Deadly Israeli Raid Draws Condemnation
By ISABEL KERSHNER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01flotilla.html?th&emc=th
JERUSALEM — Israel faced intense international condemnation and growing domestic questions on Monday after a raid by naval commandos that killed nine people, many of them Turks, on an aid flotilla bound for Gaza.
Turkey, Israel’s most important friend in the Muslim world, recalled its ambassador and canceled planned military exercises with Israel as the countries’ already tense relations soured even further. The United Nations Security Council met in emergency session over the attack, which occurred in international waters north of Gaza, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was flying home after canceling a Tuesday meeting with President Obama.
With street protests erupting around the world, Mr. Netanyahu defended the Israeli military’s actions, saying the commandos, enforcing what Israel says is a legal blockade, were set upon by passengers on the Turkish ship they boarded and fired only in self-defense. The military released a video of the early moments of the raid to support that claim.
Israel said the violence was instigated by pro-Palestinian activists who presented themselves as humanitarians but had come ready for a fight. Organizers of the flotilla accused the Israeli forces of opening fire as soon as they landed on the deck, and released videos to support their case. Israel released video taken from one of its vessels to supports its own account of events.
The Israeli public seemed largely to support the navy, but policy experts questioned preparations for the military operation, whether there had been an intelligence failure and whether the Israeli insistence on stopping the flotilla had been counterproductive. Some commentators were calling for the resignation of Ehud Barak, the defense minister.
“The government failed the test of results; blaming the organizers of the flotilla for causing the deaths by ignoring Israel’s orders to turn back is inadequate,” wrote Aluf Benn, a columnist for Haaretz, on the newspaper’s Web site on Monday, calling for a national committee of inquiry. “Decisions taken by the responsible authorities must be probed.”
The flotilla of cargo ships and passenger boats was carrying 10,000 tons of aid for Gaza, where the Islamic militant group Hamas holds sway, in an attempt to challenge Israel’s military blockade of Gaza.
The raid and its deadly consequences have thrown Israel’s policy of blockading Gaza into the international limelight; at the Security Council on Monday voices were raised against the blockade, and the pressure to abandon it is bound to intensify.
Israel had vowed not to let the flotilla reach the shores of Gaza, where Hamas, an organization sworn to Israel’s destruction, took over by force in 2007.
Named the Freedom Flotilla, and led by the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish organization, Insani Yardim Vakfi, the convoy had converged at sea near Cyprus and set out on the final leg of its journey on Sunday afternoon. Israel warned the vessels to abort their mission, describing it as a provocation.
The confrontation began shortly before midnight on Sunday when Israeli warships intercepted the aid flotilla, according to a person on one boat. The Israeli military warned the vessels that they were entering a hostile area and that the Gaza shore was under blockade.
The vessels refused the military’s request to dock at the Israeli port of Ashdod, north of Gaza, and continued toward their destination.
Around 4 a.m. on Monday, naval commandos came aboard the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, having been lowered by ropes from helicopters onto the decks.
At that point, the operation seems to have gone badly wrong.
Israeli officials say that the soldiers were dropped into an ambush and were attacked with clubs, metal rods and knives.
An Israeli official said that the navy was planning to stop five of the six vessels of the flotilla with large nets that interfere with propellers, but that the sixth was too large for that. The official said there was clearly an intelligence failure in that the commandos were expecting to face passive resistance, and not an angry, violent reaction.
The Israelis had planned to commandeer the vessels and steer them to Ashdod, where their cargo would be unloaded and, the authorities said, transferred overland to Gaza after proper inspection.
The military said in a statement that two activists were later found with pistols taken from Israeli commandos. It accused the activists of opening fire, “as evident by the empty pistol magazines.”
Another soldier said the orders were to neutralize the passengers, not to kill them.
But the forces “had to open fire in order to defend themselves,” the navy commander, Vice Adm. Eliezer Marom, said at a news conference in Tel Aviv, adding, “Their lives were at risk.”
At least seven soldiers were wounded, one of them seriously. The military said that some suffered gunshot wounds; at least one had been stabbed.
Some Israeli officials said they had worried about a debacle from the start, and questioned Israel’s broader security policies.
Einat Wilf, a Labor Party member of Parliament who sits on the influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said that she had warned Mr. Barak and others well in advance that the flotilla was a public relations issue and should not be dealt with by military means.
“This had nothing to do with security,” she said in an interview. “The armaments for Hamas were not coming from this flotilla.”
The fatalities all occurred aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish passenger vessel that was carrying about 600 activists under the auspices of Insani Yardim Vakfi, an organization also known as I.H.H. Israeli officials have characterized it as a dangerous Islamic organization with terrorist links.
Yet the organization, founded in 1992 to collect aid for the Bosnians, is now active in 120 countries and has been present at recent disaster areas like Haiti and New Orleans.
“Our volunteers were not trained military personnel,” said Yavuz Dede, deputy director of the organization. “They were civilians trying to get aid to Gaza. There were artists, intellectuals and journalists among them. Such an offensive cannot be explained by any terms.”
There were no immediate accounts available from the passengers of the Turkish ship, which arrived at the naval base in Ashdod on Monday evening, where nearly three dozen were arrested, many for not giving their names. The base was off limits to the news media and declared a closed military zone.
The injured had been flown by helicopter to Israeli hospitals. At the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv, relatives of injured soldiers were gathered outside an intensive care unit when a man with a long beard, one of the wounded passengers, was wheeled by, escorted by military police.
Organizers of the flotilla, relying mainly on footage filmed by activists on board the Turkish passenger ship, because all other communications were down, blamed Israeli aggression for the deadly results.
The Israeli soldiers dropped onto the deck and “opened fire on sleeping civilians at four in the morning,” said Greta Berlin, a leader of the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement, speaking by phone from Cyprus on Monday.
Israeli officials said that international law allowed for the capture of naval vessels in international waters if they were about to violate a blockade. The blockade was imposed by Israel and Egypt after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007. Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, said Monday that the blockade was “aimed at preventing the infiltration of terror and terrorists into Gaza.”
Despite sporadic rocket fire from the Palestinian territory against southern Israel, Israel says it allows enough basic supplies through border crossings to avoid any acute humanitarian crisis. But it insists that there will be no significant change so long as Hamas continues to hold Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured in a cross-border raid in 2006.
The Free Gaza Movement has organized several aid voyages since the summer of 2008, usually consisting of one or two vessels. The earliest ones were allowed to reach Gaza. Others have been intercepted and forced back, and one, last June, was commandeered by the Israeli Navy and towed to Ashdod. This six-boat fleet was the most ambitious attempt yet to break the blockade.
Reporting was contributed by Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, Dina Kraft from Tel Aviv, Rina Castelnuovo from Ashdod, Fares Akram from Gaza and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
Raid Complicates U.S. Ties and Push for Peace
By HELENE COOPER and ETHAN BRONNER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01policy.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — Israel’s deadly commando raid on Monday on a flotilla trying to break a blockade of Gaza complicated President Obama’s efforts to move ahead on Middle East peace negotiations and introduced a new strain into an already tense relationship between the United States and Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel canceled plans to come to Washington on Tuesday to meet with Mr. Obama. The two men spoke by phone within hours of the raid, and the White House later released an account of the conversation, saying Mr. Obama had expressed “deep regret” at the loss of life and recognized “the importance of learning all the facts and circumstances” as soon as possible.
While the administration’s public response was restrained, American officials expressed dismay in private over not only the flotilla raid, with its attendant deepening of Israel’s isolation around the world, but also over the timing of the crisis, which comes just as long-delayed American-mediated indirect talks between Israelis and Palestinians were getting under way.
Some foreign policy experts said the episode highlighted the difficulty of trying to negotiate peace with the Palestinian Authority without taking into account an element often relegated to the background: how to deal with Hamas-ruled Gaza. Hamas, the Islamist organization that refuses to recognize Israel’s existence, operates independently of the Palestinian Authority and has rejected any peace talks. Gaza has repeatedly complicated Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
“This regrettable incident underscores that the international blockade of Gaza is not sustainable,” Martin S. Indyk, the former United States ambassador to Israel, said Monday. “It helps to stop Hamas attacks on Israelis, but seriously damages Israel’s international reputation. Our responsibility to Israel is to help them find a way out of this situation.”
The Obama administration officially supports the Gaza blockade, as the Bush administration did before it. But Mr. Obama, some aides say, has expressed strong frustration privately with the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
At a time when the United States is increasingly linking its own national security interests in the region to the inability of Israelis and Palestinians to make peace, heightened tensions over Monday’s killings could deepen the divide between the Israeli government and the Obama administration just as Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu were trying to overcome recent differences.
“We’re not sure yet where things go from here,” one administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic delicacy of the issue. The White House statement said that Mr. Obama “understood the prime minister’s decision to return immediately to Israel to deal with today’s events” and that they would reschedule their meeting “at the first opportunity.”
No matter what happens, foreign policy experts who advise the administration agreed that if Mr. Obama wanted to move ahead with the peace talks, preceded by the so-called proximity or indirect talks, the flotilla raid demonstrated that he may have to tackle the thornier issue of the Gaza blockade, which has largely been in effect since the takeover of Gaza by Hamas in 2007.
Since then, Israel, the United States and Europe have plowed ahead with a strategy of dealing with the Palestinian Authority, which has control over the West Bank, while largely ignoring Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians.
Gaza was left with a deteriorating crisis as Hamas refused to yield to Western demands that it renounce violence and recognize Israel.
“You can talk all you want about proximity talks, expend as much energy as Obama has, but if you ignore the huge thorn of Gaza, it will come back to bite you,” said Robert Malley, program director for the Middle East and North Africa with the International Crisis Group.
For the Obama administration, the first order of business may be figuring out a way to hammer out a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas that will end the blockade of Gaza. Several attempts in the past two years to reach such an agreement have come close, but ultimately failed, the last time when the two sides were unable to reach a consensus on the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas, Gilad Shalit.
Mr. Indyk, the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, says that after things cool down, the administration needs to work on a package deal in which Hamas commits to preventing attacks from, and all smuggling into, Gaza. In return, Israel would drop the blockade and allow trade in and out. “That deal would have to include a prisoner swap in which Gilad Shalit is finally freed,” he said.
It was unclear whether the indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority would suffer an immediate delay. George J. Mitchell, the Obama administration envoy to the Middle East, was still planning to attend the Palestine Investment Conference in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Wednesday and Thursday.
The indirect talks involved American negotiators shuttling between the Israelis and Palestinians, and are widely viewed as a step back from nearly two decades of direct talks.
But their structure may actually serve the purpose of keeping them going. Mr. Mitchell and his staff have been shuttling between the two sides for more than a year, meaning that the preparation for indirect talks and the talks themselves do not look different from the outside. As a result, the American brokers could continue their shuttles despite the flotilla attack.
While the blockade of Gaza has been widely criticized around the world, Israeli officials say it has imposed political pressure on Hamas. The group has stopped firing rockets at southern Israel and is fighting discontent among the people in Gaza.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 31, 2010
An earlier version of this article misstated the stance of the European Union on the Gaza blockade.
Israel Holds Hundreds Seized During Raid on Flotilla
By ISABEL KERSHNER and ALAN COWELL
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: June 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/middleeast/02flotilla.html?hp
JERUSALEM — A day after Israeli commandos raided an aid flotilla seeking to breach the blockade of Gaza, Israel held more than 600 activists seized aboard the convoy on Tuesday as news reports said activists may be planning a fresh attempt to ferry supplies to the Hamas-run enclave.
As international pressure mounted for Israel to end its blockade, Egypt’s president ordered a temporary reopening of its border with Gaza to allow humanitarian and medical aid to reach the 1.5 million people there.
Hours earlier, the Israeli military said troops clashed with two militants who infiltrated from Gaza, killing them both. While such occurrences are almost routine along the volatile border between Israel and Gaza, the clash underscored the tensions seizing the region after Monday’s confrontation at sea, which strained relations between Israel and the United States just as American-sponsored proximity talks involving Palestinians and Israelis were getting under way.
There was little sign Tuesday that international criticism of Israel was easing.
In the early hours of the morning, after protracted wrangling, the United Nations Security Council condemned “acts” leading to the loss of life in Israel’s operation in international waters on Monday, which had claimed the lives of nine civilians, many of them Turks aboard a Turkish vessel. The Security Council also urged an impartial inquiry — a call echoed in a separate forum by Russia and the European Union on Tuesday at a meeting of senior officials in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
For its part, Turkey, once seen as Israel’s most important friend in the Muslim world, recalled its ambassador on Monday and canceled planned military exercises with Israel as the countries’ already tense relations soured even further. On Tuesday, Israel announced that four of the nine killed in the military operation were Turkish citizens, the Anatolian News Agency reported.
Turkish animosity seemed to deepen.
“This irresponsible, heedless, unlawful attitude that defies any human virtue should definitely, but definitely, be punished,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in his regular weekly address to his party in the capital, Ankara.
“No one should dare to challenge Turkey or test her patience for that the strength of Turkey’s animosity is as strong as the value of its friendship.”
In a speech often interrupted by loud applause, Mr. Erdogan called on Israel to end the embargo on Gaza and asked the Israeli people to rise against the violent policies of their government. And Egypt’s official Middle East News Service said that President Hosni Mubarak was moving to temporarily reopen the Rafah border crossing — the only crossing not controlled by Israel — to “alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people in the besieged Gaza Strip.”
Egypt has kept its border with Gaza largely sealed since Hamas seized power there in 2007.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, meanwhile, was flying home after canceling a Tuesday meeting with President Obama.
Mr. Netanyahu has defended the Israeli military’s actions, saying the commandos, enforcing what Israel says is a legal blockade, were set upon by passengers on the Turkish ship they boarded and fired only in self-defense. The military released a video of the early moments of the raid to support that claim.
Israel said the violence was instigated by pro-Palestinian activists who presented themselves as humanitarians but had come ready for a fight. Organizers of the flotilla accused the Israeli forces of opening fire as soon as they landed on the deck, and released videos to support their case. On Tuesday, activists promised more confrontation. Greta Berlin of the Free Gaza Movement, which organized the flotilla, said that another cargo boat was heading to Gaza from the coast of Italy while a second boat carrying some 35 passengers was expected to join it, The Associated Press reported.
“This initiative is not going to stop,” Ms. Berlin said from the group’s base in Cyprus. “We think eventually Israel will get some kind of common sense. They’re going to have to stop the blockade of Gaza, and one of the ways to do this is for us to continue to send the boats.”
An Israeli police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said 634 activists, mostly from the Turkish passenger ship, who had refused to identify themselves were being detained at a prison in southern Israel, where they were awaiting deportation procedures. Forty-five others had agreed to identify themselves and were being deported.
Immigration officials said the people to be deported included Henning Mankell, a best-selling Swedish author.
While the Israeli public seemed largely to support the navy, policy experts questioned preparations for the military operation, whether there had been an intelligence failure and whether the Israeli insistence on stopping the flotilla had been counterproductive. Some commentators were calling for the resignation of Ehud Barak, the defense minister.
“The government failed the test of results; blaming the organizers of the flotilla for causing the deaths by ignoring Israel’s orders to turn back is inadequate,” wrote Aluf Benn, a columnist for Haaretz, on the newspaper’s Web site on Monday, calling for a national committee of inquiry. “Decisions taken by the responsible authorities must be probed.”
The flotilla of six cargo ships and passenger boats was carrying 10,000 tons of aid for Gaza. But the raid and its deadly consequences have thrown Israel’s policy of blockading Gaza into the international limelight. The statement by the United Nations Security Council early on Tuesday stressed “the need for sustained and regular flow of goods and people to Gaza.”
Israel had vowed not to let the flotilla reach the shores of Gaza, held by Hamas, an organization sworn to Israel’s destruction.
Named the Freedom Flotilla, and led by the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish organization, Insani Yardim Vakfi, the convoy had converged at sea near Cyprus and set out on the final leg of its journey on Sunday afternoon. Israel warned the vessels to abort their mission, describing it as a provocation.
The confrontation began shortly before midnight on Sunday when Israeli warships intercepted the aid flotilla, according to a person on one boat. The Israeli military warned the vessels that they were entering a hostile area and that the Gaza shore was under blockade.
The vessels refused the military’s request to dock at the Israeli port of Ashdod, north of Gaza, and continued toward their destination.
About 4 a.m. Monday, naval commandos came aboard the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, having been lowered by ropes from helicopters onto the decks.
At that point, the operation seems to have gone badly wrong.
Israeli officials say that the soldiers were dropped into an ambush and were attacked with clubs, metal rods and knives.
An Israeli official said that the navy was planning to stop five of the six vessels of the flotilla with large nets that interfere with propellers, but that the sixth was too large for that. The official said there was clearly an intelligence failure in that the commandos were expecting to face passive resistance, and not an angry, violent reaction.
The Israelis had planned to commandeer the vessels and steer them to Ashdod, where their cargo would be unloaded and, the authorities said, transferred overland to Gaza after inspection.
The military said in a statement that two activists were later found with pistols taken from Israeli commandos. It accused the activists of opening fire, “as evident by the empty pistol magazines.”
Another soldier said the orders were to neutralize the passengers, not to kill them.
But the forces “had to open fire in order to defend themselves,” the navy commander, Vice Adm. Eliezer Marom, said at a news conference in Tel Aviv, adding, “Their lives were at risk.”
At least seven soldiers were wounded, one of them seriously. The military said that some suffered gunshot wounds; at least one had been stabbed.
Einat Wilf, a Labor Party member of Parliament who sits on the influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said that she had warned Mr. Barak and others well in advance that the flotilla was a public relations issue and should not be dealt with by military means.
The fatalities all occurred aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish passenger vessel that was carrying about 600 activists under the auspices of Insani Yardim Vakfi, an organization also known as I.H.H. Israeli officials have characterized it as a dangerous Islamic organization with terrorist links.
Yet the organization, founded in 1992 to collect aid for the Bosnians, is now active in 120 countries and has been present at recent disaster areas like Haiti and New Orleans.
“Our volunteers were not trained military personnel,” said Yavuz Dede, deputy director of the organization. “They were civilians trying to get aid to Gaza. There were artists, intellectuals and journalists among them. Such an offensive cannot be explained by any terms.”
There were no immediate accounts available from the passengers of the Turkish ship, which arrived at the naval base in Ashdod on Monday evening, where nearly three dozen were arrested, many for not giving their names. The base was off limits to the news media and declared a closed military zone.
The Free Gaza Movement has organized several aid voyages since the summer of 2008, usually consisting of one or two vessels. The earliest ones were allowed to reach Gaza. Others have been intercepted and forced back, and one, last June, was commandeered by the Israeli Navy and towed to Ashdod. This six-boat fleet was the most ambitious attempt yet to break the blockade.
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, and Alan Cowell from London. Reporting was contributed by Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul; Dina Kraft from Tel Aviv; Rina Castelnuovo from Ashdod, Israel; Fares Akram from Gaza; Mona El-Naggar from Cairo; and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
U.N. Security Council Condemns ‘Acts’ in Israeli Raid
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and ALAN COWELL
Copyright by Copyright by The New York Times
Published: June 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/middleeast/02nations.html?hp
UNITED NATIONS — After hours of negotiations, the United Nations Security Council early on Tuesday condemned “acts” resulting in the deaths of nine civilians in Israel’s attack on an aid flotilla trying to breach the Gaza blockade.
In a formal statement that seemed less forceful than what had been demanded by Palestinians, Arabs and Turkey, the council also demanded an impartial investigation into the confrontation.
The statement also urged that aid ships seized in the raid on Monday be released along with civilians held by Israel.
“The Security Council deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries resulting from the use of force during the Israeli military operation in international waters against the convoy sailing to Gaza,” the statement said, adding that the 15-member body “in this context, condemns those acts which resulted in the loss” of lives.
The wording seemed designed to dilute demands for condemnation exclusively of Israel, which argues that its soldiers acted in self-defense in response to violent resistance to their interception of the vessels from passengers on board. After the raid, Israel seized hundreds of activists as well as the ships.
“The Security Council requests the immediate release of the ships as well as the civilians held by Israel,” the United Nations statement said, calling for “a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation conforming to international standards.”
It also said the situation in Gaza, under blockade by Israel, was “not sustainable” and called for a “sustained and regular flow of goods and people to Gaza, as well as unimpeded provision and distribution of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza.”
On the broader Palestinian-Israeli confrontation, the Security Council renewed calls for a two-state solution and voiced concern that the raid on the flotilla took place while United States-sponsored so-called “proximity talks” were under way.
Earlier, Turkey — the unofficial sponsor of the convoy — had proposed a statement that would have condemned Israel for violating international law and demanded a United Nations investigation, the prosecution of those responsible for the raid and compensation for the victims. It also called for the end of the blockade.
But the Obama administration refused to endorse a statement that singled out Israel, and it proposed a broader condemnation of the violence that would include the assault by passengers of the Israeli commandos as they landed on the deck of the ship.
As the wrangling continued late Monday night and in the early hours Tuesday, the two countries were trying to work out their differences on the wording, including whether to specify that the investigation should be conducted by outsiders, diplomats said.
While condemnation of Israel in the Security Council is not uncommon, the criticism at the emergency session called by Turkey and Lebanon was notable for both its vehemence and for the broad array of countries demanding an independent investigation into the decision to fire on civilians in what they described as a humanitarian mission.
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, whose country’s once close relations with Israel have deteriorated markedly since Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2009, called the attack “tantamount to banditry and piracy; it is murder conducted by a state.”
Noting that the ships were carrying items such as a playground equipment, cancer medicine and milk powder, he said that given the history of the Jews the Israelis should be more conscious than others of “the dangers and inhumanity of ghettoes as the one we currently witness in occupied Gaza.”
Gerard Araud, the French ambassador, said the death toll indicated “there was disproportionate use of force and a level of violence which nothing justifies and which we condemn.”
Nawaf Salam, the Lebanese ambassador, said even the laws of war require the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Several envoys said Israel was in violation of international law, not least because Security Council resolution 1860, passed in January 2009 during the Gaza war, had called for ending the blockade and opening unfettered access to humanitarian assistance throughout the strip. The diplomats also demanded immediate access to their citizens, with some 32 different nationalities among the estimated 600 to 700 people on the flotilla. Israel seized all six ships and forced them into port.
The United States, which habitually defends Israel in the council, said that the attempt to run the blockade by sea was ill advised.
“Direct delivery by sea is neither appropriate nor responsible, and certainly not effective, under the circumstances,” said Alejandro Wolff, the deputy permanent representative of the United States. But he also described the situation in Gaza as “unsustainable” and called on Israel to undertake a credible investigation. Daniel Carmon, the deputy Israeli ambassador, scoffed at the idea that the ships were a humanitarian convoy — Israel had offered to bring the goods into Gaza over land — and said Israeli commandos acted in self-defense after being attacked with “life threatening means; live ammunition, knives, clubs, deck furniture and others types of weaponry.”
He described the organizers as linked to a variety of Islamic terrorist organizations, which the Turkish foreign minister called a lie.
The International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization which seeks to end conflicts, issued a statement condemning the attack but noted that it was an outcome of the failed policy of many countries, not just Israel, in trying to isolate the Hamas government which controls the Gaza strip and thus turn the population against it.
Neil MacFarquhar reported from the United Nations, and Alan Cowell from London.
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