Two Israeli soldiers have been charged with using a Palestinian child as “human shield” during Israel’s last winter assault on the Gaza Strip.

The two soldiers, whose names were not released, are facing charges for forcing a nine-year-old boy to open several bags suspected of containing explosives while searching a building in Gaza.

The Israeli army pressed the charges on Thursday.

The boy’s case came to light after it was forwarded to the Israeli military by the United Nations.

The soldiers have been indicted in military court for “unauthorized conduct” and “exceeding their authority in a manner that endangered life or health,” the army said.

The military says the soldiers could face up to three years in jail if convicted.

A UN report on the war, conducted by retired South African judge Richard Goldstone, slammed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity by Israel in the Gaza Strip.

The criminal charges are believed to be the first combat-related charges brought against Israeli soldiers for their actions during the three-week-long war on Gaza. A previous criminal case was brought against soldiers accused of stealing a credit card.

About 1,400 Palestinians, mostly women and children, were killed during the offensive. Human rights groups and a UN commission have accused Israel’s military of committing war crimes and targeting civilians during the operation.

Several Palestinians have been injured as Israeli aircraft bomb two sites in southern Gaza Strip early Friday, the army and witnesses said.

The Israeli military said it blew up a metal workshop in Khan Yunis in the early hours of Friday, injuring several people.

The condition of the injured was not immediately clear, witnesses said.

Minutes later, a second strike targeted a tunnel in the border town of Rafah, the Israeli military said.

The army claims that the two strikes were in retaliation to a Thursday rocket attack that hit an empty workshop on a kibbutz in southern Israel, but caused no casualties.

The attacks come as US Vice President Joe Biden is wrapping up a 5-day visit to the region.

The elected Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh is planning to appoint a female minister to head a Women’s Affairs Ministry in the besieged Gaza Strip.

“The government is planning to appoint a number of female ministers to better include them in the decision-making process,” the Ma’an new agency quoted Haniyeh as saying at an event held on Tuesday to honor working women in Gaza City.

“We are a national government, based on Islamic principles, and we call on women to be more involved in the parliament, municipalities, and ministries. We are proud of this for this is a woman’s right,” he added.

Haniyeh said the Gaza government will attach more significance to women’s issues in the future.

The decision came a day after International Women’s Day, which was celebrated across the globe on March 8. World leaders and international organizations are calling for women’s rights to be recognized and for women to be given more opportunities in order to help resolve global problems.

Israel says it would facilitate the visit of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Ashton to the besieged Gaza Strip.

A statement by Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Monday said the decision came in response to a request by Ban and Ashton but it did not specify when the two leaders might visit Gaza.

This is while Israel prevented a delegation of European MPs from travelling to the blockaded coastal strip last December.

Ashton took the news with a grain of doubt, though.

“It is true that the Israeli government has so far reacted positively to this request. We are continuing to work on the final program for the trip and are continuing to talk with the Israeli government in relation to this,” her spokesman said in Strasbourg.

In February, Irish Foreign Minister Micheal Martin, however, made a visit to the region to become the first European diplomat who managed to get in the sliver via Egypt.

Witnessing the plight of the impoverished Palestinians there, Martin called the Israeli blockade of Gaza inhumane and unacceptable.

European Union High Representative of Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton is expected to arrive in the Middle East next week and is scheduled to visit Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

On March 19, Ban is expected to take part in a meeting of the International Quartet on the Middle East in Moscow. He is then to visit the region at the end of the month, ahead of his participation in the Arab League summit in Libya.

Gaza has been under more than two years of paralyzing Israeli blockade which has been in place even after Tel Aviv’s military offensive against the populated costal enclave last January, which left more than 1,400 people killed.

Gaza’s infrastructure devastated in the three-week onslaught prompted the UN and other human rights groups to urge Israel to put an end to the “collective punishment” of some 1.5 million Palestinians in the region and allow construction materials and humanitarian aid into the strip.

The Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip has so far resulted in the death of 500 Palestinians, says a Palestinian lawmaker as the siege enters its 1,000th day.

Jamal al-Khudari, Palestinian legislator said most of the mortalities had been caused due to the medical shortages which were a result of the siege, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reported on Sunday.

Sunday marked the 1,000th day, since Israel subjected the already-impoverished Gaza Strip to an all-out blockade which has deprived its roughly-1.5-million population of their most-direly-needed requirements.

Al-Khudari, also the chairman of the Popular Committee Against the Siege said, “The siege harmed the people, as well as the environment, health, the economy and social life. It constitutes a serious attempt to suffocate the people and break their will.”

“The Palestinian economy in Gaza has been completely destroyed with more than 140,000 people unemployed, which amounts to 80% of Gaza’s manpower,” the lawmaker added.

Few construction materials had been allowed into the enclave since the destructive Israeli bombardments between late December 2008 and early January 2009, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians and inflicted more than USD 1.6 billion in damages on Gaza’s economy, Ma’an reported.

Ireland blasts the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip as “medieval,” urging the European Union to pressure Tel Aviv into easing the restrictions.

“I genuinely believe that the medieval siege conditions being imposed on the people of Gaza are unacceptable,” wrote Irish Foreign Minister Micheal Martin, in an opinion piece published in the International Herald Tribune.

The already-impoverished coastal sliver has endured almost three years of an Israeli-imposed blockade which has deprived it of its most direly-needed requirements.

The siege has pushed some 80 percent of Gaza’s nearly 1.5-million population below the poverty line, leaving more than half of them jobless.

Martin, who was to the enclave last week, added that “the tragedy of Gaza is that it is fast in danger of becoming a tolerated humanitarian crisis.”

The situation, he said, “is proving extremely difficult to remedy or ameliorate due to the blockade and the wider ramifications of efforts to try and achieve political progress in the Middle East.”

The siege lasted during the December 2008-January 2009 Israeli bombardment of Gaza which lasted for three weeks and killed more than 1,400 Palestinians.

“The European Union and the international community simply must do more to increase the pressure for the ending of the blockade and the opening of the border crossings to normal commercial and humanitarian traffic.”

The Israeli Embassy in Madrid has recently been received hundreds of schoolchildren’s letters protesting against Tel Aviv’s conduct toward the Palestinians.

One letter directed at Israel’s ambassador in Madrid, Rafael Shotz, asked, “How many Palestinians have you murdered today?”

Another read, “Mr. Ambassador, you should think about not killing the Palestinian children and elderly. I don’t know if it doesn’t bother you, having to murder people. You should leave Palestine.”

Israel has blockaded all border crossings to the Gaza Strip for more than two years. The illegal Israeli imposed blockade on the Gaza Strip, which has steadily tightened since 2007, has had a disastrous impact on the humanitarian and economic situation in the coastal enclave.

Some 1.5 million people are being denied their basic rights, including freedom of movement, and their rights to appropriate living conditions, work, health and education. Poverty and unemployment rates stand at approximately 80% and 60% respectively in the Gaza Strip.

Three weeks of Israeli air strikes and a ground incursion into the Gaza between late December 2008 and early January 2009 resulted in the death of over 1400 people — mainly women and children.

The carnage also inflicted more than $1.6 billion of damage on Gaza’s economy.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says a promising solution to the plight of Palestinian refugees lies in their moral and legal right to return to what was once Palestine.

Assad stated that granting the right of return is an inalienable, basic human right to each individual Palestinian refugee and they should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date.

Right of return will alleviate the problems of Palestinians living in refugee communities scattered around the Middle East, he added.

The Syrian leader made the remarks during a meeting with Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency Filippo Grandi in Damascus on Tuesday.

Grandi also called on Arab nations to throw their weight behind international efforts to lift the years-long siege of the Gaza Strip, and help end the suffering of some 1.5 million Palestinians living there.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were displaced from their homes during the Israeli-Arab wars in 1948 and 1967. They and their descendents live, many crammed into overcrowded enclaves, mainly in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon while some of them still retain old deeds and keys to homes now occupied by Israelis.

The Palestinians have been demanding the right to return to their homeland citing the United Nations General Assembly resolution 194, while Israelis are pushing for the refugees to be absorbed into their Arab host countries.

But most of the Arab nations have refused to do so, wishing neither to surrender to Israeli demands nor to upset the demographic balance of their own populations.

A senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, Ghazi Hamad, says the Islamic Resistance Movement is holding negotiations with the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority as well as others to reopen the Rafah border crossing into the besieged coastal enclave.

Speaking at a press conference in Gaza City on Tuesday, Hamad said Egypt, along with the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations, are engaged in talks to bring the border crossing back into normal operation in order to protect the lives and dignity of Palestinians.

According to Hamad, 70 to 100 patients leave Gaza through the Erez crossing with Israel every day, while the Kerem Shalom and Karni crossings allow limited amounts of goods and humanitarian assistance into Gaza on a weekly basis.

“Several parties have suggested that Gaza and Ramallah form a joint police force to monitor the Rafah crossing,” Hamad said.

“This was discussed with Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, and he agreed. Another option would be for the Palestinian presidential guards and European monitors to resume monitoring.”

Israel has continued the closure of all border crossings to the Gaza Strip for more than two years. The illegal Israeli imposed blockade on the Gaza Strip, which has steadily tightened since 2007, has had a disastrous impact on the humanitarian and economic situation in the coastal enclave.

Some 1.5 million people are being denied their basic rights, including freedom of movement, and their rights to appropriate living conditions, work, health, and education. Poverty and unemployment rates stand at approximately 80% and 60% respectively in the Gaza Strip.

Three weeks of Israeli air strikes and a ground incursion into the Gaza Strip between December 2008 and January 2009 resulted in the death of over 1,400 Palestinians and the injury of about 5,450 people. Most of the victims were civilians.

The carnage also inflicted more than $1.6 billion of damage on Gaza’s economy.

A group of Arab MPs have embarked on a tour of the Gaza Strip to show solidarity with its people and help end the rift between rival Palestinian factions.

The delegation from the Arab Parliamentary Union is comprised of 22 deputies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Morocco, Algeria, Qatar, Bahrain, Lebanon, Sudan, Kuwait, and Oman.

“We came to represent the Arab parliaments and the Arab nation. We came, 22 deputies who represent the Arab nation from the Atlantic Ocean to the [Persian] Gulf as a united nation,” the group said in a declaration upon arriving via the Egyptian-controlled Rafah crossing on Monday.

The Arab lawmakers highlighted the significance of unity among the Palestinians for achieving the “nation’s aim of establishing an independent Palestinian state.” “We want the Palestinian people to be united, as no party ever defeated its enemy when it was divided,” they urged.

Prominent Omani MP Salem Bin Ali al-Kabi, who is leading the delegation expressed “great optimism about Palestinian reconciliation,” given the increasing hopes that Hamas will sign an Egyptian-brokered reconciliation deal.

The visit comes amid signs of a breakdown in the three-year-old standoff between the Islamic Hamas movement and the rival Fatah party, following a rare visit by senior Fatah leader Nabil Sha’ath who met with Hamas’ Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and other Gaza-based officials.

On Sunday, representatives from 13 Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Fatah, held talks in Gaza to underline their commitment to end internal strife.

Palestinian civil rights groups hailed the delegation’s visit as a show of “support for Palestinian steadfastness in the face of Israeli intransigence, the tightening of the blockade, the closure of the crossings, and the ban on the entry of construction materials and all requirements for a decent life.”

During the two-day tour, the Arab deputies are scheduled to meet with Palestinian politicians as well as the families of those affected by Israel’s last year’s offensive against Gaza.

The 22-day onslaught left more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, dead and devastated a large part of the infrastructure of the impoverished area, which has been under Israeli siege since 2007.

The legitimate PA government in the Gaza Strip has welcomed the visit of an Arab parliamentary delegation to the besieged Gaza Strip, stressing that it is about time for Amre Mousa, the secretary-general of the Arab League to visit the Strip.

In a statement it issued Monday, the Haneyya government highlighted the importance of the Arab delegation visit to Gaza but stressed that the Arab parliaments can do more than just a visit to rescind the unjust siege on the Strip.

“We deeply appreciate such solidarity visit but we believe that our people deserve more than a visit, they deserve practical and serious steps to bail them out of the repressive siege that they have been suffering of for four years now”, the government underlined in the statement.

The government also welcomed the efforts of the Arab league and Mousa in supporting peace in the war-torn Sudanese province of Darfur, explaining that the visit of the Arab representatives in AL to the province and holding meetings there contributed to calming the situation there.

“We indeed feel what our brothers in Darfur feel, yet, we confirm that our people in the besieged Gaza Strip deserve more attention and more practical steps to lift the siege that almost destroyed all aspects of life in Gaza”, the statement pointed out.

For his part, Hassan Abu Hasheesh, the head of the information office in Haneyya’s government, invited Mousa to pay a visit to Gaza and to hold the preparatory meeting of the Arab foreign ministers in Gaza city, saying, “history will record such historic step for the AL if it indeed did it”.

However, Abu Hasheesh regretted the “biased” stand of the AL in the Palestinian internal rift, explaining that the AL takes a position in favor of Fatah faction at the expense of Hamas Movement alleging “international consideration”.

“Indeed it sad to have an AL position like this because it freezes the role of the League that should always be vital and should translate its principles, charter, and system for all member states to achieve the Arab dream which Palestine is part of”, Abu Hasheesh underscored.

Mousa has called for an Arab meeting in Darfur to demonstrate Arab support to the integrity of Sudan.

The Gaza Energy Authority says the Gaza Strip’s only power plant will stop functioning once again if fuel is not received immediately.

In a statement issued on Saturday afternoon, the Energy Authority said that one generator had already been shut down and the remaining amount of fuel was only sufficient to continue the plant’s electricity output for a few hours.

The power plant’s output decreased to 30 megawatts from more than 60 last week and Gaza will experience blackouts as a result of an energy deficit of 50 percent, the statement noted.

The announcement of an imminent power outage is the second in two weeks. On February 4, an emergency fuel delivery prevented blackouts. Two days later, a generator was shut down, but then restarted later in the week as some fuel arrived.

Gaza border checkpoints controlled by the Israelis are frequently shut, and Israeli courts have reduced the regular fuel quota entering the Gaza Strip for no given reason, the Energy Authority said. In the first week of February, 1,600 cubic meters of fuel entered instead of 2,200 cubic meters.

The Gaza Energy Authority has appealed once again to international and humanitarian organizations, as well as to Arab states and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, to make every effort to raise Gaza’s electricity generation capacity to the required level.

Egypt’s Navy arrests four Palestinian fishermen near the coast of the Gaza Strip as Cairo further restricts the blockaded sliver’s sources of livelihood.

An official with Hamas’ security forces said the arrests had been made on Friday near the divided border town of Rafah in southern Gaza, AFP reported.

Hamas’ agriculture ministry said the four were arrested while “doing their job” and called on Egypt to stop “oppressing” the Palestinian fishermen. Security officials on the Egyptian side of Rafah denied the arrests.

Israel has restricted the Gazan fishing territory from the 20 nautical miles, agreed under the Oslo agreement between Tel Aviv and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993, to just three nautical miles today.

More than four miles of Gaza’s coastline has also been deemed contaminated due to the overflow of the strip’s sewage system, which is dysfunctional due to the Israeli siege that has been in place for almost three years.

As Israel controls the access to the territory by sea and air, Egypt keeps shut the Rafah border crossing — the sliver’s only border that bypasses Israel. The Egyptian authorities claim that the border post is an Egyptian-Israeli crossing and should not be used without Tel Aviv’s permission.

The Egyptian government is additionally building a steel wall along the Gaza border to prevent the transfer of any goods into the strip.

Egypt is also to block the seaborne Gaza-bound supplies by stepping up security measures at its maritime border with Gaza.

Work on the Gaza-Egypt steel barrier, which has been going on with US assistance, has been halted in some places due to technical difficulties, an Egyptian newspaper says.

According to workers, the border area’s geological characteristics are hindering work and preventing construction teams from laying steel plates, Al-Masry Al-Youm reported on Friday.

They further explained that boulders had made it impossible to drill deeper than four meters into the ground at some spots.

The workers also said that it was the most serious problem they had encountered since construction of the underground barrier began.

The steel wall would block a network of underground tunnels the Palestinians use to bring in a wide variety of goods and products that Israel does not allow into Gaza due to the closure of the commercial crossings with Israel.

The illegal Israeli-imposed blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has steadily tightened since 2007, has had a disastrous impact on the humanitarian and economic situation in the coastal enclave.

Some 1.5 million Gazans are being denied their basic rights, including freedom of movement, and their rights to appropriate living conditions, work, health, and education. The poverty and unemployment rates stand at approximately 80 percent and 60 percent respectively in the Gaza Strip.

Israel has rejected United Nations demands of an independent probe into its last year war on the Gaza Strip which claimed the lives of more than 1,400 Palestinians.

A senior official in the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Friday that the report Israel gave UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on the investigations it is conducting into Operation Cast Lead earlier this month is sufficient.

“Israel feels the report it gave was a serious, comprehensive, credible and complete answer to the UN secretary-general,” the official said.

“We believe that we conduct credible investigations and that we have procedures in place to investigate these types of matters that are as good as exist in any country in the world,” he added.

Israel’s rejection comes as Ban Ki-moon has repeatedly urged Tel Aviv to allow an independent inquiry into the Gaza war.

The United Nations blasted Israel last week for what it called Israel’s un-reliable report.

The UN report led by former South African judge Richard Goldstone concluded last September that Israel carried out “deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects” in January-December war on Gaza.

The 575-page UN-ordered report asserts seven incidents in which Palestinian civilians were shot while leaving their homes, trying to run for safety or waving white flags.

In November 2009, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that accuses Israel of war crimes and criminal acts against humanity during the weeks-long onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

At least eleven students have been arrested over their interruption of a lecture by the Israeli ambassador to the US at the University of California, Irvine.

Michael Oren was invited to the university by the Jewish Federation of Orange County to speak about Israeli views on the status of the Middle East and Tel Aviv’s relationship with Washington.

However as the ambassador was addressing the crowded auditorium, he was interrupted for at least ten times by anti-Israeli students.

“Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech,” the first of the ten students yelled before being led away by university police.

The remainder of Oren’s speech was drowned by similar remarks, with some students shouting “killer” and “how many Palestinians did you kill?”

By the end of the night, 11 students were arrested and cited for disturbing a public event.

They could face misdemeanor charges as well as university disciplinary hearings that could result in suspensions or dismissals, Cathy Lawhon, Media Relations Director at the UC-Irvine campus said.

The University’s Muslim Union was not available for contact but it did issue a statement prior to the event, saying that it strongly opposed and condemned the ambassador’s visit, a Press TV correspondent reported from Los Angeles.

“Israel continues its human rights violations, thereby breaking international law and law of Israeli accord,” the group had said.

It also added that Israel has committed war crimes against the Gaza Strip and is responsible for the massacre of thousands of Palestinians.

Zionist warplanes fired on the southern Gaza Strip late Tuesday night, locals reported and the army confirmed.

There were no immediate reports of injury.

A Zionist military spokeswoman said that the strikes came in retaliation for alleged projectiles launched into the western Negev in recent days.

The airstrikes targeted the Yasser Arafat International Airport in Dahaniya, said BBC correspondent Shadi Al-Kashif. Five missiles struck the facility in total, Agence France-Presse quoted a witness as saying.

Zionist forces last targeted the airport on 3 February. Three Palestinians were wounded in those airstrikes, which also targeted a tunnel along the Gaza-Egypt border.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has expressed confidence that Israel will be unable to achieve its goals in the Gaza Strip.

“The Zionists [Israelis] will definitely fail to reach their objectives in Gaza,” said Mottaki in a meeting with Secretary-General of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Ramadan Abdullah in Tehran on Monday.

“The occupying regime [Israel] is not in a position to make mistakes because it is aware of their consequences,” Mottaki added.

He criticized the West’s stance on international issues including the ongoing developments in Palestine and the Middle East and said that Palestinian popular resistance against Israel would lead to their victory.

Mottaki went on to say that he hoped the West would change its “irrational” approach to regional and international developments and that “all countries would enjoy their inalienable rights.”

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has scoffed at the blockade of the Gaza Strip, saying walls cannot force Palestinians to submit to external control.

“Gaza is surrounded on three sides; north, east, and south; to make it raise a white flag,” Haniyeh said on Monday, insisting that Egypt’s underground wall will fail to produce Cairo’s desired effect. “The escalation of the blockade and the siege is aimed at toppling the (Hamas) government and bringing the Palestinians to their knees,” he added.

The Gaza Strip has long been under siege by the Israelis, who have closed all Gaza crossings, preventing donated food and other basic needs into the area, which is home to some 1.5 million Palestinians.

The only border terminal not controlled by Tel Aviv is the southern Rafah crossing which is closed by the Egyptian government. Cairo also launches regular attacks on the Palestinians’ cross-border tunnel network in the area, filling the “food and energy vessels” with gas and water.

Late last year, the Israeli daily Haaretz revealed Egypt was constructing a subterranean steel wall to stem the flow of goods into the coastal enclave.

Haniyeh said that his government is entering “its fourth year in the next few days, and no one can deny the accomplishments and successes it made in achievements in security, stability, preventing chaos and restoring the rights to the people through courts and the judiciary.”

The Islamic Hamas movement came to power in Palestine following its sweeping victory in the 2006 general elections but faced pressure under Western diplomatic and economic sanctions.

In June 2007, Hamas had to limit it rule to the Gaza Strip after the rival Fatah party tried to dismantle the resistance movement’s administration and forged its own government in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Zionist occupation forces kidnapped on Sunday morning 7/2/2010, 4 fishermen on the shore of the town of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip.

The sources said that Zionist gunboats opened fire at fishing boat where the four fishermen were, off the coast of Beit Lahiya, before they kidnap the fishermen and taking them to an unknown destination.

In the occupied West Bank, the Zionist occupation forces kidnapped at dawn two citizens from the town of Abu Dis, for allegedly throwing Molotov cocktails at a patrol of the occupation forces.

Also, the forces raided “Al Zababdeh” town south of Jenin, and installed a military checkpoint at the entrance to the town, no injuries reported.