At least 469 children have been killed and over 3,000 injured in Gaza since the start of the Israeli offensive, a senior UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) official said, adding that more than 370,000 Palestinian kids require “immediate psychosocial first aid.”

Kein diplomatisches Blatt vor dem Mund nahm sich am Mittwoch der deutsche Entwicklungsminister Gerd Müller (CSU), als er Katar direkt der Finanzierung des „Islamischen Staats“ bezichtigte. Damit schlug er in die Kerbe des nunmehrigen irakischen Übergangspremiers Nuri al-Maliki, der wiederholt nicht nur das kleine Emirat, sondern auch Saudi-Arabien als Geldgeber der extremistischen sunnitischen Jihadisten benannte.

At Germany’s initiative, Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with Federal Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel.

On the eve of Ms Merkel’s visit to Kiev on August 23, the two leaders exchanged views on the situation in Ukraine.

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Israel’s Move to the Right Challenges Diaspora Jews

This is a brilliant speech– not just in its ideas but its subtle manner, its means of entering a Jewish space and forever changing it. The speech avoids the rhetoric of anti-Zionism, but when you hear this speech, you realize that it is Over for the Israel lobby inside the Jewish Diaspora. It is just a matter of time.

I pose the same question to those in high positions in Jewish institutions in America who enable Israel in the name of the Jewish people everywhere (as you also claim).

What’s your endgame in Gaza?

Then, tell me, what your endgame is in the West Bank and Jerusalem. As leaders you have a strategy – you have to. What is it? Where is it likely to lead us?

You justify everything Israel does. You invoke the Nazis, terrorist Hamas and now ISIS. Jews, indeed the whole world, has heard it all.

Tell us Israel, beyond tomorrow or the next day, what do you have in mind?

At least 2090 Palestinians have been killed in the ongoing Israeli offensive rocking besieged Gaza since July 7, Al-Mezan center for human rights said on Thursday.

The center said in a statement issued Thursday that Al Mezan and sister human rights group documented until August 21, 2014, the killing of 2,090 Palestinians whose names were identified. The total death toll includes 494 children and 287 women.

Sleeping in Gaza becomes a prosperity due to the continuous Israeli raids day and night from air, sea and ground.

Sleeping becomes our last priority we would care about because death is everywhere. At home we are counting our last minutes and expecting any moment a strike would hit our house or our neighbor’s house.

The US decision to block the adoption of a UN Security Council draft resolution on aid to Ukraine leaves no doubt the United States wants to continue the armed confrontation in that country, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday, commenting on US decision to block the Russia-proposed draft resolution on relief aid to the population in southeast Ukraine.

On August 21, Russia suggested adopting a UN Security Council Resolution to support the delivery of relief aid to the conflict-hit eastern Ukraine.

Ein Jahr nach dem letzten Versuch wollen die U.S.A. wieder einmal Luftangriffe in Syrien legitimieren. Nur diesmal nicht gegen dessen Regierung, sondern die eigenen Invasionsstreitkräfte, die sie und ihre “Alliierten” selbst aufgebaut und ins Land haben einfallen lassen. Lächerlicher geht es nicht.

As predicted, the „sudden“ appearance of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) in northern Iraq weeks ago, has created the rhetorical framework within which the United States and its regional partners will attempt to militarily intervene in both Iraq and Syria. Token US airstrikes have already been underway in Iraq, and it is now revealed that US special operation forces have been operating in Syria, under the guise of attempting to rescue abducted and now slain American journalist, James Wright Foley.

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Safwat Al-Zayat, a retired Brigadier General in the Egyptian Army and an expert in military affairs, told the Anadolu news agency that „Israel‘s use of such internationally banned weapons is a continuation of the approach it adopted in Operation Cast Lead in 2008/2009.“

Al-Zayat added that Israel used Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME), which had already been used in Operation Cast Lead. DIME weapons spread inert metal atoms that penetrate the human body and are difficult to get out of human tissue.

The amount of support of for Israel’s economy originating from Silicon Valley’s private equity firms is especially large. In 2001, during the first year of the Second Intifada, Sequoia Capital Partners, a private equity company headquartered in Menlo Park, raised $150 million to invest in Israeli technology companies. This was Sequoia’s second Israel-focused venture capital fund. Last year Sequoia raised its fifth Israel-dedicated fund, totaling $215 million. Since 1999 Sequoia Capital has injected over $789 million into Israel’s software and electronics industries. Much of this money managed by Sequoia Capital was contributed by California investors, including major tax-exempt institutions like the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

(21. August) „Our policy is simple, if they (Hamas) will shoot, they will be hit back seven-fold,“ Netanyahu said on TV, adding that Israel will use „all means“ to „restore the quiet“ across the country.

Too many Israelis seem to believe they have a God-given right to occupy, suppress, disenfranchise and displace non-Jews—particularly Arabs—in Israel. That right seems to be implied in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s insistence that Palestinians affirm the State of Israel as the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

It is a belief that, by extension, also leads some Israeli Jews to discredit and disenfranchise fellow Israeli Jews on Israel’s political left and NGO humanitarian and civil rights activists who criticize Israel’s behavior as deeply violative of democratic and humanitarian norms. That is why there have been repeated efforts in Israel’s Knesset to outlaw these NGOs.

That belief may also account for the fact that adherents to a Jewish religious tradition that stresses the sanctity of human life and man’s creation in the image of the divine react so callously to the destruction of innocents as Israelis have, 80 to 90 percent of whom approved Israel’s incineration of so many of Gaza’s non-combatant population. It seems not to have occurred to them that this sense of special entitlement that characterizes their behavior resonates an ideology that lead to the Holocaust—even as they invoke the memory of the Holocaust in justification of measures they say are intended to prevent its reoccurrence.

An astonishing piece by Henry Siegman, at the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Center, goes further than this Jewish leader, who escaped the Holocaust himself, has gone before. Siegman categorically defends the right of resistance for a subject people exposed to the violence of occupiers in occupied lands and says Palestinians may exercise the same right of resistance exercised by Jewish people in the 1940s. He uses the words “Dresden” and “incineration” to describe the destruction of Gaza, and then explicitly likens Netanyahu’s ideology of Jewish exceptionalism to the ideology of the Nazis.

One of those Abu Khdeir cousins is an American “teenager” named Muhammad. His arrest came up at the State Department yesterday afternoon, thanks to AP’s Matt Lee.

On July, 20th, 2014, at 6:20 am, Hamed Asheikh Khalil could snatch some sleep for only 10 minutes through which a streak of consternation buckled the place. “I woke up with a distraught shake by the very heavy shelling of the Zionist artillery, F16, and unmanned planes, paving my way down to the staircase which my whole family gathered there as we thought it was the safest place in the house, never imagining that this staircase would be the eyewitness of the ferocious massacre of 7 members of my family,” he desperately said.

Israeli occupation forces today killed the father of Issam Younis, the director of Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza.

Wir begrüßen die erzielte endgültige Einigung über alle Parameter der dringlichen Lieferung von russischer humanitärer Hilfe in den ukrainischen Südosten über die Fahrtroute Iswarino – Lugansk. Dieser gingen angestrengte und vielfältige Bemühungen voraus, welche nicht nur die praktische Organisation des Transports einer großen Menge von Lebensmitteln, Medikamenten, Gegenständen des alltäglichen Bedarfs und Elektrogeneratoren beinhalteten, was alleine schon vom logistischen Standpunkt eine beispiellose Aufgabe darstellt, sondern auch intensive Kontakte mit verschiedenen ukrainischen Instanzen, der Leitung und Vertretern des Internationalen Komitees vom Roten Kreuz und anderen ausländischen Partnern. Letzten Endes konnten alle Bedingungen für die möglichst rasche und effektive Erreichung des Hauptziels erfüllt werden: die Lieferung und Verteilung der jetzt im ukrainischen Südosten so notwendigen humanitären Fracht.