Blindfolded Palestinian detainees are led out of the Gaza Strip by Israeli soldiers of the Golani infantry unit after an operation in the territory, Nov. 8.

The dignity of the Palestinians is being trampled underfoot day after day by Israel’s harsh security measures which are causing an enormous humanitarian cost in the occupied territories, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said in a new report.
The Palestinian territories face a deep human crisis, where millions of people are denied their human dignity. Not once in a while, but every day, said the strongly-worded report highlighted by The Independent on Friday, December 14.
Rules can change from one day to the next without notice or explanation.
They live in an arbitrary environment, continuously adapting to circumstances they cannot influence and that increasingly reduce the range of their possibilities.
The ICRC said Israel’s closures of Gaza’s crossings since Hamas takeover prevented 823 sick Palestinians from leaving the besieged strip for treatment.
“Three of these cases, in which the ICRC had directly intervened, had subsequently died because of administrative and security clearance delays,“ said the report, which was released on Thursday, December 13.
Nael Al-Kurdi, 20, died last month of cancer, becoming the fifth patient to die that month because of the Israeli closure of the impoverished coastal
territory.
Israel closed Gaza’s main crossing since Hamas seized control of the impoverished strip in June, citing security concerns.
The balance between [Israel’s] legitimate security concerns and the right of the Palestinian people to live a normal life has not been struck, said the ICRC.

Humanitarian Crisis
The ICRC said that the Israeli closures are causing an enormous humanitarian crisis in the besieged Gaza.
Gazans are getting increasingly anxious as shelves in grocery shops begin to empty because of the closure, it said.
Prices have skyrocketed, and the little that comes in to Gaza is virtually unaffordable.
The Israeli closures have cost some 80,000 Gazans to lose their jobs since June, according to the World Food Program.
Many local industries also had to shut down due to lack of raw materials because of the Israeli closures.
Gaza farmers remember how green and fertile their land was in the recent past. Rich harvests from their citrus and olive trees were exported to the West Bank and Israel, said the ICRC report.
Today, a large part of their land has been leveled and their trees uprooted during the frequent military incursions.
Palestinian farmers have lamented that their luscious, perfectly ripened strawberry crop is being left to rot rather than being shipped to European markets as usual because of the Israeli closures.
The infrastructure of the Gaza Strip is in a fragile state, said the ICRC report.
Basic services such as hospitals, water and sewerage systems can only function if they are connected to the electrical grid. If the grid fails to provide the required power, all basic services will suffer.

Powerless
The ICRC said that the humanitarian situation in the West Bank, controlled by the Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas, is also deteriorating day by day.
Palestinians stand by powerlessly as their land is confiscated, it said.
Over the years, Israeli settlements and roads have expanded, taking over more and more of the land that the same families have cultivated for generations.
It said that large tracts of Palestinian farming lands are being confiscated for the construction of the internationally condemned separation wall, which sneaks through vast swathes of Palestinian territories, preempting the borders of a long-awaited Palestinian state.
During the summer, farmers helplessly watched as wild fires destroyed olive trees isolated behind the Barrier.
They were barred from the area because the gate was not scheduled to open or they lacked the appropriate permit. Some of the trees had taken over fifty years to grow--two generations of labor and care lost in one night, the report said.
In a report to be presented to a donors’ conference on Monday, December 17, the World Bank said that the Israeli restrictions were blocking efforts to revive the shattered Palestinian economy.
It said that Israel’s lifting of trade and travel restrictions could make the difference between continued economic stagnation and double-digit growth.
During the conference, Abbas-appointed Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad will ask donors to provide about $5.5 billion in aid over three years to strengthen the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority.
The World Bank said that the recovery of the Palestinian economy is dependent on Gaza, which represents about 40 percent of the population, calling it “an essential part“ of the economy.
TURKISHWEEKLY.NET

Newly returned Iraqi refugees pick up their luggage from a bus upon their arrival from Syria to Baghdad's international bus station in Al-Mansur district, Dec. 4.

With the first presidential primaries on the U.S. doorstep January 3rd, the usual unholy alliance of Bushites, Democrats, and Big Media are doing their damndest to skam a skeptical electorate into swallowing the lie that the surge has worked, the drawdown has begun, and the war in Iraq is just about over.
Security is so improved in Baghdad thanks to the Bush-Petraeus putsch that New York Times reporters can walk certain streets without armed escort. Even the refugees, driven off by unspeakable violence, are returning to Baghdad in droves.
This myth is being perpetrated by the likes of Fox News and CNN. A four-column full-color photo on the front page of the New York Times November 20th of a gala Baghdad wedding party was accompanied inside by a shot of smiling adolescents playing fussball and a banner headline “BAGHDAD EXHALES AS SECURITY IMPROVES.“
The U.S. military affirms that insurgent activity is at its lowest level since the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarrah that set off sectarian bloodshed. Yet more U.S. troops have lost their lives in 2007 than in any other year of this brutal war precisely because of Bush’s surge.
All this happy talk gets Bush and the Republicans off the hook for an overwhelmingly unpopular war just in time for the U.S. presidential election season. It also means that the Democrats won’t have to defend their half-hearted call for withdrawal and risk being tarred as traitors on the 24 House news cycle.
Indeed, the purported calm that has returned to the streets of Baghdad is mostly a photo op touted by Bush’s Big Media collaborators that defuses the war as a campaign issue.
The truth of the matter is that the much-hyped success of the surge and the return of the refugees is as big a bosh as Bush’s WMDs. The streets of Baghdad and Mosul remain deadly killing grounds and the refugees are being manipulated like pawns in a political bunko game to get a U.S. president elected.
Moreover, the myth of their return is a cruel hoax that could shred them of the legitimacy of sanctuary.
The campaign to foist these lies on the U.S. electorate began congruently enough just a few hours into this past November election day.
On November 7th, the Washington Post reported on a Baghdad press conference by the U.S.-Iraqi Joint Pacification Command at which General Quassin al-Moussawi insisted the city had grown so safe that over 46,000 refugees had returned in October.
Moussawi was seconded by his U.S. counterpart Major General Joseph Fils: “there is no question that families are returning to Baghdad.“ The next day, New York Times correspondent Damien Cave met with General Fils over egg rolls in the Green Zone and later wrote “by all accounts, Iraq families who fled their homes in the past two yeas are returning to Baghdad.“
Then on November 12th, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki announced that 7000 families had already returned to Baghdad thanks to the good offices of Bush’s surge and invited the millions of Iraqis still displaced by the carnage to come home.
A spokesperson for the Displacement Ministry backed up the Prime Minister, estimating that 1600 families a day had returned from internal and external exile during October, many of them on free buses the Iraqi government had sent to Damascus to transport refugees home.
Days later, even Cave had to concede the numbers were bogus. General Moussawi’s 46,000 seems to represent all Iraqi citizens crossing the borders from Syria and Jordan during October 2007 and included returning vacationers, business travelers, religious pilgrims, and exiles temporarily returning to retrieve money or for medical care or to bury a relative--in addition to a few refugees going home for good.
Even foreign fighters and three insurgents who had fled to Syria and were arrested in Baqouba days later are thought to be in the mix.
The 1600 families who had reportedly returned daily during October were more like 50, a representative of the bus line chartered by the Maliki government to bring them home, told Cave. Once more, thousands were still fleeing Baghdad--more than were returning according to a bulletin issued by the Iraqi Red Crescent.
Those on the run were mostly being forced into internal displacement--traffic between Baghdad and Damascus has been greatly diminished because the Syrian government is no longer issuing temporary visas to Iraqis seeking sanctuary.
In fact, some of the would-be refugees being turned back at the border may have been counted into Moussawi’s numbers.
The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) counts 4.2 million displaced Iraqis, 2.2 million internally displaced and the rest dispersed in neighboring countries, the largest forced displacement in the Arab world since the Palestinian exodus of 1948. The Middle East now accounts for half the world’s refugees--according to the Swiss-based International Organization on Migration (IOM), the Iraqi diaspora has been responsible for a 14% spike in the number of refugees worldwide. Yet the world has been slow to recognize the crisis and the Iraqi displacement doesn’t have the visibility that the Darfur Crusade, bankrolled by Hollywood moguls, has had.
The internally displaced are the most vulnerable. Herded into ragtag desert camps where violence and disease are epidemic, they face a harsh winter with little resource--UNHCR calculates that half the refugees are children. Some, having been refused residency by 11 out of Iraq’s 18 provincial governments, have taken up Maliki’s offer of a million dinars ($800 USD) and are returning to Baghdad but nowhere in the numbers that Maliki claims.
According to the displacement ministry, only 4300 families, 25,000 Iraqis, have availed themselves of the stipend. UNHCR tallies indicate that 28,000 Iraqis, 3000 more than returned, left Baghdad in October.
A third of the returnees return to find someone else living in their homes, Dana Ladek of the IOM told the Times. Because many Sunna have lost their homes to Shiia families, the housing of returnees has the potential for amping up sectarian confrontation.
Ominously, the Maliki government has charged former CIA asset and convicted embezzler Ahmad Chalabi, a wily veteran of Iraqi’s bruising political wars (U.S. troops once stormed his mansion) with resolving the returnees’ housing crisis.
An estimated 2,000,000 Iraqis have escaped across the country’s borders since the war began in March 2003--1.2 to 1.5 million to Syria; 750,000 to Jordan; and several hundred thousand more to the Persian Gulf states and Arab capitals like Cairo and Beirut--although the threat of renewed civil war is reportedly driving Lebanese into the refugee flow, further impacting the refugee crisis in the Middle East. 20,000 Iraqi Christians have been granted sanctuary in Sweden but a jittery Europe is reluctant to admit more Muslims.
COUNTERPUNCH.COM

The mystery of Vladimir Putin’s preferred successor is solved: Dmitri Medvedev, from the president’s St. Petersburg circle. As the world gets used to a new name, however, it should realize that behind it lies a familiar one, and the West will continue to be challenged by an assertive Russia.
Mr. Putin has endorsed a young loyalist and admirer who owes his career as first deputy prime minister and head of the state gas monopoly to his mentor. That Mr. Medvedev is a former law professor and not a former KGB man (as Putin is), makes him easier to control, because he has no powerful security faction to defend him.
Of course, the youthful Medvedev--slimmer, more dapper, and a more polished speaker than a year ago--still needs to be elected. But with the state and Putin (now one and the same) behind him, that’s a done deal.
Exactly how Putin will perpetuate his influence is immaterial. He might become prime minister after his two terms as president expire next year, as Medvedev this week proposed. He might not. But Putin should be taken at his word that he intends to exercise power based on his “moral mandate,“ which is firmly anchored in his overwhelming popularity.
This week, analysts characterized Medvedev as a milder Putin with democratic credentials and a more cooperative attitude toward the West. Somehow, his Deep Purple rock-music collection is supposed to buttress this view, but remember, Yuri Andropov loved American jazz, and what difference did that make?
Medvedev’s comments this week point to continuity, not divergence, from the Russia that Putin has built. He praised his friend’s eight-year record, saying Putin had rescued the country from “collapse“ and “civil war.“ The world’s attitude toward Russia has also changed, he said. “We are not being treated like schoolchildren. People respect us and reckon with us.“
Indeed, this is why so many Russians are grateful to Putin. The West would do well to remember how much Russians suffered from the political and economic chaos of the Boris Yeltsin years, and how humiliating it was to have NATO and the European Union lap up so any states in the former Soviet empire.
One can celebrate a stronger, more stable, and more prosperous Russia, but it’s the way in which Putin has achieved this that’s worrisome.
As is Medvedev’s implicit approval of the Putin way: centralization of power and suppression of political and civic dissent; nationalization of oil and gas; threatening flexes of military muscle (Russia just suspended participation in a key arms treaty with NATO); and foreign policy by energy-bullying (at Gazprom, Medvedev participated in Eastern European arm-twisting by cutting off gas supplies).
CSMONITOR.COM