Even Israel's justice minister, Tommy Lapid, the only Holocaust survivor in the government, told a weekly cabinet meeting that the Gaza house demolitions were inhumane. He said television images of an old woman picking through rubble for medicine reminded him of his grandmother, who was killed by the Nazis. "The demolition of houses in Rafah must stop," he said. "It is not humane, not Jewish, and causes us grave damage in the world. At the end of the day, they'll kick us out of the United Nations, try those responsible in the international court in The Hague, and no one will want to speak to us."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FF10Ak01.html

In his May 25 meeting with Israeli Infrastructure Minister Yousef Paritzky, Erdogan harshly criticized Israel for its aggression on the Palestinian people, making it clear that there was no difference between Israel's actions and the attacks carried out by terrorists in Turkey. Erdogan asked the Israeli minister: "What is the difference between terrorists, who kill Israeli civilians, and Israel, which also kills civilians?

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As negotiations at the United Nations on a new resolution for Iraq apparently near a close, developments with respect to the Kurds and north Iraq, where there has been relative calm until now, are looking more and more ominous. Recently, the People's Congress
of Kurdistan (the former Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK), announced an abrupt end to its five-year ceasefire with Turkish forces, warning that it would soon resort to violent means to achieve its ends.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FF09Ak03.html

The Sunnis and Shi'ites appear to be mostly content with the look of the new interim council and with Iraq's direction, but the Kurds are certainly not content. They have been marginalized before, by the United States itself, and intend to take care of their own interests, by violence if need be. This is indeed ominous.

So, the United States now has little use for the Kurds, who see clearly that once again they are being abandoned by the US. All the parties see the Kurds, therefore, as possible spoilers of the solution currently being put together under UN auspices. Hence, little sympathy exists for them. Realizing this fact, the Kurds are already resorting to threats and violence in an effort to get a satisfactory hearing. By its short-sighted, ad hoc approach to Iraq's complicated situation, first using the Kurds and then casting them aside, the United States may have sealed both its own and Iraq's fate.

In the end, the handover of sovereignty on June 30 may not change anything, except that it may well accelerate Iraq's descent into sectarian violence, with Turkey and Syria cooperating militarily to secure their interests in northern Iraq by taking control of that region, and the southern regions of Iraq moving significantly closer into cooperation with Iran, with the US military caught in the middle. The relative calmness of northern Iraq is very likely to be much like the calmness of a large bomb - its calmness very deceptively masks the huge explosion which is likely imminent.