The Palestinian ministry of health reported Sunday that the number of victims who have been killed in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli occupation since the start of 2010 and until the ninth of March amounted to 12 Palestinians and the injuries to 25 others.

According to a report issued by the ministry's information office, 75 percent of these deaths happened during last January and 91.7 percent of the victims were under age 18.

The report also said that most of the victims, who were killed or wounded, sustained injuries all over their bodies while few had injuries either in the head or neck only.

An article in Sunday's UK Guardian newspaper tells the story of Observer reporter Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian who was hanged in Iraq as a spy 20 years ago by Saddam Hussein.

In penning the article, the author Donald Trelford, who was editor of the Observer when Bazoft was arrested, seeks to "remember a friend and colleague whose death served as a warning to the world about Saddam Hussein".

The official story goes like this:

In September 1989, Bazoft went to Iraq to cover elections in Kurdistan. On the day his press party arrived in Baghdad, a massive explosion occurred at a military complex in the city.

Farzad met the deputy foreign minister, Nizam Hamdoun, and asked to visit the site. He enlisted the help of Daphne Parish, a British nurse he had met on a previous visit. They went on successive days to take photographs and collect soil samples, though they always stayed on public roads.

While waiting for an Iraq Airways flight to London on the 15 September, he was picked up at Baghdad airport and taken for interrogation by Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat secret police.

On November 1st, the Iraqis issued a tape showing him "confessing" to being a spy for Israel. Earlier the Iraqis had claimed he was spying for Britain. On March 15th 1990 he was hanged.

As a veteran journalist, it is appalling that Trelford is content to limit his analysis of the case of Bazoft to the official story. With the US and Israel winding up the world's press to prepare the public for the first Gulf "war", there was good reason to be suspicious of any reports that demonized Saddam in the 1989-1990 period. With everything we know now about how willing Western politicians are to fabricate rationale for war, it is nothing short of yellow journalism to hold fast to the official story. Worse still is the fact that a much more plausible account of the case of Farzad Bazoft, from a truly reliable source - ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky - has been available to Trelford for 15 years.

Rightist: "[W]e will teach those Leftists what democracy is," he added. "Obama is anti-Semitic, pro-Arab, an agent of the PLO and we stand behind what the poster says."

Israeli-Occupation Archive Editor: Hardly - but there's no reason for the Israeli Right not to try pushing Netanyahu further to the right. This latest, made-in-Israel diplomatic crisis is reminiscent of the Bush-Baker-Shamir mini-crisis. We know how quickly the US bounced back to letting Israel carry on with the Occupation and inflict a great deal more damage to the Palestinians.

A religious group accuses Rabbi Mordechai Elon of sexually exploiting male students. No police complaints have been filed, but the case spotlights subjects some would prefer to avoid.

Many Israelis pride themselves on a kind of European sophistication when it comes to public sex scandals: For the most part, they shrug them off.

But those limits are being tested by a brewing controversy concerning an Orthodox rabbi who has been accused by a nongovernmental religious organization of sexually exploiting male students.

Rabbi Mordechai Elon, 50, a popular spiritual figure from a prominent family, has not been charged with any crime, and no evidence has emerged that any of the students allegedly involved were under age 18, according to police and child-protection advocates. No students have filed police complaints, a law enforcement official said.

But the case is rattling the foundations of Israel's Orthodox community by casting a public focus on topics that some would prefer to avoid: sexual harassment by religious leaders and homosexuality among rabbis.

Iraq's electoral commission on Monday delayed releasing more results from last week's parliamentary vote, amid mounting claims of fraud as the protracted count continued. Iraq's March 7 parliamentary elections, the country's second since the 2003 US-led invasion, are widely seen as a key test of the country's stability ahead of US combat troops' withdrawal, and will shape the country's politics for years to come.

The Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC)'s Judge Qassim al-Aboudi had earlier on Monday said the commission would announce results of the vote with 60 per cent of ballots counted, but in an evening press conference alongside fellow electoral official Hamdiya al-Husseini, the two simply announced that 66 per cent of votes had been counted.

The chaotic and protracted process of announcing the early results has compounded suspicions of manipulation in the count from some quarters.