More than 84o Palestinians dead, over 230 children

Jan 10 in The Independent

Largest London Palestine demo held in Hyde Park, ending at the Israeli embassy

Eyewitness report

This was the largest ever demonstration for Palestine, ever held in London. The organisers have claimed more than 100,000 some time around noon, but many thousands have joined after the start of the rally, so I cannot even imagine how many people were there – it was huge, colourful, angry and very, very cold. After the many speeches by leading artists, politicians and other public figures, the whole huge crowd started to cross the park towards Lancaster Gate and Queensway. The crowd was so immense, that this short walk took hours to complete in the freezing cold. Moslems, Jews Christians and even humle atheists such as myself have all rubbed shoulders, shared water bottles, and tried to exchange sentences in the enormous din of this great public display of anger over the murderous actions of the Israeli regime and the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in Gaza.

MASSIVE DEMONSTRATION AGAINST THE WAR + continuing protest: Gush Shalom

At the same time as Ehud Barak was ordering the army to start the bloody ground offensive against Gaza, some ten thousand protesters from all over Israel marched in Tel-Aviv in a massive demonstration against the war. All four lanes of Ibn Gvirol St., one of the city’s main throughfares, were packed full of demonstrators who marched the two kilometres from the Rabin Square to the Cinemateque, chanting and waving banners all the way. “One does not build an election campaign over the dead bodies of children!” shouted the protesters in Hebrew rhymes. “Orphans and widows are not election propaganda!”, “Olmert, Livni and Barak – war is no game!”’ “All cabinet ministers are war criminals!!” Barak, Barak, don’t worry – we shall meet you in The Hague!”, “Enough, enough – speak with Hamas!”

How Many Divisions?: Uri Avneri in Gush Shalom

NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands. Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

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Gaza: ICRC demands urgent access to wounded as Israeli army fails to assist wounded Palestinians

Geneva/Jerusalem/Tel Aviv (ICRC) – On the afternoon of 7 January, four Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulances and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) managed to obtain access for the first time to several houses in the Zaytun neighbourhood of Gaza City that had been affected by Israeli shelling. The ICRC had requested safe passage for ambulances to access this neighbourhood since 3 January but it only received permission to do so from the Israeli Defence Forces during the afternoon of 7 January.

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World Health Organisation Situation Report

CASUALTIES The total number of people killed in the Gaza Strip since 27 December is 758, at least 85 being women and 257 children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH). At least 3100 Palestinians have been injured including at least 1080 children and 452 women1. WHO has not been able to independently verify these details. Among those reported killed on 8 January were two Palestinian forklift drivers in an UNRWA convoy in Gaza near the Erez Crossing. “UNRWA decided to suspend all its operations in the Gaza Strip because of the increasing hostile actions against its premises and personnel,” Adnan Abu Hasna, the agency’s Gaza-based spokesman, said. It was unclear how long the suspension would last.

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FIELD UPDATE ON GAZA FROM THE HUMANITARIAN COORDINATOR: United Nations 8 January 2009, 17.00 hours

A humanitarian cease-fire, the first since hostilities began on 27 December, came into effect between 1300 and 1600 hours on 7 January to allow the civilian population to access basic supplies and medical services and medics to access the dead and wounded trapped under destroyed buildings. Israeli air strikes and clashes resumed as soon as the cease-fire ended. Today, air strikes continue notably in open areas of Nuseirat, Beit Lahia and Rafah (along the Egyptian border). The Israeli military operation has caused extensive damage to homes, civilian institutions and infrastructure. The entire Gaza Strip is on the verge of collapse, already weakened by the 18-month blockade on the territory. Most people have no electricity and no clean running water. While food assistance has entered, agencies are facing difficulties to distribute it due to the security situation. Food stocks are low in people’s homes, people are afraid to go out to find food and there is no cooking gas to cook whatever is available. Many homes do not have glass in their windows, and others are leaving them open to avoid shattering. Without electricity, the hospitals are operating on backup generators and are low on fuel, threatening the life-saving services doctors and nurses are urgently providing in the overloaded hospitals.

We stand with the majority. We will not be silent on Gaza: International Jewish Ani-Zionist Network

We write with grief and rage as we watch the horrifying Israeli air and ground attacks on Gaza. As Jews committed to ending Zionism, the founding ideology of Israel, and all forms of colonialism, we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, who continue to struggle in the face of these attacks, much as they have against more than 60 years of ethnic cleansing and racism. As Joseph Massad recently wrote, Gaza is in uprising against genocide, and is receiving today the same indifference from the capitals of the West that the rebels in the Warsaw Ghetto received in 1943.We stand with the hundreds of thousands who have taken the streets in solidarity with Gaza’s resistance. We stand with all those who struggle against racism, dispossession and genocide.We stand with the majority. We will not be silent on Gaza.We reject Israel’s pretense to act in response to rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas. Israel broke the ceasefire on November 4, 2008, while world attention was focused on U.S. elections.What the Israeli government calls “security” is fundamentally opposed to the real safety of all people living in the region. Residents of Sderot and other towns bordering Gaza have begged the government of Israel to maintain the cease-fire and accused it of “wasting that period of calm, instead of using it to advance understanding and begin negotiations.

Welcome to Hell: Gaza’s unending misery: The Independent

A wounded Palestinian boy waits for treatment at Shifa hospital in Gaza City yesterday

Israeli forces yesterday pounded dozens of targets in the Gaza Strip and dropped leaflets warning of an escalation in attacks, as southern Israel came under renewed Palestinian rocket fire. Last night, as flames and smoke rose over Gaza City, speculation grew that Israel was about to launch the so-called third stage of its offensive: the forcible entry into Gaza City by thousands of troops.In response, Hamas said that the Gaza offensive had “killed the last chance for settlement and negotiation with Israel”. Earlier yesterday, Israeli aircraft attacked more than 40 targets throughout Gaza, striking 10 rocket-launching sites, weapons-storage facilities, smuggling tunnels, an anti-aircraft missile launcher and gunmen. And civilians. In the day’s bloodiest incident, an Israeli tank shell landed outside a home in the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya, killing nine people as they sat in their garden. They were all from the same clan, and, said health administrator Adham Hakim, their bodies were so mangled they were brought to hospital in the boot of a civilian car. Two were women and two were children.

Al Jazeera English: Bulletin 1 Jan 10

Al Jazeera English: Bulletin 2 Jan 10

In Gaza, the schools are dying too: The Guardian

A new word emerged from the carnage in Gaza this week: “scholasticide” – the systematic destruction by Israeli forces of centres of education dear to Palestinian society, as the ministry of education was bombed, the infrastructure of teaching destroyed, and schools across the Gaza strip targeted for attack by the air, sea and ground offensives. “Learn, baby, learn” was a slogan of the black rights movement in America’s ghettoes a generation ago, but it also epitomises the idea of education as the central pillar of Palestinian identity – a traditional premium on schooling steeled by occupation, and something the Israelis “cannot abide… and seek to destroy”, according to Dr Karma Nabulsi, who teaches politics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. “We knew before, and see more clearly now than ever, that Israel is seeking to annihilate an educated Palestine,” she says.

Israel to step up assault on Hamas: The Guardian

The Israeli military appeared to be preparing for a major new ground assault against Gaza City and other towns tonight after dropping leaflets warning residents it was about to “escalate” its offensive against Hamas. The tens of thousands of leaflets, dropped on parts of Gaza City, the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya and the south of the territory, warned residents: “The Israeli Defence Force will soon escalate its operations against tunnels, weapons warehouses, terrorist infrastructure and terrorists all over the Gaza Strip. To keep yourself and your families safe, you are ordered not to be close to terrorists, weapons warehouses and the places where the terrorists operate.”

UN human rights chief accuses Israel of war crimes: The Guardian

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”.

Enough. It’s time for a boycott: The Guardian

It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era”. The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause – even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions” and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves … This international backing must stop.”

We must uphold the UN charter in Gaza: The Guardian Letters

The UN charter, so carefully drafted by the international community after the second world war, expertly anticipates conflicts such as the Gaza crisis and provides a framework for preventing them or containing them. As the Iraq war has made clear, the consequences of ignoring that framework are deeply damaging. The charter is based on the obvious truth that it is perilous for any nation to enter into a war except as a last resort. Quick fixes soon become quagmires, and in the meantime people die. The drafters of the charter understood that member states embroiled in disputes might overlook the long view. The charter thus provides that the international community will regulate those disputes, and remove the need or temptation for self-help: under Article 1 one of the purposes of the UN is to take effective collective measures to remove threats to or breaches of peace.

Letter from 75 signatories: Guardian Jan 10

We the undersigned are all of Jewish origin. When we see the dead and bloodied bodies of young children, the cutting off of water, electricity and food, we are reminded of the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto. When Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, talked of putting Gazans “on a diet” and the deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, talked about the Palestinians experiencing “a bigger shoah” (holocaust), this reminds us of Governor General Hans Frank in Nazi-occupied Poland, who spoke of “death by hunger”. The real reason for the attack on Gaza is that Israel is only willing to deal with Palestinian quislings. The main crime of Hamas is not terrorism but its refusal to accept becoming a pawn in the hands of the Israeli occupation regime in Palestine. The decision last month by the EU council to upgrade relations with Israel, without any specific conditions on human rights, has encouraged further Israeli aggression. The time for appeasing Israel is long past. As a first step, Britain must withdraw the British ambassador to Israel and, as with apartheid South Africa, embark on a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions. Ben Birnberg, Prof Haim Bresheeth, Deborah Fink, Bella Freud, Tony Greenstein, Abe Hayeem, Prof Adah Kay, Yehudit Keshet, Dr Les Levidow, Prof Yosefa Loshitzky, Prof Moshe Machover, Miriam Margolyes, Prof Jonathan Rosenhead and 65 others

Meshal: No Gaza truce until IDF ends offensive, opens border crossings: Ha’aretz

Hamas’s leader in exile, Khaled Meshal, said on Saturday that his group would not consider a Gaza cease-fire until Israel ends its 15-day-old military offensive and opens the coastal enclave’s border crossings. “Let Israel pull out first, let the aggression stop first, let the crossings open and then people can look into the issue of calm,” said Meshal, in a televised speech in Damascus.

Israel warns Gaza of escalation: BBC

Israel has dropped leaflets on the Gaza Strip warning residents that it is to escalate its military action. There is speculation the leaflets may mean Israel will adopt new tactics in its battle with Palestinian militants. Israel says it has attacked dozens more Hamas targets, including what it says were rocket-launching sites, weapons stores and smuggling tunnels. Hamas militants fired more than 30 rockets across the border, injuring two Israelis in Ashkelon, Israel added. Medical staff in Gaza say more than 820 Palestinians have died during the two-week offensive, including 235 children.

So they will start being really nasty, apparently. After all, until now they were controlling themselves so well, that they only managed to kill 230 children. By the way, bearing in mind the size of Gaza and Palestine, if one calculates what this kind of murder would mean in the UK, the number is over 11,000 dead, over 3,000 of them children. Makes you think.

As the Israelis are now into leaflet dropping, I have worked out my own leaflet, to help them, as they must be so busy killing, that they may not have time for doing a proper job on a leaflet. You can read it here:

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UK protesters call for Gaza peace: BBC

Thousands of demonstrators have marched through London to call for an immediate ceasefire in the conflict in Gaza. The protest started peacefully but there were confrontations as police tried to move demonstrators away from the gates of the Israeli embassy. The windows of a Starbucks was smashed and three police officers were injured as a minority of people threw missiles.The Metropolitan Police says 20,000 people marched but the BBC estimates the figure could be as high as 50,000.It is estimated there were several hundred police officers dealing with around 200 protesters outside the embassy.

Well, they always are so accurate about numbers… you can see here a clip about the demo, obviously concentrating on the broken windows of Starbucks. That the BBC have also lied about the number of protesters, giving the number as 20,000, makes you understand also its main drive in reporting Gaza.

Analysis: Where is Israel heading?: BBC

Two weeks after Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, is it clear what the government is trying to achieve? Against the constant din of gunfire, ministers and officials have kept up a steady barrage of comment, which points to a range of possibilities. The most frequent refrain has also been the most ambiguous. “The fundamental objective of the operation,” said Defence Minister Ehud Barak earlier this week, “is to change the reality of security for the south.”

This is obviously a great success story! After all, Israel has more than managed to “change the reality of security for the south”; let us admit they have changed the security situation in the whole world, making the world a safer, nicer and mmore friendly place to live in. Let us all thank the Israeli regime for its prescient action! Any moment now, I am about to start singing with joy.

Bowen diary: The days before war: BBC

I am going to London for a very quick break. I have now spent two weeks looking over the border at the war in Gaza, unable to get in. The only foreign journalist Israel has allowed into Gaza in the last fortnight was a cameraman, my friend Sarge from the BBC, who went in for a day with the army. My last visit was a week or so before the formal end of the ceasefire on 19 December. I try to visit places in the Middle East that are newsworthy at times when I don’t actively have to do a story. It is easier to have a proper talk when you don’t have a deadline and a camera breathing down your neck.

A little disappointing from someone spending so much of the BBC (and my tax) money in Gaza and Israel, and still coninuing to represent the Israeli position so well…

Vatican deplores Gaza situation: BBC

The Pope’s justice minister, Cardinal Renato Martino, has sharply criticised Israel’s actions and likened the Gaza Strip to a “big concentration camp”. Correspondents say his words mark the Vatican’s toughest comments since Israel began its offensive with intensive air attacks 12 days ago.

The Guardian, 8 Jan 2009