Gaza Strip

Much more important than the back-and-forth about Israel's (lethally bungled) raid on a boatload of (deliberately provocative) protesters trying to bring humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is the bigger question it raises: what to do about the blockade? Without a doubt, its critics are right to say it inflicts terrible human suffering on civilian Palestinians.

JERUSALEM — Israel will significantly ease its bruising land blockade of the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, officials said, in an effort to blunt the widespread international criticism that has followed a deadly Israeli commando raid on a blockade-busting flotilla.

A Kassam rocket fired from the Gaza Strip landed in southern Israel.

The head of the Arab League is visiting the Gaza Strip for the first time since Hamas took over.

This past Wednesday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered a wide-ranging speech at an Orthodox Union event in Washington, D.C. The senator's lecture touched on areas such as Iran's nuclear program, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and several domestic policy issues.

By Avner Gidron, Senior Policy Adviser at Amnesty International

JERUSALEM — Israeli and Palestinian officials say Israel has allowed some formerly banned food items into the Gaza Strip after widespread international criticism of its three-year-old blockade.

In a significant departure from most of her colleagues, Sen.

The IDF's blockade of the Gaza Strip and its interdiction of humanitarian flotillas is ironic in view of recent history. The end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi death camps left a pool of 500,000 Jewish refugees in Europe. Many wished to emigrate to Palestine, but were barred by immigration restrictions contained in a 1939 British White Paper designed to ensure that a soon-to-be-independent Palestine "would be neither an Arab nor a Jewish state." At war's end, there were 600,000 Jews in Palestine and 1.2 million Arabs.

Last week, Israeli commandos boarded a relief ship attempting to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip and, during a clash with pro-Palestinian activists, shot nine people to death. It was an old-fashioned, bona fide "international incident," a fiasco that raised alarming questions about the current trajectory of Israel's security, the wisdom of its government, as well as the fate of Obama's Middle East policies and U.S. security in general.