TEHRAN – Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki announced on Sunday that the unilateral ceasefire declared by the Zionist regime signified its defeat in the face of “heroic resistance” shown by the Gaza people.
The ceasefire shows that the Zionist regime has failed to “achieve its goals”, Mottaki said in a statement on Monday.
The remarks come as Israel declared a ceasefire which began at 2:00 am (0000 GMT) on Sunday.
The foreign minister said the Gaza people’s victory over the Israeli forces during the past 22 days finally made the political and military leaders of the Zionist regime make such a decision.
“The reason behind the decision taken by the political and military leaders of the Zionist regime was the regime’s failure to accomplish the goals it had announced and that the valiant people of Gaza and Islamic resistance have emerged the victors during the past 22 days in the battle against the Israeli army (which is) armed to the teeth,” he pointed out.
Palestinian resistance forces declared on Sunday that they will stop their fight against Israel to give the invading forces the time to leave Gaza.
Mottaki also insisted that Israel must withdraw its troops from the enclave.
“Just halting air, ground and sea attacks is not enough” and Tel Aviv must pull out its troops from the occupied areas, he added.
The presence of the Zionist forces in the region is “provocative” and as long as the Israeli forces have not pulled out “there is no guarantee” for a halt to the clashes.
“Reopening of the border crossings and the withdrawal of the Zionist regime troops from Gaza” can pave the way for the situation to calm down, he noted.
Hamas victory keeps it in political scene for ever: expert
International expert Ahmad Bakhshayeshi Ardestani said on Sunday that the victory of Hamas will perpetuate the presence of Hamas in the political scene of Palestine.
“With its victory in Gaza, Hamas will remain for ever in the political scene of Palestine.”
Pointing to the ceasefire declared in Gaza, the expert said, “Surely, Israel has suffered a defeat in Gaza. This is the second failure of this regime and will not be the last one.”
Bakhshayeshi made a reference to the failure of the Zionist regime to achieve its objectives in invading Gaza, saying, “Israel did whatever it could but we saw that it did not succeed. This is the beginning of the historical downturn of the Zionist regime.”
Helping Gazans, a ‘humanitarian and Islamic duty’
MP Ali Motahhari stated helping the innocent Palestinian nation is a “humanitarian and Islamic duty”.
“We have both humanitarian and Islamic duties with regard to the Palestinian people. We can institutionalize this in the world to frustrate the negative propaganda campaign of the Zionist regime.”
Pointing to the propaganda campaign of the Western media on relations between Iran and Hamas, he said, “Strengthening the defense power is a legal right of all governments.”
On the Egyptian government’s cooperation with Israel, the MP said Cairo’s cooperation with Israel and its refusal to open the Rafah crossing is a “greatest betrayal”.
Israel faced a humiliating defeat in Gaza
Deputy Interior Minister for Social and Cultural Affairs Alireza Afshar insisted that Israel suffered a humiliating defeat in the Gaza Strip.
“The failure of the Zionist regime in Gaza is in fact its failure in face of the Palestinian nation and the resistance groups especially Hamas.”
Afshar added Israel “should have learned a lesson” from its 33-day war with Hezbollah.
“Israel did not learn a lesson from the 33-day war… and today we see that this regime (despite) having so many military facilities was not able to defeat the resistance groups.”
He made a reference to the Iran’s political measures during the conflict, saying, “Iran was able to involve the international, Arab and Islamic community in the Gaza issue.”
JERUSALEM — On the day that an Israeli artillery strike hit his neighborhood in Gaza City, sending a hail of shrapnel through his house and his uncle’s, Sameh Akram Habeeb went online and filed a bleak report:
“Thanks to God, we all safe but I don’t know what will happen next,” Habeeb, 23, wrote Saturday on his blog, gazatoday.blogspot.com. Readers responded with a flurry of antiwar comments from Greece, Iran, Tunisia and the United States.
Habeeb, a soft-spoken journalist with a degree in English literature, may not consider himself an activist, but he’s on the front lines of the vibrant and at times hostile cyberwar over Gaza, a battle for public opinion that’s raged in seemingly every corner of the Internet since the conflict began last month.
An enormous number of people around the world are using blogs, YouTube and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to register their support or opposition to the war. Thousands of images — from Palestinians under siege in Gaza to Israeli neighborhoods that have been hit by Hamas rocket attacks — have filled photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and Picasa.
It doesn’t get any simpler than www.israel-vs-palestine.com, where visitors can just pick sides. With nearly 500,000 votes cast, the race is a virtual tie, while the Web site’s server is overloaded.
The clearest sign that the Internet has become a propaganda tool, however, is the brand-new YouTube page by the Israeli military, at www.youtube.com/idfnadesk. Created at the start of the war, as of Tuesday the page had been viewed more than 685,000 times, making it one of the most visited on the site.
Since Israel has barred international journalists from the Gaza Strip, its YouTube page features some of the only battlefield footage available, and naturally it shows the military in the best possible light and Hamas in the worst. You can watch the Israeli air force blow up a truck that’s supposedly carrying rockets, see how Hamas allegedly rigged a school with explosives and watch Israeli soldiers admit a Palestinian child for medical care.
Israeli officials say that it’s part of an effort to win the wartime battle of “hasbara,” or public relations, which many think that Israel lost during the 2006 conflict with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
“If I tell you Hamas is shooting rockets at Israel, that’s one thing,” government spokesman Mark Regev said, “but if I can produce a video that shows them shooting rockets, that makes a very powerful argument.”
With its highly wired population and large Jewish communities in the United States and Europe, Israel unquestionably has the upper hand in technology, just as it does on the battlefield with its huge military arsenal. So it’s not surprising that Israelis have used the Internet in innovative ways.
On Dec. 30, the Israeli consulate in New York conducted a news conference on the war entirely on Twitter, the social messaging site where users communicate in short, rapid-fire notes, or “tweets.”
As a chance to field questions from a world audience, the experiment succeeded, but with questions and answers limited by Twitter to 140 characters, it didn’t exactly make for nuanced discussion, even when consulate staffers rewrote the abbreviations. Take, for example, this exchange:
@carrotderek: “What steps are being taken about the humanitarian situation in the Gaza? Is it enough?”
The reply: “Israel does everything in its power to prevent deterioration of situation.” The consulate then inserted a link to a story about Israel allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Dan Peguine and Arik Fraimovich, young Internet entrepreneurs in Tel Aviv, created QassamCount — named for the simple rockets that Hamas favors — which aims to give a sense of what it’s like for Israelis who live under the threat of rocket fire. The application works with Facebook, which allows users to post brief status messages on any topic, and every time militants fire a rocket into Israel — 20 to 60 times a day — QassamCount updates a user’s status with news on where the rocket landed and any casualties.
Some 70,000 Facebook users have subscribed to the application, said Peguine, who’s 26.
“As you go through your day, you realize that Qassams are falling every hour, every two hours, just randomly.” Peguine said. “You realize that people live under constant threat.”
A Facebook group called “I Support the Israel Defense Forces in Preventing Terror Attacks From Gaza” had, as of Tuesday evening, more than 76,000 members. On the other side, a group called “Let’s collect 500,000 signatures to support the Palestinians in Gaza” counts more than 531,000 members.
Hamzeh Abu-Abed, a 22-year-old Palestinian who’s living in Jordan, created the pro-Palestinian group in August to protest the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The group had only about 500 members when Israel launched the military offensive, she wrote in an e-mail, then suddenly tens of thousands of people a day were signing up for the page and sending messages.
Abu-Abed and Joel Leyden, a 52-year-old marketing executive in Tel Aviv who launched the pro-Israel group, say they’ve received threats and had opponents hack into their pages. Both discussion boards feature some vitriolic, hateful comments, which seem to proliferate faster than moderators can erase them.
However, Leyden, a native New Yorker and former Israeli soldier and reservist, said that he’d generally been pleased by the level of thoughtful debate on the page.
“I’ve gone from being very pessimistic . . . to being optimistic by seeing an abundance of both Arabs and Jews communicating with one another,” Leyden said.
GAZA, Jan 7 (Reuters) - Israel and Hamas studied an Egyptian proposal for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday that won immediate backing from the United States and Europe, hours after Israeli shells killed 42 Palestinians at a U.N. school.
However, Israeli officials also said ministers would discuss a major escalation of their 12-day-old offensive that would push troops deep inside Gaza’s cities and refugee camps in their bid to end rocket salvoes into Israel by Islamist militants.
A Palestinian official said Gaza’s Hamas rulers, who want an end to Israel’s blockade of the enclave, had been briefed in Egypt by President Hosni Mubarak and were debating the proposal. More than 600 Palestinians have been killed in the offensive.
In New York, where the U.N. Security Council met on Gaza, Israeli Ambassador Gabriela Shalev told reporters: “I am sure that (Egypt’s proposal) will be considered and you will find out whether it was accepted. But we take it very, very seriously.”
Israel, which has lost seven soldiers and four civilians in the conflict, wants any end to hostilities to satisfy its demand that Egypt cut off Hamas’s supplies of smuggled weapons.
Mubarak made his ceasefire call at a joint news conference in Egypt with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. He gave little detail, but diplomats have described a process that would focus on bringing in foreign forces to seal the Egypt-Gaza border against Hamas arms smugglers while easing other trade routes.
Sarkozy, winding up a two-day tour of the Middle East, said: “I am confident the Israeli authorities’ reaction will make it possible to consider putting an end to the operation in Gaza.”
With Washington in a transition period ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, France and its European partners, with backing from U.S. allies in the Arab world, have been pushing hard for Israel to cease fire.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice endorsed the Mubarak proposal and said a “sustainable” ceasefire should involve both closing off Hamas’s ability to rearm through tunnels from Egypt and easing the lives of the 1.5 million people of Gaza by reopening trade routes.
“We need urgently to conclude a ceasefire that can endure and that can bring real security,” Rice told the Security Council.
She welcomed an offer by Israel to open what it called a “humanitarian corridor” that would let aid agencies more easily distribute food and medicine around Gaza while it continues its military operation.