Another possible attack on Gaza

Tel Aviv is conducting war games in the Negev desert, in what appears to be preparation for a new offensive on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

An Israeli TV channel reported the military drills on Thursday, saying the rightist government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely gearing up for a massive attack on Gaza shortly after the anniversary of the deadly Gaza onslaught last year.

It further revealed that Tel Aviv plans to occupy the entire coastal enclave this time to compensate for the failure to overthrow Hamas, the democratically elected ruler of the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli army is said to be practicing to forestall the mistakes which led to the deaths of several of its soldiers during the last offensive, the poor handling of which cost Tel Aviv severe criticism at home and forced senior army officials to resign.

The report added that Israeli tanks have been equipped with a new system able to identify friendly units operating in the battlefield — even when they are among civilians.

The 22-day Israeli offensive last year saw weeks of relentless air, land and sea incursions against the Palestinians in Gaza. It left more than 1,400 people, including hundreds of women and children, dead.

It also devastated a large part of the infrastructure in the impoverished coastal sliver which has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007.

Israel has recently stepped up saber-rattling against the Palestinians in Gaza, with Israeli planes dropping thousands of leaflets across Gaza in December, urging Gazans against cooperating with the resistance fighters based in the region, and threatening a new attack.

MRS/MD

Press TV

German prosecutors have launched an investigation over a magazine report claiming CIA agents and employees of a notorious US private security firm had sought to assassinate a German-Syrian terror suspect.

Berlin on Monday denied any knowledge of the CIA's operation, several days after the report's publication in Vanity Fair just before Christmas.

The controversy centers around claims that the American intelligence agency and the Blackwater — renamed Xe — private security firm sent a covert assassination team to Hamburg in 2004 to spy on and liquidate 51-year-old businessman Mamoun Darkazanli.

The report also alleges that aside from regular CIA agents, German authorities and lawmakers had also been kept in the dark.

Darkazanli is believed to have had contact with several of the terrorists involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York since they lived or studied in the northern German port city.

For five years after the 2001 tragedy, police investigated Darkazanli's alleged terror links with several of the terrorists involved in 9/11 attacks. The probe was closed due to lack of any incriminating evidence.

While CIA's tactics have long been criticized amid accusations of torturing terror suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Blackwater is perhaps the world's most notorious private military contractor, haunted by claims of brutality and aggression.

The company is accused of bribery and the voluntary manslaughter in Iraq.

While the issue has united the coalition government as well as the opposition in condemnation of a murder plot against a German citizen, Hans-Christian Strobele, a prominent German Green Party politician, criticized Berlin for not confronting the CIA.

"The fact is that the CIA can, for the most part, do whatever it wants here in Germany…The secret prisoner transports after Sept. 11 showed that -- and no one dared to do anything about it, " he said. "Try to imagine the opposite happening."

"Imagine if the BND (Germany's federal intelligence agency) were to carry out a hit job via a front company, say in New Orleans. It would be a shocking occurrence," said the parliamentarian.

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