Israel Bombs Gaza - Hundreds Dead

[M_Saint]

Israel's Wars of Forced Regime Change

by Helena Cobban
The war that Israel launched on Gaza Dec. 27 is the seventh war of choice Israel has launched against its neighbors since 1973, the last year in which it fought a war that was forced upon it.

Of the seven wars one – in Lebanon, 1978 – had the goal of establishing an Israeli-controlled "security zone" running inside Lebanon's border with Israel. The other six, including the present war on Gaza, all aimed at imposing a "forced regime change" on Arab communities neighboring Israel through the violent physical dismantlement of politico-military structures then present in, or on occasion dominating, those societies.

The five earlier attempts at forced regime change all had interesting – and quite unintended – consequences that might have given Israel's leaders serious pause before they launched the present war.

The first of those "forced regime change" (FRC) wars was the one Ariel Sharon, as defense minister, planned and launched against the PLO's structures in Lebanon in 1982. The PLO mounted a spirited defense. But after seven weeks of terrible destruction, pressure from their Lebanese allies forced the PLO leaders to agree to an internationally mediated cease-fire that mandated the evacuation of the entire PLO security force to distant Arab lands.

From a military viewpoint, Sharon's war had "worked." But it had two intriguing political-strategic consequences. Regarding Palestine, Palestinians in the occupied territories who previously had waited to be "saved" by PLO forces from outside realized after 1982 that they needed to work for their own liberation.

They launched their first intifada against Israel in 1987. In Lebanon, meanwhile, the IDF was left as a badly overstretched occupation force, unable to counter the emergence of a new, indigenous Islamist-nationalist organization that hadn't even existed before 1982: Hezbollah.

In 1992, Hezbollah's political wing ran in Lebanon's parliamentary election, winning four seats and considerable additional legitimacy in national politics. The next year the IDF launched another FRC war in Lebanon, this time against Hezbollah. That war, the IDF was unable to win. It ended in a fairly fragile – because unmonitored – cease-fire.

In 1996, Prime Minister Shimon Peres, worried about his chances in an impending Israeli election, ordered the IDF to try again. That FRC war was even less satisfactory for Israel. Hezbollah's resilient military and mass-organisation structures withstood the IDF's repeated attempts to bomb them into either annihilation or submission.

The IDF's violence and the mass killings it inflicted proved politically counterproductive to Israel at both the Lebanese and international levels. After some weeks Peres had to agree to a cease-fire resolution in which the subsequent actions of both sides would be subject to international monitoring. The IDF returned to the "security zone" demoralized. (And Peres lost his election.)

Regarding Palestine, the first intifada had led to the Oslo Agreement which led to the establishment of a somewhat autonomous "Palestinian Authority" (PA) in the occupied Palestinian territories. Oslo also mandated that negotiations on a final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace would be finished by 1999. As Israel stalled on those key negotiations and continued to plant settlers in the Occupied Territories, Palestinian frustration grew. In September 2000, the second intifada erupted.

That eruption was sparked when Ariel Sharon very provocatively entered Jerusalem's holiest Islamic space, the Haram al-Sharif, accompanied by more than 1,000 armed police. By then, Sharon was leader of the opposition Likud Party, despite his earlier exclusion from high office in line with the recommendation of the Kahan Commission regarding his actions in the 1982 war in Lebanon. Elections were getting ever closer in Israel. They were held in February 2001. Likud won, and Sharon became prime minister.

In 2002, he ordered Israel's fourth FRC war of the modern era. This one was against the PA's structures in the Occupied Territories – both the security forces and those delivering social and economic services.

Sharon largely succeeded in smashing the PA's infrastructure, but once again the political-strategic consequences proved counterproductive. Hamas, a militant Islamist-national group that Israel had once incubated, had always criticized the PLO for giving away too much in its never-ending peace talks with Israel. Now, with the PLO both incapacitated and humiliated, Hamas saw considerable new growth. In January 2006 it ran for the first time in PA legislative elections – and won.

Sharon had recently suffered a stroke. He was replaced by Ehud Olmert, a much younger figure who seemingly needed to prove his military toughness. In June 2006, Olmert unleashed another FRC war, this one against Lebanon's Hezbollah. Hezbollah withstood that one, too. It, and the whole of Lebanon, suffered badly in 2006. But by the middle of 2008 Hezbollah's political position in Lebanon was stronger than ever.

For his part, Olmert was badly damaged politically by the strategic ineptitude he and the IDF displayed in 2006. He clung to office, his power much diminished. At the end of 2008, as foreign minister Tzipi Livni and defense minister Ehud Barak were squaring off to fight each other and Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu in the February 2009 election, the Israeli cabinet decided on Israel's sixth FRC war: this one against Hamas in Gaza.

The history of Israel's FRC wars deserves close study. All have been "wars of choice" in that the "unbearable" situations that Israeli leaders have cited, each time, as giving them "no alternative" but to fight can all be seen as having been very amenable to negotiation – should Israel have chosen that path instead.

Also, all these wars were planned in some detail in advance, with the Israeli government just waiting for – or even, on occasion, provoking – some action from the other side that they could use as a launch pretext. All have received strong financial, re-arming, and political support from the U.S., not least because they were waged in the name of counter-terrorism.

But the outcomes are important, too. At a purely military level, the two FRC wars against the PLO were the ones that Israel was able to "win," in terms of being largely able to dismantle the structures it targeted. But the longer term, political-strategic outcomes of both those wars were distinctly counterproductive for Israel, since they paved the way for the emergence of much tougher-minded and better-organized movements.

By contrast, Israel was unable to win any of its three FRC wars against Hezbollah. In each, Hezbollah withstood Israel's assault long enough to force it into a cease-fire. All these wars ended up strengthening Hezbollah's position inside Lebanese politics.

So how will Israel's current attempt to inflict forced regime change on the Gaza Palestinians work out? If history is a guide, as it is, then this war will bring about either Hamas' dismantling or a cease-fire on terms that will lead to (or at least allow) Hamas' continued political strengthening.

A dismantling is unlikely, since Hamas' leadership is located outside Gaza and has links throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds that ensure that the annihilation of Hamas in Gaza would have serious global consequences. But if Hamas is dismantled in Gaza, it is most likely to be replaced there – faster or slower – by groups that are even more militant and more Islamist than itself.

Meanwhile, the high human costs of the war continue to mount daily.

(Inter Press )

Israel's Wars of Forced Regime Change - by Helena Cobban - Antiwar.com

 

[M_Saint]

Holocaust Denied

By John Pilger, Jan 9, 2009
The lying silence of those who know.
“When the truth is replaced by silence,” the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie.” It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia’s incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, “Israel’s right to exist.” They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine’s right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous “Plan D” resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as “ethnic cleansing.” Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, “What shall we do with the Arabs?” Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them’. The order to expel an entire population “without attention to age” was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world’s most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya’ari noted “how easily” Israel’s leaders spoke of how it was “possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war … we are appalled.”

Every subsequent “war” Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first. Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Schlaim, Noam Chomsky, the late Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Yuri Avnery, Ilan Pappe and Norman Finklestein have dispatched this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism. “It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on 2 January, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate 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].”

In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, meet the international standard of the Genocide Convention. “Is it an irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and international law authority at Princeton University, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”

In describing a “holocaust-in-the making,” Falk was alluding to the Nazis’ establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland. For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews led by Mordechaj Anielewiz fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the Nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew. Today’s holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben-Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250-pound “smart” GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza, having been approved by a Congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4 billion in war-making “aid,” give Washington de facto control. It beggars belief that President-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken on Russia’s war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama’s silence on Palestine marks his approval, which is to be expected, given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as his secretary of state, chief of staff and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings “Think,” her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama’s inauguration on 21 January, I trust someone with the brave heart of Muntadar al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: “Gaza!”

The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now “Operation Cast Lead,” which is the unfinished “Operation Justified Vengeance.” The latter was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with Bush’s approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time. In the same year, the authoritative Jane’s Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the “green light” to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel’s secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of New Labor Party’s enduring, cringing complicity in Palestine’s agony. However, the 2001 Israeli plan, reported Jane’s, needed the “trigger” of a suicide bombing which would cause “numerous deaths and injuries [because] the ‘revenge’ factor is crucial.” This would “motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians.” What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Chief of Staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On 23 November, 2001, Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader, Mahmud Abu Hunud, and got their “trigger”; the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.

Something uncannily similar happened on 5 November last, when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda “trigger.” A ceasefire initiated and sustained by the Hamas government - which had imprisoned its violators - was shattered by the Israeli attack and homemade rockets were fired into what used to be Palestine before its Arab occupants were “cleansed.” Then on 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz.

Behind this sordid game is the “Dagan Plan,” named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon in his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organization, Dagan is the author of a “solution” that has seen the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mohammed Abbas is Dagan’s achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through a mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in America, that says Hamas is a terrorist organization devoted to Israel’s destruction and to “blame” for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, long before its creation. “We have never had it so good,” said the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. “The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine.” In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as “Hamas’s seizure of power.” Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce as a historic recognition of the “reality” of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, 99 per cent of humanity concurs. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a “monstrosity.”

When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a “1948-style solution” - the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller “cantonments” and perhaps finally into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed … Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.”

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. “Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic,” she wrote on 31 December. “But I’m not talking about World War Two, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What I’m referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years … Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy doesn’t get more anti-Semitic than this.” She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young American who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. “I am in the midst of a genocide,” wrote Corrie, “which I am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible.”

Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of “responsibility.” Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform. With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-Semitism. The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.

Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plea for help? Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than “intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries”?

Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third Writers’ Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 3,500 jammed the auditorium and a thousand were turned away. Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete; the literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance; false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: “The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are.”

If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilized society. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us the power to speak out. For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza: of the people’s courage and resistance and their “luminous humanity,” as Karma Nabulsi put it. On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No one told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and a few of them climbed on to a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, believing the world will not forget them.

 

[Mujahid Islam]

Asslamulaikum,

The bombastic speeches and the worst words of the Heads of states of Muslim countries are not the solution of Palestine.....
Suicide attacks and huge bombardment on the Infidels of Israel is just the one and only solution..........And the chanting slogans of Jihad...
Allah has warned us in the Holy Qur'an that " JEWS AND CHRISTIANS CAN NEVER BE THE FRIENDS OF MUSLIMS">.............
It is not the first time that Jews are destroying Palestine but so many a times they have done it............

Regards

 

[pkpatriotic]

Special Briefing On the Humanitarian Situation in Gaza

Elizabeth Hopkins, Director for Asia and the Near East, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration
Howard Sumka, USAID Mission Director to the West Bank and Gaza
Via teleconference
Washington, DC and Tel Aviv
January 9, 2009

MR. DUGUID: Good afternoon, everyone. We have a special briefing on the humanitarian situation in Gaza. With us from Tel Aviv is Howard Sumka, who is the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Mission Director to the West Bank and Gaza. With us here, we have Elizabeth Hopkins, who is from our own RPM[1] Bureau. And we will begin with a statement, or opening remarks I should say, by Mr. Sumka.

I would like to also highlight for you comments that Secretary Rice made this morning when asked about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. And she said that we are continuing to pass to the Israelis information about what we’re doing on the humanitarian situation on the ground, and try to support in any way the efforts that we can through the UNRWA and other NGOs who are working there.

With that, Mr. Sumka, I trust you can hear me.

MR. SUMKA: Yes, I hear you fine, Gordon.

MR. DUGUID: Good. After Mr. Sumka’s opening remarks, we’ll go directly to questions. As he can’t see you, would you please, as you ask your question, identify yourself so he knows that – who he’s speaking with.

Mr. Sumka, please, go ahead.

MR. SUMKA: Okay, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit about what we’re doing. The USAID mission, starting almost two weeks ago now after the hostilities began in Gaza, basically reoriented its efforts to humanitarian assistance for the Gazans. We immediately began working through one of our contractors to procure humanitarian goods, non-food items as we call them, that were essential. The first purchase we made was medical equipment, probably about $80,000 worth. And of that amount, about $15,000 was, within a day or so, delivered to the Patient’s Friends Benevolent Society, one of the organizations we work with in both the West Bank and Gaza.

We then turned to other procurement, identified plastic sheeting for windows and doors that had been blown out as a very high priority. We purchased immediately about 26,000 kilograms of plastic sheeting. And it, along with all the other commodities we have available to us, with one exception, which I’ll talk about in a second, is in the warehouse that UNRWA manages in east Jerusalem.

Basically, the supply lines into Gaza have been slow. We are relying exclusively on UNRWA to be our shipping vehicle from east Jerusalem, from where we’re purchasing things, to the crossings into Gaza and into the distribution points in Gaza. As you know, the number of trucks that have been able to get across the Kerem Shalom crossing has been not as high as we would have liked. There have been days when it’s been exceptionally low. UNRWA has been queuing up its commodities in terms of the priorities that they’ve identified for what needs to get to the people first. And we are procuring stuff, putting it in the UNRWA warehouse for the moment, and hoping that these bottlenecks will open up very quickly.

We have signed grant agreements with six nongovernmental organizations that we’ve worked with before in both the West Bank and Gaza. But in particular, these six organizations have presence on the ground in Gaza, have a capacity to distribute commodities to people, and will be working with us both to procure and distribute. And so the mechanism will be that they will procure, the commodities will be turned over to UNRWA, they will take them into Gaza. And once they’re in Gaza, the participating NGO will do the distributions for us.

We have awarded $1.75 million in six grant agreements. This is in addition to the procurement I mentioned before of medical supplies, some of which have gone in, and in addition to about $250,000 worth of the plastic sheeting that’s waiting to go in. On top of that, using OFDA as our supply mechanism, the Office of Federal – Foreign Disaster Assistance, we are procuring a total of 40,000 blankets which we expect to have in the country by the beginning of next week and we will distribute as soon as the supply lines are open. We have had that identified as a very high priority, both that and mattresses, in particular, for people who are in the shelters.

And finally, for our ongoing programs with the World Food Program, we have delivered since the hostilities began about 1.6 metric tons of food that was funded by USAID, about $1.5 dollars worth of food. And those foods are already in Gaza; much of it has been distributed. Some of the distribution within Gaza has been delayed because of the security situation. But through the World Food Program warehouses and our – the NGO that works with us to distribute it, we’ve gotten much of that food out to the people.

We are hoping that the supply condition – that the security conditions improve enough so that the distribution can move more quickly. At the moment, as I said, our commodities are going into the UNRWA warehouse, but we’ve made a conscious decision to keep on procuring, so that once the bottleneck are opened up, we will have an adequate supply to begin rapid distribution of the commodities that the people in Gaza need so desperately.

I’d be happy to answer any questions that anyone has.

MR. DUGUID: Thank – excuse me. Thank you, Howard. The questions, please, also direct to either Elizabeth or to Howard as you identify yourself. The first question, please, Elise.

QUESTION: I guess this is for both of you. Thank you for taking the time to do this. It’s Elise Labott with CNN. A couple of things. If you could talk about the kind of consequences of the aid not getting through. USAID officials are telling us that about three-quarters of Palestinians in Gaza right now are in need of food assistance, and not only that, but the fact that the vaccination programs have stopped as a result of the conflict, and the fact that you have these dire living conditions, that the entire territory of Gaza is facing widespread disease. Could you address that?

And then also, if you say you’re relying solely on UNRWA for your supply lines into Gaza, could you talk about the fact there have been several charges of Israeli forces firing on UN trucks? I know the aid was suspended for some time and has just very recently been reinstated after they got assurances from Israel that it wouldn’t happen again. But there are serious charges from not only UNRWA, but ICRC, about firing upon aid workers; about the fact that the humanitarian situation, although some supplies are getting in, is not really being adhered to; dead are being left in the streets, wounded are being kind of left among the dead. If you can just talk in general terms about your discussions with the Israelis about taking more care for the injured, wounded, and aid workers. Thank you.

MR. SUMKA: Okay. Well, the consequences of the aid not getting to people, I think, are fairly obvious. People who don’t have food are hungry. People who don’t get vaccinations get diseases. That’s quite clear. So that’s why we’re putting all the effort we can into procuring and to making sure we’re ready to distribute commodities as soon as the supply lines open.

I was – with regard to your second question, the reason we’re relying on UNRWA is because they have the capacity and the experienced people and the supply and the assets on the ground to actually deliver the commodities into Gaza. We were concerned, for sure, when the incident yesterday that resulted in the killing of one of the Palestinian workers at the Erez crossing, that combined with some other incidents that have affected UNRWA facilities, led UNRWA to put its operations in suspension.

I was on the phone with the head of UNRWA just late this afternoon while they were still in discussions with the Government of Israel. I actually had not heard the news that they had agreed to resume their work, and I’m actually quite happy to hear that.

We’ve been working with the Government of Israel through the humanitarian operations cell that has been set up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in COGAT, which is the civil administration for the West Bank and Gaza. And that operation basically consists of representatives from international organizations and the Government of Israel, the Ministry of Defense, to try to coordinate sufficiently well so that the locations of where the military activity is taking place and the movement of goods and people on the humanitarian side are known to both sides, can be coordinated, and incidents such as the ones we’ve had will not happen.

We are in continuous discussion with the Government of Israel about the capacity of the Erez crossing and the Kerem Shalom crossing for getting people and goods out of Gaza, or goods into Gaza, people out of Gaza. And we are working as hard as we can with them to make sure that these flow smoothly.

MR. DUGUID: Thank you. Elizabeth, anything to add?

MS. HOPKINS: Well, actually, I just wanted to make sure people understood for the sake of this briefing, my bureau, Population, Refugees, and Migration, is responsible for supporting the funding for UNRWA, and it was out in a media note earlier, but I’ll just reiterate it. On December 30th, we were able to announce an $85 million contribution towards the 2009 appeal from UNRWA, of which $25 million will go directly to West Bank/Gaza, $5 million of that directly to the flash appeal that UNRWA issued in response to this crisis.

So with that kind of contribution, of course we’re concerned with UNRWA having access and safe access into the Gaza Strip. We would like to see some more real-time coordination, but we feel that there’s – and we strongly support this – the coordination cell. But clearly, we’d like to see the operation run more smoothly.

QUESTION: Can I just quickly follow up? I mean, in – on UNRWA specifically, I mean, there’s been a lot of tension between Israel and UNRWA for years. I mean, Israel has always kind of suspected UNRWA of working with Hamas, and I mean, the fact that your money is going to UNRWA – I mean, do you think some kind of more political discussions or negotiations or something needs to be done so that UNRWA can have the kind of unimpeded access that you’re – that you obviously feel it needs if you’re giving your money to them? I mean, this has been a longstanding problem that seems to have come to a head during this crisis.

MS. HOPKINS: Yeah, well, we’re – our bureau is primarily concerned with the humanitarian element of it. UNRWA is clearly the large partner in that. And I would refer you to – the policy questions to the policy folks.

MR. DUGUID: Okay. Next question, Kirit, please.

QUESTION: For all the aid that’s arriving to the – in Gaza, and I understand that it’s going – most of it through UNRWA, can you say whether the recipients will know that it came from the United States? Are there flags on these things, just, you know, speaking – generally speaking?

MS. HOPKINS: PRM does not necessarily require that. I’ll leave AID to answer.

MR. DUGUID: Yes. Howard, would you like to answer that, please?

MR. SUMKA: Yeah, I’d be happy to. We – the first shipment we released last week, the medical supplies, was in clearly marked USAID boxes. We have some nice pictures of people unloading boxes. To be perfectly honest with you, though, we have received word from some of our NGOs that branded supplies – USAID-branded supplies – might not be so welcome. And so, for example, the blankets which we are bringing in through OFDA will, in fact, not be branded, just to make sure we don’t have any security issues.

MR. DUGUID: Next question, Joel.

QUESTION: Joel Wishengrad, World Media Reports, WMR News. The situation on the ground, which I guess is considered dire – Israeli forces obviously are worried about booby traps and IEDs possibly hidden in the roadways as well as sniper fire. Have – we won’t talk to Hamas, obviously, as the U.S.A., but is the PA Authority attempting to work with them and the Egyptians through the Mubarak government?

MR. DUGUID: I think, Joel, that that’s probably a question for a different briefing other than specifically on the aid question. If you’d like, I’ll try and take your question for later then – later in the afternoon. Thanks.

Arshad, please.

QUESTION: Arshad Mohammed of Reuters. Forgive if I missed this, but could you give us an estimate of how much of the U.S.-funded assistance that has been delivered to Gaza has actually been, to your knowledge, distributed to people on the ground? And secondly, could you give us an estimate of – given the supply line difficulties that UNRWA has experienced, could you give us a sense of, you know, what proportion of the aid that you would have wished to deliver to Gaza has actually been able to get through?

MR. DUGUID: I believe that’s directed to Howard and --

QUESTION: Yes.

MR. SUMKA: Okay, yeah. The – all of the commodities that have gotten into Gaza, or virtually all of them, have been distributed. That includes about $1.6 million of food and the $15,000 of medical supplies and equipment. There’s another, you know, give or take, $3 million of commodities that we have either purchased or are in the process of purchasing, and expect to have on hand within the next four or five days at the most. And so far, none of that has gone into Gaza because of the crimps in the supply chain. Most of that is in the warehouse that UNRWA has in east Jerusalem.

QUESTION: Thank you.

MR. DUGUID: Thank you. Next question, Kirit, please.

QUESTION: Hi, I’m Kirit Radia with ABC News again. Just if you could speak to the scope of the humanitarian crisis that you’re seeing there – more broadly, if you could speak to that, and then whether that seems to indicate any sort of indication that there was a disproportionate response on the Israeli part?

MR. SUMKA: On the issue of the disproportionate response, I think you need to ask someone else that question. It’s for the policy people.

QUESTION: But based on the scope of the humanitarian crisis, I mean --

MR. SUMKA: But on the scope of the crisis, I have to say that most of what I know about the scope is what you also know from the reports you’re getting. Now, we have a number of people on the ground who are giving us first-person reports about what they’re seeing and what they and their families are suffering through. But we don’t have any USAID employees, with the exception of one local Gazan, actually able to be in Gaza. And so the rest of us are receiving information through the same channels that everyone else is. We hear reports from the UN, from both UNRWA and OCHA. We get some reports from World Food Program but, by and large, we don’t have an on-the-ground presence in Gaza itself.

QUESTION: But your reports are – but – that they are grave. Your reports are describing kind of grave and dire humanitarian conditions. Is that correct?

MR. SUMKA: Yes.

MR. DUGUID: We’ve got Charlie Wolfson, please.

QUESTION: This is Charlie Wolfson from CBS News. Can you put in any kind of context, numerical or otherwise, the scope of the need compared to what’s been delivered or promised to be delivered?

MR. SUMKA: Well, the scope of the need is quite extensive. We are prepared just through our regular budget, which we’re actually diverting the humanitarian relief operation -- we’re prepared to go to $10 or $15 million of assistance over the next couple of weeks, if the hostilities last that long. We would be prepared probably to put $40 to $60 million in an immediate post – an immediate ceasefire situation, so that – in which we could work a little more comfortably.

But I would say that in terms of food and medical supplies and the non-food items, like mattresses and blankets and the plastic that I talked about, there’s just not very much of that getting in right now at all, and that’s a problem. I believe that the commitments that the internationals have made to procure and distribute these commodities probably would meet the need quite well, but the problem is the logistics and the security.

QUESTION: A follow-up, if I might. I know the situation now, and I think for the past three, four, maybe it’s five years now, U.S. officials have not been going into Gaza for reasons we all know. In a ceasefire situation, has anyone envisioned the idea that that might change, due to the current crisis?

MR. SUMKA: We have not even begun to talk about that. We have not gone into Gaza since October of 2003 when an American convoy was hit by an IED and three Americans were killed. We manage our Gaza programs with a staff of about – or it used to be a staff of about a half a dozen Gazan employees and with contractors and grantees who are actually doing the work for us, who have an on-the-ground presence. So all of what we do there is managed by Gazans and by the contractors and grantees. Right now, I have no expectation of being able to go into Gaza, myself or other U.S. Government employees, anytime soon.

MR. DUGUID: Time for just two more questions, if they’re brief. Joel, then Kirit.

Joel.

QUESTION: Joel Wishengrad again, World Media Report, WMR News. Howard, what is the type of the selection of food products that are going into Gaza? Is it prepackaged food? Is it food that has been selected by the authorities in Gaza and the UN NGOs, as well as others? Or is this – these – are these items something similar to what would be procured here, for instance, in the United States with FEMA going into Katrina and other hurricane situations?

MR. SUMKA: We – the food program that we run with (inaudible) with WFP, the World Food Program, basically consists of providing each family – and we have had 20,000 beneficiary families – providing each one with a package of five foods: wheat flour, chickpeas, cooking oil, salt and sugar. And we make the distributions on a monthly basis, and they get enough of those commodities for a month.

Now obviously, there’s a problem now because families that get wheat flour might not be able to bake bread because they haven’t got electricity or because they’re displaced from their houses. So the wheat flour now is more likely going to bakeries, and the bakeries that have generators can actually bake the bread. And in the new purchases that we’re doing, we are beginning to purchase packaged, non-perishable food items. But the vast majority of the food we’ve put in has been this five basic commodities package that is kind of a standard, high-calorie package for families.

MR. DUGUID: From Kirit, and then if it’s brief, back to Charlie.

QUESTION: Just to – since you are on the ground, I figure maybe you have a larger picture of the humanitarian aid that’s going into Gaza, not just from the United States. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about where you’re seeing the most aid come from, if it’s not the U.S. – the amount of Iranian aid, for example, that might be coming into Gaza.

MR. SUMKA: I have no idea. I have not seen any aid coming in from any specific countries. There’s – there are aid shipments that are coming in through Egypt and they’re either – if Rafah is open to allow a few trucks, they’ll come in that way; otherwise, they can come around from Egypt through the Kerem Shalom crossing. Those commodities have come from Qatar and other Gulf state countries. I don’t think it’s been a huge amount, but I really am not sure.

MR. DUGUID: I’d have to refer to you UNRWA, I think, for those sorts of things.

MS. HOPKINS: Yes. There’s quite a few countries actually contributing, but not directly to UNRWA, though.

MR. DUGUID: Okay. Charlie.

QUESTION: It’s Charlie Wolfson, CBS again. Two things. You mention non-perishable items. Can you say what those might be?

And then on a totally different issue, in other cases where aid has been given in some war zone or conflict situations, there’s been concern about aid being siphoned off. Can you tell us whether you have any such concerns in this case, and what you can do about that, if any – anything?

MR. SUMKA: Okay. Non-perishables include powdered milk, canned foods of various kinds. These are not the ideal items to provide, you know, food assistance because they’re heavy and they’re difficult to ship. We have even been considering UHT milk, because we’re not sure that powdered milk – that for powdered milk, there’d be enough clean water to mix it.

The issue of siphoning off, we maintain through our partner that distributes the food, which in this case is CHF International, they maintain control of the food from the time it gets into Gaza, once they’ve picked it up from UNRWA, and it goes to their warehouses which are secure and under their control, and then it’s distributed by them.

MS. HOPKINS: And we don’t have any specific concerns about UNRWA assistance being siphoned either.

MR. DUGUID: Okay.

QUESTION: Thank you.

MR. DUGUID: Thank you, Mr. Sumka. Thank you, Ms. Hopkins. Thank you all for attending today. That concludes our briefing.

MR. SUMKA: Thank you very much.
2009/033

QUOTE:

^^^^ Hmm....Good joke.....that the killings of innocnets specially kids conitue going on, by Israel, while these guys now making numbers as so -called humanitarians..

 

[Al-zakir]

Israel, Hamas ignore truce calls

Sat Jan 10, 2009 10:57am EST


GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli tanks advanced on Gaza and Hamas militants fired rockets at Israel on Saturday, as both sides ignored international calls to stop the conflict and Israel warned it would escalate its assault.

An Israeli tank shell killed eight Palestinians in Jabalya, a refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip, and an air strike killed a woman in nearby Beit Lahiya, Palestinian medics said.

All of those killed in Jabalya were believed to be men from the same family. The Israeli army denied carrying out any attacks in the area.

The deaths, including those of several Palestinian gunmen, raised the Palestinian toll to at least 821, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza. Thirteen Israelis have been killed: 10 soldiers and three civilians hit in rocket fire.

The fighting continued even during a three-hour ceasefire window Israel has established in recent days to allow aid into Gaza to sustain the 1.5 million people living there.

As Israeli tanks advanced in northern Gaza and aircraft hit targets across the coastal strip, Hamas rockets hit Ashkelon, 20 km (12 miles) north of Gaza, wounding three Israelis.

The Israeli military also dropped leaflets on southern Gaza, around the town of Rafah, warning residents to stay away from militants, weapons storage facilities and tunnels as it was about to escalate its bombing throughout the coastal territory.

"In the coming period, the Israeli army will continue to attack tunnels, weapons caches, and terrorists with escalating force all over the Gaza Strip," the leaflets read.

Concerned about the deepening humanitarian impact of the war, with more than half Gaza's population dependent on U.N. food assistance, the United Nations said it hoped to resume full aid distribution after receiving Israeli assurances that its staff would not be harmed. A U.N. driver was killed on Thursday.

Israel has pressed on with its offensive despite a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire and Egyptian-European efforts at mediation, saying it is intent on stopping Hamas rocket fire. Hamas, too, has ignored calls for a halt to hostilities, firing eight rockets at Israel on Saturday.

A phalanx of Israeli tanks advanced from the north toward the city of Gaza, creeping in on the large refugee camp of Jabalya, home to around 100,000 people.

EGYPTIAN EFFORT FALTERS

In an attempt to breathe life into a faltering Egyptian-led mediation effort, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah party is a political foe of Hamas, met Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for talks in Cairo.

They discussed the possible deployment of international forces along the Gaza-Egypt border under any ceasefire deal, but Abbas said they should be in Gaza itself, not along the border.

Privately, diplomats believe the Egyptian initiative, also sponsored by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is in trouble, even if Israel has said talks about the proposal will continue and Hamas has sent representatives to Cairo. Continued...

Israel, Hamas ignore truce calls | International | Reuters

 

[Al-zakir]

International anger over Gaza grows | Video | Reuters.com

 

[Cheeta]

Muslims are shamelessly losing the opportunity. It is a matter of great disgrace for all especially ease loving and luxuriously living Arabs.

 

[Cheeta]

To answer the atrocities and get the first Qibla it is the time ripe. It is the time for a call to Jehad for volunteers. If Muslims did not respond now it will create a bad name for them in human history. They will have to answer to God Almighty for this.

 

[pkpatriotic]

UN human rights chief accuses Israel of war crimes

Official calls for investigation into Zeitoun shelling that killed up to 30 in one house as Israelis dismiss 'unworkable' ceasefire
Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
The Guardian,
Saturday 10 January 2009

The United Nations' most senior human rights official said last night that the Israeli military may have committed war crimes in Gaza. The warning came as Israeli troops pressed on with the deadly offensive in defiance of a UN security council resolution calling for a ceasefire.

Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has called for "credible, independent and transparent" investigations into possible violations of humanitarian law, and singled out an incident this week in Zeitoun, south-east of Gaza City, where up to 30 Palestinians in one house were killed by Israeli shelling.

Pillay, a former international criminal court judge from South Africa, told the BBC the incident "appears to have all the elements of war crimes".

The accusation came as Israel kept up its two-week-old air and ground offensive in Gaza and dismissed as "unworkable" the UN security council resolution which had called for "an immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire".

Protests against the offensive were held across the world yesterday just as diplomacy to halt the conflict appeared to falter.

With the Palestinian casualty toll rising to around 800 dead, including 265 children, and more than 3,000 injured, fresh evidence emerged yesterday of the killings in Zeitoun. It was "one of the gravest incidents" since Israel's offensive began two weeks ago, the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs said yesterday.

"There is an international obligation on the part of soldiers in their position to protect civilians, not to kill civilians indiscriminately in the first place, and when they do, to make sure that they help the wounded," Pillay told Reuters. "In this particular case these children were helpless and the soldiers were close by," she added.

An Israeli military spokeswoman, Avital Leibovich, said the incident was still being examined. "We don't warn people to go to other buildings, this is not something we do," she said. "We don't know this case, we don't know that we attacked it."

Despite the intense bombardment, militants in Gaza fired at least 30 rockets into southern Israel yesterday. Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, told al-Jazeera TV: "This resolution doesn't mean that the war is over. We call on Palestinian fighters to mobilise and be ready to face the offensive, and we urge the Arab masses to carry on with their angry protests."

Israeli officials said they could not be expected to halt their military operation while the rockets continued and said they first wanted an end to the rocket fire and a "mechanism" to prevent Hamas rearming in future.

"The whole idea that Israel will unilaterally stop protecting our people when Hamas is sending rockets into our cities to kill our people is not a reasonable request of Israel," said Mark Regev, spokesman for prime minister Ehud Olmert. Israel wanted security for its people in southern Israel, he said, and dismissed suggestions his military might seek to topple Hamas, saying they were "not in the regime-change business".

Israeli public opinion still strongly favours the war. One poll of Jewish Israelis yesterday, by the War and Peace Index, said 90% of the population supported continuing the operation until Israel achieved all its goals.

Olmert held a meeting of his security cabinet, and on the agenda was discussion about whether to intensify the offensive by launching a fresh stage of attacks in which Israeli troops would invade the major urban areas of Gaza as more reservists were called up. There was no word on the outcome.

So far 13 Israelis have been killed in this conflict, of whom three were civilians.

Another 23 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military yesterday. Seven from one family, including an infant, died when Israeli jets bombed a five-storey building in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza. There was heavy aerial bombing and artillery fire across the territory.

More than 20,000 Gazans have fled their homes in the north of the strip and thousands more in the south. In some cases Israeli troops have told them to leave, or dropped leaflets warning them to evacuate their homes. Some are even dividing their families between different addresses for fear of losing them all in a single air strike.

"Many people are leaving their homes and moving to the centre of the cities," said Abdel Karim Ashour, 53, who works with a local aid agency, the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee. He, his wife and their four children fled their house on the coastal road in northern Gaza on the third day of the conflict. He sent the four children to stay with his brother while he and his wife are staying at a friend's house. "We were in an area of heavy shelling, so we left and I divided the family to try to reduce the victims if we face any trouble. We try and keep in touch by telephone but there are problems with the network," he said. "We're just hoping for a ceasefire. If the fighting goes on there will be more victims."

 

[pkpatriotic]

Gaza bombing witnesses describe horror of Israeli strike - Telegraph
When the first accounts emerged this week of what the Israeli armed forces did to the extended Samouni clan in Gaza they were initially lost in an already crowded chorus of civilian suffering.

By Tim Butcher in Jerusalem
10 Jan 2009

Palestinians mourners carry the bodies of three toddlers, Ahmed, Mohamed, and Issa Samouni in Zeitoun Photo: AP

But as more survivors surfaced to give largely consistent testimony the horrific realisation emerged what happened to the Samouni family could constitute war crimes by Israel.

Israel is barring foreign journalists from Gaza so it is difficult to verify completely the survivors' accounts about an incident that left up to 70 civilians dead.

They contain allegations that Israeli forces shelled a building where they had previously put a large number of civilians, killed a child in cold blood, used human shields and failed to provide proper treatment to survivors.

Even though they were nearby, Israeli soldiers were found not to have taken action to help four children who spent 48 hours clinging to what the ambulance crew believed to be their mothers' corpses.

The Gazan town of Zeitoun has been home to the Samouni clan for generations but its location in the sandy southern approaches to Gaza City made it a strategic target for Israel on the first night of their ground offensive.

After Israeli tanks and infantry rolled through the Gaza perimeter fence on last Saturday night one of the units headed straight to Zeitoun.

Known to be an area where Hamas militants have been active, Israeli commanders wanted to make sure they took the town as part of a strategy of encircling Gaza City and cutting it off from the rest of the Gaza Strip.

Surviving members of the Samouni family said that at around dawn on Sunday Israeli soldiers arrived in large numbers, knocking on doors and detaining men of fighting age.

Meysa Samouni, 19, described how the Israeli soldiers had "blackened'' their faces for night combat.

The troops went from house to house detaining younger men and then crowding a large number, mostly women and children, into a building owned by Wael Samouni.

Described by Meysa as a "warehouse'', up to 110 members of the Samouni family were forced inside without running water or food.

Conditions grew more dire and tensions rose so by dawn on Monday Rashed Samouni, 41, Meysa's father-in-law and two other men prepared to leave to go in search for missing family members and supplies.

As they left the door of the warehouse they were hit by a barrage.

"My husband went over to them to help, and then a shell or missile was fired onto the roof of the warehouse,'' Meysa said. "Based on the intensity of the strike, I think it was a missile from an F-16.

"When the missile stuck, I lay down with my daughter under me. Everything filled up with smoke and dust, and I heard screams and crying.

"After the smoke and dust cleared a bit, I looked around and saw twenty to thirty people who were dead, and about twenty who were wounded.

"The persons killed around me were my husband, who was hit in the back, my father-in-law, who was hit in the head and whose brain was on the floor, my mother-in-law Rabab, my father-in-law's brother Talal, and his wife Rhama Muhammad a-Samuni, 45, Talal's son's wife, Maha Muhammad a-Samuni, 19, and her son, Muhammad Hamli a-Samuni, 5 months, whose whole brain was outside his body, Razqa Muhammad a-Samuni, 50, Hanan Khamis a-Samuni, 30, and Hamdi Majid a-Samuni, 22.'' She said she tended to her nine month old daughter, Jumana, whose thumb and two fingers had been cut off one hand.

According to her count up to 30 died in the building but other witnesses suggest the death toll among the 110 crowded inside was higher.

Meysa said survivors and walking wounded eventually emerged and found some Israeli soldiers who took two of the male survivors and let the rest pass. She believed the men were to be used as human shields.

According to Majed Samouni, a 42-year-old farmer, he was corralled into another house in Zeitoun on Sunday by Israeli soldiers.

He alleged when Israeli soldiers went from house to house rounding up members of his family a cousin Atiyeh Samouni, 43, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers as he opened the door to his house.

Majed also alleged Israeli soldiers shot Atiyeh's two-year-old son, Ahmad, in cold blood.

Majed said 80 Samouni family members ended up crowded in his two-storey house before they too fled after the barrage early on Monday morning.

There were other allegations that Israeli soldiers picked off at least one member of the Samouni family as they fled.

By midday on Monday the first Samouni survivors got to Shifa hospital in Gaza City carrying mortally wounded children.

By Tuesday the mortuary had records of ten Samounis having died including three infants who were buried in funeral in Gaza City. A photograph of the funeral appeared on the front of the International Herald Tribune newspaper.

But the number of Samounis who had died but still lay in Zeitoun was unknown. The International Committee of the Red Cross and the local Palestinian Red Crescent twice tried to reach Zeitoun but it was too dangerous.

On Wednesday the ambulances were finally given permission by Israel but with Israeli earth berms on the roads and war damage it was difficult and dangerous for them to search Zeitoun properly.

Around 15 wounded were found including four traumatised children next to what ambulance crew took to be the corpses of their mothers.

The fact Israeli soldiers were within a hundred yards of the children but did not help them led to the ICRC to issue an uncharacteristically strong condemnation pointing out failing to help wounded violates the rules of war.

"The ICRC believes that in this instance the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded,'' the statement said.

"It considers the delay in allowing rescue services access unacceptable.'' And it demanded full access to Zeitoun to recover wounded civilians it believes are still there.

Israel has so far refused permission for the ambulances to carry out a full sweep.

Last night an Israeli army spokesman said an initial internal investigation had found no evidence Israeli armed forces had done anything wrong during combat around the Samouni family homes in Zeitoun.

He denied the army massed civilians in specific locations and said there was no record of a “specific attack on a specific target’’ in the area last Monday.

“This does not rule out exchanges of fire but it does rule out targeting of a specific building,’’ he said.

 

[Brown]

my Pakistani friends first need to look bombing of there citizen by US then showing alacrity in Israel's actions.

I do not see any difference between both.
In either cases innocent are been killed in name of terrorists.

Pakistani's need to take a break from this post and prevent US from bombing in FATA and come back to condemn israel's actions.

 

[pkpatriotic]

Israel Is Committing War Crimes - WSJ
Hamas's violations are no justification for Israel's actions.

By GEORGE E. BISHARAT
JANUARY 10, 2009

Israel's current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. Rather, it involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes. Senior Israeli political and military leaders may bear personal liability for their offenses, and they could be prosecuted by an international tribunal, or by nations practicing universal jurisdiction over grave international crimes. Hamas fighters have also violated the laws of warfare, but their misdeeds do not justify Israel's acts.

The United Nations charter preserved the customary right of a state to retaliate against an "armed attack" from another state. The right has evolved to cover nonstate actors operating beyond the borders of the state claiming self-defense, and arguably would apply to Hamas. However, an armed attack involves serious violations of the peace. Minor border skirmishes are common, and if all were considered armed attacks, states could easily exploit them -- as surrounding facts are often murky and unverifiable -- to launch wars of aggression. That is exactly what Israel seems to be currently attempting.

Israel had not suffered an "armed attack" immediately prior to its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Since firing the first Kassam rocket into Israel in 2002, Hamas and other Palestinian groups have loosed thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israel, causing about two dozen Israeli deaths and widespread fear. As indiscriminate attacks on civilians, these were war crimes. During roughly the same period, Israeli forces killed about 2,700 Palestinians in Gaza by targeted killings, aerial bombings, in raids, etc., according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.

But on June 19, 2008, Hamas and Israel commenced a six-month truce. Neither side complied perfectly. Israel refused to substantially ease the suffocating siege of Gaza imposed in June 2007. Hamas permitted sporadic rocket fire -- typically after Israel killed or seized Hamas members in the West Bank, where the truce did not apply. Either one or no Israelis were killed (reports differ) by rockets in the half year leading up to the current attack.

Israel then broke the truce on Nov. 4, raiding the Gaza Strip and killing a Palestinian. Hamas retaliated with rocket fire; Israel then killed five more Palestinians. In the following days, Hamas continued rocket fire -- yet still no Israelis died. Israel cannot claim self-defense against this escalation, because it was provoked by Israel's own violation.

An armed attack that is not justified by self-defense is a war of aggression. Under the Nuremberg Principles affirmed by U.N. Resolution 95, aggression is a crime against peace.

Israel has also failed to adequately discriminate between military and nonmilitary targets. Israel's American-made F-16s and Apache helicopters have destroyed mosques, the education and justice ministries, a university, prisons, courts and police stations. These institutions were part of Gaza's civilian infrastructure. And when nonmilitary institutions are targeted, civilians die. Many killed in the last week were young police recruits with no military roles. Civilian employees in the Hamas-led government deserve the protections of international law like all others. Hamas's ideology -- which employees may or may not share -- is abhorrent, but civilized nations do not kill people merely for what they think.

Deliberate attacks on civilians that lack strict military necessity are war crimes. Israel's current violations of international law extend a long pattern of abuse of the rights of Gaza Palestinians. Eighty percent of Gaza's 1.5 million residents are Palestinian refugees who were forced from their homes or fled in fear of Jewish terrorist attacks in 1948. For 60 years, Israel has denied the internationally recognized rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes -- because they are not Jews.

Although Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005, it continues to tightly regulate Gaza's coast, airspace and borders. Thus, Israel remains an occupying power with a legal duty to protect Gaza's civilian population. But Israel's 18-month siege of the Gaza Strip preceding the current crisis violated this obligation egregiously. It brought economic activity to a near standstill, left children hungry and malnourished, and denied Palestinian students opportunities to study abroad.

Israel should be held accountable for its crimes, and the U.S. should stop abetting it with unconditional military and diplomatic support.

Mr. Bisharat is a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.[/B]

 

[Brown]

Stop posting crap, PAF and PA is acting within its territory while israel is attacking another country.
And for your kind and poor information, this is the very reason we have disputes over with the US because unlike you guys who can kill anyone and everyone who is a muslim by faith and has beard, PA differentiate between them. Also you havent answered my question Hamas was a democratically elected government, why was it not accepted then?

In that case US is firing in FATA and attacking your country.
I see you lecture abt

israel is attacking another country.

Take a break. First prevent US from doing do.
and then replay to this.

 

[pkpatriotic]

Ban on foreign journalists skews coverage of conflict in Gaza
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
The Guardian,
Saturday 10 January 2009

Throughout the two-week bombardment of the Gaza Strip most journalists have been kept out by the Israeli government on the pretext of security. And the Israelis are pleased with the results.

Foreign journalists have been forced to report without getting to the detail of what is going on. That meant, at least in the early days of the bombardment, that reporters who would have been in Gaza were instead reporting from Israeli towns and cities under fire from Hamas, and Israeli officials found it easier to get themselves in front of a television camera.

An Israeli official told me they were delighted at a BBC TV correspondent broadcasting from Ashkelon in a flak jacket, reinforcing the impression that the Israeli city is a war zone when there is more chance of being hit by a car than a rocket. The notable exception is al-Jazeera TV, which has a bureau in Gaza City and has been broadcasting live from there.

Danny Seaman, head of the Israeli government's press office, who has described foreign journalists as a "figleaf" for Hamas, says the exclusion of reporters from Gaza has worked in Israel's favour as it has forced a greater focus on Israel's side of the story.

"When you have hundreds of journalists coming in, most haven't the faintest idea about the war or the situation," he said. "Take the UN school [where 42 people were killed by an Israeli shell] for example. There's a lot of questions as to what actually happened. If the foreign media had been there it would have had much more of an impact on the conflict than it has at the moment. For the first time, when Israel raised questions, journalists had to address these issues and not get caught in feeding frenzy of reporting the story."

Israel has long accommodated an often critical foreign press corps, generally without interference, although hostility grew after the outbreak of the second intifada because journalists were perceived as pro-Palestinian. The Israeli government boycotted the BBC at times and a cabinet minister wrote to the corporation to accuse its highly regarded former Jerusalem correspondent, Orla Guerin, of antisemitism.

The BBC has two Palestinian producers in Gaza who have supplied material. But its Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, is among those unable to enter Gaza. "We've had coverage but of course it is not the coverage that we would have liked to have had because we would have preferred to have gone in ourselves," he said.

Israel says there is no formal ban on reporters entering Gaza and that they are prevented only by the security situation. But the government has failed to implement a high court order to let in reporters when the principal crossing is open.

Israel is not alone in this. British forces restricted access by journalists to parts of Afghanistan because of government fears about public reaction to pictures of dead Afghans. The US has manipulated coverage from Iraq, via the policy of embedding journalists with troops and discouraging "unilateral" reporters.

BBC man on the ground
Palestinian TV producer Rushdi Abu Alouf has become the unlikely star of the BBC's Gaza coverage after Israel banned foreign correspondents entering the territory, preventing Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen from taking the helm. Although unknown to most British viewers, Abu Alouf has worked for the BBC for more than five years and is a familiar voice on the BBC Arabic service. His on-camera assurance is remarkable given that he has little previous broadcasting experience."He's the unlikely star but in other ways he is the most obvious because he's used to keeping things in Gaza running," said the BBC's world news editor, Jon Williams.
Oliver Luft

 

[Pk_Thunder]

Slaughter in Gaza​

Saturday, 10 Jan, 2009 | 09:41 AM PST |
By A.G. Noorani

WHAT precisely are Israel’s war aims in Gaza? Is the massacre it unleashed there designed simply to stop the rocket attacks by Hamas?

Or is its real aim the elimination of Hamas as a power in Gaza with all that it would entail? The result would be that its sole negotiating partner would be Mahmoud Abbas on the West Bank, enfeebled, not strengthened by Hamas’ ouster, and the wreckage of the remnants of the peace process. The military had been preparing for the attack for a year. The US is complicit in all this.

Hamas’ proneness to tactical mistakes and to excess is not doubted. But that stems from exasperation at the economic boycott and border closing it has been facing all along. It was prepared to play a constructive role, but that was denied to it. Quite regardless of how the Israel’s military venture ends Mahmoud Abbas will emerge a diminished man Steven Erlanger of The New York Times reported from Nablus in the West Bank. “Fury is rising here over the war in Gaza, as are support for Hamas and anger with the Palestinian Authority…. Security forces had broken up pro-Hamas demonstrations, arrested Hamas supporters, confiscated Hamas flags and torn up placards carrying pro-Hamas slogans.”

Mahmoud Abbas’ term as chairman of the Palestinian Authority expired yesterday (Jan 9). The Israeli Knesset goes to the polls on Feb 10. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had resigned last year. His foreign minister Tzipi Livni could not drum up a coalition. Hence, the elections in which Likud’s hard-line Binyamin Netanyahu will make a strong bid for return to power. The ruling Kadima needs to show that it can be as tough.

Israel never accepted the poll results which brought Hamas to power and soon began to contain it forcibly. Having failed, it now seeks to crush it.

On Jan 25, 2006, around 1,073,000 Palestinians went to the polls to fill 132 seats in the Palestine Legislative Council. Hamas secured an astonishing 74 seats. Fatah got 45. Hamas’ rallying cry was “For change and reform”. Its number two candidate Sheikh Mohammed Abu Teir said “Israel and a future Palestinian state could live side by side.”

On Jan 29 four days after the polls, a communiqué was issued after the cabinet meeting: “The State of Israel will not negotiate with any Palestinian administration even part of which is composed of an armed terrorist organisation that calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.”

On July 5, 2006 Israel Radio announced the cabinet’s decision to jail the Hamas government leaders and destroy the movement’s infrastructure. A spate of bombing raids began on July 2, 2006, lasting days and pounding the prime minister’s offices in Ramallah, Gaza and Nablus and the ministries of the interior and foreign affairs in Gaza.

When Mahmoud Abbas met President George W. Bush in the Oval Office in the White House in October 2005, the president warned “Don’t have an election if you think you will lose.”

A Hamas-Fatah coalition agreement arranged through Saudi mediation fell apart. Hamas controlled Gaza; Fatah controlled the West Bank. However, Israel immediately announced that it would not deal with the new government because its programme fell short of the three conditions for acceptance — recognising Israel, renouncing violence and accepting previous peace deals.

Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was designed, not to promote, but to wreck the peace process. Its architect the then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s friend and Chief of Staff Dov Weissglas said as much to the Israeli daily Haaretz on Oct 6, 2004: “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion of the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Disengagement supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Formaldehyde is the liquid in which dead bodies are preserved.

A security wall was built around the West Bank to cage in more than two million Palestinians, an electrified fence having already imprisoned more than a million in Gaza. More than 1,000 Israeli settlers are added every month to the thousands in the West Bank. More than 500 checkpoints hinder Palestinian movement. Palestinians were split into two Bantustan statelets behind high concrete and electrified fences.

This is the lot of 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and 1.5 million in Gaza. There are besides 1.13 million in Israel; 2.8 million in Jordan, l.64 million in other Arab countries and 0.57 million in the rest of the world. A nation of 10.1 million dispossessed from its own lands by force and deceit.

The Hamas leader Khalid Mishal’s plea to president-elect Barack Obama is naïve and pathetic “The start is not good. You commented on Mumbai but you say nothing of the enemy (Israel). This policy of double standards should stop”. But Israel is a valued ally.

After his nomination as the Democrats’ candidate, Barack Obama rushed to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and declared that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

Secretary of State-designate Hilary Clinton is no less staunch a supporter of Israel. It is heartening to know that at long last the UN Security Council has done its job by passing a resolution calling for an “immediate” and “durable” ceasefire in Gaza. How it is translated into practice remains to be seen.