May 2006

by Lailia El-Haddad

[In the two-and-a-half weeks preceding the Tel Aviv suicide bombing of April 17 that killed nine Israeli civilians, the Israeli military killed 26 Palestinians -- at least five of them children -- and injured 161 more. At the time of this article, Israel had been continuously pounding Palestinians in the Gaza Strip with hundreds of artillery shells per day. Israel has also severely limited the flow of goods to and from the Gaza Strip, in a move designed to freeze the Gazan economy and, as senior Israeli advisor Dov Weissglas joked, put the Palestinians on a diet.