"For the sixteenth consecutive day, besieged Gaza is still taking the blows of Israel’s battering ram amid international silence and Arab apathy. Today a 19-year-old Palestinian fighter belonging to the resistance movement Hamas was killed by an Israeli tank shell east of the Strip. 19 years, but who’s counting anyway? To hear about the death of young men striving for the least standards of life, does not touch hearts anymore. Why should it, when television networks broadcast weak-up calls like the pictures of 4-months-old Iman Hajo with a bullet hole in her heart or Mohammed Durra being shot dead on his father’s lap, in vain. Patients in coma do not always respond to wake-up calls. If the scenes of death of these infants did not move the “Arab Conscience” how can empty stomachs and empty pockets move it.? When you hear more news, astonishment just never stops."

"But obligation cannot make “moderate” Arabs - who possess the means of black gold and piled green bills – pull through “immoderate” Gazans because they are in Hamas’s territory and because they democratically elected –under international monitoring - this group to rule. Instead they are proposing financial aid to the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in Ramallah. It is so hard to believe that foreigners, westerners or whatever they may call them across the “gapped” Arab nation, challenge Israel and break the blockade while Arabs are getting more sluggish and this much indifferent. They even made a “faux pas” proposal to send an Arab force to the Strip, something the Americans and the Israelis might favor and push for. “If the latest proposed round of Palestinian reconciliation talks in Cairo materializes, then it could be the last fig leaf the Arab states would hold before they follow the disastrous road of acting as policemen to protect the occupation against the Palestinians,” Arab writer Dr. Ahmed Mustapha wrote. Arabs should have seized the moment of this global economic crisis as well as the power shifts in the US and Israel to make substantial give-and-take bargains to save the day for the Palestinians."

http://www.almanar.com.lb/NewsSite/NewsDetails.aspx?id=64480&language=en