There was a good bit from the article I posted about the negotiations to free the hostage Gilad Shalit that Hamas has been holding for almost five years. The article also reported on Syria's use of the Palestinians to try to breach Israel's border as they did three weeks ago in order to deflect attention away once again from their crackdown and killing of their citizens:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MF08Ak03.html
This evolving situation was further complicated on Sunday by Syria's staging of a provocation on Israel's northern border. Over the weekend the uprising against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was rekindled, and Friday reportedly became the deadliest day so far, with over 60 protesters killed in the city of Hama. Predictably, Assad responded by escalating the tension with Israel. On Naksa day, he tried to recreate the events of three weeks earlier, when hundreds of Palestinian refugees living in Syria broke through the border fence and briefly entered an Israeli Druze town.
What happened merited a Hollywood action movie. Israeli troops, placed on high alert and their numbers increased, put into use a wide array of crowd control measures ranging from obstacles to tear gas to rubber-coated bullets. When these failed, snipers opened fire, allegedly at the lower bodies of protesters trying to breach the fence. Some reports mention the use of dogs.
The protesters made things worse for themselves, since they reportedly violated several ceasefires to which Israel agreed, and thus made the evacuation of the wounded more difficult. They also threw Molotov cocktails which started a bush fire and set off old anti-tank land mines on the Syrian side of the border.
Syrian TV, positioned strategically to cover the events as fully as possible, claimed that at least 23 died and over 300 were injured, but these figures are hard to verify. Israel claims that the number is a "gross overestimate". [9] Many of the wounded, according to Israeli analysts, were probably hurt by the land mines, and some of the dead probably died of blood loss as the Red Cross was unable to reach them.
On Monday, the United States condemned Syria for the incitement and expressed support for Israel's right to defend itself. "This is clearly an attempt by Syria to incite these kinds of protests," Department of State spokesman Mark Toner told reporters. Since the Syrian army had no trouble preventing a similar demonstration the next day, on Monday, arguments that it could do nothing about the Naksa day events seem preposterous. Syrian opposition sources, meanwhile, told reporters that the regime had in fact paid the demonstrators, offering $1,000 to each one alongside $10,000 to the family to each killed.
According to a report that surfaced on Tuesday, moreover, at least 14 Palestinian were shot dead by the security forces of their own leaders on Monday in a refugee camp in Syria. A crowd rioted following the funerals of dead Naksa day protesters, and accused the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) of putting them in the line of Israeli fire. [10] This is a very strong indication that the demonstrators themselves feel exploited, most likely by some of their own corrupt strong men in collusion with Assad.
