Free Talk Live

The top United Nations investigator on Palestinian human rights is calling for a boycott of all companies linked to settlements in the occupied West Bank. Richard Falk, the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said firms including Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Volvo and Caterpillar are complicit in the Israeli occupation.

Reporting from Jerusalem
Israel faced a diplomatic firestorm Monday over its deadly attack against a protest flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.

Foreign leaders and protest organizers accused Israel of using excessive force in the raid in international waters, but Israel defended its actions, saying that soldiers were ambushed with knives and metal bars, as well as handguns wrested from the commandos.

The award-winning new documentary, "Five Broken Cameras," tells the story of a Palestinian farmer who got a video camera to record his son’s childhood, but ended up documenting the growth of the resistance movement to the Israeli separation wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in. The film shows the non-violent tactics used by residents of Bil’in as they join with international and Israeli activists to protest the wall’s construction and confront Israeli soldiers. We speak with the film’s directors Emad Burnat, a Palestinian, and Guy Davidi, an Israeli.

"The upshot: [John Dennis] wants to not only continue to dole out three billion in military funding to Israel every year, he insists that Israel should be able to build unlimited settlements/colonies, and the U.S. has absolutely no right to criticize what Israel does with the U.S. guns."

For more than eleven years, Israel has been wildly celebrating the success of its 9/11 operation against the United States of America. The latest example: Israeli children recently dressed up as the burning Twin Towers, complete with impaled exploding airplanes, to celebrate the bizarre Jewish holiday known as Purim.

Israel admitted Sunday that it uses cyberspace to attack its enemies. The confession came in a statement on the Israeli military's website. The website said it was "for the first time" revealing a document recently written by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Operations Department, detailing the goals and methods of its cyberwarfare. "The IDF has been engaged in cyberactivity consistently and relentlessly," said the statement.

According to an Arabic investigative journalism website, Assange had received money from semi-official Israeli sources and promised them, in a “secret, video-recorded agreement,” not to publish any document that may harm Israeli security or diplomatic interests.

In the digital age, war isn't contained to the ground. The Israeli government on Sunday said it has been hit with more than 44 million cyberattacks since it began aerial strikes on Gaza last week. Anonymous, the hacker collective, claimed responsibility for taking down some sites and leaking passwords because of what it calls Israel's "barbaric, brutal and despicable treatment" of Palestinians. The war is being fought on three fronts," Carmela Avner, Israel's chief information officer, said on Sunday in a press release.

Israel’s government has announced its plans to speed up the deportation of at least 25,000 African immigrants living illegally in the country. Human rights supporters have decried the move and branded the mass expulsion of migrants as “immoral.”