***Israel initiates genocidal ground war into Gaza: 1,300 killed > 6,000 wounded

[sociostudent]

REPORT - Israeli attacks continue throughout the 3 hour humanitarian window on Sunday - PressTV

Wow, they are just ASKING for it, aren't they? 

Crimes against humanity, anyone?

[Geolibertarian]

Its odd if they had the AAA why they didnt use it earlier..maybe they are being supplied by russia?..the USA is supplying israel to the hilt, in our name...."we the people" are responsible for this genocide..without that huge cache of never ending weapons ...this wouldnt be happening.

And how many times since 9/11 have the leaders of both major parties proclaimed that those who "aid" or "assist" terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves?

More than a few, perhaps?

[Triadtropz]

Wow, they are just ASKING for it, aren't they? 

Crimes against humanity, anyone?

killing 400 children in an assault, is a universal crime against nature...it's unheard of to target children like this in modern warfare..

[Geolibertarian]

killing 400 children in an assault, is a universal crime against nature...

It's also terrorism -- the very thing the U.S. government is supposedly waging "war" on.

The bipartisan hypocrisy never ends.

[sociostudent]

It's also terrorism -- the very thing the U.S. government is supposedly waging "war" on.

The bipartisan hypocrisy never ends.

do most americans still believe that BS about "fighting terror"? Even after all this?

That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. 

[Byrne0ut]

do most americans still believe that BS about "fighting terror"? Even after all this?

That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. 

yes most americans do believe we are fighting terrorism, thats the sad part and the reason it is so hard to wake people from their slumber.

[Triadtropz]

do most americans still believe that BS about "fighting terror"? Even after all this?

That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. 

Thats how they paint it..your average nascar fan thinks they are just fighting terrorists, and israel needs help..the brainwashing has been going on so long,,..you gotta feel sorry for the jews, and it gives them a greenlight to do anything and oppress the world..

[Biggs]

British MP George Galloway: "Victory To The Palestinian Resistance"

Video (10mins)

"The Palestinian People Will Never Surrender"

Meeting: Palestine Solidarity Campaign - STOP THE WAR ISRAEL OUT OF GAZA - at Friends Meeting House, 173 Euston Road London NW1 2 BJ

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21709.htm

[Biggs]

"Limbs And Meat" In The Street

By Ewa Jasiewicz

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21710.htm

'A boy next to me, he went crazy, he was overwhelmed, he saw the massacre, the street was full of blood, the nails from the shells were as long as your hand'

January 10, 2009 "The Sunday Herald" -- THE SHADOURA family live in the Moaskar Jabaliya area in the north of the Gaza Strip. They are originally from the town of Majdal in 1948 Palestine, now Ashkelon in present-day Israel. Their simple white, one-storey house is just yards away from the Fakhoura UN school where 42 people died, 20 of them children, when Israeli tanks opened fire on a busy intersection. Paramedics and eyewitnesses reported seeing nothing but "limbs and meat" in the street at the time. Witnesses report that four tank shells smashed into the ground releasing flying chunks of burning shrapnel.

Mohammad Shadoura, aged nine, had been playing marbles with friends in the street at the time. Mohammad's father, Bassem Ahmad Shadoura, was close by. He describes the scene: "I saw an explosion, after which there was black smoke everywhere - the area was pure black. They hit twice in the same area. I saw a boy with his finger in the air saying I am a witness to God' and I picked him up to take him out. Then I saw my son, he had been hit twice, in the legs and in the head. His brain was out'."

Mahmoud, 15, recalled what he saw, his eyes widening with trauma. "We saw legs everywhere, flesh, some people without heads, meat. A boy next to me, he went crazy, he was overwhelmed, he saw the massacre, the street was full of blood, the nails from the shells were as long as your hand."
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I am sitting in the Shadoura house. The women of the house are in their second day of collective grieving. Mohammad's mother, stunned and silent, is flanked by her sisters, aunts, and daughters Najah, 17, Iman, 12, and Shahed, two, all remembering Mohammad. Their home is very basic, the living room area is partially open, with a grooved roof with white pigeons nesting within it. You can see Apache helicopters emitting bright dazzle-flares through the metre gap all around it.

Three cats, one, a tiny ginger kitten, stretches in the sunlight. The floor is covered with woven coloured mats, the walls lined with foam mattresses and there is a poster of a cousin, Nidal, 24, short-haired, clean-shaven, with serene eyes. He was an Islamic jihad fighter.

He was killed directly by an Israeli missile two months ago. As with all families here, there is little political homogeneity. Bassem was a first commander in the Fatah Authority and his brother a police intelligence officer.

Bassem isn't working but still gets paid a $700-a-month salary from the Fatah authority in Ramallah. But even this doesn't stretch far with his family of seven children. Rent for their one-bedroom house is $100 per month. Cooking gas - the price of which has more than doubled here since the siege - is around $120 for a 6kg canister. It lasts around two weeks, when they can get it. When they can't, they cook on a primitive mud clay stove, powered by wood and paper. All nine members of the family sleep in one bedroom.

There was no water in the house. The electricity lines had been smashed down by the tank shell attack on Tuesday and the family's water system is electrically powered. Even without the attack, power is only available some four hours a day.

Najah, 17, wants my phone number. She's a lively teenager in black mourning clothes and hijab. Of course, I give it to her. I ask her what her brother was like. "He was the best one of us all. He was very kind.

"When he would watch TV he would get very scared of all the killing - all the children being killed."

We eat our dinner by candlelight. A small plate of tinned tuna, two small bowls of "Gaza Salad" - chopped tomatoes with onion and chilli peppers - a kind of Palestinian salsa, olives from the family olive tree, cold mujaddara (no gas to heat it) a mix of rice and lentils, and bread. After tucking in, the whole family and I sit under one blanket, all focusing on their new house guest. Children make up 51% of the population of Gaza and witness everything.

"So many of our neighbours have died," explains Foad. Iman, 12, knew one of the daughters of Nizar Rayan, a senior Hamas leader who was killed along with his four wives and 11 children. Aya Rayan, 12, died when eight bombs fired by an F16 fighter jet slammed into the family home. A further 10 houses were also wrecked in the attack. I saw the site myself, giant slabs of concrete criss-crossed on top of one another, pulverised homes, a pile hundreds of metres wide, flanked by at least four wall-less apartments revealing living rooms, coloured walls with pictures of loved ones and sunsets, smashed kitchens, with families picking through their wreckage and, below it all, dusted white, a dead horse twisted on to one side.

"Look at this," says Mahmoud, 15. He hands me a lump of rock the size of a pineapple. "This came through the roof of my grandmother's house next door the day of the attack. It wrecked their roof. If we had been there it would have killed us," he says.

Mohammad's father drinks his sweet amber tea slowly. "You've made the children here very happy", he says.

He puffs on his cigarette. "I worked in Israel, I lived with Israelis, Jews from Europe, from Iraq, the Arab world and we all got along, we were friends. They're good people, 100%. Twelve years I spent working there, but nothing has changed."

Bassam was jailed in 1983, before the first intifada broke out. He was just 16 years old and spent three years in an Israeli prison. "Do you know why?", he asks me, his small, wizened, embattled features squinting in the darkness. "For throwing a stone."

"I couldn't complete my studies, I wasn't allowed to, and the Red Cross didn't do anything for us. They just gave us some clothes."

We look up at the poster of Nidal. "He was a fighter," says Bassem. "My son, he was nine years old, he wasn't doing anything. In our religion, our son is in heaven. He'll be drinking water in heaven. Our son is a martyr."

We get ready to go to bed. Its 8pm and everything is a gentle dim orange in the candlelight. The sound of falling bombs shakes the house, a swooping zip and slam-thud sound. "We hear it all night," say the children.

Reem, mother of Mohammad, is only 36 but looks 10 years older. She is taking Mohammad's clothes out, putting them up to her face and smelling them, then folding them.

She starts crying in the gentle orange light. "Where, where?", she says gently. Her sisters comfort her. Im Qusam is one of them. "You know we can't sleep, we can't live, no gas, no bread, no water."

Bassem recalls the funeral procession for the 42 dead. I attended, too.

"It was the first time in one-and-a-half years that we all marched together, we all prayed together, every faction, every flag was there. I wanted my son in the funeral, my son is the son of the people."

Usually each faction has their own funeral procession and burial. Mahmoud 15, recalls the burial. "We had gone to bury the dead and the Israelis shot at us, we were so afraid, we ran. We're afraid all the time, all the time that we'll be hit."

Sitting on a small sandy hill, listening to a beautiful, sorrowful, deep-voiced song, I saw the mass of mourners run, streaming over gravestones for the gate, as shot after shot rang out of the crowd. "Kannaas" snipers, my friend said to me grimly.

I ask Ahmad, 16, how he feels about the rockets from the Palestinian resistance. "They hit us with missiles and we shouldn't react? Ours are like games, they're like toys compared to theirs. But ours lift our spirits."

We go to sleep to the sound of thudding missiles, the ones close by shake the house. Terror leaps in our chests. "That one was a house! It was a house," breathes Reem in the middle of the night. The house of the Salha family in the Beit Lahiya projects area was bombed at 4.30am. Six family members, four of them under 15 years old, were killed. They had moved there for shelter, according to friends.

We wake up to the sound of bombing. I count 15 Israeli missile strikes between seven and 8.30am. Two crunky old Palestinian missiles make off in response. Ten of us share a plate of maybe five scrambled eggs dusted with pepper and four discs of white bread.

The family pause together. "Jabaliya used to be so beautiful," says Roweeya, 17, a visiting aunt, pouring tea for us. "There is a garden close by, full of orange trees. The Israelis keep blasting missiles into it."

[bigron]

Aiding and abetting a Holocaust 


11/01/2009 10:08:00 PM GMT
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/Aiding_and_abetting_a_Holocaust.html
 
 The Palestinians are being killed not because of Hamas.They bleed because they are the non-Jewish natives of that land.


By Tariq A. Al-Maeena


(Reuters) 'What have Palestinians done to deserve such a fate?


A reader last week objected to my references of a ‘holocaust’ in this latest atrocity being carried out by the Israelis against civilians in Gaza, and specifically targeting children. May I remind the reader and other skeptics that this word is no longer exclusive to crimes of the past?

(Watch video: Israeli guns bombard Gaza in escalation of Hamas war) :
http://www.aljazeera.com/mm/video/video.php?op=showvideo&vidid=896

(Watch video: Doctor decries Israeli attacks):
http://www.aljazeera.com/mm/video/video.php?op=showvideo&vidid=899

(Watch video: Israeli lies revealed by Tzipi Livni):
http://www.aljazeera.com/mm/video/video.php?op=showvideo&vidid=904


Cambridge Dictionary defines holocaust as “a very large amount of destruction, especially by fire or heat, or the killing of very large numbers of people” a situation that is currently in full force against Palestinians in Gaza.


Palestinians are being killed like insects not because of Hamas or because of Qaseem rockets or hand-thrown rocks. Palestinians burn and bleed because they are the non-Jewish natives of that land. There is no other reason. Just like Jews in the past were killed for being Jewish. Palestinians today are killed for being the Muslims and Christians who hold historic, legal and even genetic title to that land.


What have Palestinians done to deserve such a fate? To be endlessly hunted and treated like animals? To have their homes demolished, their ancient history and heritage cast into forgotten space? To languish in refugee camps and slums, while Jews from all corners of the earth flock to fill their confiscated homes and farms? To be tortured, imprisoned, and denied in every inhumane way?


Israel should face charges for War Crimes as bluntly stated by Professor Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. Writing in "Israel's Collective Punishment of Gaza", she cites four specific violations carried out by the Israelis:


‘Israel’s air and ground attack in Gaza violates Geneva in four ways.


-First, it constitutes collective punishment of the entire population in Gaza for the acts of a few rebels.

-Second, it targets civilians, as evidenced by the large numbers of civilian casualties.

-Third, it is a disproportionate response to the rockets fired into Israel.

-Fourth, an occupying power has an obligation to ensure food and medical supplies to the occupied population; Israel’s blockade has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.’


UN Relief workers discovered four starving children sitting next to their dead mothers and other corpses in a house in a part of Gaza City bombed by Israeli forces, as reported by the Red Cross. Scores of other such horrific circumstances litter the Gaza landscape. How long can the world and specifically the U.S. pretend that Israel is a civilized nation, immune from censure for their on-going butchery?


The NY Times reported that, “International aid groups lashed out at Israel on Thursday over the war in Gaza, saying that access to civilians in need is poor, relief workers are being hurt and killed, and Israel is woefully neglecting its obligations to Palestinians who are trapped, some among rotting corpses in a nightmarish landscape of deprivation.”


If Americans do wonder why the rest of the world detests U.S. foreign policy and is accused as an implicit partner in this holocaust, then they should not look any further than the recent headlines: ‘U.S. rejects Arab bloc’s ceasefire proposal.’

The U.S. had objected to the proposal, which demanded an “immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip”, the lifting of Israel’s border blockade and the establishment of an international force to monitor the truce. Ever wonder the motive?


While the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, publicly condemned the Israeli attacks that had caused the deaths of four UNRWA workers, together with shelling a UN-run school that killed 40 people including many children earlier last week, and there are mass demonstrations in all parts of the world including Israel against this mass slaughter, U.S. President Bush okayed the green light to the Israelis to invade Gaza with tanks and artillery.


In his weekly radio address, Bush held Hamas responsible for the latest violence, and proclaimed that 'no peace deal would be acceptable without tougher action to prevent Hamas and other groups from receiving weapons'. Why? So that they could be sitting ducks? No mention of the carnage of civilians was brought up. And sure enough, barely hours after he spoke, on January 3, U.S. supplied Israeli tanks rolled into the Gaza Strip.


A human being with no remorse and a perverted demolisher, he must have analyzed the vast wreckage around him at the end of his presidency strewn with colossal foreign policy failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and decided to go out in full fanfare – this time in Gaza.


Several years ago, he lied to the world about weapons of mass destruction to gather support for his illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq. A few days ago, Israel employed a barely more credible excuse, the rockets as justification for its own barbaric shock and awe in Gaza.


While millions of Americans face home foreclosures, health care uncertainties, job and pension losses, none of these crises currently threaten the flow of their tax dollars to Israel’s war machine. It is their money that buys F-16 jets made by Lockheed Martin to drop bombs on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.


Indeed, the world is wondering where the spirit of America has evaporated so quickly to, the very spirit that brought the first black President to the White House recently? Why the silence and subjugation to a government that falls nothing short of aiding and abetting a holocaust?


--Tariq A. Al-Maeena is a Saudi socio/political commentator. He lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and can be reached at talmaeena@gmail.com.



-- Middle East Online

 

[bigron]

Israel fails to capture Gaza City 

12/01/2009 08:13:00 AM GMT
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/Israel_fails_to_capture_Gaza_City.html
 

(Reuters) A convoy of Israeli armoured military vehicles rolls across the border into the northern Gaza Strip.

Israeli forces have failed to capture Gaza City despite sending thousands of reserve soldiers to invade the city on Sunday, a Press TV correspondent reports.

Israeli troops and tanks which have been trying to enter the Gaza City are still engaging resistance fighters and have not succeeded to sweep into the city Press TV correspondent Akram al-Satarri reported.

On Sunday, thousands of Israeli reservists backed by tanks and helicopter gunships attacked eastern Gaza city, facing a strong resistance from Palestinian fighters.

On Monday, heavy clashes between the Palestinian fighters and Israeli forces are going on in East and South of the Gaza City.

Plums of smoke have darkened Gaza sky on 17th day of the U.S.-backed Israeli onslaught on the besieged region as the Israeli army continues shelling and air strikes.

Israeli massive bombing campaign of the besieged Gaza Strip which started on December 27, and its later ground offensive has so far killed at least 900 Palestinians and wounded 4000 others, most of them women and children.

Gazans have been suffering from a tight Israeli blockade a short time after the Hamas movement -- which does not recognize Israel as a legitimate state-- won an overwhelming victory in 2006 parliamentary elections.

Israel launched the military campaign against the impoverished coastal strip after a recent Israeli National Security Council assessment urged Tel Aviv to hinder "elections in the Palestinian Authority” because the upcoming elections in the Palestinian Authority might lead to Hamas victory.


-- Press TV

 

[bigron]

Monday, January 12, 2009
09:30 Mecca time, 06:30 GMT   
OPINION: WAR ON GAZA 
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/war_on_gaza/2009/01/2009110112723260741.html
 
Who will save Israel from itself? 
 
 By Mark LeVine


 The Israeli government's justifications for the war are being scrutinised [GALLO/GETTY]

One by one the justifications given by Israel for its latest war in Gaza are unravelling.

The argument that this is a purely defensive war, launched only after Hamas broke a six-month ceasefire has been challenged, not just by observers in the know such as Jimmy Carter, the former US president who helped facilitate the truce, but by centre-right Israeli intelligence think tanks.

The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose December 31 report titled "Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report," confirmed that the June 19 truce was only "sporadically violated, and then not by Hamas but instead by ... "rogue terrorist organisations".

Instead, "the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement" occurred after Israel killed six Hamas members on November 4 without provocation and then placed the entire Strip under an even more intensive siege the next day.

IN DEPTH

Latest news and analysis from Gaza and Israel :
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/war_on_gaza/

Send us your views and videos :
http://yourviews.aljazeera.net/

Watch our coverage of the war on Gaza :
http://www.livestation.com/aje


According to a joint Tel Aviv University-European University study, this fits a larger pattern in which Israeli violence has been responsible for ending 79 per cent of all lulls in violence since the outbreak of the second intifada, compared with only 8 per cent for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.

Indeed, the Israeli foreign ministry seems to realise that this argument is losing credibility.

During a conference call with half a dozen pro-Israel professors on Thursday, Asaf Shariv, the Consul General of Israel in New York, focused more on the importance of destroying the intricate tunnel system connecting Gaza to the Sinai.

He claimed that such tunnels were "as big as the Holland and Lincoln tunnels," and offered as proof the "fact" that lions and monkeys had been smuggled through them to a zoo in Gaza. In reality, the lions were two small cubs that were drugged, thrown in sacks, and dragged through a tunnel on their way to a private zoo.

Israel's self-image

The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them.

With each new family, 10, 20 and 30 strong, buried under the rubble of a building in Gaza, the claim that the Israeli forces have gone out of their way to diminish civilian casualties - long a centre-piece of Israel's image as an enlightened and moral democracy - is falling apart.

Anyone with an internet connection can Google "Gaza humanitarian catastrophe" and find the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Territories and read the thousands of pages of evidence documenting the reality of the current fighting, and the long term siege on Gaza that preceded it.

The Red Cross, normally scrupulous in its unwillingness to single out parties to a conflict for criticism, sharply criticised Israel for preventing medical personnel from reaching wounded Palestinians, some of whom remained trapped for days, slowly starving and dying in the Gazan rubble amidst their dead relatives.

Meanwhile, the United Nations has flatly denied Israeli claims that Palestinian fighters were using the UNRWA school compound bombed on January 6, in which 40 civilians were killed, to launch attacks, and has challenged Israel to prove otherwise.

War crimes admission

Additionally, numerous flippant remarks by senior Israeli politicians and generals, including Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, refusing to make a distinction between civilian people and institutions and fighters - "Hamas doesn't ... and neither should we" is how Livni puts it - are rightly being seen as admissions of war crimes.

Indeed, in reviewing statements by Israeli military planners leading up to the invasion, it is clear that there was a well thought out decision to go after Gaza's civilian infrastructure - and with it, civilians.

The following quote from an interview with Major-General Gadi Eisenkot that appeared in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth in October, is telling:

"We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective these [the villages] are military bases," he said.

"This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised."

Causing "immense damage and destruction" and considering entire villages "military bases" is absolutely prohibited under international law.

Eisenkot's description of this planning in light of what is now unfolding in Gaza is a clear admission of conspiracy and intent to commit war crimes, and when taken with the comments above, and numerous others, renders any argument by Israel that it has tried to protect civilians and is not engaging in disproportionate force unbelievable.

International laws violated

On the ground, the evidence mounts ever higher that Israel is systematically violating a host of international laws, including but not limited to Article 56 of the IV Hague Convention of 1907, the First Additional Protocol of the Geneva Convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention (more specifically known as the "Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949", the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the principles of Customary International Humanitarian Law.

None of this excuses or legitimises the firing of rockets or mortars by any Palestinian group at Israeli civilians and non-military targets.

As Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur, declared in his most recent statement on Gaza: "It should be pointed out unambiguously that there is no legal (or moral) justification for firing rockets at civilian targets, and that such behavior is a violation of IHR, associated with the right to life, as well as constitutes a war crime."

By the same logic, however, Israel does not have the right to use such attacks as an excuse to launch an all-out assault on the entire population of Gaza.

In this context, even Israel's suffering from the constant barrage of rockets is hard to pay due attention to when the numbers of dead and wounded on each side are counted. Any sense of proportion is impossible to sustain with such a calculus.

'Rogue' state

Israeli commentators and scholars, self-described "loyal" Zionists who served proudly in the army in wars past, are now publicly describing their country, in the words of Oxford University professor Avi Shlaim, as a "rogue" and gangster" state led by "completely unscrupulous leaders".
 

Gazans inspect the damage after an air strike hit a mosque [GALLO/GETTY]

Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, has declared that Israel's actions in Gaza are like "raising animals for slaughter on a farm" and represent a "bizarre new moral element" in warfare.

"The moral voice of restraint has been left behind ... Everything is permitted" against Palestinians, writes a disgusted Haaretz columnist, Gideon Levy.

Fellow Haaretz columnist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Amira Haas writes of her late parents disgust at how Israeli leaders justified Israel's wars with a "language laundromat" aimed at redefining reality and Israel's moral compass. "Lucky my parents aren't alive to see this," she exclaimed.

Around the world people are beginning to compare Israel's attack on Gaza, which after the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers was turned literally into the world's largest prison, to the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Extremist Muslims are using internet forums to collect names and addresses of prominent European Jews with the goal, it seems clear, of assassinating them in retaliation for Israel's actions in Gaza.

Al-Qaeda is attempting to exploit this crisis to gain a foothold in Gaza and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, as well as through attacking Jewish communities globally.

Iran's defiance of both Israel and its main sponsor, the US, is winning it increasing sympathy with each passing day.

Democratic values eroded

Inside Israel, the violence will continue to erode both democratic values in the Jewish community, and any acceptance of the Jewish state's legitimacy in the eyes of its Palestinian citizens.

And yet in the US - at least in Washington and in the offices of the mainstream Jewish organisations - the chorus of support for Israel's war on Gaza continues to sing in tight harmony with official Israeli policy, seemingly deaf to the fact that they have become so out of tune with the reality exploding around them.

At my university, UCI, where last summer Jewish and Muslim students organised a trip together through the occupied territories and Israel so they could see with their own eyes the realities there, old battle lines are being redrawn.

The Anteaters for Israel, the college pro-Israel group at the University of California, Irvine, sent out an urgent email to the community explaining that, "Over the past week, increasing amounts of evidence lead us to believe that Hamas is largely responsible for any alleged humanitarian crisis in Gaza".

I have no idea who the "us" is that is referred to in the appeal, although I am sure that the membership of that group is shrinking.

Indeed, one of the sad facts of this latest tragedy is that with each claim publicly refuted by facts on the ground, more and more Americans, including Jews, are refusing to trust the assertions of Israeli and American Jewish leaders.

Trap

Even worse, in the Arab/Muslim world, the horrific images pouring out of Gaza daily are allowing preachers and politicians to deploy well-worn yet still dangerous and inciteful stereotypes against Jews as they rally the masses against Israel - and through it - their own governments.

What is most frightening is that the most important of Israel's so-called friends, the US political establishment and the mainstream Jewish leadership, seem clueless to the devastating trap that Israel has led itself into - in good measure with their indulgence and even help.

It is one that threatens the country's existence far more than any Qassam rockets, with their 0.4 per cent kill rate; even more than the disastrous 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon, which by weakening Israel's deterrence capability in some measure made this war inevitable.

First, it is clear that Israel cannot destroy Hamas, it cannot stop the rockets unless it agrees to a truce that will go far to meeting the primary demand of Hamas - an end to the siege.

Merely by surviving (and it surely will survive) Hamas, like Hezbollah in 2006, will have won.


Support for the war remains high in Israel[GALLO/GETTY]

Israel is succeeding in doing little more than creating another generation of Palestinians with hearts filled with rage and a need for revenge.

Second, Israel's main patron, the US, along with the conservative Arab autocracies and monarchies that are its only allies left in the Muslim world, are losing whatever crumbs of legitimacy they still had with their young and angry populations.

The weaker the US and its axis becomes in the Middle East, the more precarious becomes Israel's long-term security. Indeed, any chance that the US could convince the Muslim world to pressure Iran to give up its quest for nuclear weapons has been buried in Gaza.

Third, as Israel brutalises Palestinians, it brutalises its own people. You cannot occupy another people and engage in violence against them at this scale without doing even greater damage to your soul.

The high incidence of violent crimes committed by veterans returning from combat duty in Iraq is but one example of how the violence of occupation and war eat away at people's moral centre.

While in the US only a small fraction of the population participates in war; in Israel, most able-bodied men end up participating.

The effects of the latest violence perpetrated against Palestinians upon the collective Israeli soul is incalculable; the notion that it can survive as an "ethnocracy" - favouring one ethnic group, Jews, yet by and large democratic - is becoming a fiction.

Violence-as-power

Who will save Israel from herself?

Israelis are clearly incapable. Their addiction as a society to the illusion of violence-as-power has reached the level of collective mental illness.

As Haaretz reporter Yossi Melman described it on January 10, "Israel has created an image of itself of a madman that has lost it".

Not Palestinians, too many of whom have fallen prey to the same condition.

Not the Middle East Quartet, the European Union, the United Nations, or the Arab League, all of whom are utterly powerless to influence Israeli policy.

Not the organised Jewish leadership in the US and Europe, who are even more blind to what is happening than most Israelis, who at least allow internal debate about the wisdom of their government's policies.

Not the growing progressive Jewish community, which will need years to achieve enough social and political power to challenge the status quo.

And not senior American politicians and policy-makers who are either unwilling to risk alienating American Jewish voters, or have been so brainwashed by the constant barrage of propaganda put out by the "Israel Lobby" that they are incapable of reaching an independent judgment about the conflict.

During the US presidential race, Barack Obama was ridiculed for being a messiah-like figure. The idea does not sound so funny now. It is hard to imagine anyone less saving Israel, the Palestinians, and the world from another four years of mindless violence.

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and the soon to be published An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.

The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of Al Jazeera.
 
 
 Source: Al Jazeera 
 
 
 
 
 

[bigron]

The Language of Death

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090112_the_language_of_death/

Posted on Jan 12, 2009
By Chris Hedges


AP Photo / Abdel Kareem Hana, Fire and smoke is seen from Israeli miltary operations in Gaza City.



The incursion into Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel. It is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use the lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase of the decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. The assault on Gaza is about creating squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos where life for Palestinians will be barely sustainable. It is about building ringed Palestinian enclaves where Israel will always have the ability to shut off movement, food, medicine and goods to perpetuate misery. The Israeli attack on Gaza is about building a hell on earth.

This attack is the final Israeli push to extinguish a Palestinian state and crush or expel the Palestinian people. The images of dead Palestinian children, lined up as if asleep on the floor of the main hospital in Gaza, are a metaphor for the future. Israel will, from now on, speak to the Palestinians in the language of death. And the language of death is all the Palestinians will be able to speak back. The slaughter—let’s stop pretending this is a war—is empowering an array of radical Islamists inside and outside of Gaza. It is ominously demolishing the shaky foundations of the corrupt secular Arab regimes on Israel’s borders, from Egypt to Jordan to Syria to Lebanon. It is about creating a new Middle East, one ruled by enraged Islamic radicals.

Hamas cannot lose this conflict. Militant movements feed off martyrs, and Israel is delivering the maimed and the dead by the truckload. Hamas fighters, armed with little more than light weapons, a few rockets and small mortars, are battling one of the most sophisticated military machines on the planet. And the determined resistance by these doomed fighters exposes, throughout the Arab world, the gutlessness of dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who refuses to open Egypt’s common border with Gaza despite the slaughter. Israel, when it bombed Lebanon two years ago, sought to destroy Hezbollah. By the time it withdrew it had swelled Hezbollah’s power base and handed it heroic status throughout the Arab world. Israel is now doing the same for Hamas.

The refusal by political leaders from Barack Obama to nearly every member of the U.S. Congress to speak out in the major media in defense of the rule of law and fundamental human rights exposes our cowardice and hypocrisy. Those who openly condemn the Israeli crimes, including Israelis such as Yuri Avnery, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe, Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, as well as American stalwarts Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich, Norman Finkelstein and Richard Falk, are ignored or treated like lepers. They are denied a platform in the press. They are rendered nearly voiceless. Falk, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied territories and a former professor of international law at Princeton, was refused entry into Israel in December, detained for 20 hours and deported. Never mind that nearly all these voices are Jewish.

I called Avnery at his home in Israel. He is Israel’s conscience. Avnery was born in Germany. He moved to Palestine as a young boy with his parents. He left school at the age of 14 and a year later joined the underground paramilitary group known as the Irgun. Four years afterward, disgusted with its use of violence, he walked away from the clandestine organization, which carried out armed attacks on British occupation authorities and Arabs. “You can’t talk to me about terrorism, I was a terrorist,” he says when confronted with his persistent calls for peace with the Palestinians. Avnery was a fighter in the Samson’s Foxes commando unit during the 1948 war. He wrote the elite unit’s anthem. He became, after the war, a force for left-wing politics in Israel and one of the country’s most prominent journalists, running the alternative HaOlam HaZeh magazine. He served in the Israeli Knesset. During the 1982 siege of Beirut he met, in open defiance of Israeli law, with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He has joined Arab protesters in Israel the past few days and denounces what he calls Israel’s “instinct of using force” with the Palestinians and the “moral insanity” of the attack on Gaza. Avnery, now 85, was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in 1975 by an Israeli opponent, and in 2006 the right-wing activist Baruch Marzel called on the Israeli military to carry out a targeted assassination of Avnery.

“The state of Israel, like any other state,” Avnery said, “cannot tolerate having its citizens shelled, bombed or rocketed, but there has been no thought as to how to solve the problem through political means or to analyze where this phenomenon has come from, what has caused it. Israelis, as a whole, cannot put themselves in the shoes of others. We are too self-centered. We cannot stand in the shoes of Palestinians or Arabs to ask how we would react in the same situation. Sometimes, very rarely, it happens. Years ago when Ehud Barak was asked how he would behave if were a Palestinian, he said ‘I would join a terrorist organization.’ If you do not understand Hamas, if you do not understand why Hamas does what it does, if you don’t understand Palestinians, you take recourse in brute force.”

The public debate about the Gaza attack engages in the absurd pretense that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, whose security and dignity are being threatened. This blind defense of Israeli brutality toward the Palestinians betrays the memory of those killed in other genocides, from the Holocaust to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia. The lesson of the Holocaust is not that Jews are special. It is not that Jews are unique. It is not that Jews are eternal victims. The lesson of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to halt genocide, and you do not—no matter who carries out that genocide or who it is directed against—you are culpable. And we are very culpable. The F-16 jet fighters, the Apache attack helicopters, the 250-pound “smart” GBU-39 bombs are all part of the annual $2.4 billion in military aid the U.S. gives to Israel. Palestinians are being slaughtered with American-made weapons. They are being slaughtered by an Israeli military we lavishly bankroll. But perhaps our callous indifference to human suffering is to be expected. We, after all, kill women and children on an even vaster scale in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bloody hands of Israel mirror our own.

There will be more dead Palestinian children. There will be more cases like that of the U.N. school, used as a sanctuary by terrified families, that was blown to bits by Israeli shells, with more than 40 killed, half of them women and children. There will be more emaciated, orphaned children. There will be more screaming or comatose wounded in the corridors of Gaza’s glutted hospital corridors. And there will be more absurd news reports, like the one on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, titled “A Gaza War Full of Traps and Trickery.” In this story, unnamed Israeli intelligence officials gave us a spin on the war worthy of the White House fabrications made on the eve of the Iraq war. We learned about the perfidious and dirty tactics of Hamas fighters. Foreign journalists, barred from Gaza and unable to check the veracity of the Israeli version of the war, have abandoned their trade as reporters to become stenographers. The cynicism of conveying propaganda as truth, as long as it is well sourced, is the poison of American journalism. If this is all journalism has become, if moral outrage, the courage to defy the powerful, the commitment to tell the truth and to give a voice to those who without us would have no voice, no longer matters, our journalism schools should focus exclusively on shorthand. It seems to be the skill most ardently coveted by most senior editors and news producers.

There have always been powerful Israeli leaders, since the inception of the state in 1948, who have called for the total physical removal of the Palestinians. The ethnic cleansing of some 800,000 Palestinians by Jewish militias in 1948 was, for them, only the start. But there were also a few Israeli leaders, including the assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who argued that Israel could not pick itself up and move to another geographical spot on the globe. Israel, Rabin believed, would have to make peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors to survive. Rabin’s vision of two states, however, appears to have died with him. The embrace of wholesale ethnic cleansing by the Israeli leadership and military now appears to be unquestioned.

“It seems,” the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote recently, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system. ... Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology—in its most consensual and simplistic variety—has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide]. …”

Gaza has descended into chaos. Hamas, which despite Israeli propaganda has never mustered the sustained resistance Hezbollah carried out during the Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon, will be ruled in the future by antagonistic bands of warlords, clans and mafias. Gaza will resemble Somalia. And out of that power vacuum will rise a new generation of angry jihadists, many of whom may spurn Hamas for more radical organizations. Al-Qaida, which has been working to gain a foothold in Gaza, may now have found its opening.

“Hamas will win the war, no matter what happens,” Avnery said. “They will be considered by hundreds of millions of Arabs heroes who have recovered the dignity and pride of Arab nations. If at the end of the war they are still standing in Gaza this will be a huge victory for them, to hold out against this huge Israeli army and firepower will be an incredible achievement. They will gain even more than Hezbollah did during the last war.”

Israel operates under the illusion that it can crush Hamas and install a quisling Palestinian government in Gaza and the West Bank. This puppet government will be led, Israel believes, by the discredited Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, now cowering in the West Bank after being driven out of Gaza. Abbas, like most of the corrupt Fatah leadership, is a detested figure. He is dismissed as the Marshal Pétain of the Palestinian people, or perhaps the Hamid Karzai or the Nouri al-Maliki. He is as loathed as he is powerless.

Israel’s destruction of Hamas and reoccupation of Gaza will not bring peace or security to Israel. It will merely obliterate the only internal organization with enough stature and authority in Gaza to maintain order. The Israeli assault, by destroying Hamas as a governing force, has opened a Pandora’s box of ills. Life will become a nightmare for most Palestinians and, in the years ahead, for most Israelis.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
Web site development by Hop Studios | Hosted by NEXCESS.NET

[ellas95]

Israeli war planes bomb mosque in Gaza Strip Rafah

[Truth researcher]

GazaFriends: A Song for Gaza
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=dlfhoU66s4Y
(please circulate widely)‏
_________________________________
[GazaFriends] FREE GAZA TO ISRAEL: “WE ARE COMING

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
http://www.freegaza.org/
For More Information, Please Contact:
(Cyprus) Huwaida Arraf, +357 96 723 999 or +357 99 081 767 huwaida.arraf@gmail.com
(Gaza) Ewa Jasiewicz, +972 598 700 497 freelance@mailworks.org
(Egypt) Caoimhe Butterly, +20 121 027 072 sahara78@hotmail.co.uk
(U.S.) Ramzi Kysia, +1 703 994 5422 rrkysia@yahoo.com

(Cyprus, 11 January 2009) - The Free Gaza Movement ship, "SPIRIT OF HUMANITY," will leave Larnaca Port at 12:00 noon, Monday, 12 January, on an emergency mission to besieged Gaza. The ship will carry desperately needed doctors, journalists, human rights workers, and members of several European parliaments as well as medical supplies. This voyage marks Free Gaza's second attempt to break through the blockade since Israel began attacking the Gaza Strip on 27 December. Between August and December 2008, the Free Gaza Movement successfully challenged the Israeli blockade five times, landing the first international ships in the port of Gaza since 1967.

The Israeli military violently attacked an earlier attempt by the Free Gaza Movement to send an emergency boat filled with doctors and medical supplies to Gaza. In the early hours of Tuesday, 30 December, the Israeli navy deliberately, repeatedly, and without warning rammed the unarmed ship, the DIGNITY, causing significant structural damage and endangering the lives of its passengers and crew. The ship found safe harbor in Lebanon, and is currently awaiting repairs.

Fouad Ahidar, a member of the Belgian Parliament sailing to Gaza aboard the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, responded to concerns that Israel may attack the unarmed mercy ship by saying, "I have five children that are very worried about me, but I told them, you can sit on your couch and watch these atrocities on the television, or you can choose to take action to make them stop."

Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have injured thousands of civilians and killed over 800 people, including scores of women and children. This ongoing Israeli massacre severely and massively violates international humanitarian law defined by the Geneva Conventions, especially the obligations of an Occupying Power and the requirements of the laws of war.

The United Nations has failed to protect the Palestinian civilian population from Israel's massive violations of international humanitarian law. Israel has closed off Gaza from the international community and demanded that all foreigners leave. But Huwaida Arraf, an organizer with the Free Gaza Movements, stated that, "We cannot just sit by and wait for Israel to decide to stop the killing and open the borders for relief workers to pick up the pieces. We are coming in. There is an urgent need for this mission as Palestinian civilians in Gaza are being terrorized and slaughtered by Israel, and access to humanitarian relief denied to them. When states and the international bodies responsible for taking action to stop such atrocities chose to be impotent, then we--the citizens of the world--must act. Our common humanity demands nothing less."

Israel has been notified that we are coming. A copy of the notification to the Israeli Authorities is below.
The media is invited to the Larnaca Port at 10:00am, Monday, January 12 for final preparations and a press conference before departure.

###

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Take Action! CALL the Israeli Government and let them know that the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY is coming to Gaza. DEMAND that Israel immediately STOP slaughtering civilians in Gaza and STOP using violence to prevent human rights and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people.

CALL
Mark Regev in the Prime Minister's office:
+972 2670 5354 or +972 5 0620 3264
mark.regev@it.pmo.gov.il

Shlomo Dror in the Ministry of Defence:
+972 3697 5339 or +972 50629 8148
mediasar@mod.gov.il

Major Liebovitz from the Israeli Navy:
+ 972 5 781 86248

Official Notification of Intent to Enter
January 11, 2009

To: The Israeli Ministry of Defense, Fax: 972-3-697-6717
To: The Israeli Navy
To: The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Fax 972-2-5303367

From: The Free Gaza Movement

This letter serves as a formal notification to you as the Occupying Power and belligerent force in the Gaza Strip that on Monday, January 12 we are navigating the motor vessel, Spirit of Humanity, from the Port of Larnaca to the port of Gaza City. Our vessel will be flying the Greek flag, and, as such, falls under the jurisdiction Greece.

We will be sailing from Cypriot waters into international waters, then directly into the territorial waters of the Gaza Strip without entering or nearing Israeli territorial waters. We expect to arrive at the Gaza Port on Tuesday, January 13, 2009.

We will be carrying urgently needed medical supplies in sealed boxes, cleared by customs at the Larnaca International Airport and the Port of Larnaca. There will be a total of 30 passengers and crew on board, among them members of various European Parliaments and several physicians. Our boat and cargo will also have received security clearance from the Port Authorities in Cyprus before we depart.

As it will be confirmed that neither we, the cargo, any of the boat's contents, nor the boat itself constitute any threat to the security of Israel or its armed forces, we do not expect any interference with our voyage by Israel's authorities.

On Tuesday, December 30, an Israeli Navy vessel violently, and without warning, attacked our motor vessel Dignity, disabling the vessel and endangering the lives of the 16 civilians on board. This notice serves as clear notification to you of our approach. Any attack on the motor vessel, Spirit of Humanity, will be premeditated and any harm inflicted on the 30 civilians on board will be considered the result of a deliberate attack on unarmed civilians.

The Steering Committee of the Free Gaza Movement
Contact: Huwaida Arraf, Free Gaza Movement, 357 96 723 999

[DJDaveMark]

Israel is not targeting Hamas militants in Gaza. How can a warship barking it's lead and fire onto a beach and beyond be said to be targeting anything? How could a tank, which were first used in the first World War and who's essential armament has not changed - it raises it's barrel and it fires - how could an artillery piece, equally using essentially the same targeting as it did a century or more ago, be said to be targeting anything? And how could anybody be said to be 'targeting' when more than 300 women and children have been killed so far in this murderous bombardment of Gaza?

And why is every Palestinian fighter a 'militant'? ...as has been said. These people are the legitimate armed forces of the elected government of Palestine that are being bombarded! And as for their tunnels, well, they wouldn't need tunnels if they were receiving, right off the assembly lines of the arms manufacturers of the United states and Great Britain, the latest armory to murder people with.

The quote has been taken from 0:01:12 - 0:02:58 of this video...

GEORGE GALLOWAY STOP THE GAZA MASSACRE (FULL VERSION) 8/1/09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NwI0EKdRLY

Which accompanies this article...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21709.htm

George Galloway also does a televised live debate show taking questions from the public...

Press TV: Weekly debate with MP George Galloway.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nE9lO6IH4hE  (Part 1 of 5)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=L4pa_TZTM78 (Part 2 of 5)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfB_hkoTfo (Part 3 of 5)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=SdOQJhYFtTc (Part 4 of 5)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=tl-H2WDpUFY (Part 5 of 5)

George Galloway is a British politician, author and talk show host noted for his socialist views, confrontational style, and rhetorical skill. He has been a Member of Parliament (MP) since 1987 and currently represents Respect for the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency. He was previously a Labour Party MP for Glasgow Hillhead and for Glasgow Kelvin.
George Galloway has always appeared to inspire a quite remarkable mix of emotions. But whether you admire him, loathe him or lampoon him - never, ever underestimate him.

http://www.georgegalloway.com/

A Scotsman to be proud of!

Cheers,

DJDaveMark (Scottish)

[Biggs]

Israeli warplanes continue to drop bombs ahead of advancing toops in southwestern Gaza City - 27 dead today, 930 total
Ma'an news

www.uruknet.info?p=50770

Link: www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=34912

Jan 13, 2009

Gaza - Ma’an - Israeli troop movement was focused on the south-western Gaza City neighborhood of Tel Al-Hawwah overnight Monday, with reports of 27 more dead mostly from clashes in the Az-Zaytoun and Tel Al-Hawwah neighborhoods.

The death toll of 18 days of Israeli attacks is 930, with more than 4,280 injured.

Israeli troops invaded and ransacked several homes in the southern Gaza City neighborhood of Tel Al-Hawwah, gathering groups of soldiers on the roofs of homes and firing on scared locals. At least four were killed in the attack.

As usual the ground attacks were preceded by air and tank fire. Missiles struck the An-Nasser home as well as the Abd Al-Carpentry workshop in Tel Al-Hawwah. Many residents were fleeing their homes in the hill-top area overlooking the Gaza shore as Israeli troops overran the area.

Down the eastern slope of Tel Al-Hawwah residents reported intensive shelling near the Al-Mujtama college, which was its self demolished. Residents are fleeing this residential neighborhood as well, many not knowing which areas in Gaza City are safe.

Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades sent several statements announcing their attacks on Israeli troops near Tel AL-Hawwah. According to their reports at least eight Israeli military vehicles were hit including two bulldozers being used to tear down buildings and facilitate troop movement in the densely populated city.

In parallel the An-Nasser brigades announced that they launched an RPG and four homemade projectiles at an Israeli tank participating in the ground battles.

Further east and closer to the city center resistance factions clashed with invading Israeli ground troops. The troops were accompanied with tank and air fire, which resulted in the death of two Al-Qassam fighters in the Az-Zaytoun neighborhood. The Brigades identified the dead as Ahmad Abu Gazar and Muhammad Al-Hawar.

On the other end of the city in the northern neighborhood of Sheikh Radwan, dozens were injured as Israeli troops came at the city from a second direction. Two were killed in strikes on the nearby Al-Karama neighborhood.

Further north near the border with Israel Israeli warplanes struck the Bet Lahiya square in Al-Taw’am area, demolishing a residential apartment tower. Strikes in Jabaliya killed two.

In Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip Israeli troops attacked a group of resistance fighters near the At-Tawhid mosque. One was killed in strikes on the Abbasan area.

Ari attacks in Rafah destroyed the Khuza’a and Kaware homes, and in the central strip more air strikes destroyed several buildings in the Nusseruat refugee camp.

Medical Sources

Head of Emergency and Ambulance Services in the Ministry of Health Muawiya Hassanain said he had received 11 bodies at the Gaza City hospital since dawn, but said there were certainly more bodies in the streets and beneath bombed buildings who cannot be reached because of ongoing Israeli attacks.

Among the dead identified Tuesday morning were two from the Al-Sherbasi family, killed in the Az-Zaitoun neighborhood, but ambulances have been unable to reach the dead and collect them because of the continued fighting in the area. The same was true, he said, for two dead in the Al-Karamah area, since Israeli forces are still pushing into the area and will not allow emergency vehicles into the area.

***Updated 11:27 Bethlehem time








:: Article nr. 50770 sent on 13-jan-2008 11:59 ECT
Israeli warplanes continue to drop bombs ahead of advancing toops in southwestern Gaza City - 27 dead today, 930 total
Ma'an news




Jan 13, 2009

Gaza - Ma’an - Israeli troop movement was focused on the south-western Gaza City neighborhood of Tel Al-Hawwah overnight Monday, with reports of 27 more dead mostly from clashes in the Az-Zaytoun and Tel Al-Hawwah neighborhoods.

The death toll of 18 days of Israeli attacks is 930, with more than 4,280 injured.

Israeli troops invaded and ransacked several homes in the southern Gaza City neighborhood of Tel Al-Hawwah, gathering groups of soldiers on the roofs of homes and firing on scared locals. At least four were killed in the attack.

As usual the ground attacks were preceded by air and tank fire. Missiles struck the An-Nasser home as well as the Abd Al-Carpentry workshop in Tel Al-Hawwah. Many residents were fleeing their homes in the hill-top area overlooking the Gaza shore as Israeli troops overran the area.

Down the eastern slope of Tel Al-Hawwah residents reported intensive shelling near the Al-Mujtama college, which was its self demolished. Residents are fleeing this residential neighborhood as well, many not knowing which areas in Gaza City are safe.

Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades sent several statements announcing their attacks on Israeli troops near Tel AL-Hawwah. According to their reports at least eight Israeli military vehicles were hit including two bulldozers being used to tear down buildings and facilitate troop movement in the densely populated city.

In parallel the An-Nasser brigades announced that they launched an RPG and four homemade projectiles at an Israeli tank participating in the ground battles.

Further east and closer to the city center resistance factions clashed with invading Israeli ground troops. The troops were accompanied with tank and air fire, which resulted in the death of two Al-Qassam fighters in the Az-Zaytoun neighborhood. The Brigades identified the dead as Ahmad Abu Gazar and Muhammad Al-Hawar.

On the other end of the city in the northern neighborhood of Sheikh Radwan, dozens were injured as Israeli troops came at the city from a second direction. Two were killed in strikes on the nearby Al-Karama neighborhood.

Further north near the border with Israel Israeli warplanes struck the Bet Lahiya square in Al-Taw’am area, demolishing a residential apartment tower. Strikes in Jabaliya killed two.

In Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip Israeli troops attacked a group of resistance fighters near the At-Tawhid mosque. One was killed in strikes on the Abbasan area.

Ari attacks in Rafah destroyed the Khuza’a and Kaware homes, and in the central strip more air strikes destroyed several buildings in the Nusseruat refugee camp.

Medical Sources

Head of Emergency and Ambulance Services in the Ministry of Health Muawiya Hassanain said he had received 11 bodies at the Gaza City hospital since dawn, but said there were certainly more bodies in the streets and beneath bombed buildings who cannot be reached because of ongoing Israeli attacks.

Among the dead identified Tuesday morning were two from the Al-Sherbasi family, killed in the Az-Zaitoun neighborhood, but ambulances have been unable to reach the dead and collect them because of the continued fighting in the area. The same was true, he said, for two dead in the Al-Karamah area, since Israeli forces are still pushing into the area and will not allow emergency vehicles into the area.

***Updated 11:27 Bethlehem time

[Biggs]

* * * NOT SATIRE * * *
Livni: Gaza offensive is good for the Palestinians
Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent

www.uruknet.info?p=50769

Link: www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055130.html


Samera Baalusha (34) carries her surving child Mohamad (15 months) while she waits to see the body of her daughter Jawaher Baalusha (aged 4) during the funeral held for her and four of her sisters who were killed in an Israeli missile strike, on December 29, 2008 in the Jebaliya refugee camp, in the northern Gaza Strip



Jun 13, 2009


Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Tuesday said that Israel's campaign against Hamas in Gaza was serving the interest of the Palestinian people.[OMFG WTF!!! - Biggs]

She added that the Palestinian Islamist group was showing signs of distress in Gaza, although its leadership in Damascus was not displaying this.

Livni, a prime ministerial hopeful, also said that there was a large gap between what Hamas officials were saying in private and public.

The foreign minister was echoing similar remarks made on Tuesday by Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, who said his troops have inflicted damage on Hamas in Gaza, but will continue fighting to achieve more.

On Saturday, a senior Israeli military commander involved in Operation Cast Lead said that Hamas militants are suffering from exhaustion and are deserting battle.

[Biggs]

A Scene Of Devastation

Video Report From Inside Gaza

Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin reports on the public who are struggling to cope under the bombardment in Gaza

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21742.htm

[Biggs]

Gaza is Sinking in a River of Blood:

A Message from a Gazan to the World

By Mohammed Fares Al Majdalawi

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21728.htm

January 12, 2009 "Commondreams" --- I want to write about the suffering of my people and my family in these days of siege against the people of Gaza. 888 people have been killed and more than 3700 injured. The Red Cross has accused the Israeli military of repeatedly refusing to allow ambulances to go to Zeitoun area, so those who are injured become those who die; a premeditated and purposeful violation of human rights.

In my house we can't get basic needs. No food. No bread. No fuel. No future. Yesterday, my father went to the bakery at 5 AM. He waited 5 hours to get one loaf of bread, which is not enough for my family because there are 11 of us. So today it was my turn. I went to all the bakeries -- all were closed.

There is no safe place we can go. We cannot communicate with our relatives and friends -- networks are down as missiles rain on our homes, mosques and even hospitals.

Our life is centered around the burials of those who have died, our martyrs, At night our camp, Jabalya Refugee Camp, is a ghost town, with no sounds other than those of Israeli military aircraft.

There is a horror in every minute and it is clear especially in the lives of children. For example, there were five sisters in one family killed from the Israeli occupation while they stayed in their home. But there are 800,000 other children in Gaza, all afraid, all waiting for someone or something to help them. They are caught in a prison that is becoming a concentration camp. Every day we sleep and open our eyes to the Israeli crimes of killing children and women and destroying civilians' homes. My words are unable to convey my feelings about this life in Gaza.

I have two messages to the world, to those who claim they love peace and seek freedom.

Imagine your life consisting of no electricity, destroyed homes, the sounds and strikes of missiles, day and night, and the only hunger as great as that for food is the hunger for an end to this occupation and siege. Imagine it is not just you but your children and your family who tell you through their eyes and cries: "We are afraid of the missiles." "We cannot sleep." "We may never sleep again." Imagine you are the dam and the river of blood has turned into a flash flood. How long could you stand it?

We wouldn't have to stand it any longer if the world stood with us. If they demanded an end to the siege and the killings and demolition of houses for our children. If they demanded assistance reach the people through rallies and sit-ins.

Finally, I invite you to come to Gaza and see the Holocaust. Because despite the siege, the barriers, the killing of my people and homes, and the total destruction of our lives by the Israeli occupation, they can not and will not kill the will of our people for equality and justice.

Mohammed Al Majdawali is a university student, member of Al-Assria Children's Library, and volunteer with Middle East Children's Alliance. He lives in Jabalya Refugee Camp with his family and aspires to be a professional filmmaker.

To help MECA send more medical aid to Gaza for thousands of sick and injured people living under siege, www.mecaforpeace.org

[Hagbard Celine]

It's hard to remain unbiased in front of this injustice...


One side of me would like to deny Israel their human rights and invade the country like they do/did...

On the other hand,I wouldn't feel comfortable applying fascism to my fellow humans.


So I guess I'll let the professional fascists aka Zionist supported live with their conscience...and the fact that millions won't think like me and stone them to death if given the opportunity.

[grapecrusher1]

whitney is claiming that the Hamas leadership is not only refusing an unconditional surrender but are making demands.  This is making it very difficult for The Israeli leadership that didn't account for this possibility and are being painted as the maniacal butchers they are. 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21739.htm

These people are gutsy and would prefer to die than be crushed further.  I could only hope that the soft over indulgent "Western" peoples would have half the integrity. 

[TBH]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055161.html

IDF Chief: Hamas bombers posing as Israeli troops in Gaza
By Shahar Ilan, Haaretz Correspondent

Hamas militants have been dressing up as Israel Defense Forces soldiers in uniform in an attempt to carry out suicide bombings against Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip, IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said Tuesday.

Ashkenazi told the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee in Tel Aviv that the militants have tried to penetrate IDF battle lines and detonate their explosives next to Israeli troops.

The IDF Chief also revealed that the army had uncovered a number of tunnels dug with the intent of being used to abduct IDF soldiers.

Ashkenazi said that the Israel Air Force had managed to strike the majority of its targets in the Strip within the first four minutes of the air campaign which began Operation Cast Lead 18 days ago.

Twenty minutes after the IAF's first bombing, it also carried out raids on Gaza sites used by militants to launch Grad rockets, Qassam rockets, and mortar shells.

He added that the government had approved the operation, days before it began and before the IDF had even determined when it was going to launch the campaign. This gave the IDF the ability to begin the operation the moment they decided the conditions were right.

[ellas95]

Israel to do what US did to Japan in WWII? 

The head of an Israeli opposition party says Tel Aviv should deal with Gaza the same way the US dealt with Japan in World War II.

"We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II," Avigdor Lieberman, the head of an ultra-nationalist opposition party, said Tuesday.

Japan was brought down to its knees before surrendering in 1945 after the US dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Lieberman was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as saying that Israel needed to decisively "break the will" of Hamas in the Gaza Strip -- home to some 1.5 million Palestinians.

Tel Aviv launched Operation Cast Lead on Dec. 27 to put an end to rocket attacks on southern Israel. At least 940 Palestinians have died during the offensive, while some 4,400 others have been wounded.

The Israeli army has sustained serious casualties since a ground operation into Gaza was launched in the second week of the attacks. Official numbers indicate at least 10 Israeli soldiers have been killed in battles against Hamas fighters.

Hamas, the democratically-elected ruler of the coastal sliver, demands a cessation of an 18-month Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip before its fighters suspend rocket attacks.

"Israel won't be secure so long as Hamas is in power, and therefore we need to come to a decision that we will break the will of Hamas to keep fighting," said Lieberman, who quit Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's coalition government last year.
MD/HGH 
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=82080&sectionid=351020202

[grapecrusher1]

Significant  differences:
no american boots on the ground
hiroshima and nagasaki

I prefer the analogy of how the americans dealt with the pesky Native population.  the first homeland security operation.

starvation, destroyed water resources, annihilated settlements, extermination, etc etc

[Hagbard Celine]

...and most of all ,not helping or let anyone befriend or help them.

[Revolt426]

Another difference : Harry Truman was a 33 degree mason and a traitor. Another difference : Japan and the U.S. are on two different sides of the world

Israel and Gaza are next to each other and Israel has oppressed Palastinians since it was born.

[UK Lyn]

A family friend just saw some of the shredded corpses of Gaza women and children.

They said to me "How can they [zionist IsraHell] believe in God?  Maybe no-one there really does"

.

[deconstructmyhouse]

Another difference : Harry Truman was a 33 degree mason and a traitor. Another difference : Japan and the U.S. are on two different sides of the world

Israel and Gaza are next to each other and Israel has oppressed Palastinians since it was born.

I sat on Harry Truman's lap when I was ten years old...

[deconstructmyhouse]

A family friend just saw some of the shredded corpses of Gaza women and children.

They said to me "How can they [zionist IsraHell] believe in God?  Maybe no-one there really does"

.

not to hijack the thread with Harry Truman stories:
Yes, this is a godless war.  What war isn't?
the dread I feel for this war wakes me up every night, I have to fight to get still and get over the panic.
It's like I can hear and feel and taste this war, more than any other.  I push it away in the day but at night it's in my dreams.

[ellas95]

Greece hinders US arms delivery to Israel
Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:39:42 GMT
The US has to re-route arms shipment to Israel as Athens declined to allow a Greek port be used as a transit point, fearing nationwide protests.

The transit was called off by the Greek government on Tuesday, after the issue provoked a media outcry in Greece, where Israel's 19-day-old offensive in Gaza is deeply unpopular.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, however, painted a different picture, saying that the route had been changed to avoid Greece, "because the Greek government had some issue with the off-loading of some of that shipment in their country."

Morrell declined to say what type of arms were included in the shipment.

This is while the US military claimed that the shipment of 325 containers of ammunition from the Greek port of Astakos to a US stockpile in Israel was canceled in light of the proximity of the Israeli port of Ashdod - the shipment's destination - to the conflict in the Gaza Strip.
Opposition parties in Greece have called for public demonstrations in Astakos on Wednesday and Thursday, raising fears of fresh nationwide protests, only weeks after violent anti-government riots were subdued.

Since the beginning of the Israeli attacks on the besieged Gaza Strip on December 27, more than 975 people have been killed and another 4,500 have been wounded.

FF/JG/AA/MMN
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=82263&sectionid=351020202

[mslynx]

I knew in my heart that the ship from the US would be detained. For that I am glad.
The new news that I have come across is the lack of being able to try Israel for war crimes. Does this finally prove that Israel is a rogue/ terrorist state that is not recognized by the world community?
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=82310&sectionid=351020202

[ellas95]

Even cemeteries have not been spared from the bombing of Zion,,, chased the missiles until the dead in their graves











http://s467.photobucket.com/albums/rr34/aboalbara_1990/Esabat/

[spangler]

Even cemeteries have not been spared from the bombing of Zion

The Gazans are have run out of places to bury their dead

[lord edward coke]

Natural Gas In Gaza!
A Secret Behind Israel's Siege of Gaza: Palestinians
Have Oil and Natural Gas Resources
Martha Rose Crow, M.S.
1-7-9
 
"there is an abundance of oil reserves both on the strip and offshore" http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entries/q_israeli_palestinian_peace/
 
"The Palestinians are, in aggregate, energy rich. For the past six years, the Palestinian Authority has been sitting on a major gas field that contains at least 1.4 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas."
http://www.epalestine.com/PalestineEnergy.pdf
 
"Palestine was rewarded with an oil reserve 22 miles off of the coast of the Gaza Strip.  The entire country was excited by this natural mineral that would hopefully provide them with the economic freedom and financial stability they desired. Unfortunately, the financial success did not come directly on the heels of their discovery"
http://www.oilandgasinvestingglossary.com/palestines_natural_gas_troubles.asp
 
To find the real reasons behind conflicts and wars in this world, you need to follow some or all of four things: Money, blood, power or natural resources (usually oil or natural gas but it can be cobalt like in the Congo).
 
Oil is behind the conflicts in Darfur, Somalia and other similar places.
 
The war in Afghanistan was never about finding bin Laden. It was about uniting Afghanistan into a single government so a pipeline could be constructed to bring a million barrels a day from areas north of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia to markets (http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/sardi7.html).
 
We need to stop listening to what the "official" media tells us when it comes to conflicts and wars because the official media is corporate and government owned and/or controlled by government. Less than one percent of the "news" in the world today is reported and what is reported is usually heavily edited and slanted for propaganda purposes.
 
Governments don't want the world to know that huge genocides are going on just because of oil, gas or other natural resources. The world might get angry as a body and might organize to reject the genocides. Big Oil and Energy doesn't want that to happen because it will interfere with their profits.
 
Historically, it has been "efficient" for Big Energy's short-term profit line to steal resources or get them "lower than wholesale" than to pay the owners decently for them. This is how they've always done business (force by boot and gun).
 
The World has been watching Israel's genocide of the Palestinians for a long time but incredibly, the media never mentions the Palestinians' natural resources or the fact that Israel has thwarted Palestine's efforts to develop them.
 
The Palestinians are usually portrayed on television as victims of impossible, cyclical poverty. Ironic the Palestinians wouldn't have to live in poverty if Israel would let them develop their natural resources.
 
But developing Palestine's energy resources wouldn't be in Israel's self-interest. The oil and gas revenues would empower the Palestinians. They wouldn't have to starve to death or struggle in poverty. Empowered Palestinians would be able to invest in infrastructure of their legal government, Hamas.
 
Israel wants the Palestinians crushed and disappeared so Israel can expand its territories for its citizens, have better access to the sea for its navy and serve as watchdog for US and Israeli hegemony.
 
Israel wants the Palestinians' oil and gas for its own because Israel needs it for its country's needs. Middle eastern countries are loathe to sell their supplies to Israel. The rulers and people of area countries know that Israel has been slaughtering their Muslim kin for over six decades and it is against their morals to help Israel with energy supplies, especially fuel for Israeli tanks, airplanes and military vehicles.
 
To thwart Palestine from developing its energy supplies, Israel keeps the region in turmoil plus in 2005, "Israel delivered a major blow to the Palestinians' fledgling oil industry by choosing to import natural gas from Egypt. By doing this, Israel completely bypassed its neighbor in favor of making a political statement. The Israeli government feared that any money given to Palestine would be later used to fund acts of terrorism against
(Israel."http://www.oilandgasinvestingglossary.com/palestines_natural_gas_troubles.asp)
 
Finding information about Palestine's oil and gas resources is difficult. Even wikipedia doesn't mention it nor do most encyclopedias and other academic resources.
 
The major corporate media has completely ignored and/or has remained blissfully ignorant about Palestinian oil and gas because it goes against the script of how powerful hidden western corporate and government interests want to portray Palestine.
 
Western media, Israel and the US would rather have the world see Palestinians groveling in extreme poverty and/or portrayed as "terrorists" who want to kill everyone.
 
Palestinians, empowered from oil and gas revenues, could live decently. Shed of their impoverished image, the world would see them as the Bright, Shining Human Beings they are. But Bright, Shining Human Beings are harder to disappear than those depicted by governments and the media as untermenschen (nazi German term for "inferior people").
 
If you want to know more about this important subject, the best places to look are oil and energy websites and publications.
 
Palestinian oil and gas is no secret in the energy field. It's just a secret to everyone else.
 
 
 

[bigron]

Israel's looming catastrophe 

15/01/2009 11:58:00 AM GMT
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/Israel_s_looming_catastrophe.html


(AFP) Israel’s current assault on Gaza is only the latest manifestation of a dangerous strategy.
 


 The neocons saw the U.S. military in Iraq as the guarantors against any assault on Israel. In other words, if Israel couldn’t reach some of those distant threats, the U.S. could.


By Robert Parry

For the past three decades, Israel has charted a course that invites its own destruction by relying on two risky propositions: first, that it could extend its security perimeter beyond the reach of a devastating missile attack, and second, that it could permanently control the political debate inside its crucial ally, the United States.

Israel’s current assault on Gaza is only the latest manifestation of this dangerous strategy, but – whether or not Israel succeeds in its stated goal of stopping the launching of short-range Hamas rockets – the more troubling writing for Israel remains on the wall.

If Israel continues to engender hatred across the Muslim world – and thus feeds the growth of extremism – eventually some radical government or group will get hold of a missile or some other means of delivering a payload against Tel Aviv that would wreak mass devastation.

In that event, Israel would almost surely turn to its sophisticated nuclear arsenal and launch a massive retaliatory strike. But to what end? Whatever counter-devastation could be delivered, it would not solve the strategic dilemma facing Israel.

Indeed, retaliation would likely make matters worse by engendering even a stronger determination among Muslims to eliminate whatever would be left of Israel. The situation might even be beyond the military power of the United States to set right.

Yet, this Israeli conundrum is not discussed inside the United States, where – for the past three decades – American neocons have led a powerful propaganda apparatus that demonizes any public figure who dares question hard-line Israeli strategy.

Even Americans with strong affection for Israel are denounced as “anti-Semites” or “pro-terrorist” if they challenge the Israel-is-always-right conventional wisdom that dominates modern Washington, where Democrats and Republicans alike line up to pander to the annual American-Israel Public Affairs Committee conference.

Former President Jimmy Carter, for instance, has become almost a political pariah although he arguably did more than any U.S. official to advance Israel’s security by negotiating the Camp David accords in 1978.

However, it was that event – the agreement between Israel and Egypt, returning the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for a lasting peace commitment – that marked the strategic turning point for both Israel and the United States.

Begin’s fury
Though Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the peace deal, he was furious over the pressure Carter put on him.

Begin – who had led a Zionist terrorist group before Israel’s independence in 1948 and founded the right-wing Likud Party in 1973 – decided he must take steps to prevent Carter from pushing for a broader Israel-Arab peace deal in a potential second term.

Begin’s views were described by Israeli intelligence and foreign affairs official David Kimche in his 1991 book, The Last Option. Kimche wrote that Begin’s government believed that Carter was overly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and was conspiring to force Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.

“Begin was being set up for diplomatic slaughter by the master butchers in Washington,” Kimche wrote. “They had, moreover, the apparent blessing of the two presidents, Carter and [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat, for this bizarre and clumsy attempt at collusion designed to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Kimche continued, “This plan – prepared behind Israel’s back and without her knowledge – must rank as a unique attempt in United States’s diplomatic history of short-changing a friend and ally by deceit and manipulation.”

Begin particularly dreaded the prospect of a second Carter presidential term.

“Unbeknownst to the Israeli negotiators, the Egyptians held an ace up their sleeves, and they were waiting to play it,” Kimche wrote. “The card was President Carter’s tacit agreement that after the American presidential elections in November 1980, when Carter expected to be re-elected for a second term, he would be free to compel Israel to accept a settlement of the Palestinian problem on his and Egyptian terms, without having to fear the backlash of the American Jewish lobby.”

Begin’s fear of Carter’s reelection – combined with alarm over Carter's perceived bungling in Iran where Islamic extremists took power in 1979 – set the stage for secret collaboration between Begin and the Republican presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, according to another Israeli intelligence official, Ari Ben-Menashe.

In his 1992 memoir, Profits of War, Ben-Menashe said the view of Begin and other Likud leaders was one of contempt for Carter.

“Begin loathed Carter for the peace agreement forced upon him at Camp David,” Ben-Menashe wrote. “As Begin saw it, the agreement took away Sinai from Israel, did not create a comprehensive peace, and left the Palestinian issue hanging on Israel’s back.”

Ben-Menashe, an Iranian-born Jew who had immigrated to Israel as a teen-ager, became part of a secret Israeli program to reestablish its intelligence network in Iran after it had been decimated by the Islamic revolution.

Ben-Menashe wrote that Begin authorized shipments to Iran of small arms and some spare parts, via South Africa, as early as September 1979. In November of that year, events in Iran took another troubling turn when Islamic radicals seized the US Embassy and took 52 Americans hostage, prompting a US trade embargo.

Carter catches on
By April 1980, however, Carter had learned about the covert Israeli shipments, which included 300 tires for Iran’s U.S.-supplied jet fighters. That prompted an angry complaint from Carter to Begin.

“There had been a rather tense discussion between President Carter and Prime Minister Begin in the spring of 1980 in which the President made clear that the Israelis had to stop that, and that we knew that they were doing it, and that we would not allow it to continue, at least not allow it to continue privately and without the knowledge of the American people,” Carter’s press secretary Jody Powell told me.

“And it stopped,” Powell said. At least, it stopped temporarily.

Questioned by congressional investigators a dozen years later, Carter said he felt that by April 1980, “Israel cast their lot with Reagan,” according to notes I found among the unpublished documents in the files of a congressional investigation in 1992.

Carter traced the Israeli opposition to his reelection to a “lingering concern [among] Jewish leaders that I was too friendly with Arabs.”

Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski also recognized the Israeli hostility. Brzezinski said the Carter White House was well aware that the Begin government had “an obvious preference for a Reagan victory.”

Extensive evidence now exists, too, that Begin’s preference for a Reagan victory led Israelis to join in a covert operation with Republicans to contact Iranian leaders behind Carter’s back and delay release of the 52 American hostages until after Reagan defeated Carter in November 1980.

In his book and in sworn testimony about this so-called “October Surprise” controversy, Ben-Menashe asserted that then-vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush personally participated in a key meeting in October 1980 in Paris. Bush denied that claim at two press conferences in 1992 but was never questioned under oath in any formal government investigation.

More evidence
Since then, additional evidence has emerged linking the senior Bush to the clandestine Republican contacts with Iran during the 1980 campaign. Chicago Tribune reporter John Maclean said he was informed by a well-placed Republican Party source in mid-October 1980 that Bush was heading to Paris for a meeting with Iranians about the hostage crisis.

David Andelman, a former New York Times correspondent who was assisting French intelligence chief Alexandre deMarenches on his memoir, said deMarenches described arranging meetings between Republicans and Iranians in Paris but insisted that be left out of the book for fear it would hurt his friend, George H.W. Bush.

After checking its intelligence files at the request of the US Congress, the Russian government submitted an extraordinary report in January 1993 that identified the senior George Bush as one of several Republicans who negotiated with the Iranians in Paris during the 1980 campaign.

The congressional task force that requested the Russian report as part of its “October Surprise” investigation in 1992 never made the report public or even disclosed its existence.

I discovered the Russian document in a storage box left behind by the task force, which – by the time the Russian report arrived – had already decided to “debunk” the allegations of a Republican-Iranian hostage deal. The task force cleared Bush without ever questioning him.

In 1993, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who followed Begin to power in Israel, became another voice endorsing the allegations of a Republican-Iranian “October Surprise” deal back in 1980.

When asked in an interview whether there had been a Republican “October Surprise” operation, Shamir responded, “Of course, it was.” [For details on this mystery, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

The 52 American hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, just as Ronald Reagan was beginning his inaugural address.

Though the allegations of a Republican-Iranian deal have remained in dispute, investigations into the controversy confirmed that Israel did resume military shipments to Iran in 1981 with the knowledge of Reagan-Bush officials who permitted the secret deliveries to go forward.

By the mid-1980s, the Reagan-Bush administration was playing both sides of the Iran-Iraq war, funneling financial and some military support to Iraq while also selling missiles to Iran, both through third countries such as Israel and directly from US stockpiles.

Rise of the neoconservatives
The election of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1980 also coincided with the emergence of a political movement known as neoconservatism.

Many neoconservatives had been liberals or even leftists but broke with the Democratic Party in the 1970s to favor a more aggressive policy toward the Soviet Union. The neoconservatives also wanted a more staunchly pro-Israeli position in the Middle East.

The Reagan-Bush administration rewarded the neocons for their support in the 1980 campaign with their first taste of executive power, giving them credentials that would prove crucial more than two decades later in their ability to push through the Iraq War.

Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz became assistant secretaries of state in the Reagan-Bush administration. Abrams now handles Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, and Wolfowitz was an architect of the Iraq policy as deputy secretary of defense. One of Wolfowitz’s protégés from the Reagan-Bush era, I. Lewis Libby Jr., became Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and a leading hawk on Iraq.

Another key neocon -- and Iraq policy architect -- was Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan. Perle’s former counsel was Douglas Feith, who returned as under secretary of defense for policy under George W. Bush and strongly promoted the invasion of Iraq.

Besides bringing intellectual firepower to the Reagan-Bush team, the neocons tapped into a powerful right-wing media apparatus that began to take shape in the late 1970s and pushed propaganda that advocated a more aggressive U.S. approach toward Israel’s “terrorist” adversaries in the Middle East.

Over the ensuing three decades, the neocons – and their right-wing Republican allies – came to dominate the Washington news media, especially on Middle East policy. Critics of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians were routinely denounced as “anti-Semites” and found little space on the major editorial pages to argue their positions.

Once the neocons returned to power under George W. Bush (and especially after the 9/11 attacks), the space for any debate shrank further, with anyone who questioned hard-line policies toward Iraq or Israel’s other Muslim enemies called “soft on terror.”

With debate suppressed, the neocons pushed for the invasion of Iraq almost without opposition. Though the war was pitched as necessary to protect the American people from Iraq’s supposed stockpiles of WMD, the invasion was viewed by many neocons as necessary to protect Israel’s long-term security.

The idea was that by transforming Iraq into a permanent base for the American military, U.S. power could be projected throughout the Middle East, forcing “regime change” in Iran and Syria and undermining other groups threatening Israel, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

The neocons saw the U.S. military in Iraq as the guarantors against any long-range assault on Israel. In other words, if Israel couldn’t reach some of those distant threats, the United States could.

The neocons also assumed that their tough-talking ways – especially President Bush’s then-popular swagger – would keep the American people in line with Washington’s Israel-is-always-right consensus.

Strategic defeat
President Bush’s strategic defeat in Iraq – defined by the new “status-of-forces agreement” that prohibits permanent U.S. bases and insists on a full U.S.. withdrawal by the end of 2011 – marks a major turning point in the Middle East.

Plus, the American neocons have been severely damaged domestically by their overreach in Iraq. Though they remain influential – especially inside the national press corps with control of the Washington Post’s editorial pages and other influential media outlets – the neocons are increasingly despised by the broad American public.

One of their chief advocates, Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, went down to decisive defeat on Nov. 4, 2008, to a political newcomer in Barack Obama, despite right-wing and neocon smear campaigns emphasizing his middle name “Hussein” and claiming that he is a secret Muslim who would be sworn in using a Koran.

Though Obama has given the neocons some hope by handing the State Department to the staunchly pro-Israel Hillary Clinton and by keeping on Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the neocons will probably never reclaim the kind of sweeping influence they had during George W. Bush's presidency.

These new facts-on-the-ground – both in the Middle East and in Washington – add to the imperative for the Israeli people to reassess the three-decade strategy of balking at reconciliation with their Arab neighbors and counting on the neocon dominance of the US political debates.

Israeli leaders might want to do whatever they can to turn back the clock to the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter showed a possible route to long-term security for Israel – by making respectful peace deals with its Arab neighbors.

Rather than trying to bomb and kill their way to security, Israeli leaders might want to consider a new strategy that steps away from endless confrontation with Arab enemies and instead seeks to integrate Israel into the economic life of the Middle East, as a center of science, technology, industry and finance.

Surely, this approach would not be easy. Given the past three decades of tit-for-tat atrocities, there would be extremists on both sides who would commit additional outrages to derail any progress.

It would have been much easier if Menachem Begin and his successors had understood that some of their greatest American friends were those – like Jimmy Carter – who recognized legitimate interests on both sides of the conflict, rather than those – like George W. Bush – who embraced the most extreme neoconservative positions.

So, whatever the outcome of Israel’s Gaza offensive, it cannot disguise how untenable Israel’s long-term position has become.

Even if Hamas’s little short-range missiles can be silenced for the time-being, the hatreds will continue to fester. The Arab Street will turn, increasingly, against authoritarian Arab leaders in countries such as Egypt and Jordan who have taken the most moderate positions regarding Israel’s right to exist.

And beyond Israel’s immediate neighbors – assuming those mutual hatreds are not defused – extremists will eventually get hold of a weapon of mass destruction, possibly in Pakistan if its current fragile civilian government falls. At some point, someone will have a missile or some other means of delivering a powerful weapon against Israel.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Bush and his neocon advisers may have imagined themselves ensuring security for Israel by taking aggressive action against its regional adversaries but have instead worsened Israel’s predicament. Now, the neocons find themselves widely discredited inside the U.S. political process.

It is this combination of realities – Bush’s failed adventurism in the Middle East and the decline of the neoncons at home – that could become the impetus for a new and serious peace initiative in the Middle East, as the best hope for Israel’s success and survival.

-- Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush , can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.



-- Middle East Online

 

[bigron]

Geopolitical Time Line: War, Natural Gas and Gaza's Marine Zone

Fishermen's Rights versus the Development of Natural Gas

David K. Schermerhorn
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m50839&hd=&size=1&l=e




Jan 14, 2009

BACKGROUND:

There is an historical connection between the Gazan community and the off shore fishery. In recent times some 3000 fishermen in over 700 boats made their livelihood in the waters off the shores of Gaza. Before 1978 when the fishing area included the sea off the Sinai coastline the area covered some 75,000 square kilometers.

The larger boats are about 20 meters in length and usually carry a crew of 7. They are typically trawlers using downriggers to lower their nets to the ocean bed. Currently their main catch is bream or sardines that average between 8 and 14 inches. The smallest craft are rowboats normally used to deploy nets a few hundred meters off shore. The nets are then hauled in by hand from the beach. These catches are very modest.

After the 1994 GAZA-JERICHO AGREEMENT the fishermen were free to use a corridor extending 20 nautical miles from the Gaza shore bounded by restricted zones to the north and south abutting Israeli and Egyptian waters. After the UN's 2002 Bertini proposal the approved location was reduced to an area within 12 nautical miles of the coast. More recently the area available has been reduced to 300 square kilometers.

Beginning in late 2000 the Israeli military began a campaign of intimidation and harassment against the fishing boats that ventured near or beyond a 6 nautical mile limit. No formal notice or explanation was ever given to the Palestinians. Instead the regulation was written and enforced by Israeli machine guns and water cannons. At least 14 fishermen have been killed by the Israelis, over 200 injured and numerous boats damaged or impounded.

WHY?

In the late 1990's the British Gas Group (BG Group) discovered a vast deposit of natural gas under the waters off Gaza: Over 1 trillion cubic feet equal to 150 million barrels of oil was estimated to be there. A significantly smaller deposit was also found in nearby Israeli waters.

On 11/8/99 Chairman Yasser Arafat signed an agreement giving BG Group 90 percent interest and 10 per cent to Consolidated Contractors Company, an Athens based Palestinian entity connected to the PLO. A final allocation of the rights continues to be contested between BG Group, Israel, Egypt and the Palestinians in obscured ongoing negotiations. The Israelis began their program of killing and harassing the Gazan fishermen only after the discovery of the natural gas deposits. It is a reasonable assumption that the two events are linked: That the Israelis are asserting control over this resource valued at over 4 billion dollars; And that they are intent on denying any benefit to the Palestinians regardless of who controls Gaza.

TIMELINE:

-May 4, 1994: PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed The Gaza-Jericho Agreement. Article XI established three Maritime Activity Zones that extended out to sea 20 nautical miles from the coast of Gaza. Two narrow Zones running parallel to the boundaries of Egyptian and Israeli waters were designated No Fishing Areas. Under the terms of the Agreement the larger remaining Zone "will be open for fishing, recreation and economic activities." The Gazan fishermen operated freely for the next 6 years within this Zone with no major confrontations with the Israelis.

- Late 1990's: The British Gas Group (later BG Group) began explorations off the Israeli and Gazan coasts for natural gas. A modest deposit was found in Israeli waters close to the Gaza Marine Activity Zone. A significantly larger deposit was found in a section of this Zone centered some 10 to 15 nautical miles offshore. It was estimated that there were sufficient reserves to generate electric power for all Palestinian needs for a decade and still have surplus to export.

- July 25, 2000: Yasser Arafat walked out on the Camp David meeting.

- September 27, 2000: Yasser Arafat traveled 19 miles off the Gaza coast to light the first flare stack flowing from the natural gas. An Israeli oil consortium had contested the Palestinian rights to the gas but was overturned in an Israeli court. The initial agreement with the BG Group gave them 90 percent interest and 10 percent to Consolidated Contractors Company, an Athens based Palestinian group. They and the Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) had the option to later assume up to 40 per cent interest.

Initially BG Group negotiated with Egypt to run an undersea pipeline designed to import the gas. Under pressure from Tony Blair BG Group was forced to negotiate with the Israelis instead. Those discussions, which centered over price, have been so long and contentious that BG Group closed their Israel office and again began dealing with Egypt.

- September 28, 2000: Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount despite warnings by Arafat and other leading Palestinians. The predictable riots and deaths following this provocation marked the beginning of 2nd Intafada. Sharon was elected Prime Minister in February 2001. He vowed that Israel would never buy gas from the Palestinians. After the outbreak of the 2nd Intafada the Israelis began an ever-tightening blockade of Gaza with fewer and fewer trucks allowed to enter.

- Late 2000: Attacks by Israeli patrol boats against Gazan fishing boats began and have continued to this day. These attacks began 5 years before Hamas freely won the legislative elections on January 25, 2006. It is apparent that these assaults on the fishermen had nothing to do with security or with Hamas. Instead it had everything to do with a 4 billion dollar resource belonging to the Palestinians.

- August, 2002: In response to a request from Prime Minister Sharon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations appointed Ms. Catherine Bertini as his Personal Humanitarian Envoy to asses humanitarian needs of the Palestinians. At the end of her visit to the area she made numerous recommendations including one that dealt with the fishing boats. In her report she included a list of "Previous Commitments Made by Israel". Item 2 states: "The fishing zone for Palestinian fishing boats off the Gaza coast is 12 nautical miles. This policy needs to be fully implemented." But never was!

- Although the attacks occurred throughout the Maritime Activity Zone they were more common once a boat had passed the 6-mile limit. Most boats now carry GPS's in order to know their exact positions. Some captains are intimidated by the Israeli threat and turn back before crossing the line. Others go further despite the increased danger from the Israelis. The fishery closer to shore has collapsed after so many boats were forced to operate in such a limited area. In addition the waters near shore are polluted due to sewage pouring in from broken pipes. One more consequence of an infrastructure crippled by the Israelis. Since the outset of these assaults at least 14 fishermen have been killed and over 200 injured. Boats continue to be damaged or impounded.

9/12/05 - Israel announced that it had ended the occupation of Gaza and withdrew its forces. It maintained control of land and sea-lanes as well as all border crossings on land.

1/25/06 - Hamas won 76 of 132 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council in an open honest election. After a bloody battle with Fatah elements Hamas took control of Gaza. Israel and the United States branded Hamas a terrorist organization and have had no public contact with it thereafter. The restrictions at the border crossings were tightened further with severe limitations on the traffic of produce, materials, medicines and people. Anemia and malnutrition were widespread as a result.

Early June 2008 - Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to covertly prepare for an invasion of Gaza to be known as operation "Cast Lead".

June, 2008 -Israel contacted BG Group to propose reopening negotiations over the natural gas deposits. Actual negotiations overseen by Ehud Olmert were taking place in October, 2008. It appears that Israel wished to reach an agreement with BG Group before the secretly planned invasion began.

6/19/08 - Hamas and Israel signed a 6-month truce agreement calling for cessation of rocket firings by Hamas and military incursions by Israel. In May over 300 rockets had been fired. In September only 5 to 10 were fired. Hamas was lead to believe that significant increase in shipments would be allowed to enter Gaza. Before the truce roughly 70 trucks were allowed to bring provisions into Gaza each day compared with some 900 permitted before the Israeli clamp down in 2000. Hamas believed that a similar flow of traffic would be restored. Instead Israel allowed only an increase from the 70 to 90 trucks.

11/5/08 - IDF forces killed 6 Palestinians while supposedly searching for a tunnel passing under the border. In effect the truce was over after this provocation. During the next 5 weeks 237 rockets were fired into Israel compared with the 5 to 10 fired in September. The increase in rocket fire was Israel's public justification for launching the long planned "Cast Lead" invasion.

11/18/08 - An Egyptian court ordered the government to stop shipping natural gas to Israel. Under a 2005 agreement Egypt agreed to deliver 1.7 billion cubic meters of gas to Israel over a 15-year period. The gas began to flow in May, 2008. A lawsuit followed seeking to bar delivery since the Parliament had not given its approval. The court supported the lawsuit and its findings are being appealed. The potential cutoff of the gas from Egypt gave Israel even more incentive to take control of the Gaza Marine deposits and to deny any benefits to Palestinians whether Hamas or Fatah.

11/18/08 - Israeli naval vessels attacked three Palestinian fishing boats located seven miles off the coast of Deir Al Balah, clearly within the limits permitted in the 1994 Gaza-Jericho Agreement. Fifteen Palestinian fishermen and three international observers were kidnapped and taken with the boats to Israel. The fishermen were held for a day and then released. The boats were eventually returned but damaged. The internationals were jailed in Israel for many days and then deported.

12/27/08 - Israel began bombing Gaza as phase 1 of operation "Cast Lead". The vast natural gas deposits of Gaza Marine 1 and 2 rest a few miles offshore.

To the victor the spoils one more time? Only time and perhaps the conscience of the world will determine.

Although the violations of law and basic human rights to the Gazan fishermen pale in comparison to the horrors that have unfolded they should not be forgot or forgiven. Based on the limited reports coming from Gaza due to Israeli restrictions on journalists it is possible that there are no fishing boats left or even a harbor. Perhaps justice will never be served on those who initiated and perpetuated these assaults. But let us never forget that the greed and self-interest embodied in these policies are those of a country that has lost its shame. Has lost its honor.

David K. Schermerhorn has traveled on humanitarian missions to Gaza on three separate occasions in recent months aboard Free Gaza (www.freegaza.org) boats. He spent spent two days aboard fishing boats that were harassed by Israeli machine gun fire and assaulted by water cannons.

[Biggs]

update on the latest situation in Gaza -

Urgent push for Gaza ceasefire

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7832406.stm

 
Israeli troops continues to pound the Gaza Strip



Diplomatic activity is intensifying over a possible ceasefire to end Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza.

An Israeli government spokesman said he hoped the conflict was "entering its final act" as talks were being held in Egypt and Washington.

Medics said they recovered 23 bodies from rubble in Gaza City as the Israeli bombardment continued. Friday also saw rockets fired from Gaza into Israel.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on Israel to end the fighting now.


"I would like to see an immediate ceasefire," he said after meeting Palestinian Authority leaders in the West Bank.

A deal between Israel and Hamas to stop the conflict may be possible within the next few days, he said.

See map of Gaza City and area

Hundreds of mourners took to the streets of Gaza City on Thursday for the funeral of top Hamas leader Said Siyam.

Siyam, who controlled thousands of Hamas security troops in Gaza, died along with his son, brother and two other Hamas officials when his brother's house in Gaza City was bombed on Thursday. 
The body of Said Siyam was carried through Gaza before burial


The Israeli army has closed all access to the West Bank for the next two days following a call by Hamas for Palestinians to observe what it called a day of wrath, by staging anti-Israeli protests at Friday prayers.

There has been a similar call by the Palestinian Authority to the followers of the rival Palestinian faction, Fatah.

Health officials in Hamas-controlled Gaza say at least 1,105 Palestinians have been killed and 5,100 wounded since Israel launched an operation on 27 December to end rocket attacks on its territory.

Thirteen Israelis - three of them civilians - have died, while 233 soldiers have been wounded, the Israeli army says.

Patients flee fire

Israeli military officials said 40 overnight attacks targeted smuggling tunnels, launching points, weaponry storages, two Hamas stations and a militants' training camp.
    The diplomacy now is in high gear. Hopefully we're entering the final act
Mark Regev
Israeli government spokesman

Gaza's medical crisis
Voices from Gaza City
Bowen diary: Damascus to Jerusalem


A BBC producer in Gaza City, Hamada Abuqammar, said Israeli artillery continued to be fired even during the daily humanitarian ceasefire, although the bombardment was not as intense as Thursday.

He said the Quds hospital was now empty, after it had to be evacuated overnight because of a fire caused by a tank shell.

The evacuees included sick and wounded patients on stretchers and wheelchairs.

The bodies of 23 people were recovered in the Tel al-Hawa district of Gaza City following Thursday's fighting, medics said.

Rockets continue to be fired from Gaza into Israel. Around 10 were launched on Friday but caused no injuries, the Israeli army said.

Meanwhile, the senior UN official in Gaza, John Ging, has described as "total nonsense" claims by the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that militants had used the UN headquarters in Gaza to fire on Israeli troops.

Hundreds of Gazans had been seeking refuge in the compound when it was attacked by Israeli shells on Thursday, causing a fire that destroyed vital food supplies.

Truce offer

Israeli ministers had late-night talks on Egypt's latest mediation bid.
   GAZA CRISIS BACKGROUND
 

In depth: Gaza conflict
Q&A: Gaza conflict
Who are Hamas?
Middle East conflict: History in maps


One diplomat said that there is now "feverish telephone tag", in an attempt to reach agreement on a ceasefire, the BBC's Tim Franks reports from Jerusalem.

Israeli envoy Amos Gilad returned to Cairo on Friday, having briefed Mr Olmert and other officials overnight on his previous day's talks with Egyptian officials.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has gone to Washington for talks, aimed at formalising an agreement with the US to help prevent Hamas smuggling in arms, a key Israeli demand for ending its three-week assault on Gaza.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev told the BBC that Israel wanted a prompt end to the violence.

"The diplomacy now is in high gear. Hopefully we're entering the final act. We want this to be over as soon as possible," he said.

"The minute we can be sure that the solution will not be a band aid, that after a few days of quiet we won't have more rockets on Israeli civilians, the minute we can understand that that situation will be a sustained peace, then we're going to go for it."

Hamas is reported to be offering a year-long truce if Israel withdraws from Gaza and lifts its blockade.

Mussa Abu Marzuk, the Damascus-based deputy head of the militant group's politburo, said the offer was made by a Hamas delegation to Egyptian authorities during talks in Cairo.

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Killed by Israel, Eaten by Dogs
Ola Attallah, IOL Correspondent

www.uruknet.info?p=50888

Link: www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1231760488574&pagename=Zon
   e-English-News/NWELayout

Jan 15, 2009

GAZA CITY - "Oh, God! I have never seen such a terrible scene," cried Kayed Abu Aukal.

The emergency doctor could not believe himself seeing the remains of what was days back Shahd, a full-fleshed 4-year-old Palestinian girl.

She died when an Israeli shell was fired at the backyard of her home in the Jabalya refugee camp northern Gaza strip, where she was playing.

When her parents attempted to rush to the rescue of their kid, who fell to the ground amid a pool of her blood, rains of Israeli bullets kept them a distance.

For the next five days Shahd's which was left lying in the open left for dogs to tear out.

"The dogs did leave one single part of the poor baby's body intact," said a tearful Abu Aukal.

"We have seen heart-breaking scenes over the past 18 days. We picked up children whose bodies were torn or burnt, but nothing like this."

For five days Shahd's brother, Matar, and cousin, Mohamed, tried in vain to reach her body. They were fired at by the Israeli occupation forces every time.

Seeing the body of the little angel torn to piece by the assaulting dogs, the two made one final attempt, and it was their last.

They were showered by Israeli bullets before they could reach Shahd's body, joining a long list of more than 920 Palestinians killed by Israel since December 27.

Deliberate

Omran Zayda, a young neighbor, said the Israelis knew very well what they were doing.

"They chased her family and prevented them from reaching to her body, knowing that the dogs would eat it," he said.

"They are not just killing our children, they are intentionally doing so in the most heinous and inhuman ways."

Zayda said words, and even cameras, can not describe the horrific scene.

"You can never imagine what the dogs have done to her innocent body," he said, fighting back his tears.

Many Palestinians insist Shahd was not the first or only such case.

In Jabalya, when Abd Rabu's family was trying to bury three of its dead, the Israeli forces started firing at them, witnesses said.

They then released their dogs at the bodies, deserted by mourners who sought shelter from the Israeli gunfire, they added.

"What happened was awful and unthinkable," Saad Abd Rabu, the deceased uncle, told IOL.

"Our sons died before our eyes and we were even prevented from burying them," he cried.

"The Israelis just released their dogs at their bodies, as even they have not done enough."

[Devotional Soul]

:cry: