WarSclerotic

Gulf states call on UN to halt Iran ‘interference’.

Gulf Arab states on Sunday called on the international community and UN Security Council to “make flagrant Iranian interference and provocations” in Gulf affairs cease after unrest in Bahrain.

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, after a meeting in the Saudi capital Riyadh, called in a statement for “necessary measures” against the Islamic republic to prevent it from sowing regional discord.

The six-nation GCC called on “the international community and the Security Council to take the necessary measures to make flagrant Iranian interference and provocations aimed at sowing discord and destruction” among GCC states.

It said the GCC — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — “categorically rejects all foreign interference in its affairs… and invites the Iranian regime to stop its provocations.”

The statement also slammed “aggression” against Saudi diplomats in Iran.

Earlier on Sunday, Riyadh threatened to recall its diplomats from Tehran unless they were better protected.

“I hope we won’t be obliged to withdraw our diplomatic mission from Tehran if Iran fails to take the necessary measures to protect it,” deputy foreign minister Prince Turki bin Mohammed told reporters.

Iranian students had demonstrated on Monday outside the Saudi embassy to condemn Riyadh’s military intervention in Bahrain and the “murder” of Bahraini citizens, the official IRNA news agency had reported.

Iran’s Fars news agency, which is close to conservatives, had reported that “six to seven petrol bombs were hurled against the embassy” as students chanted slogans against the ruling Sunni dynasties in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

On Sunday, Prince Turki said: “Shiites in the Gulf are our brothers and have national rights under the umbrella of their loyalty (to their countries) and not to the outside.”

Iran has repeatedly condemned the dispatch of Saudi troops to Bahrain to support the Bahraini forces’ crackdown on demonstrations there by Shiites who form the majority of the population of the country.

Iran is predominantly a Shiite Muslim country.

Saudi Arabia and Iran Wage a New Cold War in the Middle East – WSJ.com.

There has long been bad blood between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but popular protests across the Middle East now threaten to turn the rivalry into a tense and dangerous regional divide.

Iran

• Active troops: 523,000
• Battle tanks: 1,613
• Combat aircraft: 336
• Regional allies: Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas

Source: Military Balance

SAUDI ARABIA

• Active troops: 234,000
• Battle tanks: 565
• Combat aircraft: 349
• Regional allies: Gulf states, Egypt, Lebanese Sunnis, Fatah

Source: Military Balance

For three months, the Arab world has been awash in protests and demonstrations. It’s being called an Arab Spring, harking back to the Prague Spring of 1968.

But comparison to the short-lived flowering of protests 40 years ago in Czechoslovakia is turning out to be apt in another way. For all the attention the Mideast protests have received, their most notable impact on the region thus far hasn’t been an upswell of democracy. It has been a dramatic spike in tensions between two geopolitical titans, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

This new Middle East cold war comes complete with its own spy-versus-spy intrigues, disinformation campaigns, shadowy proxy forces, supercharged state rhetoric—and very high stakes.

“The cold war is a reality,” says one senior Saudi official. “Iran is looking to expand its influence. This instability over the last few months means that we don’t have the luxury of sitting back and watching events unfold.”

On March 14, the Saudis rolled tanks and troops across a causeway into the island kingdom of Bahrain. The ruling family there, long a close Saudi ally, appealed for assistance in dealing with increasingly large protests.

Iran soon rattled its own sabers. Iranian parliamentarian Ruhollah Hosseinian urged the Islamic Republic to put its military forces on high alert, reported the website for Press TV, the state-run English-language news agency. “I believe that the Iranian government should not be reluctant to prepare the country’s military forces at a time that Saudi Arabia has dispatched its troops to Bahrain,” he was quoted as saying.

The intensified wrangling across the Persian—or, as the Saudis insist, the Arabian—Gulf has strained relations between the U.S. and important Arab allies, helped to push oil prices into triple digits and tempered U.S. support for some of the popular democracy movements in the Arab world. Indeed, the first casualty of the Gulf showdown has been two of the liveliest democracy movements in countries right on the fault line, Bahrain and the turbulent frontier state of Yemen.

But many worry that the toll could wind up much worse if tensions continue to ratchet upward. They see a heightened possibility of actual military conflict in the Gulf, where one-fifth of the world’s oil supplies traverse the shipping lanes between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Growing hostility between the two countries could make it more difficult for the U.S. to exit smoothly from Iraq this year, as planned. And, perhaps most dire, it could exacerbate what many fear is a looming nuclear arms race in the region.

Iran has long pursued a nuclear program that it insists is solely for the peaceful purpose of generating power, but which the U.S. and Saudi Arabia believe is really aimed at producing a nuclear weapon. At a recent security conference, Prince Turki al Faisal, a former head of the Saudi intelligence service and ambassador to the U.K. and the U.S., pointedly suggested that if Iran were to develop a weapon, Saudi Arabia might well feel pressure to develop one of its own.

The Saudis currently rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella and on antimissile defense systems deployed throughout the Persian Gulf region. The defense systems are intended to intercept Iranian ballistic missiles that could be used to deliver nuclear warheads. Yet even Saudis who virulently hate Iran have a hard time believing that the Islamic Republic would launch a nuclear attack against the birthplace of their prophet and their religion. The Iranian leadership says it has renounced the use of nuclear weapons.

How a string of hopeful popular protests has brought about a showdown of regional superpowers is a tale as convoluted as the alliances and history of the region. It shows how easily the old Middle East, marked by sectarian divides and ingrained rivalries, can re-emerge and stop change in its tracks.

There has long been bad blood between the Saudis and Iran. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni Muslim kingdom of ethnic Arabs, Iran a Shiite Islamic republic populated by ethnic Persians. Shiites first broke with Sunnis over the line of succession after the death of the Prophet Mohammed in the year 632; Sunnis have regarded them as a heretical sect ever since. Arabs and Persians, along with many others, have vied for the land and resources of the Middle East for almost as long.

These days, geopolitics also plays a role. The two sides have assembled loosely allied camps. Iran holds in its sway Syria and the militant Arab groups Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories; in the Saudi sphere are the Sunni Muslim-led Gulf monarchies, Egypt, Morocco and the other main Palestinian faction, Fatah. The Saudi camp is pro-Western and leans toward tolerating the state of Israel. The Iranian grouping thrives on its reputation in the region as a scrappy “resistance” camp, defiantly opposed to the West and Israel.

For decades, the two sides have carried out a complicated game of moves and countermoves. With few exceptions, both prefer to work through proxy politicians and covertly funded militias, as they famously did during the long Lebanese civil war in the late 1970s and 1980s, when Iran helped to hatch Hezbollah among the Shiites while the Saudis backed Sunni militias.

But the maneuvering extends far beyond the well-worn battleground of Lebanon. Two years ago, the Saudis discovered Iranian efforts to spread Shiite doctrine in Morocco and to use some mosques in the country as a base for similar efforts in sub-Saharan Africa. After Saudi emissaries delivered this information to King Mohammed VI, Morocco angrily severed diplomatic relations with Iran, according to Saudi officials and cables obtained by the organization WikiLeaks.

As far away as Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, the Saudis have watched warily as Iranian clerics have expanded their activities—and they have responded with large-scale religious programs of their own there.

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AFP/Getty Images

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Saudi King Abdullah in November 2007

The 1979 Iranian revolution was a major eruption that still looms large in the psyches of both nations. It explicitly married Shiite religious zeal with historic Persian ambitions and also played on sharply anti-Western sentiments in the region.

Iran’s clerical regime worked to spread the revolution across the Middle East; Saudi Arabia and its allies worried that it would succeed. For a time it looked like it might. There were large demonstrations and purported antigovernment plots in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, which has a large population of Shiite Muslim Arabs, and in Bahrain, where Shiites are a distinct majority and Iran had claimed sovereignty as recently as 1970.

The protests that began this past January in Tunisia had nothing to do with any of this. They started when a struggling street vendor in that country’s desolate heartland publicly set himself on fire after a local officer cited his cart for a municipal violation. His frustration, multiplied hundreds of thousands times, boiled over in a month of demonstrations against Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. To the amazement of the Arab world, Mr. Ben Ali fled the country when the military declined to back him by brutally putting down the demonstrations.

Spurred on by televised images and YouTube videos from Tunisia, protests broke out across much of the rest of the Arab world. Within weeks, millions were on the streets in Egypt and Hosni Mubarak was gone, shown the door in part by his longtime backer, the U.S. government. The Obama administration was captivated by this spontaneous outbreak of democratic demands and at first welcomed it with few reservations.

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Reuters

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (above, in 2008) has recently compared the region’s protests to Iran’s 1979 revolution.

In Riyadh, Saudi officials watched with alarm. They became furious when the Obama administration betrayed, to Saudi thinking, a longtime ally in Mr. Mubarak and urged him to step down in the face of the street demonstrations.

The Egyptian leader represented a key bulwark in what Riyadh perceives as a great Sunni wall standing against an expansionist Iran. One part of that barrier had already crumbled in 2003 when the U.S. invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam Hussein. Losing Mr. Mubarak means that the Saudis now see themselves as the last Sunni giant left in the region.

The Saudis were further agitated when the protests crept closer to their own borders. In Yemen, on their southern flank, young protesters were suddenly rallying thousands, and then tens of thousands, of their fellow citizens to demand the ouster of the regime, led by President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his family for 43 years.

Meanwhile, across a narrow expanse of water on Saudi Arabia’s northeast border, protesters in Bahrain rallied in the hundreds of thousands around a central roundabout in Manama. Most Bahraini demonstrators were Shiites with a long list of grievances over widespread economic and political discrimination. But some Sunnis also participated, demanding more say in a government dominated by the Al-Khalifa family since the 18th century.

Protesters deny that their goals had anything to do with gaining sectarian advantage. Independent observers, including the U.S. government, saw no sign that the protests were anything but homegrown movements arising from local problems. During a visit to Bahrain, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates urged the government to adopt genuine political and social reform.

But to the Saudis, the rising disorder on their borders fit a pattern of Iranian meddling. A year earlier, they were convinced that Iran was stoking a rebellion in Yemen’s north among a Shiite-dominated rebel group known as the Houthis. Few outside observers saw extensive ties between Iran and the Houthis. But the Saudis nonetheless viewed the nationwide Yemeni protests in that context.

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Reuters

Saudi Arabian troops cross the causeway leading to Bahrain on March 14, above. The ruling family in Bahrain had appealed for assistance in dealing with protests.

In Bahrain, where many Shiites openly nurture cultural and religious ties to Iran, the Saudis saw the case as even more open-and-shut. To their ears, these suspicions were confirmed when many Bahraini protesters moved beyond demands for greater political and economic participation and began demanding a constitutional monarchy or even the outright ouster of the Al-Khalifa family. Many protesters saw these as reasonable responses to years of empty promises to give the majority Shiites a real share of power—and to the vicious government crackdown that had killed seven demonstrators to that point.

But to the Saudis, not to mention Bahrain’s ruling family, even the occasional appearance of posters of Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah amid crowds of Shiite protesters pumping their fists and chanting demands for regime change was too much. They saw how Iran’s influence has grown in Shiite-majority Iraq, along their northern border, and they were not prepared to let that happen again.

As for the U.S., the Saudis saw calls for reform as another in a string of disappointments and outright betrayals. Back in 2002, the U.S. had declined to get behind an offer from King Abdullah (then Crown Prince) to rally widespread Arab recognition for Israel in exchange for Israel’s acceptance of borders that existed before the 1967 Six Day War—a potentially historic deal, as far as the Saudis were concerned. And earlier this year, President Obama declined a personal appeal from the king to withhold the U.S. veto at the United Nations from a resolution condemning continued Israeli settlement building in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The Saudis believe that solving the issue of Palestinian statehood will deny Iran a key pillar in its regional expansionist strategy—and thus bring a win for the forces of Sunni moderation that Riyadh wants to lead.

Iran, too, was starting to see a compelling case for action as one Western-backed regime after another appeared to be on the ropes. It ramped up its rhetoric and began using state media and the regional Arab-language satellite channels it supports to depict the pro-democracy uprisings as latter-day manifestations of its own revolution in 1979. “Today the events in the North of Africa, Egypt, Tunisia and certain other countries have another sense for the Iranian nation.… This is the same as ‘Islamic Awakening,’ which is the result of the victory of the big revolution of the Iranian nation,” said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran also broadcast speeches by Hezbollah’s leader into Bahrain, cheering the protesters on. Bahraini officials say that Iran went further, providing money and even some weapons to some of the more extreme opposition members. Protest leaders vehemently deny any operational or political links to Iran, and foreign diplomats in Bahrain say that they have seen little evidence of it.

March 14 was the critical turning point. At the invitation of Bahrain, Saudi armed vehicles and tanks poured across the causeway that separates the two countries. They came representing a special contingent under the aegis of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a league of Sunni-led Gulf states, but the Saudis were the major driver. The Saudis publicly announced that 1,000 troops had entered Bahrain, but privately they concede that the actual number is considerably higher.

If both Iran and Saudi Arabia see themselves responding to external threats and opportunities, some analysts, diplomats and democracy advocates see a more complicated picture. They say that the ramping up of regional tensions has another source: fear of democracy itself.

Long before protests ousted rulers in the Arab world, Iran battled massive street protests of its own for more than two years. It managed to control them, and their calls for more representative government or outright regime change, with massive, often deadly, force. Yet even as the government spun the Arab protests as Iranian inspired, Iran’s Green Revolution opposition movement managed to use them to boost their own fortunes, staging several of their best-attended rallies in more than a year.

Saudi Arabia has kept a wary eye on its own population of Shiites, who live in the oil-rich Eastern Province directly across the water from Bahrain. Despite a small but energetic activist community, Saudi Arabia has largely avoided protests during the Arab Spring, something that the leadership credits to the popularity and conciliatory efforts of King Abdullah. But there were a smattering of small protests and a few clashes with security services in the Eastern Province.

The regional troubles have come at a tricky moment domestically for Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah, thought to be 86 years old, was hospitalized in New York, receiving treatment for a back injury, when the Arab protests began. The Crown Prince, Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, is only slightly younger and is already thought to be too infirm to become king. Third in line, Prince Nayaf bin Abdul Aziz, is around 76 years old.

Viewing any move toward more democracy at home—at least on anyone’s terms but their own—as a threat to their regimes, the regional superpowers have changed the discussion, observers say. The same goes, they say, for the Bahraini government. “The problem is a political one, but sectarianism is a winning card for them,” says Jasim Husain, a senior member of the Wefaq Shiite opposition party in Bahrain.

Since March 14, the regional cold war has escalated. Kuwait expelled several Iranian diplomats after it discovered and dismantled, it says, an Iranian spy cell that was casing critical infrastructure and U.S. military installations. Iran and Saudi Arabia are, uncharacteristically and to some observers alarmingly, tossing direct threats at each other across the Gulf. The Saudis, who recently negotiated a $60 billion arms deal with the U.S. (the largest in American history), say that later this year they will increase the size of their armed forces and National Guard.

And recently the U.S. has joined in warning Iran after a trip to the region by Defense Secretary Gates to patch up strained relations with Arab monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia. Minutes after meeting with King Abdullah, Mr. Gates told reporters that he had seen “evidence” of Iranian interference in Bahrain. That was followed by reports from U.S. officials that Iranian leaders were exploring ways to support Bahraini and Yemeni opposition parties, based on communications intercepted by U.S. spy agencies.

Saudi officials say that despite the current friction in the U.S.-Saudi relationship, they won’t break out of the traditional security arrangement with Washington, which is based on the understanding that the kingdom works to stabilize global oil prices while the White House protects the ruling family’s dynasty. Washington has pulled back from blanket support for democracy efforts in the region. That has bruised America’s credibility on democracy and reform, but it has helped to shore up the relationship with Riyadh.

The deployment into Bahrain was also the beginning of what Saudi officials describe as their efforts to directly parry Iran. While Saudi troops guard critical oil and security facilities in their neighbor’s land, the Bahraini government has launched a sweeping and often brutal crackdown on demonstrators.

It forced out the editor of the country’s only independent newspaper. More than 400 demonstrators have been arrested without charges, many in violent night raids on Shiite villages. Four have died in custody, according to human-rights groups. Three members of the national soccer team, all Shiites, have also been arrested. As many as 1,000 demonstrators who missed work during the protests have been fired from state companies.

In Shiite villages such as Saar, where a 14-year-old boy was killed by police and a 56-year-old man disappeared overnight and showed up dead the next morning, protests have continued sporadically. But in the financial district and areas where Sunni Muslims predominate, the demonstrations have ended.

In Yemen, the Saudis, also working under a Gulf Cooperation Council umbrella, have taken control of the political negotiations to transfer power out of the hands of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, according to two Saudi officials.

“We stayed out of the process for a while, but now we have to intervene,” said one official. “It’s that, or watch our southern flank disintegrate into chaos.”

Corrections & Amplifications

King Mohammed VI is the ruler of Morocco. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the ruler was Hassan II.

—Nada Raad and Farnaz Fassihi contributed to this article.

Ahmadinejad: ‘The era of Zionism has passed away’.

  Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, addressing crowds gathered on Monday in honor of Iran’s Army Day, stated that “the era of Zionism and capitalism has passed away.”

Discussing the unrest sweeping Middle East and North Africa, Ahmadinejad pointed the finger of blame at the United States, accusing Obama and his government of conspiring to create a rift between Iran and other Arab nations.

Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric has followed a similar theme in recent days.

In public speech last week, Iranian president says he envisions new Middle East without presence of Israel, US and their allies.

Hezbollah and Iranian Revolutionary Guard operatives plan to attack Western targets in the coming days, a Lebanese report said on last week.

The report was based on information gathered by Western intelligence agencies monitoring the “recent abnormal movements of cadres suspected of belonging to Hezbollah or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,” the Beirut Observer website said.

According to UPI, the report said the attacks are meant to divert global attention from indictments the international United Nations tribunal is expected to serve in the investigation of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Also last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the world would see a new Middle East without the United States and Israel. He made the remark in a speech to thousands of people in the southeastern city of Zahedan, Iranian Press TV reported.

“A new Middle East will emerge without the presence of the United States and the Zionist regime [Israel], and their allies in the near future,” Ahmadinejad said.

He accused the US and Israel of plotting to “spark an Iranian- Arabian Shia-Sunni conflict.”

Ahmadinejad denounced “US imperialism” in the region, saying, “Regional governments and nations should remain vigilant to overcome US plots, and to not play in the US court.”

Israel was nearing its end, he said, and added, “Regional nations have awakened, but the global arrogance intends to sow discord among countries in the region.”

The Iranian people and regional nations are unhappy with the existence of the Zionist regime [Israel], and are against it. They will continue their fight until the defeat of the US and Zionist regime in the region,” Ahmadinejad said.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report April 17, 2011, 10:45 PM (GMT+02:00)

Long lines of trucks for Syria wait at Lebanese border

Syrian troops were fanned out Sunday, April 17, along the country’s borders with Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon to choke off the smuggled arms, funds and foreign agents streaming in recent weeks to the aid of the opposition whose uprising has spread to every corner of the country.  Independence Day Sunday was marked by a display by the authorities of a collection of automatic weapons allegedly smuggled through Iraq, as well as processions calling for the president’s removal. In Homs, security forces shot dead four protesters and injured more than fifty.  Some demonstrators wore shrouds proclaiming: Death is better than shame!
Large sections of the Syrian economy have ground to a halt, debkafile‘s sources report, because 2,500 supply trucks are backed up on the Lebanese border and 3,000 trucks on the Jordanian and Iraqi frontiers for meticulous, time-consuming searches. The Syrian authorities suspect Saudi Arabia of smuggling weapons to the opposition through Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon, having commandeered the infamous Middle East smuggling ring of which the Assad regime was an organizer and key link – and which has now turned around to bite its master.

The searches of convoys have caused the Syrian economy critical damage: Imported foodstuffs and raw materials are withheld from stores and factories and exports are almost at a standstill.

Syria’s political, business, military and intelligence elites, including the Assad family, amassed personal fortunes by creating and running those networks, whose pathways run from Sudan in the south through Sinai and Jordan up to Iraq in the east and Syria in the northwest.

debkafile‘s military sources report that the Syrian regime was also its best customer, using the network to transfer contraband weapons to the Lebanese Hizballah, Palestinian extremists such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip and allied groups on the West Bank, and Sunni terrorists, including al Qaeda, in Iraq.

Assad and his security chiefs have now decided that Damascus’ role as the smuggling hub of the Levant threatens their hold on power because Saudi Arabia has begun using three network branches for spiriting arms and financial aid to the Syrian opposition:.
1.  Jordan: Syrian intelligence suspects Riyadh of establishing a headquarters in Amman headed by Prince Bandar bin Sultan Secretary-General of the Saudi National Security Council for aiding and arming the uprising.
The town of Daraa, which leads the protest movement in southern Syria, lies athwart the only overland route linking Syria to Jordan. It is 100 kilometers from Damascus and 88 from Amman. More than 1,500 supply trucks, some from Saudi Arabia, are awaiting Syrian security checks before they can drive through.
Syrian tanks and undercover forces also lie in wait for suspect traffic along the Yarmouk River which flows into Jordan.
2.  Iraq: Assad suspects the Saudis of pushing into Syria arms, money and provocateurs for stirring up riots with the help of the Sunni militias of the western Iraqi province of Al-Anbar. These locals are familiar with the paths to the Syrian border hidden by the dense wooded vegetation of the Euphrates and Tigris riverbanks between Husaiba in Iraq and Abu Kamal in Syria. The latter is the center of the Shammar tribe whose lands spill over into Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
Since the Syrian army closed the only regular border with Iraq at Rabiyaa-Tall Kujik, another 1,500 trucks are piled up awaiting permission to pass through.
3. Lebanon:  Syria has clamped its most stringent security measures on its border with Lebanon, especially the goods terminal on the Abboudiyeh border. Damascus accuses Lebanese lawmaker Jamal al-Jarrah, a member of the Mustaqbal Movement headed by Saad Hariri, the Sunni prime minister ousted by Hizballah, of running the Saudi arms and funds route for sustaining the Syrian uprising.

Boy hurt in Gaza rocket attack on Israeli bus dies of his wounds – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

16-year-old Daniel Viflic dies after Palestinian militants launch rocket at Israeli school bus earlier this month, which sparked an escalation in cross-border fire.

The teenager who was critically wounded after Gaza militants launched an anti-aircraft missile at a school bus in southern Israel earlier this month succumbed to his wounds Sunday.

16-year-old Daniel Viflic died in the Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva after his condition seriously deteriorated last week.

	Bus damaged by missile strike from Gaza which wounded two people, April 7, 2011.
	Photo by: Ilan Assayag

The missile hit the bus traveling near Kibbutz Sa’ad just moments after it had dropped off the rest of the school children, wounding Viflic and the bus driver, who was moderately wounded by shrapnel wounds in his leg.

“Sadly, Daniel passed away this afternoon,” said Professor Shaul Sofer, the director of the intensive care unit at the Soroka Medical Center. “It wasn’t a surprise for us. He arrived in critical condition and shortly afterward his brain stopped functioning. Due to the sensitive nature of the event, we continued treatments despite knowing that he had no chance of recovery.”

Yitzhak Viflic, Daniel’s father, thanked the doctors and the supporters of his family. “Daniel fought but passed away calmly. I am positive he is in a good place now.”

Viflic was a resident of Beit Shemesh and studied in a yeshiva there. When he was wounded, he was on his way to the western Negev to visit his grandmother.

Following the bus attack, cross-border fire between Gaza and Israel seriously escalated. Palestinian militants fired dozens of rockets into southern Israel and IDF forces launched numerous attacks on targets in the Gaza Strip.

Syria protests persist despite Assad’s promise of reforms – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Protests reach Syria’s second city Aleppo, which has thus far been mostly free of protests; people call for freedom during independence day rally after Assad says intends to lift the country’s decades-old emergency law.

By Reuters

Protests erupted Sunday in several Syrian cities, including Suweida and Aleppo, with thousands of demonstrators calling for greater freedom a day after President Bashar Assad promised to lift the decades-old emergency laws.

Thousands of protesters in the southern town of Suweida participated in a rally to mark Evacuation Day, commemorating the departure of the last French soldiers 65 years ago and Syria’s proclamation of independence. Supporters of Assad were present alongside protesters, declaring loyalty to the president.

	Syrian anti-government protesters march in the northeastern town of Qamishli on April 1, 2011
	Photo by: AFP

Several hundred people chanted “the people want freedom” at the grave of independence leader Ibrahim Hananu in Syria’s second city Aleppo on Sunday, a rights campaigner in contact with the protesters said.

Aleppo, a large trading and industrial hub, has been mostly free of protests since mass pro-democracy demonstrations challenging President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian rule erupted more than a month ago in southern Syria and spread to large parts in the country of 20 million people.

Assad said on Saturday that the emergency laws, in place for almost 50 years, would be lifted by next week. But he did not address protesters’ demands to curb Syria’s pervasive security apparatus and dismantle its authoritarian system.

“God, Syria, freedom, that’s all,” chanted several hundred protesters in the South Syria town of Suweida. They also shouted “no fear” and slogans in support of the city of Deraa, where protests first broke out a month ago and has suffered the heaviest bloodshed.

Human rights groups say more than 200 people have been killed since demonstrations erupted in Deraa on March 18 in protest against the arrest of youths who had scrawled graffiti inspired by the Arab uprisings in North Africa.

The unprecedented unrest has spread across the tightly controlled state, posing the sternest challenge yet to the 45-year-old Assad, who assumed the presidency in 2000 when his father, Hafez Assad, died after 30 years in power.

Authorities have pledged to replace the repressive emergency law with anti-terrorism legislation, but opposition figures said this was likely to preserve tough restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly in Syria, which has been under Baath Party rule since 1963.

“When the lifting of the emergency law package is issued, it should be firmly enforced. The Syrian people are civilized. They love order and they do not accept chaos and mob rule,” Assad told a new cabinet which he named last week.

“We will not be lenient toward sabotage,” Assad said in the comments broadcast by state television. Syrian authorities have blamed “infiltrators” for stirring up unrest at the behest of outside players, including Lebanon and Islamist groups.

State news agency SANA said on Sunday a “large quantity” of weapons had been seized at the Tanaf border crossing with Iraq, including rifles, night vision goggles, explosives and pistols.

It said officials also had recently seized arms shipments at crossings with Turkey and Lebanon.

Emergency law bans public gatherings of more than five people and has stifled public dissent until Syrians took to the streets in March, emboldened by the popular uprisings that ousted autocratic leaders in Egypt and Tunisia.

In his speech to the cabinet, Assad said corruption was a problem and a commission to address it should be set up. He did not, however, announce any measures to end his own family’s dominance over the Syrian economy.

Assad’s cousin Rami Makhlouf, a tycoon, has expanded his businesses during Assad’s rule and he has been widely cited by protesters in their calls for an end to public corruption.

The West, which had been trying to coax Syria away from its anti-Israeli alliance with Iran and support for militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah, has urged Assad to refrain from violent crackdowns on disaffected Syrians.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague welcomed what he said was Assad’s “acknowledgement…that reform in Syria is necessary and urgent”.

“We call on the Syrian government to lift the state of emergency next week as proposed by President Assad and to ensure that those responsible for the deaths of civilians are held to account,” Hague said.

Two teens from West Bank village arrested over Itamar massacre – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Two teenage Palestinians from the village of Awarta admitted to carrying out the brutal murder last month of five members of the Fogel family, who lived in the nearby settlement of Itamar.

By Anshel Pfeffer

Israeli security forces have arrested two teenage residents of the West Bank Arab village of Awarta for allegedly carrying out last month’s murder of five family members in the settlement of Itamar, the lifting of a gag order revealed on Sunday.

Palestinian students Amjad Awad, 19, and Hakim Awad 18, both admitted to committing the murder.

	The suspects in the murder of the Fogel family in Itamar, Amjad Awad and Hakim Awad, with the crime scene in the background.

Five members of the Fogel family were brutally stabbed to death in their home in the West Bank settlement of Itamar on the night of March 11th. The murderers killed Ehud and Ruth Fogel, along with three of their young children, Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and Hadas, 3 months old, before fleeing the scene.

The two suspects, who are unrelated to one another, were identified as members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine along with several members of their family.

Shin Bet investigators have at this point not identified the murder as being carried out under the auspices of the Popular Front organization. According to what is currently known, the murders were carried out independently by the two suspects.

Six additional Palestinian suspects from Awad were also arrested in connection to the crime, four of whom belong to the same family. The six purportedly aided the two alleged perpetrators in hiding the murder weapon and in suppressing additional evidence. One of the six is a member of the Popular Front organization whom the suspects supposedly asked for a weapon to carry out a terror attack. Another one of the six is a resident of Ramallah at whose home the murder weapon was hidden.

An investigation revealed that the two suspects decided that they would carry out the murder on Friday afternoon, hours before the murder was carried out. According to the investigation, the two left Awarta at nine p.m. carrying an umbrella, several knives and wire cutting shears.

	The victims of the Itamar settlement attack, 10-year-old Yoav Fogel, Udi Fogel, 37, four-year-old Elad Fogel, three-month old Hadas Fogel and Ruth Fogel, 36.
	Photo by: Emil Salman

According to the investigation, it took the suspects about ten minutes to cut the fence which separates the settlement of Itamar from the Palestinian village of Awarta. They climbed the security barrier at the settlement unnoticed and walked about 400 meters into the settlement. Once inside the settlement, they broke into an empty home and stole an M-16 rifle, a weapons cartridge, a vest and a helmet before proceeding to the Fogel family’s home.

Before entering the house, the suspects noticed Yoav and Elad Fogel in the home’s window. Yoav and Elad were the first to be stabbed after the suspect entered the home. The suspects then entered the parents’ room. Ehud and Ruth tried to fight off the attackers, but were eventually overcome and stabbed to death. Ruth was also shot, but due to the weather at the time of the murder, the gunshots were not heard. The suspects fled the home, fearing that the gunshots had been heard.

Outside of the home, the suspects realized that their gunshots had gone unnoticed and they had not yet been discovered. Amjad Awad subsequently reentered the home in order to steal an additional M-16 rifle that was there. Back inside the parents’ room, Awad noticed three-month-old Hadas and stabbed her to death. While leaving the home once more, the suspect noticed that there were more children but apparently figured that he was running out of time. The lives of Roi Fogel, 8, and Yishai Fogel, 2, were spared.

The two suspects escaped the settlement at around 11 pm. An hour and a half later, twelve-year-old Tamar Fogel returned home from a youth group meeting and discovered the murder scene.

During the time that lapsed before the murder was discovered, the suspects fled Itamar and arrived back at Awarta, at the home of Salah Awad, the uncle of Hakim. According to the investigation, the suspects told Salah what they had done. Salah helped them hide the knives that they used in the murder and the weapons which they stole, as well as helped burn their clothes, which were covered in blood.

Israel Defense Forces troops arrived at the scene of the murder and made sure that there were no terrorists in the area. The IDF troops, along with the Shin Bet then left to carry out arrests in Awarta, to which a trail from the murder had led. Hundreds of the village’s 8,000 residents were arrested in the ongoing investigation.

Investigators came upon Hakim Awad on April 5th, and after he confessed to the crime, his alleged partner Amjad Awad five days later. During the investigation the father of Hakim was arrested along with two of his uncles and his brother. In addition, the man who the suspects supposedly approached to procure a weapon was arrested along with the Ramallah resident at whose home the two M-16 rifles were found hidden.

According to a senior Shin Bet official, despite the suspects’ young age, Hakim and Amjad “described what they did with self-control and did not express regret over their actions at any stage of the investigation.”

The same official said that the two suspects went to Itamar with the clear intention of carrying out a terror attack and stealing weapons.

Eyeing nuclear sites, Iran tests new anti-aircraft missile.

Tehran had previously introduced the Sayyad-1 surface-to-air missile which is capable of destroying targets with a low Radar Cross Section (RCS) at low and medium altitudes, and can also defuse electronic warfare attacks, according to Fars report.

The newest Sayyad-2 is an upgraded version of the system and has “higher precision, range and destruction power,” said the report.

Iranian Lietenant Commander Colonel Abolfazi Farmahini said recent tests of the mid-range hawk anti-aircraft missiles, conducted near the Khondab nuclear facility, successfully hit their targets. He said the test was aimed at assessing the level of preparedness of the system in defending Iran’s nuclear plants.

Farmahini said the Khatam ol-Anbia Air Defense Base tests the missiles regularly to strengthen the country’s defense capabilities.

Also Saturday, Iranian military officials said the US and Israel are behind the Stuxnet computer worm that has harmed the country’s nuclear program, AFP reported quoting IRNA.

“Investigations and studies show that the source of Stuxnet originates from America and the Zionist regime,” Gholam Reza Jalali, the commander of the Iranian civil defense organization, said.

Jalali stated that once the worm is mounted on a system, it starts collecting information and then sends reports from the infected machines to specific Internet addresses.

“After following up the reports that were sent, it became clear that the final destinations (of these reports) were the Zionist regime and the American state of Texas,” IRNA quoted Jalili as saying.

Jalili was the first Iranian military official to blame the US and Israel for the Stuxnet virus last year.

Barak: U.S. aid significantly bolsters Israel’s missile-defense capabilities – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Defense Minister’s comment comes after U.S. House passes budget including $205 million intended for developing Iron Dome anti-missile system.

By Haaretz Service

Defense Minister Ehud Barak welcomed Friday a decision by the U.S. House of Representatives to approve a budget which includes $205 million intended for continuing development of the Iron Dome anti-missile system.

Barak said the decision is a “significant reinforcement of Israel’s defense capabilities against missiles.”

	Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minster Ehud Barak visit the Iron Dome defense system in Ashkelon, April 10, 2011.
	Photo by: AP

The U.S. Congress also voted to continue aiding Israel to fund defense projects such as Arrow 2, Arrow 3, and Magic Wand. U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the budget on Friday evening.

Earlier this month, the Iron Dome missile defense system successfully intercepted for the first time a Grad rocket fired at Israel from Gaza. The achievement marked the first time in history a short-range rocket was ever intercepted.

The Israeli-developed system uses cameras and radar to track incoming rockets and is supposed to shoot them down within seconds of their launch.

Last weekend, Israel-Gaza violence heavily escalated when Gaza militants launched a rocket at an Israeli school bus, which left a teenager critically wounded.

Moreover, southern Israel suffered a heavy barrage of rocket and mortar fire for several days, as IDF forces launched strikes in Gaza which left 19 Hamas militants and two civilians dead.

Last weekend’s escalation was followed by five days of relative calm when two rockets hit the southern Israeli city of Ashdod on Friday, in a move which may spark further violence.

IDF believes Gaza calm could last despite rocket fire – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

IDF responds to Friday’s rocket fire with attack on Hamas outposts in Strip; PM welcomes move by U.S. Congress to allocate $205 million for Iron Dome rocket interception system.

By Anshel Pfeffer and Yanir Yagna

The few days’ lull in the south was broken on Friday by a Grad rocket fired from Gaza toward Israel on Friday. The rocket exploded in an open ground in Ashdod, causing no casualties or damage. Earlier reports of another rocket fired proved unfounded.

The Israel Defense Forces responded with an attack on two Hamas outposts, one in Gaza City and another in the Shati refugee camp. Despite the rocket, IDF sources told Haaretz they believe relative quiet will be maintained in the next few days.

	Policemen examining rockets that struck near Ashdod Saturday.
	Photo by: Ilan Asayag

Meanwhile, the Israel Navy fired on a fishing boat that entered the no-sailing zone in the Gaza waters. The IDF believes Hamas and other organizations are using fishing boats to test the vigilance of patrolling navy ships and the reactions of the IDF.

Although the IDF regards Hamas as responsible for any rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, the army believes Friday’s rocket was launched by one of the Islamist organizations in the Strip. The army hopes the attack over the weekend will restore a balance of deterrence, and does not believe Hamas will try to escalate the confrontation in the next few weeks. Other organizations may try to do it independently, the army warned.

On Friday, the U.S. Congress allocated $205 million to continue developing and producing the Iron Dome rocket interception system. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the move, saying the money will help protect Israeli civilians from Gaza rockets. Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the step significantly strengthens Israel’s defensive capability against rocket attacks, and he reaffirmed the depth of American support for Israel’s security.

The preceding weekend 120 rockets and mortar shells were fired from Gaza, keeping tens of thousands of Israelis in communities near Gaza in bomb shelters. The barrage came soon after militants fired an anti-tank missile at a school bus operated by the Shaar Hanegev regional council, leaving one boy critically injured. The IDF attacked tens of targets in the Strip, killing 19 Palestinians and injuring more than 50. The Iron Dome system so far has intercepted eight rockets fired toward Ashdod and Ashkelon.