The al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, reported that one of its fighters was killed on Saturday morning during a mission in central Gaza. The Brigades did not elaborate on the cause of death but stated that the fighters "was killed while performing his duty." He was identified as Majdi Hasan, 24, from Al Mughraqa village in central Gaza. 

The Israeli army declared a northern West Bank village a closed military zone Saturday, preventing entry to journalists and residents, witnesses said.  Onlookers told Ma`an the `Iraq Burin village south of Nablus was the closed in anticipation of a rally and said a large deployment of soldiers was seen in the area.
...This week’s protest carried the message of “Israeli Blood Diamonds”, as consumers spend billions of dollars annually on diamonds crafted in Israel, while the Palestinians call for boycott... The army responding by firing tear gas at the residents, and even chased the residents and the peace activists while heading back to the village, and fired more gas at them. Dozens received treatment after inhaling gas fired by the army; at least ten suffered heavily and could not breathe.
Three protestors were injured in the weekly demonstration in Al-Mas'ara, near Bethlehem, after clashes broke out between protesters and Israeli forces at the entrance of the illegal settlement of Efrat on Friday. 
24 June - One of Britain’s largest trade unions passed a motion at its annual conference in Bournemouth last week accusing Israel of lying over the Gaza flotilla incident and has called for a complete boycott of Israel and for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, it was confirmed on Thursday. The emergency motion was introduced on the third day of the annual conference of UNISON, the largest public sector union with around 1.4 million members. 
24 June - The working class movement in Turkey is starting to join the Boycott Against Israel Campaign. While the working class movements around the world has escalated the campaign against Israel by refusing to unload Israeli cargo ships, the Dock Workers Union “Liman-Is” is the latest union in Turkey joining the anti apartheid, anti racist campaign against the state of Israel. 
In a moment of supreme irony, Ben Gurion University President Rivka Carmi, who only a few months ago was facing a revolt among donors and Israelis aghast at Prof. Neve Gordon‘s support of the global BDS movement, has now released a strong statement of support for him in the face of a death threat.
Once upon a time, Ireland was a huge supporter of Jewish aspirations in the Promised Land. What happened? -- The Palestinian issue has long occupied a place in the Irish consciousness far greater than geographic, economic, or political considerations appear to merit. Perceived parallels with the Irish national experience, however, have inspired an emotional connection with Palestine that has inspired Irish activism in the region up to the present day.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/23/why_the_irish_support_palestine

Despite recent cancellations by other international artists, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the famed Russian-American ballet dancer and actor, arrived in Israel this week to honor his commitments to perform.
Fatah leader Nabil Sha`ath on Saturday said bringing an end to Israel's blockade "is more important than unity, elections or any other matter." "Gaza is being destroyed forever [by the siege] and so is the Palestinian state," Sha`ath told the Saudi daily Al-Watan. 
Conflict over natural gas reserves on the northern border heated up Friday as Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri responded to threats by Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau to forcefully defend Israel's offshore drilling, worth billions of dollars ... Meanwhile Lebanese officials continued to accuse Israel of invading its territorial waters with drilling at the Tamar and Leviathan sites.
Washington – A proposed Lebanese bill will accelerate off-shore oil exploration and drilling in Lebanese waters, reported Ynet news Friday. The bill manifests accusations that Israeli rigs are stealing Lebanese oil. "Israel is ignoring the fact that, according to the maps, this field is included within Lebanon's territorial waters.” The accusation came from Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, who has been a strong voice behind both the accusations and the new oil legislation.

The US denied on Saturday reports by an Arab newspaper saying officials were holding secret talks with Hamas. Assistant White House Press Secretary Tommy Vietor said the story was "inaccurate", and that it was unfortunate the paper's editors neglected to request a comment by the US administration.
Chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat and Israeli deputy premier Dan Meridor entered a heated debate on Friday in New York, with the PLO official warning of the need to reach a peace deal by the end of 2010. 
WASHINGTON – US officials are looking for Israel to take risks in pursuit of an aggressive peace process, according to Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “They want to see an Israel that takes its security seriously but is ready to take risks to advance an assertive peace process,” he said of the message he received in meetings with top American officials.
Egypt's Foreign Ministry has expressed anger over comments reportedly made by senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahhar over its role in Palestinian reconciliation, an official told Arabic-language media on Saturday. Zahhar's charge was allegedly leveled at Foreign Minister Ahmad Aboul Gheit during an interview with an Egyptian newspaper, saying the ministry was "not authorized" to be in charge of Palestinian unity
Hamas refuses to ratify a unity deal because Fatah declined direct talks on comments to the Egyptian-backed proposal, a source close to the party told Ma'an Friday. Hamas had urged Fatah to discuss the agreement before signing the deal in Egypt
Dagan, who has been Mossad director since 2002, requested another year but was refused, Channel 2 news reported ... Dagan faced international criticism after the January assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, which was widely believed to be carried out by Mossad agents using forged foreign passports.
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Palestinian women are speeding into the record books by competing in the first all-female car racing team — the Speed Sisters. Along the way, they're crashing through another gender barrier in this conservative Muslim society.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/supreme-court-rejects-joint-petition-to-free-immanuel-fathers-1.298337
It is wonderful to see an international effort to assist Palestinians in their struggle, however, the question remains: how can internationals help in the most effective way? Westerners have an incredible privilege in this conflict with their access to foreign press, social media networks and ability to travel throughout Israel and Palestine. Documenting events seems to be the clearest path of using this privilege in an effective way since the internet has opened a space of fast communication from the front lines. Rather than getting arrested in a small village, it may be that documenting and disseminating events from that village will provide more positive results. An arrest in Beit Jala or Bil’in is an event that often goes unnoticed by the Israeli and International media and only serves to reinforce negative images of the Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement in the West Bank. These actions can increase the damaging mechanism against the Palestinian population and the architecture of the occupation. Arrests of Israelis tend to carry more influence in the Israeli press than those of internationals.
The estimated number of Palestinian Christians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem is 51,710, making the percentage of the Palestinian Christians in the Occupied Territories two percent of the Palestinian population... Various Christian Zionist propaganda sources claim that the main problem for Palestinian Christians is their Muslim neighbours. The decline of Christian presence in Palestine is portrayed as the fault of Muslims and not of the illegal Israeli occupation. Even though the relationship between Palestinian Christians and Muslims is not always a rosy one, the above claims are far from true. 
...I worked on Capitol Hill for more than 15 years (House and Senate) and I can say with certainty that these seeming "Israel firsters" do not, with few exceptions, care all that much about Israel ... They support bad Israeli policies, and sign those "Israel, right or wrong" letters only because that is the path of least resistance.  I doubt there are 30 Democrats in both houses together who really think attacking the flotilla was right, but hundreds signed the letters anyway. So why do they do it? They do it because they don't care about the issue enough to risk the lobby's wrath.
...Gilad Shalit has become a living symbol - a symbol of Israeli reality, of the inability of our leaders to make decisions, of their moral and political cowardice, of their inability to analyze a situation and draw conclusions. If there had been an opportunity to free Shalit through military action, the Israeli government would have seized it eagerly. So much is obvious, because the Israeli public always prefers solving a problem by force than doing anything that might be interpreted as weakness.
...Inside Israel, BDS has already started to work. It is working where years of other civil society strategies have achieved far too little. For the first time in a very long while, many Israelis around me are sitting up and taking notice: Notice that there is still an occupation in place 43 years down the line, an occupation "out there" beyond their "normal" lives and beyond the self-perpetuated "existential threat." Notice that millions the world over believe "ordinary" Israelis -- both personally and collectively -- have something to do with this occupation. Notice that it just may turn out to be too costly.
[translated from Hebrew version of Haaretz] “Israel won’t change unless the status quo has a downside” – these words were written by journalist Tony Karon, a Jew from South Africa. This sentence reflects the rationale behind the broad BDS campaign – which includes sanctions, institutional boycott, and divestment – which has begun trickling down into public consciousness in Israel. Instead of a defensive, self-righteous response along the general lines of “the whole world is against us”, it would be best to learn the facts about the campaign and peer into the collective mirror, which reflects grievous and systematic violations of human rights and international law.
...Then comes the fourth and most surprising stage: The prime minister's zigzag makes no waves, not even a ripple, in the coalition. No one attacks Netanyahu on the morning radio talk shows. Benny Begin, Moshe Ya'alon, Eli Yishai and Avigdor Lieberman, who certainly oppose the government's frequent policy shifts, cling to their seats in the ministerial septet. Netanyahu treats them with respect, convenes them for worthless discussions that go on for hours and in the end gets what he wants: Everyone is committed to a decision that Obama dictated. This scenario has occured four times already. 
"Solomon: Your parents were among the country’s founders. Livni: They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons." Remember that the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel, killing 90-odd civilians, and ethnically-cleansed Deir Yassin and later Jaffa, where Palestinians were literally forced into the sea.
When we hear someone call for the “right of return,” we tend to think the speaker is a Palestinian solidarity activist or a radical who doesn’t believe that Israel has a right to exist. How many of us understand that for many years, American presidents of both parties also called for the right of return, as essential to the American interest in stability in the Middle East?
Or, how we’ll entrench ourselves in our besieged ghetto without the outside world -- As part of the preparations for the total isolation of the country, a comprehensive contingency plan has been drawn up called Operation Chicory. Its aim: to find a local substitute for almost everything, under the slogan, “We are not the world.” A few items from this ambitious, multidisciplinary project have been made available to us. Examples follow.
Excerpt: At least 17 Iraqis were wounded in the latest violence, but 11 decomposed bodies were found in a mass grave. Also, two people were wounded in an attack on Iranian pilgrims. Acting Electricity Minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, warned government officials to resist using their influence to gain more power and asked all Iraqis to cut down their usage altogether. "Emergency lines" reserved for officials and other notables wereremoved from use. The Green Zone in particular will be forced to reduce its massive power use.
Love them or hate them -- usually both -- but Baghdad residents are obsessed with the thousands of generators around the city that they rely on for electricity because the national power grid is so notoriously unreliable.
Several thousand Egyptians, joined by top opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei, protested on Friday what they call authorities' systematic use torture in the largest demonstration yet sparked by the alleged beating death of a young man by police this month.
This is where US tax dollars are spent: propping up a ruthlessly violent Egyptian regime that doesn't respect human rights, civil society, and democracy: at Foreign Policy, Soha Abdelaty reports on the tyranny of Egypt's emergency laws.