Fresh air strikes by the United States have killed at least 33 civilians and injured several others in southern Afghanistan, the Afghan interior ministry says.

Afghan authorities announced that the fatalities included four women and a child.

US-led forces said that they fired by mistake on a group of vehicles that carried women and children.

The strikes took place in Uruzgan province on Sunday.

Interior Ministry Spokesman Zemeri Bashary said Monday he had reports of 33 people killed.

He added there were 42 people in the vehicles, all of them civilians.

The Afghan government and NATO have launched an investigation.

Wants to Block It; Kremlin Rejects Crippling Sanctions

It appears that, the International Atomic Energy Agency is at least allowing for the possibility that documents allegedly found on a laptop some years ago --but discounted by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency as of dubious provenance and incompatible with other intelligence gathered in Iran -- point to a nuclear weapons program that no one has been able to locate. Some close observers have concluded that the laptop documents are forgeries. A new IAEA report that declines to dismiss the alleged documents will certainly cause the war lobby in the United States to redouble its efforts to get up an attack on Iran.

Forged documents on the supposed purchase of yellowcake uranium by Iraq from Niger were used by George W. Bush to promote a war on Iraq. It was at that time the Intelligence and Research division of the Department of State that attempted to throw cold water on these "documents," but was ignored by the president. Then head of the IAEA, Mohammed Elbaradei, was able to show them false in one afternoon.

The UN inspectors have a right to be frustrated with Iran, which has allowed inspections of its Natanz nuclear enrichment site, but which has not been completely transparent or adhered to the letter of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But the sum of those frustrations does not point to a nuclear weapons program, unlike the disputed laptop documents. In statements to the press this fall, US intelligence officials have said that they stand behind the conclusions first reached in 2007, that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.

Dubai's police chief said in a report on Saturday that his force has evidence incriminating the Mossad in the killing of a Hamas commander in the Gulf emirate last month, despite Israeli denials.

"Among the new evidence available to Dubai police which incriminates the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, and confirms its involvement in the murder ... are telephone communications between the culprits who have been detected," Dhahi Khalfan said in the newspaper Al-Bayan.

Mahmud al-Mabhuh, one of the founders of Hamas's military wing, was found dead in his luxurious Dubai hotel room on January 20.

"Dubai police also have reliable information that some perpetrators bought their tickets in other countries using credit cards bearing the same identity revealed" previously by the emirate, he added.

Israel's Mossad had tipped off British intelligence that they were going to use fake British passports before the assassination of the Hamas commander, a new report says.

According to a report by the Daily Mail on Friday morning, the British intelligence agency MI6 was notified before the assassination took place in Dubai last month.

The UK newspaper published the report several hours following a 20-minute meeting between the Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor and a senior British diplomat in London on Thursday.

The two officials discussed the British passports apparently used in the assassination of Mabhouh in Dubai.

Message boasts of Israeli player's 'hit on Dubai target' amid mounting row over Hamas chief's killing

Amid the mounting diplomatic row over Mossad's alleged assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai, the Israeli embassy has turned to Twitter to comment.

A tweet issued by the embassy today read: "@israeluk You heard it here first: Israeli tennis player carries out hit on #Dubai target http://ow.ly/18A79". It links to a story about the Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer, who beat the top-ranked Caroline Wozniacki yesterday to reach the quarter-finals of the Dubai Championship.

But the tweet is open to interpretation. The Mossad hit squad accused of assassinating Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior figure from the militant group Hamas, at the Al-Bustan Rotana hotel in Dubai were disguised as tennis players.

Interpol should help arrest the head of Mossad if Israel's spy agency was responsible for the killing of a Hamas commander in Dubai, the emirate's police chief said today.

In comments to be aired on Dubai TV, Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim called for Interpol to issue "a red notice against the head of Mossad ... as a killer in case Mossad is proved to be behind the crime, which is likely now".

International pressure intensified against Israel's spy service as official "wanted" notices were released for the suspected team of Israeli secret agents accused of participating in the assassination. The faces of an 11-strong alleged hit squad appeared on the Interpol website this morning, 48 hours after authorities in the United Arab Emirates issued arrest warrants for the killing last month of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

The Link interviewed Naeim Giladi, a Jew from Iraq, for three hours on March 16, 1998, two days prior to his 69th birthday. For nearly two other delightful hours, we were treated to a multi-course Arabic meal prepared by his wife Rachael, who is also Iraqi. "It's our Arab culture," he said proudly.

In our previous Link, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe looked at the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians whose lives were uprooted to make room for foreigners who would come to populate confiscated land. Most were Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. But over half a million other Jews came from Islamic lands. Zionist propagandists claim that Israel "rescued" these Jews from their anti-Jewish, Muslim neighbors. One of those "rescued" Jews-Naeim Giladi-knows otherwise.

In his book, Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews, Giladi discusses the crimes committed by Zionists in their frenzy to import raw Jewish labor. Newly-vacated farmlands had to be plowed to provide food for the immigrants and the military ranks had to be filled with conscripts to defend the stolen lands. Mr. Giladi couldn't get his book published in Israel, and even in the U.S. he discovered he could do so only if he used his own money.

The Giladis, now U.S. citizens, live in New York City. By choice, they no longer hold Israeli citizenship. "I am Iraqi," he told us, "born in Iraq, my culture still Iraqi Arabic, my religion Jewish, my citizenship American."

John F. Mahoney
Executive Director, AMEU

The Jews of Iraq

By Naeim Giladi

I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called "cruel Zionism." I write about it because I was part of it.

My Story

Of course I thought I knew it all back then. I was young, idealistic, and more than willing to put my life at risk for my convictions. It was 1947 and I wasn't quite 18 when the Iraqi authorities caught me for smuggling young Iraqi Jews like myself out of Iraq, into Iran, and then on to the Promised Land of the soon-to-be established Israel.

Israel's foreign minister has said there is "no reason" to believe that his country's spy agency was behind the killing of a senior Hamas figure in the United Arab Emirates, but did not explicitly deny involvement.

Hamas has blamed Israel for the murder in a Dubai hotel room last month and the emirate's police force has refused to rule out the possibility that the 11 suspects wanted by investigators were working for Mossad.

Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, told Army Radio on Wednesday: "There is no reason to think that it was the Israeli Mossad, and not some other intelligence service or country up to some mischief.

US President Barack Obama nominates Robert Ford as Washington's first ambassador to Syria in five years as Damascus emerges an influential peacemaker in the Middle East.

Washington recalled its envoy after Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in early 2005 in a bombing the West blamed on Syria.

Obama's choice now awaits the Senate's approval to become the diplomat to formally launch the resumption of diplomatic ties between the US and Syria.

The White House announcement comes a day before top State Department official William Burns went to Syria as part of Washington's efforts to expand dialogue with Damascus on "all aspects" of a strained relationship.

Obama has recently turned to Syria for help with mediating between Palestinians and Israel after his tantalizing first year in office saw no breakthrough out of the current deadlock in the Middle East peace process.

Jerusalem - The Israeli foreign minister said today there was no reason to assume that Mossad assassinated a Hamas military commander in a Dubai hotel room, even as suspicions mounted that the spy agency made the hit using the identities of Israelis with European passports.

While few people are privy to the cloak-and-dagger operations of Mossad, senior Israeli security officials not directly involved with the affair said they were convinced it was a Mossad operation because of the motive and the use of Israeli identities.

The officials characterised it as a significant Mossad bungle.