Gaza War Why?: Natural Gas valued at over $4 billion MAYBE?

Comment

Comment by Cheryl Benson on May 2, 2009 at 12:10pm

War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza's Offshore Gas Fields


by Michel Chossudovsky

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11680

i put that in the side bar of the video info box forgot here.

meta refused it, however, i did a search it's all over the net including on palestine bloggers, well here's looking to doing more professional looking and sounding ones in the future :)


Global Research, January 8, 2009



Email this article to a friend
Print this article





The military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves.

This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.

British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon's Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority.

The rights to the offshore gas field are respectively British Gas (60 percent); Consolidated Contractors (CCC) (30 percent); and the Investment Fund of the Palestinian Authority (10 percent). (Haaretz, October 21, 2007).

The PA-BG-CCC agreement includes field development and the construction of a gas pipeline.(Middle East Economic Digest, Jan 5, 2001).

The BG licence covers the entire Gazan offshore marine area, which is contiguous to several Israeli offshore gas facilities. (See Map below). It should be noted that 60 percent of the gas reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline belong to Palestine.

The BG Group drilled two wells in 2000: Gaza Marine-1 and Gaza Marine-2. Reserves are estimated by British Gas to be of the order of 1.4 trillion cubic feet, valued at approximately 4 billion dollars. These are the figures made public by British Gas. The size of Palestine's gas reserves could be much larger.



Map 1




Map 2

Who Owns the Gas Fields

The issue of sovereignty over Gaza's gas fields is crucial. From a legal standpoint, the gas reserves belong to Palestine.

The death of Yasser Arafat, the election of the Hamas government and the ruin of the Palestinian Authority have enabled Israel to establish de facto control over Gaza's offshore gas reserves.

British Gas (BG Group) has been dealing with the Tel Aviv government. In turn, the Hamas government has been bypassed in regards to exploration and development rights over the gas fields.

The election of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 was a major turning point. Palestine's sovereignty over the offshore gas fields was challenged in the Israeli Supreme Court. Sharon stated unequivocally that "Israel would never buy gas from Palestine" intimating that Gaza's offshore gas reserves belong to Israel.

In 2003, Ariel Sharon, vetoed an initial deal, which would allow British Gas to supply Israel with natural gas from Gaza's offshore wells. (The Independent, August 19, 2003)

The election victory of Hamas in 2006 was conducive to the demise of the Palestinian Authority, which became confined to the West Bank, under the proxy regime of Mahmoud Abbas.

In 2006, British Gas "was close to signing a deal to pump the gas to Egypt." (Times, May, 23, 2007). According to reports, British Prime Minister Tony Blair intervened on behalf of Israel with a view to shunting the agreement with Egypt.

The following year, in May 2007, the Israeli Cabinet approved a proposal by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "to buy gas from the Palestinian Authority." The proposed contract was for $4 billion, with profits of the order of $2 billion of which one billion was to go the Palestinians.

Tel Aviv, however, had no intention on sharing the revenues with Palestine. An Israeli team of negotiators was set up by the Israeli Cabinet to thrash out a deal with the BG Group, bypassing both the Hamas gov

Comment by Cheryl Benson on January 11, 2009 at 1:56pm

Thank you for submitting to Metacafe. Your video 'Gaza War Why?: Natural Gas Valued at over $4 Billion MAYBE?' has been declined for the following reason:

Your video has been marked as sexually explicit or extremely violent by our review panel.
Your video will not be published on Metacafe. We invite you to submit other videos that fit our submission rules.

Comment by Cheryl Benson on January 11, 2009 at 9:50am

took several tries to do this, my speech very bad for hours prior, at least didn't turn out to be 23 minutes like the last one I tried for moi, found the timing in movie maker. the backlash on the internet I am getting, wow, here is a link to the history of the gaza walls, they did go up around the time the gas was found, there was a flimsy one prior torn down, the mega ones up after

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Gaza_Strip_barrieries