Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak called today for Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert to step aside over corruption allegations or face a collapse of his
coalition that would disrupt peace talks with the Palestinians.
Sami Faleh Mohammed was one of thousands of exiled Iraqis who after the invasion of Iraq decided to give his country another chance.
Destitution and food insecurity among Gaza’s 1.5 million residents has reached an unprecedentedly critical level, according to unpublished UN findings that they now need “urgent assistance” to avert a “serious food crisis” in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The trial of Tariq Aziz, the public face of Saddam Hussein’s regime, began in Baghdad yesterday. The former Iraqi deputy prime minister is charged with executing dozens of merchants who were accused of breaking state price controls in 1992.
Israeli fire hit a house in the Gaza Strip today while a family was eating
breakfast, killing six Palestinians, including four children and their
mother, residents and medical officials said.
The United Nations has suspended food aid to 650,000 Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip after it ran out of fuel for its delivery vehicles. At the request of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), distributors sent an emergency tanker to the Nahal Oz terminal through which Israel transfers petrol and diesel, but it was turned back by 1,500 farmers protesting that they needed fuel just as urgently. The driver was held for three hours, and then forced to return empty.