massacre

Eventually, it did come out that the United States Embassy had been notified that a massacre was going on at Sabra and Shatila, and despite that, did nothing for 48 hours so that the massacre could be concluded before the U.S. embassy said anything at all about it to the Israelis. And this despite the fact that Philip Habib (then U.S. Envoy to the Middle East himself, on behalf of the United States government) had personally promised Arafat that if the PLO fighters abandoned the camps where they were protecting the innocent civilians, from the Christian Phalange, from outright massacres that the Phalange had said they were going to perpetrate, as well as [from] the Israeli Army, that the U.S. would guarantee their protection. And yet we knew, the U.S.

In May and July 2001, the authoritative Jane's Foreign Report disclosed that Britain and France had given Israel 'the green light' to attack the West Bank. The Blair government was shown a top-secret plan for an all-out invasion and reoccupation of both the West Bank and Gaza, which were then administered by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority under Israel sufferance. The plan was to use 'the latest F-16 and F-15 jets against all the main installations of the Palestinian Authority [and] 30,000 men or the equivalent of a full army'. However, this plan needed 'the trigger' of a suicide bombing which would cause 'numerous deaths and injuries [because] the "revenge" factor is crucial'. This 'would motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians'.

In the latest of a series of attacks causing significant civilian casualties in recent weeks, more than 200 were killed by coalition troops in Afghanistan in June, far more than are believed to have been killed by Taliban militants.

The bombardment, which witnesses said lasted up to three hours, in the Gereshk district late on Friday followed an attempted ambush by the Taliban on a joint US-Afghan military convoy. According to Mohammad Hussein, the provincial police chief, the militants fled into a nearby village for cover. Planes then targeted the village of Hyderabad. Mohammad Khan, a resident of the village, said seven members of his family, including his brother and five of his brother's children, were killed.