It is our understanding that His Honour Judge Bathurst-Norman, who used to sit at Southwark Crown Court, has been assigned to sit on the case. This means the trial will be going ahead on 7th June.

British Gas and Israel eyeing Gaza's natural gas reserves
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...while Gaza suffers its 35th month of blockade with natural gas sparsely available for over 1.5 million imprisoned inhabitants, among many other basic necessities, 1.4 trillion-cubic-feet of the thing is sitting right there underneath their feet, confiscated by the corprotocracy of British Gas and the apartheid state of Israel.

The massacre in Gaza accomplished nothing more than a death toll of over 1,000 dead and 5,000 wounded Palestinians. World leaders scrambled like headless chickens to find ways to achieve a ceasefire, instead of stripping Israel from its membership at the UN and declaring it an outlaw state, and news media around the world carried daily coverage of the carnage, inviting “experts in the field” from both the Palestinian and Israeli perspectives. Yet not a single network exposed the other motive behind Israel’s attacks: Gaza’s natural gas reserves.
The current societal framework is in fact manufactured in a way that seldom enables the people to be empowered with information. Only when the exciting stuff emerges on television does everyone’s attention become so dedicated to the tube. In modern history however, wars are usually preceded by the eerie smells of reticent business deals gone bad. Quiet arrangements made by a corprotocracy that the masses are usually unaware of.

According to British Gas Group (BG), in 2000 an estimated 40 billion cubic-meters of natural gas were discovered off the Gaza coast, stretching north-west of the Strip. By any way one measures it, these reserves legally belong to Palestine as they are directly located off the shore of the Gaza Strip, an illegally occupied territory by Israeli forces. A 25-year exploration-rights deal ensued with BG and the Consolidated Contractor International Company as partners of the Palestinian Authority in a respective 60-30-10 percentage revenue split. The Middle East Economic Digest reported on January 5, 2001, that this agreement also includes field development and the construction of a gas pipeline. The BG group thus began drilling two wells named Gaza Marine 1 and Gaza Marine 2.

Where does this leave the state of Israel? As per its very existence and usual state-run policies based on theft and dispossession, the election of Ariel Sharon in 2001 propounded nothing different. At the Israeli Supreme Court he stated that “Israel would never buy gas from Palestine” and in 2003 vetoed a deal that would enable BG to supply Israel with natural gas from the Gaza wells. For the Israelis, the very definition of to whom the natural gas belonged was still not understood nor accepted.

Hamas’ election victory in January 2006 and Israel’s refusal to buy gas from the Palestinians complicated matters for BG. Thus, they decided to sell natural gas to the Egyptians. And once again, Israel cried fowl.