Middle East Follow

An aerial photo released by the Israeli army to justify their attack on Qana shows a rocket launch site in a field outside the village (bottom).

Egyptian postal workers occupied the Egyptian Postal Service building in the capital Cairo last week.

Mansour Osanloo, the President of the Syndicate of Workers of the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Sherkat-e Vahed) was kidnapped on 10 July in Tehran, Iran by unknown assailants.

Lebanese soldiers opened fire on a demonstration of Palestinian refugees in the Beddawi camp near Tripoli in northern Lebanon on Friday of last week, killing at least two people and wounding dozens more.

Fatah emerged out of the Palestinian revolution in the 1960s to take on the might of Israel, which had been created in 1948 with the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

The stunning military victory by the Palestinian Hamas movement over the rival Fatah organisation in the Gaza Strip last week was a strike against imperialism in the Middle East.

Defence companies such as BAE Systems are strategically important to the British state, but the exact nature of the relationship has changed over the last two decades as the domestic arms industry has been opened up to international competition.

By 1967 the US was losing its long and bitter war in Vietnam with the Viet Cong, the peasant-based guerrilla national liberation movement. It was terrified by the prospect of the anti?imperialist movement spreading to the Middle East.

In June 1967 Israeli troops marched into East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Sinai Desert and the Golan Heights.

Since 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees had been waiting to return to the homes they had been forced to leave when Israel was founded. By the 1960s a new generation was growing up, one which had known nothing but squalid refugee camps.

There are growing fears that the Lebanese army’s assault on the refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared near the northern city of Tripoli will become part of a general offensive against Palestinian refugees across Lebanon.