Tag: Gaza

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain

1. Who won? In an immediate military sense, Israel. What do you expect? The Israeli Defense Forces made 2,500 plus F-16 and ‘copter air sorties against a densely populated urban area where the only opposing armed forces possessed no anti-aircraft guns, no surface to air missiles and no planes. It is estimated that repairing the damage suffered by the already desperate inhabitants of this colossal open air prison, the ones who survived, will run over $2 billion. 80% of the agricultural infrastructure of Gaza is reported to have been been destroyed.

Beyond the horrific destruction visited to the Palestinian people, though, the Israelis appear to have picked up a stone only to drop it on their own feet. They will have an uphill slog in the battle for summation, with direct political consequences in increased isolation as sympathy and even material support from people around the world flow to Gaza.

2. Despite careful timing–to take advantage of reduced attention to news during the Christian holiday season and to finish before administration change in the US–Israeli aggression caught world attention. Some analysts have pointed out that Israel dominated the “war of words,” banning foreign journalists from Gaza and working to see that discourse was laced with terms like terrorism, Islamic fundamentalists, security and the like. However, it decisively lost “the war of images” as photos and video provided by the Palestinian news agency Ramattan appeared on al-Jazeera and other news outlets, even CNN. This showed the people of the world the carnage, and the agony of those still living, and it documented IDF attacks on homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and UN facilities.

3. At the level of international government, Israel pretty much got a free ride at first, due in part to splits among Palestinians and between Arab states, and in part to US intransigence in blocking meaningful action in the UN Security Council. But while governments started out largely sitting on their hands, an unprecedented outpouring of mass anger and protest in country after country forced institutions like the news media and the international  Red Cross and then governments to speak up in criticism of Israel. (Still, only Venezuela and Bolivia broke ties with Israel over the attack).

Three choice examples of the popular struggle, from Europe alone:

Norway, where over 85 pro-Palestinian protests and broader peace marches  took place in 59 towns (in a country of 4.5 million!), saw the most intense rioting in recent memory in central Oslo as police tried to repress militant young protestors. (See the nifty interactive map–in English–from Frontlinjer magazine here.)

In the United Kingdom, even after the truce/ceasefire, students at sixteen (16, count ’em, 16) universities seized campus buildings around a series of anti-Israel and pro-Palestine demands. Most are still on. Students at the London School of Economics and Oxford report victories in negotiations with administrators.

In Greece, a January 9 news story from Reuters sent Greek activists and bloggers into research mode. They were able to identify a contracted shipment of GBU-39 bunker buster bombs scheduled to go from Sunny Point, NC through the port of Astakos en route to Israel. They started organizing for an embargo of US and Israeli shipping including outreach to dockworkers. By the 16th, one week later, the contract was cancelled!

4. In the United States, the astonishing power of the Israel lobby once again gave it unchallenged sway in the media and government. The Senate passed by unanimous voice vote and the House with a total of 5 courageous Nays (Dennis Kucinich, Gwen Moore, Maxine Waters, Nick Rahall and Ron Paul) a resolution hailing the aggression and blaming Hamas for all the Palestinian deaths. Candidate Obama last July signaled his stance, saying, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.” (No one in the media asked him about whether he had stolen his house at gunpoint and was keeping the former residents and their children in a concentration camp in his back yard.)

Considering the propaganda barrage and the “conventional wisdom” in the very air we breathe here, the fact that Americans generally (according to a Rasmussen poll) “are closely divided over whether the Jewish state should be taking military action against militants in the Gaza Strip” (44-41%, with 15% undecided) and that non-Republicans oppose it solidly is a remarkable development.  

(Kathy Kelly, a Chicagoan twice nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, who has devoted her life to promoting peace through non-violence, has often put herself in harm’s way as a witness. She has been in Gaza for six days.)

by Kathy Kelly

January 21, 2009

GAZA –Traffic on Sea Street, a major thoroughfare alongside Gaza’s coastline, includes horses, donkeys pulling carts, cyclists, pedestrians, trucks and cars, mostly older models. Overhead, in stark contrast to the street below, Israel’s ultra modern unmanned surveillance planes criss-cross the skies.  F16s and helicopters can also be heard.  Remnants of their deliveries, the casings of missiles, bombs and shells used during the past three weeks of Israeli attacks, are scattered on the ground.  

Workers have cleared most of the roads.  Now, they are removing massive piles of wreckage and debris, much as people do following an earthquake.  

“Yet, all the world helps after an earthquake,” said a doctor at the Shifaa hospital in Gaza. “We feel very frustrated,” he continued.  “The West, Europe and the U.S., watched this killing go on for 22 days, as though they were watching a movie, watching the killing of women and children without doing anything to stop it.  I was expecting to die at any moment.  I held my babies and expected to die.  There was no safe place in Gaza.”

He and his colleagues are visibly exhausted, following weeks of work in the Intensive Care and Emergency Room departments at a hospital that received many more patients than they could help.  “Patients died on the floor of the operating room because we had only six operating rooms,” said Dr. Saeed Abuhassan, M.D, an ICU doctor who grew up in Chicago.  “And really we don’t know enough about the kinds of weapons that have been used against Gaza.”  

In 15 years of practice, Dr. Abuhassan says he never saw burns like those he saw here.  The burns, blackish in color, reached deep into the muscles and bones.  Even after treatment was begun, the blackish color returned.  

Two of the patients were sent to Egypt because they were in such critical condition.  They died in Egypt. But when autopsies were done, reports showed that the cause of death was poisoning from elements of white phosphorous that had entered their systems, causing cardiac arrests.  

In Gaza City, The Burn Unit’s harried director, a plastic surgeon and an expert in treating burns, told us that after encountering cases they’d never seen before, doctors at the center performed a biopsy on a patient they believed may have suffered chemical burns and sent the sample to a lab in Egypt. The results showed elements of white phosphorous in the tissue.  

The doctor was interrupted by a phone call from a farmer who wanted to know whether it was safe to eat the oranges he was collecting from groves that had been uprooted and bombed during the Israeli invasion.  The caller said the oranges had an offensive odor and that when the workers picked them up their hands became itchy.  

Audrey Stewart had just spent the morning with Gazan farmers in Tufaa, a village near the border between Gaza and Israel.  Israeli soldiers had first evacuated people, then dynamited the houses, then used bulldozers to clear the land, uprooting the orange tree groves.  Many people, including children, were picking through the rubble, salvaging belongings and trying to collect oranges. At one point, people began shouting at Audrey, warning her that she was standing next to an unexploded rocket.  

The doctor put his head in his hands, after listening to Audrey’s report.  “I told them to wash everything very carefully. But these are new situations. Really, I don’t know how to respond,” he said.

Yet he spoke passionately about what he knew regarding families that had been burned or crushed to death when their homes were bombed. “Were their babies a danger to anyone?” he asked us.  

“They are lying to us about democracy and Western values,” he continued, his voice shaking. “If we were sheep and goats, they would be more willing to help us.”

Dr. Saeed Abuhassan was bidding farewell to the doctors he’d worked with in Gaza.  He was returning to his work in the United Arab Emirates.  But before leaving, he paused to give us a word of advice. “You know, the most important thing you can tell people in your country is that U.S. people paid for many of the weapons used to kill people in Gaza,” said Dr. Saeed Abuhassan.  “And this, also, is why it’s worse than an earthquake.”

Kathy Kelly (email: [email protected]) is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. She and Audrey Stewart have been in Gaza for the past six days.  

Gaza rebuild ‘to cost billions’

Today, the news reports that Israel has moved beyond its land/air/sea bombardment of Gaza, which has killed hundreds, including many civilian men, women and children. Tanks, motorized forces and troops have virtually cut the territory in half. While four Israelis have died from Hamas rocket attacks since the invasion began, BBC reports:

According to Hamas officials and witnesses, the main fighting is now centred on four areas: east of the Jabaliya refugee camp; in the Zeitoun neighbourhood to the east of Gaza City; on the coastal road close to the site of the former Jewish settlement of Netzarim, south of Gaza City; and in an uninhabited area in the centre of Gaza.

Hamas said its fighters were in some cases engaged in “face-to-face battles” with Israeli soldiers.

Earlier, the Israeli military said the militants were not engaging its troops in close combat but using mortars and improvised bombs.

The Palestinian health ministry says more than 500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have now been killed since the Israelis began their assault on Gaza eight days ago. A further 2,500 have been wounded.

Scottish activist films Israeli navy shooting at Gaza fishermen

Claims of 14 deaths in previous incidents

According to

Billy Briggs, writing in Scotland Sunday Herald,

A Scottish human rights activist has filmed the Israeli navy firing machine guns at unarmed Palestinian fishing boats in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of the Gaza Strip. The footage, taken on September 6 by Andrew Muncie, who is from the Highlands, shows an Israeli gunboat engaging fishing boats while international observers hold their arms in the air and scream for them to stop firing.

Briggs reports that:

No-one was injured in the incident, but Palestinian fishermen claim 14 colleagues have been murdered at sea by the Israeli navy since the onset of an economic blockade imposed after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.

Israel says patrolling these waters is a vital security measure to stop weapons being smuggled into Gaza, but by its blockade, Israel controls the Palestinians’ food, fuel, aid, and ability to fish in their own territorial waters.

The Sunday Herald article states that:

According to the United Nations, the crisis has left the number of households in Gaza below the poverty line at an unprecedented 52%.

Gaza’s fishing industry has been hit particularly hard. Under the 1993 Oslo accords, Gazan fishermen were to be allowed 20 nautical miles out to sea. According to Oxfam, fishermen are now only allowed six miles out to sea – not far enough out to reach the schools of large fish – and risk being shot or arrested if they breach this limit.

But that’s not all Israel controls with its gunboats in Gaza’s maritime territory.

Three Palestinian children aged 10, 12 and 14 were killed this evening in an Israeli air-strike in northern Gaza, bringing today’s Palestinian death toll to 12. Five members of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades were killed this morning in two targeted assassinations in Gaza, while this afternoon two Palestinian farmers were killed by Israeli tank fire.

In retaliation for the killing of its activists, Hamas fired at least 30 Qassam rockets into Israel, killing a student in Sderot and wounding several others. Olmert indicated that the campaign of assassinations will continue, declaring that “no one in Hamas, not the low-level officials nor the highest echelon, will be immune against this war.” To prove his sincerity, Israeli jets bombed the Hamas Interior Ministry (again), killing a six-month old baby and wounding at least 14 bystanders.

After being subjected to almost two years of relentless economic siege and vicious military assault, the 1.5 million residents of Gaza are on the brink of collapse. Israel is apparently determined to push them over the edge.

Okay, so yesterday was Christmas and much merriment was had by all. Except, as the media were determined to remind us, by Palestinian Christians suffering persecution by Muslim extremists. While the persecution certainly exists, it is plainly a sideshow to the Israeli occupation, which not only persecutes but kills Palestinians of all religious persuasions. It’s perfectly egalitarian in that sense: men, women, children, Muslims, Christians – no Palestinian is safe. But that story doesn’t fit with the “evil Muslims taking away Christmas” or the “war on terra” memes, and has therefore been marginalised.

In any event, ’tis the season to be jolly, so let’s look at the bright side: this will all be over within a year, as agreed upon at Annapolis. Both sides will work tirelessly and sincerely to achieve a final settlement. The Palestinian Authority will make real attempts to crack down on militant groups while Israel will freeze all settlement construction and dismantle all outposts, and will in no way attempt to use the structure of the roadmap to delay and obfuscate progress, as it has done in the past. Good, now that’s sorte – huh?:

Suppose I were to argue that, given Israel’s numerous and gross war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the international community should impose sanctions on Israel of such severity that 80% of the Israeli population would be reduced to reliance upon UN food aid for mere survival, and over 65% of Israeli households would be forced to live in ‘deep poverty’ (i.e. on less than $474 per month). The blockade would be so tight that only 41% of Israel’s food import needs would be met, and supplies of 91 out of 416 essential drugs and about a third of essential medical supplies (including most children’s antibiotics) would run out.