Even Discussion

Thousands of Israelis have protested in a central park here demanding that their
government revoke its decision to deport 400 children of migrant workers.

As Hamas cracks down on the rights of Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip,
their sisters in the occupied West Bank are slowly gaining ground. But a
bureaucracy, that is sometimes supported by foreign aid, is crippling these
advances.

Rightwing Israeli groups financially supported by Jewish and fundamentalist
Christian groups from abroad are on a campaign to undermine free thought in
Israeli universities. Collaterally, a move is under way by right-wing parties in the
Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to limit the freedom of action of civil and human
rights-minded NGOs.

Cancer patient Ahmed Abu Fuad needs chemotherapy to survive. Muhammad
Subeh needs an eye-transplant while paramedic Alaa Sarhan desperately needs
surgery to remove shrapnel from his body. But these Gazans are unable to leave
the area to seek the required medical treatment elsewhere, and it is not because
of the Israeli siege.

In a bright and spacious classroom, with plants overflowing in the courtyard
outside, six students lean forward at their desks looking at the 10-digit addition
they are asked to make. One student stands before the numbers on the
chalkboard and a red and yellow-beaded abacus. But her attention is on the
abacus she visualises in her mind.

It was his second time to be caught stealing a car, so Turki was meted a jail term
of five years. But the young repeat offender was only 17 years old at the time of
his arrest, and therefore was still considered a minor under the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child.

“It’s been days without electricity and water. We can’t do anything, and it’s
unbearably hot now.” Abu Fouad, 83, speaks of the power cuts plaguing all of
the Gaza Strip.

When the Barack Obama administration unveiled its plan last
week for an improvised State Department-controlled army of
contractors to replace all U.S. combat troops in Iraq by the
end of 2011, critics associated with the U.S. command attacked
the transition plan, insisting that the United States must
continue to assume that U.S. combat forces should and can
remain in Iraq indefinitely.

Just off Omar Al-Mukhtar Street, Gaza City’s main thoroughfare, in a narrow,
sandy alley way is a little second-hand clothing shop. In the dimly lit store, with
only intermittent electricity for some hours a day at best, sits a single battered
and aging sewing machine.

Three weeks after a fatal exchange of fire between Israel and
Lebanon along the U.N.-demarcated Blue Line, the United
Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has yet to make
recommendations on easing tension at the border.