Wednesday’s release of the much-anticipated Winograd Report on Israel’s conduct of the 2006 Lebanon War is bringing the Israeli political system to the boiling point. The heat is rising quickly under the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who led the country in the war against Hezbollah, the first war in Israel’s short history in which the country did not win a decisive victory. Olmert remains deeply unpopular, but he may yet survive. In the end, it could be another politician — the other Ehud — who ends up the loser. Nobody knows what will remain after the temperature drops [...]
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 [...]
