Jewish Boat to Gaza overpowered and captured by Israeli Navy: Jewish Boat to Gaza
1. Arrival in Ashdod and possible release
The passengers and crew of the Irene arrived the port of Ashdod in Israel in the custody of the Israeli Navy.
The Irene, which was towed into port by Israeli Navy boats, was met by a group of peaceful protestors on the beach of Ashdod port. The Israeli passengers and crew were separated from the foreign nationals (from the UK, USA and Germany) aboard the boat. The Israelis were questioned in Ashdod, whilst the foreign nationals were taken to Holon.
The legal team have visited the Israelis and have reported to us that the most of them were treated well, although Yonatan and Itamar, were separated and taken onto a Naval boat, where Yonatan was tasered, and both Yonatan and Itamar were restrained with handcuffs before being led off. Yonatan is now doing well, as is Reuven, who there was great concern about as he does suffer from a heart condition.
The lawyer reports that the Israeli members of the crew will be released today, although all their phones and cameras have been confiscated in case they contain images that may be a security risk. It may take up to two weeks to return them.
The lawyer is now on route to Holon, to visit with the foreign nationals. We have received reports that the UK members of the crew refused Consular advice and support so that they would not be deported until they had confirmed the safe release of the Israeli nationals from the Irene. The FCO confirmed that support will still be available to them if they require it.
It is believed that all the crew and passengers will be released tonight, but we will let you know when we have official confirmation.
The foreign nationals are being held by the Israeli Immigration Police (OZ) at Hatzoref 5 in Holon, if any journalists or well wishers in the area would like to go and support their release.
FURTHER UPDATE SINCE THE TIME OF WRITING THIS
2. Foreign Nationals denied access to their legal representatives
We have just received a call from the legal team in Israel.
The lawyers had made all the necessary negotiations and had all the required paperwork required to visit the foreign nationals held by the Israeli Immigration Police (OZ) at Hatzoref 5 in Holon.
When the legal team arrived, they were told that they needed to submit a formal request via fax in order to visit them. The legal team’s office then sent through a fax request but it was rejected (we are not currently clear why it was refused but will report more as we hear it).
The legal team were then advised to contact the Israeli Foreign Office, however the Foreign Office has currently refused to speak to them. We are currently phoning the relevant Consuls and Embassies to inform them that there are foreign nationals who are being held by the OZ and are being refused access to their legal representatives.
If you want to help, please contact the Foreign Office in the UK, USA and Germany and their Embassies or Consulates in Israel and state your concern that there are citizens being held by the Israeli Immigration Police OZ without access to their legal representatives.
Israeli navy diverts Gaza-bound yacht: The Guardian
Naval personnel board boat carrying 10 Jewish activists who were trying to break sea blockade
Jewish activists leaving Cyprus yesterday on their Gaza-bound yacht which was forcibly diverted by the Israeli navy today. Photograph: Reuters
The Israeli navy today boarded a yacht carrying 10 Jewish activists who were attempting to break the sea blockade around Gaza, forcibly diverting the vessel to the nearby port of Ashdod.
“There was no resistance, no violence,” an Israeli military spokeswoman said. “Before we boarded, we twice asked the captain not to cross the international line into Gaza waters but he refused.”
Contact with the passengers and crew via satellite phone was cut off.
The boat, the Irene, sailing under a British flag, was carrying 10 Jewish passengers and crew from Israel, Britain, the US and Germany.
It was also carrying cargo, including medical supplies, fishing equipment, textbooks and children’s toys, which the Israeli authorities said they would transfer to Gaza by land from Ashdod.
Shortly before the takeover, Miri Weingarten, media adviser to the Irene, spoke to the British captain, Glynn Secker. He reported that the boat was flanked by a small military boat bearing machine guns and a naval frigate, with which he was in contact.
The crew and passengers were warned that they were close to restricted waters and would not be allowed to proceed. They were told the Israeli passengers would be held legally liable.
Secker reported that the mood on board the Irene was high-spirited. All on board had pledged to resist the Israeli troops passively rather than physically.
Among the passengers are an Israeli Holocaust survivor, an Israeli whose daughter was killed in a suicide bombing in 1997, and a former Israeli air force pilot.
The boat’s sponsors include the UK organisation Jews for Justice for Palestinians, which is supported by Marion Kozak, the mother of the Labour leader, Ed Miliband.
The interception comes almost four months after Israeli naval commandos boarded a flotilla of ships to prevent it reaching the Gaza Strip, which has been under blockade by Israel for over three years. Nine Turkish activists were killed in the bloody assault, on 31 May.
The Irene is the first boat to get close to Gaza since the May flotilla despite a number of pledges to send aid by sea to the besieged territory. The Free Gaza Movement, which helped organise the flotilla, is planning a further attempt this autumn.
Since the assault on the flotilla, Israel has agreed, under international pressure, to ease the blockade of Gaza, allowing in a wide range of food and goods. However, badly needed construction materials are still limited, exports are still banned, and there is no free movement of people from Gaza into Israel.
Netanyahu is failing to create a climate for peace: Haaretz Editorial
The wealth of experience that has accrued since the Oslo Accord was signed 17 years ago shows that peace is not made at festive ceremonies, and formal agreements alone do not ensure reconciliation. Leaders need the support of their people to generate change.
The construction freeze in the settlements was intended to convince Palestinians that Israel really intends to end its occupation of the territories. The wealth of experience that has accrued since the Oslo Accord was signed 17 years ago shows that peace is not made at festive ceremonies, and formal agreements alone do not ensure reconciliation. Leaders need the support of their people to generate change.
The Palestinian leadership, headed by President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, has been impressively successful at persuading Palestinians to abandon the armed struggle in favor of an effort to create a flourishing civil society. But after many years of living under occupation and violence, the Palestinians will need quite some time to achieve economic, and especially employment, independence.
Until then, thousands of Palestinian breadwinners from the West Bank will have to continue seeking work in Israel. Today, some 25,000 Palestinians have permits to work in Israel (and about an equal number work in the settlements). Every morning, they get up early to get to building sites and fields throughout Israel.
Over the last few weeks, Haaretz journalist Avi Issacharoff and photographer Daniel Bar-On have documented the disgraceful conditions at the Qalandiyah and Bethlehem checkpoints into Israel. Many Palestinians reach these crossings only after being delayed for security checks at one of dozens of internal checkpoints all over the West Bank.
Defense officials say that only a negligible number of terror attacks have been carried out by Palestinian laborers who entered Israel legally. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks a great deal about the importance of “economic peace,” by which he means that improving the lives of residents of the territories is the best guarantee of peace and security.
Netanyahu should therefore order the defense establishment to allocate the necessary resources, and to provide clear instructions to its people on how to behave, so as to ease passage from the West Bank into Israel and treat our neighbors with respect. A change of attitude toward the Palestinians is an essential condition for peace and reconciliation.
EDITOR: Israel operates web destructve software!
The new unit of the Israeli army seems to attack again in the viral world of the ethernet:
Welcome to the 1 October edition: The Guardian Weekly
Is state-sponsored cyber attack the new front for warfare? How Facebook users felt when the site went out. Sunshine amid the rains brings laughter and sharing in Bhutan. And we listen to you on sports coverage.
The “most refined pieces of malware ever discovered” are quietly at work undermining critical infrastructure in some of the world’s most volatile places. So say security experts as they describe the Stuxnet computer worm, which is believed to be targeting industrial complexes, one of them thought to be nuclear, mostly in Iran. To make things worse, some of these experts believe the destructive software is the product of a national government – the suggestion is Israel.
A state-sponsored cyber attack? It could be espionage on a new front, and an indication of the way warfare may well be waged in the future.
In keeping with that front-page technology theme, our finance page profiles entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, who has morphed from college geek to social supremo. We also report on the evening Facebook vanished from the web. Were you bereft? On the lighter side, our comment page details the rules of internet friendship and how virtual economies could alter global labour markets.
The review section visits Africa, and ten infants first profiled by the Guardian five years ago. One is thriving, one has died and the others struggle daily. The Guardian will follow the fates of this group through to 2015, the target set for achieving the United Nations’ millennium development goals.
Our Letter From column is exceptionally good this week. It’s a slice of life from Bhutan, where a rare day of sunshine during the rainy season inspires a spirit of laughter and sharing.
From south-east Asia, we look at the Green School in Bali, where youngsters learn how to lead a sustainable life. And Nature watch takes us to Wenlock Edge, where, as autumn creeps across Britain, the land is bothered by the plough.
On the books pages, our reviewer welcomes a devastating inquiry into the Vatican child abuse scandal. Shortcuts reports that Canada’s Inuit and their seal skins may save Scotland’s traditional sporran.
Finally, in the sports section, after several weeks of testing out different columns and copy, we bring you both the Sports Roundup and a rather cheeky blogpost, this week in the form Guardian columnist Marina Hyde. Thanks to all the readers who emailed about the way in which we use this space. I enjoyed the conversation. Please feel free to sign in and leave comments on the end of this item.
Mahmoud Abbas delays decision on whether to quit Middle East peace talks: The Guardian
Palestinians will consult the Arab League before reacting to Israel’s refusal to extend the West Bank settlement freeze
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, signalled yesterday that he will not rush to decide whether to abandon peace talks after Israel refused to renew a temporary freeze on settlement construction in the occupied West Bank.
Speaking in Paris, Abbas said there would be no “quick reactions” before he consults the Arab League next week. “After this series of meetings, we might publish a position that clears up the position of the Palestinian and Arab people after Israel has refused to freeze settlements,” he told reporters, after talks with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
An extension for “three or four months” would give the sides a chance to discuss the core issues, Abbas added.
Sarkozy said he “deplored the decision to resume settlement construction just as the talks were finally and concretely under way”. William Hague, the foreign secretary, meeting his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, at the UN in New York, said he was “very disappointed”. George Mitchell, the US special envoy, is due back in Jerusalem today to seek a way out of the crisis.
Abbas’s caution reflects the high stakes following the Israeli prime minister’s failure to extend a 10-month moratorium on building. Abbas and other Palestinian spokesmen had warned that they could not negotiate unless it was renewed.
Direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians were relaunched under US auspices this month with an ambitious pledge by President Barack Obama to reach agreement within a year. Expectations for success have been low, but collapse at this early stage would be a grave blow to US prestige and risk a slide into violence on the ground.
Abbas’s plans to consult foreign ministers of the 22-member Arab League in Cairo next Monday will mean a big diplomatic role for Egypt and Jordan, which have peace treaties with Israel, as well as for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which do not. All have insisted a settlement freeze is a test of Israeli intentions.
Hamas, the Islamist movement which controls Gaza and opposes talks with Israel, is also piling pressure on Abbas. “I call on my brothers at the Palestinian Authority, who had stated they would not pursue talks with the enemy [Israel] if it continued settlement construction, to hold to their promise,” said Khaled Mishal, the movement’s Damascus-based leader. “To negotiate without a position of strength is absurd.”
The US is pressing Syria to resume peace talks with Israel as part of its push for broad settlement between Arab countries and Israel. The US secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, met the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, to push for negotiations. The State Department said Clinton was the first secretary of state to meet Syria’s top diplomat in three years, although special Mideast envoy George Mitchell has made several visits to Syria in the past year.
On the West Bank, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of Abbas’s Fatah movement, has already threatened to teach Israeli settlers “unforgettable lessons” if construction resumes. Four settlers were killed before talks resumed.
Israeli media reported that bulldozers had started work at the settlement of Ariel near Nablus. Ground-levelling was also under way in settlements near Ramallah and Hebron. But Israeli settlers were being urged to avoid provocative actions.