Israel’s move to cut energy supplies to the Gaza Strip amounts to collective punishment of civilians and violates the laws of war, Human Rights Watch said in a report published on Thursday.
   Aid groups have warned that the Israeli sanctions are set to tighten on Thursday with a reduction of electricity provided to the impoverished Hamas-run territory.
   ‘Israel’s cuts of fuel and electricity to Gaza, set to escalate today, amount to collective punishment of the civilian population, and violate Israel’s obligations under the laws of war,’ the New York-based group said.
   Israel began reducing the amount of fuel it supplied to Gaza in late October after declaring the coastal strip a ‘hostile entity’ following its takeover by Hamas, an Islamist movement pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state.
   Israel says the measures are aimed at stopping Gaza militants from firing rockets into Israel and has pledged not to allow a humanitarian disaster in the territory where most of the population depends on foreign aid.
   But HRW said the measures were affecting civilians not involved in anti-Israeli violence and having a grave impact on essential infrastructure like hospitals, water-pumping stations and sewage treatment facilities.
   ‘Israel views restricting fuel and electricity to Gaza as a way to pressure Palestinian armed groups to stop their rocket and suicide attacks,’ HRW’s Middle East director Joe Stork said in the statement.
   ‘But the cuts are seriously affecting civilians who have nothing to do with these armed groups, and that violates a fundamental principle of the laws of war,’ he said.
   
   Israel kills seven in new
   strikes on Gaza
   Israeli raids on Gaza killed six Palestinian fighters and a teacher on Thursday as the army pressed on with an assault on the Hamas-run territory following a suicide bombing in Israel this week.
   Escalating violence in and around Gaza this week has now seen 19 Palestinians, mostly militants, killed in Israeli strikes and several Israelis, including two young children, injured by militant rocket attacks.
   In the first air strike on Thursday, four militants – three from the armed wing of Hamas and a fourth from Islamic Jihad – were killed near Jabaliya in the north of the territory by a missile fired from a drone.
   The second air raid saw two militants killed near Tuffah north of Gaza City, while four others were wounded, two of them seriously, medics said.
   Hamas said Israeli ground forces were also operating in the area, while an Israeli military spokesman said only that ‘an army operation is underway.’
   A teacher was also killed when an Israeli tank shell hit a high school in the northern town of Beit Hanun, wounding three students, medics said.

Egypt said on Thursday it would no longer tolerate Palestinians infiltrating the country from the Gaza Strip, and threatened to break the legs of anyone crossing the Rafah border illegally.
   ‘Anyone who breaches the border will have their legs broken,’ the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, was quoted as saying by the official MENA news agency on public television overnight.
   Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the impoverished Gaza Strip, subjected to a punishing Israeli blockade, crossed freely into Egypt after Islamist militants from Hamas blew apart border barriers late last month.
   Abul Gheit said Egypt had allowed the Palestinians to flood across the border for humanitarian reasons only.
   He blamed Israel for the situation in the Gaza Strip, accusing the Jewish state of imposing collective punishment on a territory that is home to 1.5 million Palestinians in response to rocket attacks by militants.
   Abul Gheit also reproached Hamas for firing rockets into Israel, describing the standoff as a ‘laughable caricature.’
   The minister said some rockets misfire and hit the Gaza Strip itself, wounding Palestinians and merely providing Israel with a pretext to attack.
   Egyptian and Hamas forces, which seized armed control of the Gaza Strip in mid-June, resealed the Rafah border last week.

Kosovo appears set to declare independence in 10 days’ time, just ahead of a meeting of EU foreign ministers, sources in Pristina and observers say.
   The authorities were ‘awaiting the green light from the West and consider the weekend before the EU meeting as the most probable date,’ according to a source close to the Kosovo government.
   The European Union meeting on February 18 could approve the start of the deployment of an EU mission charged with supervising the initial phase of independence for the Albanian-majority southern province of Serbia.
   ‘We are assuming (February) 17th or 18th,’ said a source close to the United Nations, which has run Kosovo since the end of its 1998-1999 war.
   A US diplomat said independence was likely to be proclaimed on a Sunday, when the UN Security Council does not meet.
   Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council, where it has warned it will use its veto powers to block any such declaration in support of its ally Serbia, which staunchly opposes Kosovo independence.
   ‘The 17th is a possible date,’ says Alex Anderson of the International Crisis Group, a think-tank close to Euro-Atlantic powers.
   That would ‘enable the EU ministers to formally adopt the operational plan (for the EU mission) and agree for a common response to the declaration, which then enables those EU countries ... to recognise’ independence before New York wakes up, said Anderson.
   The UN Security Council would find itself confronted with Kosovo’s already declared independence, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would be in a better position to resist Russian pressure, he said.

Russia lashed out Thursday against the ‘unacceptable’ decision by Europe’s top elections watchdog to boycott a controversial presidential poll next month.
   ‘We believe the actions of the ODIHR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights) are unacceptable,’ foreign ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said in a statement. ‘We cannot but deeply regret this position.’
   ODIHR, the elections arm of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said earlier Thursday it would boycott Russia’s March 2 presidential vote because of restrictions imposed by Moscow.
   The OSCE’s Parliamentary Assembly also said its monitors would stay away.
   Slovenia, current holder of the European Union presidency, said it regretted that ODIHR was unable to carry out its work ‘due to restrictions contained in the invitation’ from Russia.
   Russia’s angry reaction was not long in coming.
   Communist Party leader and presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov said the OSCE ‘was being capricious,’ while a member of the upper house, Vasily Likhachev, accused the monitors of ‘Russophobia,’ Russian news agencies reported.
   ‘ODIHR’s demarche is senseless in all ways, especially since the lack of OSCE representatives will not make the elections illegitimate,’ Mikhail Margelov, head of the upper house’s international affairs committee, told RIA Novosti news agency.

The police in Nepal said they were hunting for the alleged mastermind of India’s biggest illegal kidney transplant racket amid reports he was hiding out in the Himalayan nation.
   ‘We are investigating Amit Kumar’s possible presence and links here in Kathmandu,’ Upendra Kanta Aryal a senior police officer said. Indian media reported that Kumar, aged 40 and the subject of an Interpol notice, fled to Nepal after the multi-million-dollar scandal was uncovered last month.
   But the Nepali police would not confirm the Indian fugitive’s presence in the Himalayan country. ‘At the moment, we can’t say whether or not he is in Nepal, but we have begun our investigations,’ said the head of Kathmandu’s crime investigation department.

Hillary Clinton’s race for the White House showed vulnerability as she admitted tapping her own pocketbook for five million dollars to keep up a gruelling fight against rival Barack Obama.
   One day after fighting to a virtual draw with senator Obama in the Super Tuesday primaries, senator Hillary acknowledged that his fund-raising supremacy had pushed her to tap her personal finances in January for the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.
   ‘I loaned the campaign five million from my money,’ Hillary said Wednesday, after 22 state nominating contests failed to set a clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
   ‘I loaned it because I believe very strongly in this campaign. We had a great month fund-raising in January, broke all records. But my opponent was able to raise more money,’ Hillary said.
   The Obama campaign called the announcement ‘a dramatic move, and a clear acknowledgement that our campaign has the momentum,’ and appealed for more donations in order to match Hillary’s cash injection.
   Hillary’s admission came as Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean warned that the party needed to settle the winner before its nominating convention in August or face an uphill challenge against Republicans in the November 4 presidential election.
   ‘The idea that we can afford to have a big fight at the convention and then win the race in the next eight weeks, I think, is not a good scenario,’ Dean said on NY1 television, according to excerpts.
   ‘I think we will have a nominee sometime in the middle of March or April. But if we don’t, then we’re going to have to get the candidates together and make some kind of an arrangement,’ he said.
   The virtual tie between Hillary and Obama has opened the possibility that the convention, which formally anoints a nominee, could end up being ‘brokered’ – negotiated under great pressure and the cloud of shady deal-making in back rooms.
   On the Republican side John McCain sought to woo the Republican Party’s wary conservative base to seal the deal for his party’s nomination after a spate of solid victories on Super Tuesday.
   ‘We’ll be hitting the campaign trail tomorrow morning,’ McCain said in Phoenix, Arizona. ‘Hopefully we can wrap this thing up, unite the party and be ready to take on the Democratic nominee in November.’
   The Arizona senator won nine of 21 states on offer Tuesday, including the high-population prizes California and New York.
   That gave him a commanding lead of 604 delegates to the Republican convention, compared with 244 for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and 187 for former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
   But McCain, 71, remains short of the 1,191 needed to win the nomination, according to a Real Clear Politics count.
   With neither rival ready to concede defeat, McCain cancelled a planned trip to Europe to meet the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, and address a German security conference in order to campaign.
   The Super Tuesday fight left Hillary and Obama in a virtual dead heat, forcing them to galvanise their campaigns for several more gruelling weeks of fighting on new state battlegrounds.
   Hillary, 60, launched an Internet appeal to raise three million dollars in three days, while Obama’s campaign countered with a bid to match Hillary’s personal cash injection of five million dollars.
   ‘We have raised more than three million dollars since the polls closed on February 5th. But we have no choice – we must match their five million dollars right now,’ Obama’s campaign said.
   Former first lady Hillary won eight states Tuesday, including the three biggest prizes, California, her home state of New York and Massachusetts, checking Obama’s capture of 13 states.
   Another state, New Mexico, remained too close to call more than 24 hours after polls closed.

Kenya’s opposition on Thursday accused the government of purchasing firearms to equip tribal gangs involved in ethnic cleansing.
   ‘The Kibaki administration continues to use tax-payers’ money to purchase firearms for PNU militia,’ Orange Democratic Movement secretary general Anyang Nyongo said at a press conference.
   He also accused president Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity of ‘raiding official armouries’ to arm pro-government militia, including the Mungiki.
   ‘These militias are then unleashed to kill innocent Kenyans protesting the flawed presidential elections,’ Nyongo said.
   ODM leader Raila Odinga charges Kibaki robbed him of victory in the December 27 poll. The dispute ignited a wave of nationwide violence that has killed more than 1,000 people and displaced 300,000.
   Political protests quickly turned into bitter clashes between rival ethnic groups, pitting notably Odinga’s Luo and allied tribes against the dominant Kikuyu tribe of the president.
   The ODM issued a statement charging the government had ordered firearms from a Chinese company and produced facsimiles of an exchange of letters between the purported dealer and Kenya’s provincial administration.
   The government dismissed the accusations and charged the opposition was seeking to undermine mediation efforts currently led by former UN chief Kofi Annan.
   ‘These accusations are preposterous,’ government spokesman Alfred Mutua said. ‘These accusations are not helping the talks, they are undermining dialogue.’
   ‘The opposition is reacting this way because they know some of their leaders are involved in ethnic cleansing and the truth is starting to come out,’ he added.
   Both sides have exchanged accusations of acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing since the violence erupted, mainly in western Kenya.

Pakistan must learn how to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban after years of preparing for a more traditional contest with India, Pentagon chief Robert Gates said on Wednesday, reiterating a US offer to help.
   The US defence secretary said Pakistan realised only in recent months that al-Qaeda posed a threat to the government of the president, Pervez Musharraf. He said the assassination of former prime minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in December underscored that threat.
   ‘All of a sudden what had been a nuisance is becoming a threat to the existence of the government,’ Gates said.
   ‘The Pakistani army is an army that essentially has been trained and equipped to potentially fight India. They are now going to have to reorient themselves and figure out how to do counterinsurgency,’ he said.
   The US military is growing more concerned about security in nuclear-armed Pakistan and wants to play a bigger role in the state’s counterterrorism fight.
   Washington already gives millions of dollars annually to Pakistan for security-related assistance – funds that have totalled $10 billion since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
   But in the face of growing instability, a suicide bomb campaign and the regrouping of al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the Pentagon has offered to step up its training of Pakistani forces as part of a new $750 million programme.
   Michael Vickers, assistant defence secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said sites are being chosen for a five-year programme to train and equip the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary unit, to confront al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region.
   The Pentagon also has offered to send US troops into Pakistan for joint operations with the Pakistani military in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, where al-Qaeda has regenerated over the past 18 months.
   But Pakistani leaders have publicly rejected the idea of US forces operating inside Pakistan, fearing it could trigger a backlash from fiercely independent Pashtun tribes living on the border with Afghanistan – a concern Gates said he understood.
   Still, Vickers said assistance could go beyond training.
   ‘Training assistance is very important, but could extend to some other areas as well,’ he said.
   US special forces could quietly help Pakistan with intelligence and reconnaissance, he said.
   ‘We have a lot of capabilities that we can do in a low-visibility manner,’ Vickers said.

The United States may use waterboarding to question terrorism suspects in the future, the White House said Wednesday, rejecting the widely held belief that the harsh practice amounts to torture.
   ‘It will depend upon circumstances,’ spokesman Tony Fratto said. ‘The belief that an attack might be imminent, that could be a circumstance that you would definitely want to consider.’
   The practice, a staple of brutal interrogations from the Spanish Inquistion to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, usually consists of strapping down a captive, covering their face with a cloth, and pouring water onto the cloth.
   Fratto underlined that the tactic – which experts liken to controlled drowning – is not currently permitted, but left the door wide open to resuming its use.
   ‘The president will listen to the considered judgment of the professionals in the intelligence community and the judgment of the attorney general in terms of the legal consequences of employing a particular technique,’ he said.
   His comments came one day after CIA director Michael Hayden for the first time admitted publicly that the agency had used waterboarding, to question three top al-Qaeda detainees after the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes.
   It was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim al-Nashiri at a time when further catastrophic attacks on the United States were believed to be imminent, Hayden said.
   After years of insisting that disclosing any specific interrogation techniques would harm US national security, the US president, George W Bush, ‘authorised’ the revelation,’ Fratto said reporters.
   ‘There’s been a lot written out there, in newspaper, magazine articles, some of it misinformation, and so the consensus was that on this one particular technique’ a public defence was necessary, he explained.
   Asked what factors Bush would weigh in deciding whether to reauthorize the use of waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA since the September 11th attacks, Fratto offered few details.
   He said that the CIA chief would go to the attorney general to discuss whether a particular method was needed, what the safeguards were, and then the attorney general would decide whether it was legal before going to the White House.

Lebanese Shiite opposition chief Hassan Nasrallah and Christian ally Michel Aoun on Wednesday demanded veto power in a future government to solve the country’s protracted presidential crisis.
   In a rare joint television interview on the second anniversary of their controversial alliance, Nasrallah and Aoun also insisted that their union helped spare Lebanon civil war.
   ‘We cannot give up veto power because we cannot be mere spectators within the government,’ Aoun said in the three-and-a-half-hour interview broadcast on his Free Patriotic Movement’s Orange TV.
   ‘It would spell our destruction.’ ‘Any attempt to evict the opposition from decision-making is unacceptable,’ Aoun added.

Southern US states mourned Thursday after tornadoes wrought havoc across the region, killing 55 people and injuring hundreds, smashing buildings and flinging trees like matchsticks.
   Dozens of tornadoes sliced across the region late Tuesday and early Wednesday, leaving a trail of destruction in five states and deaths in four, in what US media called the deadliest US tornado outbreak in two decades.
   In hardest hit Tennessee, the death toll rose late Wednesday to 31, with one other person presu-med missing, the Tennessee Emer-gency Management Agency said.
   Thirteen people were killed in Arkansas, seven in Kentucky and four in Alabama, and hundreds of people were injured in those states and in Mississippi, officials said.
   ‘We’ve never seen anything like this. It will take 15 years to clean everything up. But the people here will never be the same,’ said Barry Newberry, a town constable in Lafayette, Tennessee who arrived to help neighbours along a road where every house was destroyed.
   ‘Everybody was running around like they were drunk. They were just dazed and devastated. It was dark and everybody was hollering,’ he said.
   ‘I’ve seen tornadoes on the ground and I’ve seen them in the air, but this was different. This one was wide, a massive funnel,’ Jean Byrd of Mason, Tennessee, a town of just over 1,000 residents, said.
   With a sigh of relief, Byrd added: ‘It touched down just after it passed our house. It took only two minutes for one twister to turn a commercial centre southeast of Memphis into a horrific wreck and leave behind three dead. It looked like a bomb hit the main building: the front was torn away and the roof collapsed, with glass and tiles spilled across the ground.

Chadian rebels who pulled back from a bitter battle for the capital have joined forces
   with fighters from another group, a military source said Thursday, raising fears of a new offensive.
   At least 200 vehicles have formed a new column about 400 kilometres from the capital, Ndjamena, where the president, Idriss Deby, has insisted he is now in control of the whole country.
   A spokesman for the rebel alliance which tried to overthrow Deby last weekend amid tank battles and helicopter air strikes in Ndjamena said the group now had new supplies of ammunition and fuel.
   The clashes in Ndjamena left at least 160 dead and hundreds wounded, according to the Chadian Red Cross, and major damage to the city of the oil producing nation.
   The military source said that rebels who had moved from near the Sudanese border in the east had linked up with the group that withdrew after its fight for Ndjamena last weekend.
   The source said there were at least 200 pick-up trucks of the kind used in the last attack on the capital.

Dozens of unsolved murders, abductions, and disappearances of journalists have cast a pall on open reporting in Sri Lanka as an ethnic civil war intensifies, a rights group said Thursday.
   At least 10 media workers have been killed over the past two years, while others have been abducted, tortured, or illegally detained, London-based Amnesty International said in a report.
   Most of the victims are Tamil journalists working in the island’s embattled north and east. Sinhalese journalists working in the south face intimidation, particularly when reporting cases of graft, Amnesty said.
   The rights group said those responsible are not punished by the government.
   ‘Investigations have stalled and no one has been brought to justice for the deaths of media workers, including cases dating back to 1990,’ said Pia Oberoi, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific programme.
   Tamil journalists working in conflict areas are under severe threat from security forces and armed groups who appear to be acting with the government’s consent, the report said.
   Amnesty also accused the Tamil Tigers of completely stifling dissent in areas under their control.