If anything projects a sense of “what me, worry?” in the Ehud Olmert “travelgate” corruption case, it’s this photo, distributed by the Government Press Office, of the Israeli prime minister paying a visit on Thursday to Sderot, a  town hit repeatedly by Hamas rockets before and during the Gaza war he helped to orchestrate.

“The Beverly Hills Hotel and Bungalows” reads the logo on his jacket. 

In a case revolving around Olmert’s foreign travels and stays in luxury hotels before he became prime minister, Israel’s attorney-general plans to summon the veteran politician and his attorneys next month to give him a chance to explain why he should not be indicted.

The Justice Ministry suspects that Olmert, during trips abroad as mayor of Jerusalem and as a cabinet minister from 2002 to 2006, double-billed for plane tickets and used the extra money for family vacations and upgrades. In a separate case, a U.S. businessman said he handed Olmert envelopes stuffed with cash and told a court about his penchant for top-class hotels and fine cigars.

Olmert has denied any wrongdoing and no criminal charges have been filed. He resigned as prime minister in September, saying he would fight the allegations. He remains caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed after Israel’s February 10 election in which he is not running.

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

Voices get loud and excited over the radio Reuters news crews use in Gaza to call in the latest information. Some people complain there are no “Western reporters” inside. But we all work for Reuters, a global agency that sets the international standard.

After two full weeks of bombardment we are all worried about our families but we work and work the story. We hope it will stop.

“They bombed a car in Beit Lahiyah,” says one colleague working in northern Gaza.

“Three dead arrived in Shifa hospital,” says another in Gaza’s largest hospital.

“Several people were injured when Israeli planes bombed the tunnels,” said a third from southern Gaza Strip near the border with Egypt.

I field these calls in our office where we have put duct tape crosses on every window to limit flying glass if a strike is too close. Still, the largest window in the hall was blown out.

We have a fixed camera on our high-rise building but our cameramen are being cautious not to point their cameras from the windows, in case they are mistaken for weapons. (Such mistakes were given as the reasons why a US tank blasted our Baghdad bureau in 2003, killing and wounding colleagues, and was also the reason given for an Israeli tank killing our colleague here in Gaza, Fadel Shana, nine months ago.)

The camera can show the blue Mediterranean sea a few blocks to the west, or point the other way to where Israeli ground forces are closing in, perhaps little more than a kilometre away. At night it used to show bright lights and traffic.

Now it is empty streets and a few cold electric lights. Nothing much moves after dark these days. And we choose, for safety reasons, not to stay in the bureau overnight. We look after our families and keep in touch with contacts and colleagues by phone, ready to head out and film if necessary.

We all get to the office around 9 a.m - typically about 10 of us, with another dozen colleagues working in other parts of the Gaza Strip. The strikes have usually been going on for a few hours by then. We call that information in to our bureau in Jerusalem where colleagues have been updating our main report around the clock. The updates go on all day long.

I often have no time to write up stories myself. It all moves so fast. I use two land phones, an Israeli mobile phone, and a Palestinian mobile phone that is intermittent.

Inside Gaza, we use text messages to communicate. We have to monitor local television and radio stations because they are often first with developments that we race to check. Those checks are essential, of course. The mixture of confusion and deliberate propaganda that accompanies any war, means that our standards of cross-checking everything and ensuring readers understand the sources of information need to be rigorous.

Every day is a new life written for me and for my family and also for the Reuters team in Gaza. Shelling and air strikes have hardly spared any place in the whole Gaza Strip. The heart of the city of Gaza has been hit several times.

Some areas seem to have been hit simply because a Hamas policeman walked nearby, or some militants were detected at a street corner by the Israeli forces. The high-explosive attack that follows can be devastating, taking out not only targeted people but a house or some passers-by.

The movement of our crews is restricted to hospitals and major strikes at places that are important, or where we think there may have been a high death toll. It is simply too dangerous to do otherwise. We cannot be with Hamas leaders or accompany the fighters to film them since that would be too great a risk.

“Please take care. Do not enter a place right after it is bombed. Wait a bit, it may be hit again.” This is a warning I issue to our crews 30 times a day.

We urge our cameramen and photographers to avoid main roads outside the city, and to look carefully where they drive.

“Try not to pass by a police station even it was already bombed. Do not go by a money exchange shop, or a house of a Hamas leader. Do not pass by a place the Israel army has threatened to bomb. Avoid passing close to a mosque.”

This is also my daily advice to myself — a list I repeat mentally as I drive back and forth.

Inside the office we have breakfast together, lunch too sometimes, and we send meals to people on outside missions. At one stage we did not see our outside crews for almost five days. When they returned to the office there was a big welcome scene. We hugged one another and thanked God we were safe, that all of us were safe.

Four journalists have been killed since the offensive began. One worked for Algerian and Moroccan television, another two for local Gaza broadcasters. The fourth was the special presidential cameraman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

When the main security complex was hit, 200 metres from our office, a piece of shrapnel penetrated the wall of our TV production room and made a hole. Part of the ceiling broke but everybody was safe. Many times we have ducked under the tables when huge blasts from air strikes shook the office. We also hear the whistle of outgoing Gaza rockets fired at Israel from inside the city.

Our families are our main concern.

I live in the south west side of Gaza City, not far from the sea, and the sounds of explosions in the district in the street have never ceased for 14 days of war. We’ve had almost no electricity for 10 days. For safety, my wife, daughter and son squeeze all day into our little hallway, listening to the news on a transistor radio. When one goes to the toilet, they all go together. One goes into the bathroom, the rest wait just outside.

For 14 days we have been sleeping in the same room, which we thought was away from the street and would be safe. But the whole building shook with every explosion and my wife had to leave our bed and hug the kids, sleeping on mattresses. My kids cover their ears a lot of the time when explosions start. My daily lectures about safety –  that we are far from what is happening — seem pretty useless.

On Thursday the children realised I was just trying to make things easier. An Israeli missile hit a house across the street where we lived and killed a journalist, his wife and his mother-in-law. I was still working and my wife called to tell me and I could hear the children crying in the background. I had to check a colour story bylined in my name by Reuters in Jerusalem. The colleagues there told me to go home and to be with my family, which must be the top priority before anything else.

We have to leave the office before it is too late at night because the streets are empty and scary. Restaurants are closed and bakeries crowded by people in the daytime. One baker helped out with a special delivery, grateful for the work of journalists.

Our Reuters colleagues in Jerusalem are far away but they have some visual contact via our live television monitor, so they can see the smoke, dust and flames caused by Israeli bombing in Gaza. They can get some of the atmosphere. We also have many colleagues on Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, just a few kilometres from our office here, watching and filming the bombs landing around us and the rockets being fired at Israel.

It is hard to get accurate statistics from independent parties on how many fighters have died. Hamas spokesmen do not answer that question. Our cameramen rarely cover funerals of gunmen of Hamas, it is too dangerous. The Israeli army says it has killed “hundreds” of fighters. From the tolls we are compiling from the hospitals, hundreds of civilians have also died.

On Friday Jan 9, an air strike hit a TV production and transmission facility about 100 metres from our office. At least one person was hurt and there was considerable damage. It was used by several Arab TV stations and Iran’s Press TV. The Israeli army said the building was not a target but may have sustained “collateral damage” - and they assured us they have the coordinates of the Reuters bureau and that we are not a target. It is worrying nonetheless.

We pray this will stop soon.

In the big battle scene in the movie Braveheart, terrified whispers ran up and down the ragged ranks of sword-waving Scots that the English were ranged before them with “500 heavy horse” – armoured cavalry of devastating power in those days.

But the wild-haired hero-general William Wallace (actor-director Mel Gibson) rode his pony up and down the front ranks shouting: “We don’t have to beat them. We just have to fight them!”

That was in the 14th century. But 700 years later it seems to be the same cry  from the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian fighters allied to the Islamic fundamentalist cause led by Hamas pursue a lopsided battle against Israel, pitching erratic, homemade rockets into nearby Israeli lands, until they trigger a major offensive and start taking the heaviest casualties in 60 years of conflict, from Israel F-16s and Apache helicopters.

The warplane is today’s ‘heavy horse’, of course, but it can represent a far, far superior advantage. The Israelis fly with virtual impunity over the crowded Gaza enclave, picking out designated targets in their own good time, capable of selecting individual apartments in a block if they need to. Should it come to ground fighting, Israel has equally advanced tanks with state-of-the-art optics and sensors, plus plenty of modern armoured personnel carriers and artillery that the Islamists do not possess.

The score in Gaza, to state the facts in the crudest terms, was 300 to 1 dead in the first 48 hours.

Monday was day three of the air campaign. In 1999 NATO found itself in its first war, against Serbia over the conflict in Kosovo. The air campaign was conducted at the safety altitude of 22,000 feet because the Serbs, unlike Hamas, did indeed possess anti-aircraft missiles and cannon. A committee of 19 states, the 45-year-old alliance was a nervous newcomer to actual fighting. It gambled that air power would inflict just enough pain to persuade the Serbs to capitulate. But when that did not happen in the first five days, NATO was in a panic, and facing the unthinkable – an invasion.

Some generals had warned the allies that, if you start a war, you must be ready to go all the way and ‘put boots on the ground’. But they had preferred wishful thinking.

Israel, of course, is no newcomer to war, does not need lessons in the limits of air power, and knows that a ground offensive in Gaza cannot be ruled out. Even if Gaza’s Islamist militants number 35,000 as estimates say, there is little doubt who would be likely to come out on top. But it would probably be on top of a land of rubble, with a storm of Arab and Muslim defiance gathering above the entire region.

As the smoke rises from Gaza, anger and defiance seems to be spreading across the Arab world, fuelling protests and violence in the occupied West Bank, stoking anti-Israel sentiment in the wider Arab world, where the young, especially, despise seemingly weak, or complacent regimes unwilling or unable to do something. Islam is their “rock n roll” now, as one writer recently put it, and the militants of Islam have no moral problem with “asymmetric warfare” — the return of the suicide bomber to Israeli cities, the weapon no Apache or F-16 can stop.

If this is what the defiance of Gaza’s puny rockets begets, then Braveheart’s romantic injunction that “you just have to fight them” could prove to be correct.

(Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip December 28, 2008. Israel launched air strikes on Gaza for a second day on Sunday, piling pressure on Hamas after killing more than 270 people in one of the bloodiest days in 60 years of conflict between the Palestinians and the Jewish state. REUTERS/Baz Ratner)

I met a young man the other day in Hebron, a bustling Palestinian city on many hills, half an hour’s drive south of Jerusalem. He was pleasant, a little shy, a bit embarrassed at the fuss of inviting a foreign journalist into the modest apartment he shares with his wife and son.

We drank tea. He talked about how Hamas once tried to recruit him as a suicide bomber and how Israelis put him in jail for more than two years. Then he began to frown more, blinking through his glasses, and rubbing his aching joints.

He spoke about being bundled out of his home in the middle of the night, of being blindfolded and beaten and made to hang for hours from his arms with his wrists tied behind his back. This didn’t happen in an Israeli prison. This, he said, was the work of fellow Palestinians, part of a force deployed in recent weeks by President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city, which has long been a stronghold for Islamists.

Among the tasks for Abbas’s security forces is ensuring that Hamas does not challenge the president’s authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in the way that it did in the Gaza Strip last year, when the Islamists who had formed the Palestinian government following a 2006 parliamentary election victory, routed Abbas’s forces and took full control of the coastal enclave.

The main questions he was asked by his interrogators, according to the bearded young man who spoke to me, revolved around his involvement with Hamas and any plans he knew of for violence. He denied being a militant, though described his politics as Islamist. After a few days of mistreatment, and a week or so more in custody, long enough for bruises to heal, though not the pains in his joints and muscles, he was let go. Just one thing, he was told - “Don’t talk to the press.”

We asked the government about that story and some others documented in our story today as well as statistics compiled by the publicly funded Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights  which show a spike in November in complaints about torture in Hebron .

The government spokesman’s office denied its security forces practise torture or detain people on political grounds. The issue of torture was “exaggerated and totally untrue”. The official statement praised the security forces for managing difficult challenges in protecting the Palestinian public despite the Israeli occupation and despite activity by Hamas, which it accused of “crimes” in Gaza.

So who is right? It is hard to say exactly what all the facts are. You can judge for yourself something about the injuries inflicted on one of our interviewees in this video clip made in hospital where he sought treatment following whipping at the hands, he said, of security officers. But it is hard to verify every element of the allegation. Many human rights monitors have no hesitation in accusing both Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah forces of using torture and dubiously legal detention practices against their opponents in Gaza and the West Bank respectively. As journalists working here, we are also no strangers to attempts at disinformation.

 My personal sense, after my conversations and what research I and my Hebron-based Reuters colleagues were able to do in the tight-knit community there , is that the people we spoke to were not making up their experiences. The government spokesmen stressed that interrogation was part of detention. And, as the events in Gaza last year showed, Palestinian leaders face genuine armed threats from within their own communities.

The European Union, United States and others are backing Abbas as the legitimate leader of the Palestinians as they seek to negotiate statehood and a peace settlement with Israel. They shun Hamas, despite its victory in the parliamentary election, because it continues to fire rockets at Israel from Gaza and is pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state. Fuelling concerns that the schism may soon come to a new round of violence, Hamas says it will no longer recognise Abbas’s legitimacy as president after Jan. 9 , four years after his term began. The dispute over the law  shows little sign of becoming less bitter, despite attempts by Arab governments to get the two sides talking again.

The EU envoy to Israel, speaking to us for today’s main article , admitted concerns about allegations of torture and said they should be investigated. But Western governments, which once anathemised Abbas’s PLO as global terrorists, is keen to foster the Palestinian Authority as Israel’s partner for peace . The big powers are focused today on threats it perceives from the kind of militant Islam represented by Hamas and its Iranian backers. The European envoy had strong praise for what he described as Abbas’s “counter-terrorist” forces.