Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was in Paris last week and he gave an interview to the French daily Le Figaro. This is what he had to say about an Egyptian proposal to hold four party talks on Gaza involving Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas: I don’t see how we can accept the Egyptian proposal. We have nothing to say to Hamas. We speak to them when we interrogate them in our prisons. But this is a fundamentalist group that says openly that it has received a divine mandate to destroy Israel. One should, on the contrary, weaken [...]
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, a staunch U.S. ally, has confirmed that a Lebanese military investigation is underway following allegations that Palestinians living in the country’s Nahr al-Bared refugee camp were beaten by Lebanese soldiers, and their homes looted and torched, in the aftermath of last summer’s battle between Islamist militants in the camp and the Lebanese army. Lebanese troops burned some homes to rid them of poison left behind by defeated militants at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, Siniora wrote in a yet-unreleased letter to Amnesty International in December. It was the first response the rights [...]
Next month, the U.S. government will begin negotiations with the government of Iraq concerning the terms under which the United States will operate in Iraq after the expiration of the previous U.N. mandate. As the New York Times reports today, the negotiations with Iraq will center around a number of difficult issues, including immunity from local laws for U.S. contractors and whether the U.S. military will be able to operate unilaterally, or will be required to gain some level of approval from Iraqi officials. However, the substantive debate in Congress, concerns whether or not the “status of forces” agreement will [...]
