeply dismayed that despite these repeated efforts, today's tragedies have ensued."
Since the fighting began, the United Nations has opened 23 of its schools as emergency shelters for the 1.5 million residents of Gaza, who are unable to leave the territory. By Tuesday night, the number of displaced Palestinians flooding into the schools had reached 15,000.
Ging, the U.N. official in Gaza, said that all U.N. facilities are clearly marked with flags and that the Israeli military has been given precise Global Positioning System coordinates.
Using unusually strong language for a body known for quiet diplomacy, Ging declared Tuesday that both Israeli and Hamas leaders, as well as the international community, are to blame for the mounting civilian death toll.
"The political leaders who are responsible on both sides have to call a halt," Ging said. "The civilian population is paying a horrific price. We need this right now. Not tomorrow. The civilians in Gaza have international rights to be protected not by verbal protection, but actual protection."
Both Hamas and Israel have rejected calls for a truce.
Speaking in Washington, President-elect Barack Obama commented for the first time on the Israeli offensive, saying that "the loss of civilian life in Gaza and in Israel is a source of deep concern to me, and after January 20th I'll have plenty to say about the issue."
The comments contrasted with statements from the Bush administration, which has focused its public remarks on condemning Hamas's role in initiating the violence. Bush has said that only after Hamas has stopped firing rockets should Israel be required to halt its military campaign.
Rockets continued to be launched from the strip Tuesday, with 35 landing in Israel, the military said. A 3-month-old child in Gedera, about 25 miles north of Gaza, was lightly wounded.
Israeli officials blamed Hamas, which has run Gaza for the past 18 months, for the deaths at the schools.
"Unfortunately, this is not the first time that Hamas has deliberately abused a U.N. installation," said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Israeli military officials said soldiers operating in the area around the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza came under mortar fire and responded by targeting the source: the U.N.-run al-Fakhora School.
"When you're fired at, you have to fight back," said reserve Brig. Gen. Ilan Tal, a military spokesman.
Tal said two known Hamas gunmen were killed in the Israeli strike just outside the school, in addition to members of a mortar squad.
U.N. officials said they did not know whether fighters had been in the school, and wanted the matter investigated.
At the local hospital where dozens of the injured were treated, physician Basam Warda said a large number of the casualties were women and children who had gathered at the school because they considered it a haven from the fighting. At the time of the attack, people were standing outside the gate of the school, where hundreds of families had sought shelter.
"The wounded arrived with multiple fractures, ripped stomachs, amputated limbs," he said. "The bodies were ripped apart."
Warda said many of the wounded had to be placed on the floor and treated there because of a bed shortage. Others were sent to another hospital, in Gaza City. "Some might have died on the way," he said.
Ging called the fighting "the product of political failure" and accused Israel of depriving Palestinians of critically needed infrastructure.
In a report, the U.N. humanitarian office in Gaza said Tuesday that water and sewage systems in the strip were on the verge of collapse because of power outages and that a third of Gaza's residents are completely cut off from running water.
As the sense of crisis in Gaza deepened, Israeli forces battled on both ends of the 40-mile-long strip, and reports from within the territory suggested the military was tightening its grip. Witnesses said that Israel made gains in Khan Younis, in the south, and that there was intense fighting around Gaza City, in the north.
One Israeli soldier was killed Tuesday, bringing to six the total dead since Israel launched its ground offensive Saturday night. Of those, four were killed in "friendly fire" incidents.
Three Israeli civilians and a soldier were killed by rocket fire earlier in the campaign.
In his remarks, Obama said he was "not backing away at all from what I said during the campaign. . . . Starting at the beginning of our administration, we're going to engage effectively and consistently in trying to resolve the conflict in the Middle East."
Leading the push for a truce in Gaza is French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been visiting Middle Eastern capitals this week, urging an immediate cease-fire.
Sarkozy said the deaths at the school illustrated the need for a nonmilitary solution. "This reinforces my determination for this to end as quickly as possible," Sarkozy told reporters in the southern Lebanese town of At Tiri after learning of the school attack. "Time works against us; that's why we must find a solution."
Sarkozy was also in Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday, in a bid to get President Bashar al-Assad to pressure Hamas into agreeing to a truce. Syria and Iran are two of Hamas's biggest backers.
Assad called Israel's offensive "a war crime." But he also urged a cease-fire.
Hamas, which has never recognized Israel, has vowed to fight on. Israel says it will not stop its offensive until it has international guarantees that Hamas can be prevented from continuing to fire rockets.
As Sarkozy visited Egypt late Tuesday, President Hosni Mubarak said he would propose an immediate cease-fire, followed by talks on the Israeli blockade of Gaza and on ways of keeping arms from being smuggled into Gaza via Egypt.
Egypt mediated a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel this summer. The expiration of that truce Dec. 19 precipitated the latest round of violence.
In New York, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Olmert had responded to Mubarak's initiative with an offer to open a humanitarian corridor into Gaza but did not say whether Israel would participate in talks with the Palestinians. "We are awaiting the Israeli response and we harbor hope that it will be a positive one," Kouchner said.
Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations and special correspondents Reyham Abdel Kareem in Gaza City and Samuel Sockol in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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