One of the most spectacular strikes during Israel's winter military offensive in Gaza came in the waning days of the fighting when Israeli white phosphorus shells hit the central United Nations compound, set the warehouse ablaze and sent a towering column of black smoke rising above Gaza City.

The UN eventually accused Israel of "negligence or recklessness" in hitting the UN warehouse, UN schools and other UN buildings during the offensive.

Israeli President Shimon Peres dismissed the UN report as biased and relations between Israel and the UN have soured considerably in the aftermath of the Gaza offensive.

Now, with the support of his superiors, one of the UN's most prominent spokesman in Jerusalem has embarked on an unusual and controversial attempt to engage Israelis by performing a one-man show in which he becomes the embodiment of the Gaza warehouse and metaphorically burns down before Israeli audiences.

As might be expected, this unique dramatic performance by Chris Gunness, spokesman for the UN Palestinian refugee agency, has sparked renewed debate about the UN, Israel and Gaza.

During the play's debut last May, one audience member rose up to try and shout down Gunness as he told the story of the warehouse.

Earlier this month, hours before Gunness was set to perform the show in Acre, the theater manager abruptly pulled the plug. Some said the theater manager came under direct political pressure from city officials who wanted to prevent the play from being seen.

Gunness says the show isn't meant to be accusatory. It's meant, he says, to show Israelis what happened in Gaza as UN workers repeatedly tried to get the Israeli military to re-direct its strikes and then battled a volatile inferno after Israeli white phosphorus rained down on the compound where hundreds of Palestinians had sought refuge.

But some Israelis see it as provocative finger-pointing.

Gunness says the show touches a nerve, but that it is a unique way to engage Israelis and start a new conversation.

Gunness is scheduled to perform "Building Understanding: Epitaph for a Warehouse" on Oct. 22 at the Hasimta Theater in Jaffa... 

(Top photo: AP/A Palestinian watches the UN warehouse in Gaza City burn. Bottom photo: Chris Gunness)

The religious council in Lod, Israel has come up with a unique way to deter drunk revelers from peeing on their walls: Dare them to pee under the watchful eye of prominent rabbis.

Faced with an unpleasant stink left by drunks who would pee on the walls of their building, the Lod religious council decided to spruce things up by putting up pictures of rabbis and holy items on the wall.

Apparently even drunks aren't willing to risk the wrath of god by peeing under the watchful eye of rabbis.

"I even kiss the wall," one youth at a café near the wall told Yedioth Ahronoth. "It's like a holy wall. And it is also very beautiful."

When asked if, in dire circumstances, he would pee on the wall, the person told Yedioth: "Heaven forbid. Near the rabbis watching you? Even criminals respect the rabbis, that's how it is here, there is respect for religious clerics."

One of the new Hamas government posters now seen around the Gaza Strip as part of the Religious Ministry's virtue campaign.

The poster suggests that wearing the Muslim headscarf and jeans is devilish dress...

This week, former GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee suggested that Palestinians deserved a state of their own, just not here in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"I have no problem with that," Hucakbee said of a two-state solution. "Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That's what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic."

Now, Amjad Atallah, co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation has made what might be considered a modest Middle East proposal: Move Palestine to California.

"I haven't yet conducted a poll of Palestinians on the Huckabee-Solution, but it seems that California - at least everything from San Francisco and south would be most preferred, no offense to Huckabee's home state of Arkansas," says Atallah. "The landscape is very similar to historic Palestine with various Mediterranean climates, lots of orange and fig trees, beautiful vistas, and lots of ocean front property. California even has its own fault lines, just like Israel/Palestine which makes for good wrath of God sermons. It wouldn't matter if you were originally from Haifa, Ramallah, or the Gaza Strip, there would be something to remind you of home."

"Many Palestinians, especially those in the Diaspora, are Christian and they could try their hand at taking over the California wine industry," Atallah writes. "And think of all the jobs in Hollywood playing Arab stereotypes that could now go to actual Arabs."

"Hmmm," Atallah asks, "but that raises the issue of what to do with all the Californians that already live there..."

A green Hamas flag now waves from the top of the bullet riddled mosque minaret with views of the Mediterranean. And workmen are busy patching up the thousands of holes left over from the "Battle of the Mosque."

No one knows for sure how many Palestinians in Gaza are turning towards Al Qaeda-inspired groups in the isolated Mediterranean Strip.

They may be small in number, but Hamas is taking the threat seriously.

Supporters of fundamentalist Islam -- including those who oppose the militant offshoots -- have been forced into hiding. Few are willing to talk openly. They speak about their faith in whispered conversations, or not at all.

Hamas has set up new checkpoints on the main Gaza Strip roads where they are looking for suspicious characters. And extremists militant groups in Gaza have vowed to exact revenge on Hamas for last weekend's brutal battle.

Until the weekend showdown, Abdel Latif Moussa was well-known for his extremist views. And he was regarded as a smart, charismatic speaker who seemed to have a magnetic appeal to young Palestinians.

Former students and those who heard Moussa speak said he was booted from a southern Gaza Strip mosque after praising Osama Bin Laden in 2002.

During Ramadan that year, Moussa upset his allies with a speech in which he lauded Bin Laden and Sayyid Kutub, the intellectual father of the Muslim Brotherhood.

"God give victory to your slave Osama," Moussa told followers, according to Ibrahim, a 23-year-old Islamic scholar who was mentored by Moussa as a teenager searching for his religious grounding.

After being kicked out of the fundamentalist group, Moussa's former students said, Moussa moved south to Rafah, the town on the Egyptian border best known for the network of smuggler tunnels that keep food, fuel, weapons and other supplies flowing in for the 1.4 million residents.

It was there that Moussa apparently met Khaled Banat, a shadowy Palestinian figure who is believed to have helped transform Moussa's followers into a militant force known as Jund Ansar Allah (Warriors of God).

Banat's story is predictably murky and difficult to verify. Some say he was a Palestinian from Gaza who became an aide to Hamas political leader Khaled Mashaal in Damascus.

As one story goes, Banat was sent to Gaza to help train Hamas militants. After becoming disenchanted with Hamas, some people claim, he joined forces with Moussa.

Others claim that Banat broke with Hamas years ago, went to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was already charting his own course when he came to Gaza via the smuggling tunnels.

Hamas claims that, as its forces closed in, Banat used a suicide belt to kill himself and Moussa.

No one is quite sure why Moussa decided that now was the time to openly challenge Hamas.

Hamas contends that Moussa, who reportedly received a salary from the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, was ordered by Fatah leaders to issue the challenge.

"We are sure Israel and Ramallah are behind it," said Ihab Ghussein, a spokesman for the Hamas government's Interior Ministry in Gaza.

Others speculate that Moussa and Banat miscalculated. Either they didn't think Hamas would respond with such force, or they thought that the small network of like-minded groups would come join the fight.

That may have been one of the reasons Hamas did respond with such force.

There were rumors that Moussa was part of an effort to unite the small and disparate fundamentalist groups under one umbrella.

Until now, Hamas has managed to contain such groups in Gaza. One of its first acts after seizing complete military control of Gaza in 2007 was to force the Army of Islam to free BBC reporter Alan Johnston.

Since then, the Army of Islam, led by Mumtaz Dagmoush (another Al Qaeda-inspired militant), has been largely held in check.

Hamas is trying to make sure these groups remain fractured and impotent.

For the moment, it seems like Hamas has contained the immediate challenge to its power.

What remains to be seen is how these militant groups respond.

Here's a surreal exchange on Obama health care between an Israeli defender of nationalized medicine and a woman wearing an Israel Defense Forces t-shirt who decides to yell "Heil Hitler!" at the Israeli while he discusses the issue, prompting a heated exchange...

Mike Huckabee is apparently a man with an ironic sense of humor.

The Fox News TV host and GOP presidential candidate (runner-up) offered a simple solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem: Move the Palestinians out!

"The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes," Huckabee said. " I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That's what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic."

In raising the simple "move them out" peace plan, Huckabee joins other world personalities who have suggested moving folks out of the Middle East:

"If European countries claim that they have killed Jews in World War II... why don't they provide the Zionist regime with a piece of Europe. Germany and Austria can provide the... regime with two or three provinces for this regime to establish itself, and the issue will be resolved.

-- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

(AP photo/Dan Balilty)

Last month, in a piece on stagnating reforms in Saudi Arabia, McClatchy wrote about Wajeha Al-Huwaider, one of the kingdom's leading feminist activists.

Wajeha has a new piece in The Washington Post about her latest campaign against Saudi laws that prevent women from traveling without permission from a male guardian.

"Everyone knows that women are denied rights in Saudi Arabia," she writes. "And you may think that our fate is the same one that women in some other developing countries face, only a little worse. In truth, we endure a status that most Americans can scarcely imagine.

"The guardianship rules are only part of a bigger system of subjugating women. Even with the permission of a guardian, a woman may not drive a car (except in some isolated rural areas and within the compounds that are home to many workers from Western countries). Obviously, there is nothing in the Koran that forbids driving. No, the reason we are not allowed to drive is that the power to transport ourselves would give men much less control over us.

The piece delves into the many challenges in Saudi, from fathers selling prepubescent girls to 70-year-old suitors to bans on women playing sports.

"While women are forced to be entirely dependent on men, men are allowed to follow their whims," she writes. "A woman can get a divorce, but only by going through a laborious legal procedure in religious court. However, a man can divorce his wife merely by saying 'I divorce you' three times. Although this is an ancient practice, these days the clerical authorities are debating whether the man has to say this in person, or if a text message will suffice. Already a judge in Jiddah has approved the first case of text-message divorce. The man was in Iraq to participate in jihad."

When it began appearing on walls across America, the now-famous poster -- depicting President Barack Obama as the unnerving Heath Ledger Joker in "The Dark Knight" (with the word "socialism" under the image) -- became an instant flash-point in the charged debate over health care and Obama's policies.

Shephard Fairey, the artist behind the famous Obama Hope image, criticized the artwork and questioned the intelligence of the anonymous artist.

A Los Angeles Weekly writer basically argued that the poster is being touted by racist white Americans.

So who is the artist behind the controversial poster?

It turns out the artist is a 20-year-old Palestinian-American college student from Chicago.

Firas Alkhateeb told the LA Times that was fooling around with Photoshop during his winter break and used a Time magazine cover to transform Obama into the Joker.

Alkhateeb said he uploaded the doctored picture to Flickr in mid-January, but didn't get many hits at first.

Then someone appropriated the image, stripped off the Time magazine stuff, added the word "socialism" to the bottom and began posting them around LA.

Alkhateeb joined Fairey in criticizing the message of the Obama-socialism poster, calling it "immature."

We are stuck in the no man's land of Erez crossing, held up at the big, electronic cattle gate that is the last door between Israel and Gaza.

People keep shuffling up on both sides. An elderly Palestinian woman in a wheelchair sits in the stifling shade of the mostly-destroyed concrete tunnel.

One of the Palestinian baggage handlers in his orange vest sits on the other side of the gate and tells me tales of living through Israel's winter military offensive. His story is filled with lots of "boom booms," whistles and demonstrations of limbs being cut off by shrapnel.

Someone presses the intercom, and the bodyless Israeli border guard on the other end of the line who sounds like a fast food drive thru cashier says it will be just a few minutes, which turns into an hour.

On the other side, Hamas continues to upgrade its bureaucratic border crossing process. Though names are still hand written in a shabby note book fit for a dusty Wild West 1800s train station, Hamas now has border cards for people to fill out. And I'm told they are even making a half-hearted attempt to screen for virus-formerly-known-as-Swine Flu. (Though they did nothing to check me for it as I came in...)

Having stood by and watched Hamas guards confiscate booze from my bag, we have decided to hide the alcohol under the seats of the car while the border guards check my suitcase...

The two guards skeptically eye my bag of ginger snaps and want to know what they are. They peer at my packet of Brazil nuts and ask me what they are. They gaze at my DVDs and ask me what "Slumdog Millionaire" is about. Then they ask me if I have any booze.

"Not in this bag, no," I say, truthfully.

"If I wanted to bring in booze," I ask casually, "can I bring it in?"

"You can bring two bottles," the guard says.

"If you bring in three," he says with a laugh, "we will smash the third."

Welcome back to Gaza, where, if there weren't enough problems already, residents are dealing with a confusing new threat from Al Qaeda aspirants who like to lash explosives on horses and send them galloping towards Israeli border patrols.

Workers have already started repairs on the pock marked white walls of the Taymeah mosque minaret with views of the Mediterranean.

A Hamas government soldier gives us the OK to look around - but tells us not to take pictures.

We casually meander around the side, away from the soldier, where I try to snap a shot or two with my cell phone. But some dude on the second floor of the mosque is keeping an eye on us and we're busted.

Very soon we are surrounded by a large group of soldiers and a very unhappy officer who demands my Jawwal. Dutifully, I give it to him, especially since I took the photo with my second cell phone and not the Palestinian phone he is now threatening to crush.

My colleague Ahmed deftly talks him out of destroying my cell phone and I sheepishly apologize for not realizing that the guard really meant it when he said no pictures...

We cruise by the family home of Abdul-Latif Moussa, the Al Qaeda-admiring Gaza sheik who boldly declared Rafah part of a new "Islamic emirate" and then died in a brutal showdown with Hamas fighters.

Nervous relatives sit in a dusty Rafah alley filled mostly by empty white plastic chairs set out for the daring mourners willing to come by.

No one here will talk. Not now. They have been warned by Hamas, they say, not to talk to anyone. Especially the press.

Everyone has a different version of the story -- a sometimes-legendary tale that can include a mix of the following central elements: The Mossad, Fatah, Egypt, Syria, Khaled Mashaal, Mohammed Dahlan, and, of course, Osama Bin Laden.

As Ahmed points out, the latest Hamas allegation -- that Moussa's Jund Ansar Allah is a proxy for reviled Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan --- doesn't quite hold up. This is the same group, Ahmed notes, that Hamas accused of bombing a Dahlan relative's wedding earlier this summer.

So now Hamas is saying that Jund Ansar Allah is for Dahlan -- and against him.

That clears things up.