It was the first claim of harassment by a group of Shiite worshippers against the territory’s mainstream rulers, who are Sunni Muslims. Hamas officials, who have close ties with Shiite Iran, denied the allegations.

A man who described himself as a Shiite said police burst into a house where followers were marking Arbaeen, commemorating the end of 40 days of mourning following the anniversary of the death of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The man said about 15 worshippers were beaten and detained.

He declined to be identified, fearing further harassment. But some of the men filed complaints to the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the rights group Mezan, which both sharply condemned Hamas over the attack.

Mezan said in a statement that during Saturday evening’s incident in the town of Beit Lahia, police smashed up the apartment, broke the bones of seven of the men, detained some of them at a police station and beat them again before sending them to a military hospital for treatment.

“The attack is a violation of the freedom … to practice one’s faith,” said Mezan official Samir Zakout.

Interior Ministry spokesman Ihab Ghussein said Tuesday that police stormed the apartment of a group of “outlaws” who were planning “criminal acts.” He said he was unaware of the presence of any Shiites in Gaza. He said his offices would look into right groups’ allegations that the men were beaten.

There are no official statistics on the number of Gaza’s Shiites. They are believed to number several dozen — a minuscule minority among a population of 1.6 million people who are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, including the territory’s Islamist militant Hamas rulers.

In many parts of the Middle East, Shiites and Sunnis have had strained relations due to deep theological differences that date back centuries. These differences have boiled over into violence over the years in places like Iraq and Pakistan.

Despite such strains, the attack in Gaza seemed surprising, given Hamas’ traditionally warm ties with Iran. The fundamentalist Shiite government in Iran has given hundreds of millions of dollars, as well as military training and other backing, to Hamas.

In a separate incident, Mezan said Tuesday that a prominent rights activist who has criticized Palestinian leaders and militants was stabbed and slightly wounded by unknown assailants.

The attack on Mahmoud Abu Rahma last Friday came after he published an essay that criticized Palestinian leaders and militant groups for threatening, silencing and even harming critics.

“It is safe to assume that neither the government nor the resistance is willing to step in to protect people who dare to criticize them,” he wrote.

Zakout said soon after the essay was published, Abu Rahma received threats by e-mail and text message. Hamas police condemned the attack and said they were searching for the assailants.

ABC/ AP

Hamas officials involved in raising funds for the organization’s military wing and some members of the political leadership have already left Syria with their families for Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan and Qatar, the sources said.

The sources told Haaretz “second- and third-ranking” Hamas activists are leaving but senior leaders such as Khaled Masha’al will remain in the Syrian capital.

Salah al-Arouri, a senior Hamas official, told the newspaper the organization had yet to make a decision on the matter. He said one or two families may have left but that top officials remained at the headquarters.

“The organization’s top officials are here in Damascus; our relations with the state and Syrian people are excellent … we have no intention of interfering in Syria’s internal affairs,” he told the daily newspaper.
UPI

Officially, Hamas leaders are sticking to their denial they plan to quit the Syrian capital, where the group keeps its main headquarters outside the Gaza Strip.

But diplomats and regional sources said the Hamas delegation in Damascus, which once numbered hundreds of Palestinian officials and their relatives, had shrunk to a few dozen.

Departures were speeded up, one regional intelligence source said, by the Arab League’s suspension of Syria last month over its military crackdown on protests rocking the Assad government.

Diplomats said dozens of Hamas operatives and their families, who had lived in Syria since the 1990s, and others who moved there in recent years have returned to Gaza via Egypt in recent weeks.

Hamas would keep a skeletal presence in Syria to “book a seat in a post-Assad era”,” one diplomat said.

“Meanwhile, Hamas officials are on planes most of the time, bolstering ties with other countries like Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, Sudan, or in contact to explore new bases and not a sole base,” the diplomat added.

Asking not to be identified, the diplomat said: “Hamas will pull out of Syria in the right time but not for good.”

TENSIONS

When asked about Hamas’s presence in Damascus, Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman said: “There is no change.”

In Beirut on Friday, a Hamas representative said the group was “still committed to supporting Assad”.

But, one intelligence source said, although Hamas “owes Syria a lot for its support, it doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of pan-Arab public opinion”.

Angering Syria, Hamas has refused to hold rallies in Palestinian refugee camps in support of the Assad government, which has sunk deeper into international isolation.

Tensions with Damascus rose further when Hamas opted not to sign a statement by nine other Palestinian groups, including President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Organization, in support of the Syrian leader.

Hamas, which Israel and many Western powers consider a terrorist group, won a 2006 Palestinian election and, a year later, seized the Gaza Strip following a schism with its secular rival, Fatah.

Reuters

Addressing a parade of about 50 thousand revolutionaries in the southwestern city of Bushehr on Sunday, Vahidi warned that it will sink the US warships :

” If the enemy attacks Iran, it must be ready to answer some questions such as how long it can fight against the Islamic Republic and how much it is ready to watch the sinking of its warships and ships.”

150, 000 missiles?
Commenting on Israeli threats to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities , Vahidi warned:“Why does the Zionist regime issue such threats? For how many missiles has it readied itself: 10 thousands, 20 thousands, 50 thousands, 100 thousands, 150 thousands, or more?”

He added, “The Zionist regime has not yet paid the price” for the massacres it committed in Sabra and Shatila and the Gaza Strip, and, if this regime attacks Iran, the Islamic Republic will take revenge for those crimes.

He did not say whether the 150, 000 missiles will be fired from Iran or by Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza.

Last Thursday the military adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei , General Yahya Rahim Safavi warned Israel that should it attack Iran’s nuclear sites the Islamic Republic will rely on its allies Hezbollah and Hamas to do the fighting.

“There will be no need for Iran to launch ballistic missiles at Israel, because all the Zionist cities are within the range of our ally Hezbollah’s Katyusha (rockets),” he said.

“We can confirm that the website has been down for several hours and an investigation is ongoing,” a spokeswoman for Shin Bet told AFP. An Israeli army spokesman also confirmed the IDF site had been down for several hours.

The website outages came two days after a video apparently from “hacktivist” group Anonymous was posted on YouTube, threatening the Israeli government with retaliation over its interception of two Gaza-bound ships.

The boats, carrying 27 activists, crew and journalists, were intercepted in international waters before they could breach Israel’s blockade on the Palestinian territory.

The flotilla was the second time activists have tried to run the blockade since May 2010, when Israeli commandos raided a Turkish-led group of ships, killing nine Turkish activists and sparking a diplomatic crisis with Ankara.

The video, entitled “An open letter from Anonymous to the Government of Israel,” accuses the Jewish state of “piracy on the high seas.”

“If you continue blocking humanitarian vessels to Gaza or repeat the dreadful actions of May 31st 2010 against any Gaza Freedom Flotillas then you will leave us no choice but to strike back,” the video warns.

It was not immediately possible to confirm whether the video was posted by the hacker group, which has claimed involvement in various hacker activity, including most recently exposing details of individuals who visited child porn sites.

And it was not clear whether the group was directly responsible for the website malfunctions, with Israeli officials declining comment on the issue.

Anonymous has been involved in scores of hacking exploits including the defacing of a website of Syria’s defence ministry to protest a bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters.

Last year, the shadowy group launched retaliatory attacks on companies perceived to be enemies of the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

Hackers from around the world attacked Palestinian servers, cutting Internet service across the West Bank and Gaza on Tuesday, a day after the Palestinians won full membership of UNESCO, over US and Israeli objections.
AFP

The Canadian and Irish boats with 27 activists from the US and eight other countries on board had set sail from Turkey on Wednesday.

They were carrying medical supplies for the coastal enclave.

The navy said no-one was hurt in the operation and the boats would be towed to the Israeli port of Ashdod, north-east of Gaza.

The Irish Saoirse (Gaelic for freedom) and the Canadian Tahrir (Arabic for liberation) were about 50 nautical miles from the Gaza shoreline when they were contacted by the Israeli navy and told to turn back, the flotilla organizers said.

The navy said it “advised the vessels that they may turn back at any point, thereby not breaking the maritime security blockade” or could sail to Ashdod or an Egyptian port.

“The activists refused to co-operate,” AFP quoted the navy as saying.

This time there appeared to be little prospect of a violent confrontation. An organizer on the Canadian boat, Ehab Lotayef, a Canadian electrical engineer of Egyptian origin, said in a video message on Wednesday after leaving Turkey that the participants “are not going to challenge Israel physically. We are a peaceful mission that is committed to the safety of the personnel on board” the two vessels, he said.

Mr. Lotayef added that the goal was “to say that the blockade is illegal and inhumane.”

“We would want to see everybody manage to go to Gaza freely from any country in the world,” he added.

BBC & New York Times

The Israeli military spokesman’s office said the country’s navy was “prepared to contact” the vessels and had “completed the necessary preparations in order to prevent them from reaching the Gaza Strip”.

The Canadian boat Tahrir and the Irish boat MV Saoirse left the port of Fethiye in southwest Turkey on Wednesday after Turkish authorities gave them permission to sail to the Greek island of Rhodes.

Al Jazeera’s Casey Kauffman, on board one of the ships, said that in total it would be a 50-hour journey, and they were currently one-fifth of the way there.

“Everyone on the boat wants to get to Gaza,” he said, adding that while the activists are prepared for the possibility of an Israeli interception, the initiative will not be wasted.

“It will still bring attention to the situation in Gaza, and the blockade of the Gaza Strip.”

Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military official, would not say how the boats might be stopped, saying only “we will have to assess and see if we are facing violent passengers.”

Describing their journey as a “provocation”, she said Israel would offer to unload any aid supplies on board and deliver them to Gaza.

Sailing under the flag of the Comoros Islands, the Tahrir is carrying six activists, a captain and five journalists.

The Saoirse – sailing under the US flag – has 12 Irish nationals on board, none of whom are journalists.

‘Support from Turkish society’

David Heap, a member of the steering committee on board the Tahrir, told Al Jazeera that the activists chose to leave from Fethiye because of the strained relations between Turkey and Israel.

“The Turkish government has been creating more distance from Israel diplomatically and we know there is support from Turkish society for what we are doing.

“Our judgment was that the Turkish state would not interfere with us if we didn’t make too much of a public issue of our plan to depart from there,” Heap told Al Jazeera.

t will take at least a couple of days before the boats reach the Palestinian waters of the Gaza Strip, where they expect to be approached by the Israeli navy.

“We have some distance to cover between where we are now and Palestinian territorial waters of Gaza.

“Obviously we are going to avoid going through Israeli territorial waters.

“Our plan is to go directly from international waters into the territorial waters of Gaza – within a couple of days.

The activists say the new attempt the break the siege on the Gaza Strip is part of a campaign they call “freedom waves”, implying that more such efforts will follow.

Both ships were part of previous attempts to break the siege on the Gaza Strip that was stalled when the Greek government refused to let a flotilla leave from its shores in July this year.

The Tahrir, the larger ship of the two, was intercepted by the Greek coast guard with more than 30 pro-Palestinian activists onboard.

Two of them were detained for defying Greece’s ban on setting sail to Gaza. The vessel was stopped about 10 minutes after it left port on the island of Crete.

The Irish boat allegedly suffered damage when it was sabotaged while waiting to join the flotilla from Turkish waters. The ship has since been repaired and kept in dry-dock in Turkey.

aljazeera

“From now on, we will not let these ships be attacked by Israel, as happened with the Freedom Flotilla.” He also said that Turkey had taken steps to stop Israel from unilaterally exploiting natural resources in the Mediterranean. An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, said, “This is a statement well worth not commenting on.”

NYT

In the interview with Turkey’s state-run TRT television, Davutoglu dismissed a U.N. report into the raid that said Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza was legally imposed as a legitimate security measure.

Davutoglu said Turkey does not recognize the blockade and will start procedures to counter its legality at The Hague, Netherlands-based court next week.

WP

Israeli military officials say at least five people were killed in the airstrike. The Reuters news agency says the dead included a chief of the Popular Resistance Committee, an armed Palestinian faction.

Earlier Thursday, gunmen carried out a series of apparently coordinated attacks in southern Israel that killed at least seven people.

Israeli officials say the attacks took place in quick succession near the border with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. They say 40 people were wounded in the attacks.

Authorities say gunmen opened fire on a passenger bus and a private vehicle, targeted a military patrol and detonated explosives near security forces. Israeli media reports say Israeli troops tracked and killed seven suspected attackers.

Defense Secretary Ehud Barak called the attacks a grave terrorist incident. Barak and other Israeli officials asserted that the attackers came from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and entered Israel from the Sinai. Hamas has denied involvement.

The United States and the United Nations issued separate statements condemning the attacks. U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon also urged restraint.

Israel has expressed concern about a deterioration of security in the Sinai since Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak resigned in February.

Last week, Egypt moved additional forces to the region in an effort to improve security.

VOA