Archive for the ‘Israel’ tag
Heat in the Holy Land
“Energy from the Ground Up” is from GlobalPost’s new video series Energy Entrepreneurs. Here’s a snippet from the background article on the series:
Al Gore isn’t going to save the world from climate change. (He may not even save his own reputation if salacious allegations about his groping a massage therapist in Portland, Ore. prove true; Gore denies the charges).
But the world doesn’t need Gore, or any other global warming “guru.”
That’s because it already has Khaled Al Sabawi in Ramallah, who’s heating and cooling homes in the West Bank with geothermal energy…
Egypt breaks its own Gaza blockade
Story published June 3, 2010 by GlobalPost:
RAFAH, Egypt — Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a target of public outrage following the deadly weekend raid by Israeli commandos on a Turkish-led aid flotilla, kept the Rafah border crossing with Gaza open Thursday to people and supplies.
Since the May 31 raid, international pressure has mounted on Israel and Egypt to ease the three-year blockade on the Gaza Strip, prompting Cairo’s move Tuesday to open the border to Palestinians seeking medical treatment.
High-ranking security officials inside the Rafah border terminal said that more than 500 Palestinians had been allowed to enter Egypt on Wednesday.
The land and sea blockade on Gaza was imposed by Israel in 2007, after the violent takeover of the strip from the Palestinian Authority by Hamas, an Islamic resistance group that had once vowed to “wipe Israel off the map.”
For its part, Egypt has also largely kept the Rafah border crossing sealed, except for the most serious humanitarian cases.
Egyptians in Rafah react to Inauguration
The soundbites above are from interviews I shot for Al-Jazeera English. I shot them in Rafah, Egypt a few days before Barack Obama was sworn in as president. Here’s what AJE’s YouTube site description read: “People at the Rafah border tell Al Jazeera what their hopes and expectations for US President Barack Obama are.”
What it didn’t say is that these were shot during Israel’s offensive in Gaza, and all the interviews were conducted inside Egypt’s border terminal directly alongside Hamas-controlled Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Some of the noise in the background includes Israeli aerial drones overhead, Gazan trucks filling with humanitarian supplies, and Egyptian ambulances carrying wounded Palestinians to hospitals. In the first frame, you are actually looking past the Egyptian border into Gaza – an area that was hit by several rounds of artillery fire not long after that interview.
