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Today
March 25, 2009: Sidon, Lebanon. A bomb killed a senior official in the Palestinian Fatah faction and four other people in southern Lebanon on Monday, security sources said.
Kamal Medhat, deputy head of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon, was killed with his companions on a road near Mieh Mieh refugee camp outside the southern city of Sidon.
The bomb, hidden under a manhole cover, hurled one car off the road into a nearby orchard. Another car plunged into what appeared to be a crater left by the blast.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned Medhat’s killing as an act of terrorism. Hamas also condemned the attack.Medhat had been accompanying Lebanon PLO representative Abbas Zaki, who was not injured in the blast, on a visit to Mieh Mieh camp.
Lebanon is home to 12 Palestinian refugee camps that house more than 200,000 registered refugees. Both had been attending a meeting to reconcile feuding families in the camp.
Describing Medhat as a martyr, Hamdan told Hezbollah’s al-Manar television it was not possible to say who was behind the attack, but said the perpetrators had served Israeli interests.
Tensions have been high in Mieh Mieh and the nearby Palestinian camp of Ain al-Hilweh, where Fatah and a range of Islamist factions compete for influence.
Two people, including a Fatah activist, were killed on Saturday in a gunbattle in Mieh Mieh camp. The clash was attributed to a family dispute.
Tensions among Palestinians remain a potential risk to stability in Lebanon, which has suffered from a string of assassinations, a war with Israel and a paralyzing internal political crisis in the past few years.
“I fear that this might be a sign of an expansion of Palestinian-Palestinian conflicts in Lebanon,” said Nabil Boumonsef, a political commentator in an-Nahar newspaper. “Palestinian-Palestinian conflicts could be spreading faster than we were expecting,” he said.
March 25, 2009: Umm El Fahm, Israel. Jewish extremists marched Tuesday through an Israeli-Arab town to demand residents show loyalty to Israel, setting off stone-throwing protests by Arab youths that police dispersed with stun grenades and tear gas.
The clashes in the northern Israeli town of Umm el-Fahm came at a time of increasing tensions between Israel’s Jewish majority and its Arab minority, and residents said the march was a provocation.
No serious injuries were reported.Dozens of Arab youths, their faces covered with checkered Palestinian scarves, heaved rocks at heavily armed black-clad police holding up shields, who responded by lobbing back tear gas.
Some of the protesters carried large Palestinian flags, running and weaving between cars.
Hardline Jews carrying large Israeli flags and flanked by security forces marched on the outskirts of the town, apparently targeted because it is one of Israel’s largest Arab communities and is known for Arab nationalist sympathies and as a stronghold of the radical Islamic Movement.
“We came to say that the state of Israel is a Jewish state. We came in a show of loyalty and to say whoever is loyal, welcome. But people who flout the law should get out of here,” said Itamar Ben-Gvir, a Jewish ultranationalist who helped lead the event. Israel’s one-fifth Arab minority is made up of ethnic Palestinians who enjoy equal rights under the law but suffer discrimination in government jobs and budgets and tend to be poorer and less educated than Israeli Jews.
Relations between Jews and Arabs have worsened in recent months following Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip and a parliamentary election last month that saw Yisrael Beiteinu, a party with an anti-Arab platform, win 15 seats.
The party called to revoke the citizenship of Arabs disloyal to the Jewish state.
The party’s popularity reflects rising distrust of Arab citizens, perceived by many Israeli Jews as disloyal and potentially hostile.March 25, 2009: Ghaziabad, India, A 16-year-old girl was allegedly burnt alive, on Monday afternoon, by four residents of her village in a case of “aggressive moral policing,” as they suspected she had a physical relationship with one Irfan of the village.
The girl later succumbed to her injuries in a Modinagar hospital.
According to district police chief, Akhil Kumar, Zalis, Asim, Azim and another village resident had been keeping a watch on the girl’s house, in Teori village, in the Bhojpur police station area. They thought one Irfan of the village was a frequent visitor to the girl’s house when her father was not at work.
“In the afternoon,” said Kumar, “the four young men came to the girl’s house, and demanded to know why Irfan allegedly frequently visited her house. The girl’s younger sister, who felt the visitors were getting violent, ran out of the house. Meanwhile, the accused beat up the girl, and then set her on fire with a kerosene oil. The oil was poured on her from a bottle that lay in her house.”
Police have launched a hunt for the accused, after the victim made a dying statement saying they had beat and set her on fire.
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