Everything you need to know about the weekend media coverage of Israel and the Mideast.
UN launches inquiry into a staffer’s false photo tweet. The Syrian army targets a Palestinian refugee camp. And are the Mossad and CIA on the same page about Iranian nukes?
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UN False Photo Tweet Controversy
• UN launches internal inquiry into Khulood Badawi’s tweet in response to a formal complaint from Ambassador Ron Prosor.
Fox News, UPI, JTA, and Foreign Policy‘s Colum Lynch followed up on the situation. Sign HonestReporting’s petition calling for the UN to dismiss Badawi and join the thousands of people demanding accountability.
Israel and the Palestinians
• PA negotiator Ahmed Qureia says it’s time to reconsider the two-state solution. The JPost writes:
The Palestinians should be talking publicly about the one state solution, putting it on the table as an option and throwing it in the face of Israel as “burning embers,” he said.
• A decade ago, six Palestinians accused of collaborating disappeared from the PA’s Salfit Detention Center without ever being brought to trial. Amnesty International and Maan News wonder about their fate:
During visits to the detention center, the families noticed marks of beatings and burns on the men’s bodies. When they were contacted by the Palestinian intelligence services to be told that the men had somehow “escaped” on March 12, 2002, they feared the worst . . . .
The PA has been dismissive of the families’ efforts to find their relatives over the years. They have told the families that the six are now in Israel and they have advised the families informally to cease trying to find out about them and to drop the case.
• Middle class Palestinians are “up to their ears in debt,” but it’s not Israel’s fault.
In recent years, the increased availability of mortgages and consumer loans instead of cash for the middle class has caused personal debt to balloon in the Palestinian territories. It more than doubled, to about $750 million, from 2008 to the end of 2011 and rose 40% over the last year alone, according to figures from the Palestinian Authority.
Most of the increase came from a surge in home loans, which were once available only to the rich or those who could find three people to cosign for them.
• Now AP picks up on the issue of Palestinian minors detained by the IDF for rock throwing. The issues raised aren’t much different from critiques from previous related articles. For more, see Guardian Report Misses the Real Child Abuse and Israel Responds to Guardian Child Abuse Charge.
