World Bank: Gaza Strip May Face 'Irreversible' Economic Collapse

Taken from Haaretz, Israel, 12 July 2007
By Reuters

The World Bank said on Thursday the prolonged closure of Israel's border crossings with Hamas-controlled Gaza could lead to the coastal strip's "irreversible" economic collapse.

The international lending agency delivered that stark assessment during a closed-door meeting of aid groups and private sector organizations.Israel has largely closed the Karni commercial crossing, Gaza's economic lifeline, in an effort to isolate Hamas after it seized control of the Gaza Strip a month ago.





Karni border crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip seen closed for traffic earlier this year. (Limor Edery)

Egypt has also kept mainly shut Gaza's border crossing with the Sinai since mid-June.

Israel has allowed humanitarian aid into the territory through smaller crossings.

While aid groups said this should be sufficient to head off a food shortage in the territory of 1.5 million people, they warned Gaza's economy would be devastated.

Almost all Gaza businesses depend on imported raw materials and other supplies that must pass through the strip's shuttered crossings with Israel.

"The pillars of Gaza's economy have weakened over the years. Now, with a sustained closure on this current scale, they would be at risk of virtually irreversible collapse," Faris Hadad-Zervos, the World Bank's acting country director for the West Bank and Gaza, told the aid groups.

A copy of the World Bank's presentation was obtained by Reuters from a participant in the meeting.

"A solution must be reached very soon, if not immediately... Otherwise, Gaza's dependence on humanitarian assistance could become a long-term and comprehensive situation. These impacts will be difficult to reverse," Hadad-Zervos said.

According to statistics compiled by the Palestine Trade Center and the Palestinian Federation of Industries, more than 3,190 Gaza businesses have temporarily shut down in the last month. Some 65,800 workers have also been temporarily laid off.

Up to 54 percent of employment in Gaza is generated by the private sector, representing more than 100,000 jobs.

Hadad-Zervos said a loss of a third of those jobs would translate into unemployment levels of over 37 percent, up from 30 percent at the beginning of the year. He said unemployment could reach the unprecedented level of 44 percent.

Israel wants to isolate Hamas in the Gaza Strip, while allowing funds and goods to flow to President Mahmoud Abbas's emergency administration in the West Bank.

Israel controls the land crossings between Gaza and Israel, as well as Gaza's air space and territorial waters.

Egyptian Billionaire ‘Who Spied For Mossad’ Found Dead In UK

From The Times, UK, June 28, 2007
By Rajeev Syal

An Egyptian billionaire financier who feared for his life after being accused of being a Mossad spy was found dead outside his Mayfair flat yesterday in suspicious circumstances.

Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of the late President Gamel Abdel Nasser, was found beneath his fourth-floor flat in Carlton House Terrace.



Police were treating his death as suspicious. Friends of Mr Marwan, a former shareholder in Chelsea Football Club, said that he had feared assassination after being named three years ago as an agent during the Yom Kippur war.

Rumours of his death circulated in London’s Arab community last night. Some believe that he may have taken his life after a serious illness was diagnosed.

Mr Marwan’s death will send shockwaves across the Middle East and among some of Britain’s wealthiest people. His associates included Adnan Khashoggi, the arms dealer, Ken Bates, the football club chairman, the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the late Tiny Rowland.
If found to be murder, his death will carry echoes of last year’s assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent.

Mr Marwan, 63, was identified as an agent by the Vanity Fair writer Harold Bloom in his book Eve of Destruction, which detailed his involvement in the Yom Kippur war in 1973. Although Nasser, who humiliated the British Government at Suez, died in 1970, Mr Marwan, his son-in-law, was part of the inner circle of his successor, Anwar Sadat, who started the war.

The identity of the agent, described by a postwar Israeli inquiry commission only as “the source”, had been a closely guarded secret. Evidence pointed towards someone high in the Egyptian Establishment.

From published accounts based on Israeli sources, it was alleged that Mr Marwan was a “walk-in” who entered an Israeli embassy in Europe and offered his services in 1969. Extensive checks convinced Mossad that he was not a double agent.

In the ensuing years Mr Marwan provided information on Egypt and the Arab world that Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Defence Minister, and others would later term priceless.

Some believed that he was a double agent. Mr Marwan denied the claims, saying that he had never worked for the intelligence communities on any side. Mr Bloom acknowledged that he could be assassinated.

Mr Marwan was believed to have been born in Egypt into a wealthy family. He married Nasser’s daughter Muna in the 1960s and they had two sons and a number of grandchildren.
Rumours of how he made his money have circulated within the Arab community for many years. Many say that he was an arms dealer and had been introduced to plenty of contacts by Sadat.

Mr Marwan considered London his main home, according to friends, despite owning property across the world. Standing at 6ft 2in and very thin, he was seen at a social gathering in Central London last week with his wife.

Mr Marwan was a friend of Ken Bates, the former Chelsea chairman, and at one point held a 3 per cent share in Chelsea Village, one of the holding companies of the club. Later he was believed to be the subject of a Financial Services Authority inquiry into the sale of shares to Roman Abramovich, the current owner.

At one point, friends say, Mr Marwan was a close associate of Mohamed Al Fayed, the owner of Harrods and a fellow Egyptian. He was also believed to have owned the Son Vida, one of the best hotels in Majorca.

Last night police kept a tight cordon around Carlton House Terrace, a white Grade I listed building overlooking St James’s Park that stretches between Buckingham Palace and Horse Guards Parade. Friends of the family said that Mr Marwan’s wife was flying back to Britain from Egypt.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said last night: “We were called at around 13.40 to Carlton House Terrace. The death is being treated as suspicious at this stage and the inquiries are under way.”
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According to Israeli News Agency Haaretz, former Mossad head Zvi Zamir has said that reports in Israel about Dr. Ashraf Marwan, Israel's Egyptian agent who warned of the pending outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, led to his death. "I have no doubt that reports published about him in Israel caused his death," Zamir told Haaretz Thursday, in response to Marwan's mysterious death in London on Wednesday. The real damage, said Zamir, concerns the implications the case has for the future. "There are serious concerns about our ability to recruit quality sources in the future," the spy master said. Zamir, who questioned Marwan during a secret meeting held in London on the Friday on the eve of the 1973 war, said he had no idea whether the Egyptian had committed suicide or had been assassinated. "This is a matter to be investigated by the British police. But it is clear that the reports and the exposure of his name by Eli Zeira [who was head of Military Intelligence in 1973] have led to his death," Zamir said.

Egypt Jails Engineer For Spying For Israel

Taken from Yahoo News, Mon Jun 25 2007
By AFP

Egypt's state security court on Monday sentenced an engineer to 25 years in jail for betraying nuclear secrets to Israel.

Mohammed Sayyed Saber, 35, who was arrested at the beginning of the year, had pleaded not guity to the espionage charges and looked shocked when the verdict was read out.



During his trial, he insisted that any information he had divulged was already in the public domain and had been handed over with the blessing of the authorities.

Saber acknowledged that he had supplied information about the Egyptian atomic energy authority where he worked to presumed agents of Israel's Mossad overseas intelligence agency.

But he insisted that he had kept the Egyptian embassy in Saudi Arabia, where he lived, abreast of his activities and denied that they had amounted to espionage.

"All the information I gave was never with the intention of spying," Saber told the High State Security Court.

"I was not a spy and the information I gave was not secret, it was all published on the Internet," he said.

Prosecutors had charged that Saber helped Israeli intelligence hack into the Egyptian atomic agency's computer system between February 2006 and February this year, in exchange for 17,000 dollars and a laptop.

They said that he also provided Israeli agents with classified documents to do with the Inshas nuclear research centre, north of Cairo.

Saber acknowledged that he had been approached by two presumed Israeli agents -- one Irish, one Japanese -- who are in absentia co-defendants in the trial, after publishing his CV online.
He admitted that in a series of contacts culminating in a visit to Hong Kong they had grilled him on aspects of Egypt's nuclear programme, a line of questioning that he said had made him feel "uncomfortable" enough to contact the Egyptian authorities in late 2006.

The questions had focused on whether Egypt had a uranium enrichment programme, what contacts it had with declared nuclear powers and what security arrangements were in force at the atomic energy authority.

"I contacted Ahmed Bahaa El Din, the official in charge of security at the Egyptian embassy in Saudi Arabia and told him everything," Saber said.

"He asked me to write a detailed report and give it to him, which I did," he told the court, adding that he had been asked to remain in touch with the presumed Israeli agents.

Saber admitted that in May 1999 he had visited the Israeli embassy in Cairo in the hope of getting a scholarship to study nuclear engineering at Tel Aviv University, but insisted that there had been nothing treacherous about that.

"I was not appreciated in my job and hoped I could find better opportunities in Israel," he said, adding that he was paid just 700 Egyptian pounds (120 dollars) a month.

Egypt Wants Probe Into 'Israeli Massacre'

Taken from The Jerusalem Post, Israel, Mar. 3, 2007

National Infrastructures Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer of Labor may be joining the long list of political officials currently under investigation, following a claim that the reconnaissance unit he commanded during the Six Day War killed 250 prisoners of war.



Egyptian parliamentarians are demanding that the IDF investigate whether Ben-Eliezer's elite Shaked unit killed the prisoners.

Dr. Mustafa al-Faki, chairman of the Egyptian legislature's Foreign Affairs Committee, denounced what he called the "massacre of helpless Egyptian soldiers," adding that it was the first time evidence had been presented proving that "Israeli hands are drenched with the blood of Egyptian prisoners."

Last week, Channel 1 aired Ruah Shaked (The Spirit of Shaked), a documentary compiled by journalist Ran Edilist. It claimed that Ben-Eliezer's unit killed 250 unarmed Egyptian prisoners of war in the Sinai desert after the fighting had stopped.

Edward Rali, head of the Egyptian parliament's Committee for Human Rights, called for his panel to meet on Sunday to discuss "the Israeli massacre of innocent Egyptian soldiers, which represents a serious violation of human rights and international law."

Ben-Eliezer, a former brigadier-general, told an Egyptian newspaper on Saturday that the accusations were inaccurate. Those killed, he said, were not Egyptian POWs, but rather Palestinian fedayun (suicide troops paid and trained by Egyptian intelligence) who were killed in battle.

Former education minister Yossi Sarid told Egypt's Al-Ahram that the "killing of prisoners of war is a war crime with no statute of limitations. The problem, however," said the former Meretz chairman, "is that the region is filled with war crimes."

Sarid told the paper he had not seen the documentary, but that he was aware that Israeli forces had committed such acts. "Punishing those responsible for these crimes is difficult due to the fact that 40 years have passed since the 1967 war, but history will judge these people," he said.