PressTVGlobalNews | October 23, 2010 - The Sabra and Shatila massacre took place in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon, between September 16 and September 18, 1982, during the Lebanese civil war. Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were massacred in the camps by the Israeli supporters Phalangist militia while the camp was surrounded by Israeli forces. In that period of time, Israel was at war with Lebanon. The Israeli forces occupied Beirut and dominated militarily the refugee camps of Palestinians and controlled the entrance to the city. Later, the Israeli forces were ruled to have been involved directly in massacres carried out in both camps.
This episode of Press TV's Remember Palestine looks at what brought on the massacres and why they are not recognized to the same extent that other atrocities in history have been.
RussiaToday | October 24, 2010 - The shocking WikiLeaks release, which has revealed thousands of unreported civilian casualties in Iraq, is the most accurate picture of war ever made, and it is food for thought, says the website's editor-in-chief.
The report, condemned by the Pentagon, claims that US commanders in Iraq ignored evidence of torture and the murder of civilians. "This material has revealed 15,000 previously unreported, undocumented civilian casualties. That's an extraordinary number of people who have never been spoken about before," Julian Assange said. "We also see that the cover up of torture by coalition forces well after Andrew Graham was a concrete policy, a secret policy: to not intervene with torture conducted by the fledgling Iraqi government," he added. "This is the most accurate description of a war that has ever been released into the historic record. There is nothing comparable.
It is the details of the deaths of 109,000 people, the wounding of 170,000 people, the detaining of nearly 200,000 people during a course of six years. Of course, that is only about a half the military action that went on during that period, because it is only the US view on things, but even so we see that there is nearly no street corner in Baghdad that did not have a body found that had been killed through violence in one form or another," he said. "We should start imagining it or stop supporting it. It is not good to support things that you do not understand," he pointed out.
"We need to understand what the reality of war is, if we are going to choose to engage in it." Assange said that WikiLeaks was now expecting some kind of response from the Pentagon, a counter-attack that follows each of the website's releases. "Last time it was names appearing in the material, which the Pentagon managed to successfully fool the press into believing was going to be a great big assassination list for the Taliban. But in fact, nearly all of those names were right to appear; they were the names of governors who were taking bribes by the US military, or the names of the radio stations that were taking bribes to put on propaganda content...
As recently as last week, NATO officials in Kabul said they could not find a single person that needed protecting or moving... And a letter has come out that was originally written on August 16th by Defense Secretary Gates stating that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods were revealed in that material, but of course, this was not the public line," he said.
AlJazeeraEnglish | October 23, 2010 - It is the biggest leak of military secrets ever. Al Jazeera has obtained access to almost 400,000 classified American documents. Torture, claims of murder at the checkpoint - revelations that make a mockery of the rules of combat.
Over the past ten weeks, working with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, Al Jazeera has read tens of thousands of documents, which we sourced through WikiLeaks.
There is a good reason that Washington did not want you to see them. They reveal the covering up of Iraqi state torture to the truth about the hundreds of civilians who have been killed at coalition road blocks.
There are fresh outrages involving private security contractors and we find out what the US really thinks about the Iraqi prime minister.
france24english | October 22, 2010 - Israel has started building at least 600 homes since the end of a construction freeze, watchdog Peace Now said on Thursday, in a move which the Palestinians slammed as "a flagrant act of defiance".
france24english | October 15, 2010 - For 60 years the Israeli Army have confiscated the bodies of Palestinian and Arab fighters. The corpses are kept in secret cemeteries and given identification numbers. The Palestinians call these cemeteries "Makaber el Arkam" the cemeteries of numbers
On October 7, 2010, the Afghanistan War entered its 10th year. This war is not making us any safer and is not worth the cost. We must join together to bring this war to a close.
AlJazeeraEnglish | October 10, 2010 - Rebiya Kadeer discusses with Riz Khan the trials and tribulations she has faced in fighting for human rights. The leading Uighur activist and philanthropist shares her stories of yielding persistence and strength.
"The President’s decision to escalate the war in that region alone costs the nation $33 billion," the legendary musician, actor and activist Harry Belafonte said at Saturday’s "One Nation Working Together" in Washington. "That sum of money could not only create 600,000 jobs here in America, but would even leave us a few billion to start rebuilding our schools, our roads, our hospitals and affordable housing. It could also help to rebuild the lives of the thousands of our returning wounded veterans."
United Nations panel of human rights experts has accused Israel of war crimes through willful killing, unnecessary brutality and torture in its "clearly unlawful" assault on a ship attempting to break the blockade of Gaza in May in which nine Turkish activists died.
The report by three experts appointed by the UN's Human Rights Council (UNHRC) described the seizure of MV illegal under international law.
AlJazeeraEnglish | September 22, 2010 - A Palestinian has been killed after a Jewish settlement guard opened fire at a group of men in an Arab neighbourhood of East Jerusalem.
The incident occurred after clashes broke out between Jewish settlers and a
History may be written by the victors, as Winston Churchill is said to have observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten a nation every bit as much as the unearthing of mass graves.
That danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to extend by an additional 20 years the country’s 50-year rule for the release of sensitive documents.
The new 70-year disclosure rule is the government’s response to Israeli journalists who have been seeking through Israel’s courts to gain access to documents that should already be declassified, especially those concerning the 1948 war, which established Israel, and the 1956 Suez crisis.
Attack on Gaza Flotilla Chomsky Says "No Credible Pretext"
The siege is savage and cruel, designed to keep the caged animals barely alive so as to fend off international protest, but hardly more than that. It is the latest stage of long-standing Israeli plans, backed by the US, to separate Gaza from the West Bank. These are only the bare outlines of very ugly policies, in which Egypt is complicit as well.
Family of Gaza war victims doubt Israeli justice
AlJazeeraEnglish | July 06, 2010 - An Israeli soldier has been charged with manslaughter in an Israeli court for the deaths of two Palestinian women during Israel's war on Gaza.
Majda Abu Hajaj and her 64-year-old mother were shot dead while carrying white flags they made out of bed sheets near their homes after the Israeli army forced the women to leave their house.
AlJazeeraEnglish | July 02, 2010 - Business in Gaza continues to suffer because Israel is refusing to allow companies to import certain materials which has forces thousands of Palestinians to rely on the use of underground tunnels to smuggle materials into the Gaza Strip.
civilians last year, according to official figures.
Thu, 01 Jul 2010 | PressTV
US-led forces in Afghanistan have killed many civilians in the southern province of Helmand amid public outrage over rising death tolls in the war-torn county, Afghan sources say.
Afghan sources told Press TV that most of the victims of the US-led forces were civilians while a statement by International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said on Thursday that they had killed "a large number" of Taliban militants in the region and captured a Taliban chief of Naw Zad.
