EU staff member killed in Syria meanwhile NGO reports children are the biggest casualty

A member of the European Union’s delegation in Syria was killed on Tuesday in a rocket attack in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus. According to EU Foreign Policy head Catherine Ashton, Ahmad Shihadeh, an EU policy officer, was killed in the area in which he lived while he was providing humanitarian assistance to the community. The opposition activist network Local Coordination Committees (LCC) reported that two surface-to-surface missiles landed in the town on Tuesday night while the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said government forces had bombarded Daraya. Meanwhile, Save the Children has said that children are perhaps the greatest victims in Syria’s conflict. The British-based non-profit organization released a report Wednesday, titled "Childhood Under Fire: The impact of two years of conflict in Syria." According to the paper, Syrian children have been shot at, beaten, tortured, and raped in the conflict sparked in March 2011. According to Save the Children’s Chief Executive Justin Forsyth, "This is a war where women and children are the biggest casualty." The report found that two thirds of children surveyed had been separated from their family members, and many had seen a close friend or family member killed in front of them. It said that two million children face malnutrition and disease. Additionally, girls are increasingly being married off at an early age in efforts to protect them from sexual violence, and in some cases reduce household expenses. The report came a day after UNICEF released a report saying Syrian children risk "becoming a lost generation."

Headlines

• The militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) released eight Turkish hostages in Northern Iraq amid talks and ahead of an expected ceasefire declaration from PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.
• Egypt’s High Administrative Court will hear an appeal Sunday on a ruling that led to the cancelation of parliamentary elections scheduled to begin April 22.
• Saudi Arabia publicly executed seven men convicted of armed robbery despite appeals from human rights groups and the United Nations.
• An unemployed Tunisian man died on Wednesday after setting himself on fire in the capital of Tunis, raising concerns over political tensions.
• The family of an Iranian-American former U.S. Marine, who has been detained in Iran for 19 months after being convicted of spying for the C.I.A., is pleading for his release. 

Arguments and Analysis

Is Any Hope Left for Mideast Peace? (Rashid Khalidi)

"WHAT should Barack Obama, who is to visit Israel next Wednesday for the first time in his presidency, do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? First, he must abandon the stale conventional wisdom offered by the New York-Washington foreign-policy establishment, which clings to the crumbling remnants of a so-called peace process that, in the 34 years since the Camp David accords, has actually helped make peace less attainable than ever.

When the most recent iteration of this process began with high hopes at the Madrid peace conference in 1991, which led to the Oslo accords two years later, there were 200,000 Israelis illegally settled in the occupied Palestinian territories: today, there are more than twice as many.

… For Mr. Obama, a decision is in order. He can reconcile the United States to continuing to uphold and bankroll an unjust status quo that it helped produce. Or he can begin to chart a new course based on recognition that the United States must forthrightly oppose the occupation and the settlements and support an inalienable Palestinian right to freedom, equality and statehood. There is no middle way."

Who Is A Liberal Zionist? (Jerry Haber, Open Zion)

"When I appealed to liberal Zionists to support the global BDS movement, I assumed that the movement called for ending Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli discrimination against non-Jewish citizens, primarily Palestinians, within Israel. I also thought that liberal Zionists accepted these goals (see Mira Sucharov here), and that the central disagreement between liberal Zionists and the global BDS movement was over the third goal, the right of return of Palestinians to Palestine in accordance with U.N. Resolution 194.

My assumptions appear to have been unwarranted. Peter Beinart, answering in the name of liberal Zionists, has problems with the language of the BDS movement’s first goal to "end Israel’s occupation and colonization of all Arab lands," for the language could include the Golan Heights, and anything over the Green Line, including the settlement blocs that the Palestinian Authority has, under duress, agreed in principle to cede to Israel. Beinart also has a problem with the language of its second goal, the "fundamental right of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality," since that could mean an end to the Law of Return."

–By Jennifer Parker and Mary Casey