Ahmad Samih Khalidi, The Guardian, Wednesday 28 October 2009
As President Obama seeks to jumpstart the Middle East peace process with increasingly disappointing results, a new approach has begun to emerge from within the upper circles of the Palestinian Authority.
In essence, this approach puts "statehood first" – without waiting for negotiations to resume, or for a full final status agreement with Israel. From this point of view, and in a kind of Zionism in reverse, unilateral actions on the ground can lay the foundations for an independent Palestinian state, irrespective of Israel's demands or strategy.
This approach has recently been formalised in the PA government's two-year plan, which includes an ambitious range of economic and developmental projects and is intended to tally with the growing international consensus on setting a two-year time frame for the two-state vision and a comprehensive Palestinian-Israeli settlement.
"Statehood first" has a superficially attractive ring to it that has begun to gain some traction among decision-makers in Washington and the EU. But it is fundamentally flawed. The first problem is the assumption that unilateral Palestinian state-building is possible when every PA action is determined by the Israeli occupation. Even putting to one side the Fatah-Hamas split, the PA cannot exercise the most elementary of powers; it cannot independently trade on the world market, decide who can enter its soil or deploy the smallest unit of its security services from one village to another; its leaders cannot even move without prior Israeli consent. In short, it cannot freely exercise its authority over its citizens or territory in any meaningful manner.
At the heart of the PA's programme lies a basic contradiction: while it claims to be building a state against the occupation, it is in practice building state-like structures with the occupation. No genuinely sovereign state has been or can be built while still under occupation, and nothing in Israel's current stance on the basic issues of Palestinian sovereignty (territorial extent, control over borders, the right to self defence, and so on) suggests otherwise.
The second problem stems from a total misreading of history. The Zionist movement may indeed have developed its state-building capacity while under the British mandate, but Israel only came into being as a state by using force against British and Palestinians alike. By way of contrast, the only military capability the PA is building under US supervision is directed against those who seek to take up arms against the occupation. The "Zionist" option of military self-reliance and readiness to use force for political-territorial ends is totally absent from the PA's new approach and is inimical to its political outlook.
The state-first approach carries other significant risks: it threatens to transform any final status negotiations into a prolonged state-to-state dispute whereby the fate of Palestinian refugees, the future of Arab Jerusalem and other critical issues will be indefinitely deferred. The urgency of dealing with Palestinians' national grievances as a whole will diminish, and their interests will be gradually pushed to the margins of international and regional concerns on the grounds that they have already fulfilled their major aspiration by being granted statehood.
In present and foreseeable circumstances, the PA's programme will be concentrated on the West Bank alone. This will only aggravate the division of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian hinterland. It will generate new Fatah-Hamas frictions, making it harder for a unified position to emerge. It is also worth remembering that the current PA cabinet is a caretaker government twice over, and has no mandate for any two-year programmes. Moreover, the issue of Palestinian statehood lies outside its legal remit: it is a political decision that rightfully belongs to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, not to the Palestinian Authority. Yet if it proceeds with its programme regardless, the PA will find itself caught in a political trap – success will undermine its claim for more land and greater territorial viability in the final status negotiations; failure will simply demonstrate that the Palestinians are unworthy of statehood.
Palestinian unilateralism will open the door to legitimising Israel's own unilateralism, and both historical precedent and the balance of power suggest that in such a contest Israel will prevail. Rather than lay the foundations for a truly viable and sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, Palestinian "Zionism" as conceived is only likely to produce a partial, ersatz entity; one that differs little from the autonomous self-rule that has long been Israel's remedy for addressing the Palestinian problem.
The new PA approach is not really about building a state by stealth or undoing the occupation by other means. Its focus is apolitical: improving Palestinian living standards and fomenting state-like behaviour but without any of the advantages of a real state. Indeed, this approach dovetails all too neatly with Bibi Netanyahu's notion of "economic peace" – it appears as a pragmatic ambition, to supplement the peace process and path to a viable two-state solution. In reality it is destined to circumvent it altogether – or, at best, to ensure that the outcome is determined by Israeli national interests alone.
The first essential duty of a state is defending its citizens against foreign incursions and threats. This part of the citizen-state contract clearly cannot be fulfilled under the proposed plan. The net result may be to devalue the already unconvincing currency of a two-state solution and leave the Palestinians suspended in yet another twilight zone whose only real dimension is a return to the heady days of "benign" occupation.
Wednesday 28 October 2009
Last Straw for the Palestinian "Authority"? Sari Makdisi
If there were any lingering doubts concerning the status and integrity of the Palestinian National Authority -- and its so-called President, Mahmoud Abbas ("so-called" because his term of office, such as it was, expired almost a year ago) -- they were surely dispelled once and for all by its decision to drop its support for a UN resolution that would have referred the Goldstone Report on Israel's post-Christmas 2008 attack on Gaza to the UN Security Council.
Saree Makdisi
Professor of English, University of California
The 575-page Report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which was led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, confirmed the already densely documented reports published by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International. Those reports had, in turn, systematically confirmed Palestinian claims that Israel had, for example, recklessly and indiscriminately used white phosphorous on the packed residential districts of Gaza; indiscriminately targeted civilian objects including UN schools (as documented by the widely circulated -- other than in the US -- photographs of an Israeli phosphorous strike on a UN school in Gaza); used Palestinian civilians as human shields; and collectively punished the population of Gaza by imposing on them a suffocating siege, cutting off vital supplies of food, medicine, and fuel (not just during the recent assault and on to this day, but, to a greater or lesser extent, since 2005, and even, arguably, since 1991, when the Israelis first methodically sealed off the hapless territory from the outside world).
The Amnesty report, published in July, found that "hundreds of civilians were killed in attacks carried out using high-precision weapons -- air-delivered bombs and missiles, and tank shells. Others, including women and children, were shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers. Aerial bombardments launched from Israeli F-16 combat aircraft targeted and destroyed civilian homes without warning, killing and injuring scores of their inhabitants, often while they slept. Children playing on the roofs of their homes or in the street and other civilians going about their daily business, as well as medical staff attending the wounded were killed in broad daylight by Hellfire and other highly accurate missiles launched from helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, and by precision projectiles fired from tanks."
The Goldstone report (though it remarkably reserves its strongest language for Palestinian rocket attacks that killed 3 Israeli civilians, compared to the 1,400 Palestinians killed in Gaza, the vast majority civilians, and a third of them children) reiterates many of the same conclusions, and reports on case after case where Israeli forces launched "intentional attacks against the civilian population and civilian objects," including "the shooting of civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so. The facts gathered by the Mission indicate that all the [latter] attacks occurred under circumstances in which the Israeli forces were in control of the area and had previously entered into contact with or at least observed the persons they subsequently attacked, so that they must have been aware of their civilian status." These incidents -- all of which constitute war crimes -- indicate, according to the Goldstone report, "that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population."
Indeed, among its other findings, the Goldstone report corroborates the well-documented reports (all of them summarily dismissed by the Israeli army, which considers itself "the most moral army in the world") that Israeli soldiers themselves admitted to the brutality of the bombardment of Gaza, and left behind them -- as unmistakable evidence of their officially-encouraged attitude towards Palestinians -- both racist slogans (e.g., "We came to annihilate you; Death to the Arabs; Kahane was right; No tolerance, we came to liquidate") and human feces smeared on the walls of the Palestinian homes they looted and vandalized. "You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them," one Israeli soldier confessed of the prevailing Israeli army attitude toward the Palestinians of Gaza, which was fueled in part by the proclamations of the army's rabbinical corps, which compared Palestinians to the biblical Philistines and urged that Israeli soldiers "show no mercy."
None of the conclusions of all these reports ought to come as a surprise. The Israeli army itself had openly proclaimed, months before the bombing even started, that its strategy in both Lebanon and Palestine has been premised since 2006 on the sweeping and indiscriminate use of massive firepower: the so-called "Dahiyeh Doctrine," referring to the Dahiyeh, or southern suburb of Beirut, which the Israelis razed to the ground in their 2006 war on Lebanon, as they also did to many villages in the south of that country. "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction," one Israeli general (Gadi Eisenkot) announced -- with contemptuous disregard for the law of war. "From our perspective, these are military bases," he added. "This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized."
Other than planning for -- and attempting (to its own satisfaction at least) to legitimate -- the massive and necessarily indiscriminate use of force, the Israeli military legal establishment had specifically authorized premeditated attacks, such as the one that killed dozens of unarmed Gaza policemen parading in their graduation ceremony, with which Israel kicked off its bombardment on 27 December 2008, that inherently involved manifest violations of the principles of proportionality and discrimination that are the pillars of international humanitarian law.
Moreover, not only the Amnesty and Goldstone reports but Israeli commanders themselves openly said that overwhelming and indiscriminate force was used -- deliberately, and in a premeditated fashion -- again, in total disregard for the principles of proportionality and discrimination. "At the start of the ground offensive, senior command decided to avoid endangering the lives of soldiers, even at the price of seriously harming the civilian population," one Israeli media report revealed. "This is why the IDF [Israeli army] made use of massive force during its advance in the Strip. As a Golani brigade commander explained, if there is any concern that a house is booby-trapped, even if it is filled with civilians, it should be targeted and hit, to ensure that it is not mined -- only then should it be approached. Without going into the moral aspects, such fighting tactics explain why there were no instances in which there was a need to assault homes where Hamas fighters were holed up."
Ultimately, all that these inquiries, including Goldstone's, have done is merely to confirm Israel's own (repeatedly flaunted) contempt for international humanitarian law.
Needless to say, from the beginning, Israel utterly refused to cooperate with the Goldstone inquiry, dismissing it -- as it has dismissed all previous attempts to investigate its conduct or to hold it accountable to the principles of international humanitarian law -- as "unfair" and "unbalanced" (as though there were anything "balanced" about the conflict between the sheer force of an occupying power and an essentially defenseless occupied people). Among the many previous investigative commissions which Israel has either summarily dismissed or refused to cooperate with are the investigation led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu into the Israeli killing of 19 members of a Palestinian family in Gaza in 2008; the commission appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2002 to investigate the indiscriminate destruction of civilian areas in the Israeli assault on Jenin refugee camp that spring (the actions of which a separate investigation, by Amnesty International, found amounted "to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes"); and the UN investigation of the Israeli artillery massacre of over a hundred Lebanese civilians huddling in a shelter at a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon in 1995, which found that "it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors," as the Israeli army said at the time -- as, indeed, it always says is the case when its soldiers kill dozens of civilians: not once has Israel actually held any of its officers or soldiers accountable for such crimes. In all previous cases, Israel's adamant refusal to be held accountable to the law has been upheld by the US, and the Obama administration proved that it had no intention of breaking that particular tradition this time either.
Nevertheless, as Professor Richard Falk (the UN's Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories) points out, the Goldstone report could have provided a basis for referring Israel's conduct durng the war in Gaza to the International Criminal Court or other international courts, or to the establishment of a war crimes tribunal along the lines of those established after the catastrophes of Bosnia and Rwanda. That would have been the best way to finally hold Israel accountable for its grave breaches of international humanitarian law, its war crimes, and its crimes against humanity (not least the sealing off an entire civilian population from the outside world, denying it the ability to flee to safety, and then subjecting that same, defenseless, shelterless population -- most of it composed of children -- to an indiscriminate round-the-clock bombardment).
The process of referral depended, however, on obtaining a vote within the UN to have the Goldstone report referred to the Security Council for further deliberation, the creation of a war crimes tribunal, and so on. And all of that depended in turn on the support of Palestinian diplomats appointed by and accountable to Mahmoud Abbas.
But it is now clear that the Palestinian team representing Mahmoud Abbas at the UN (for they certainly do not represent the Palestinian people) has, on his instructions, dropped its support for the resolution that might have set the legal machinery of the international judicial system in motion. Other states can hardly be expected to stand up to US pressure and support a resolution on behalf of Palestinian rights that the Palestinian delegation itself is unwilling to support -- why should Venezuela or Nigeria or Pakistan be more Palestinian than the Palestinians?
Reports have been circulating in the Arab, Israeli and European media that Abbas and his associates may have been prompted to take this extraordinary action because Israel had been threatening, had they continued with their support of the UN resolution, to withhold its release of a share of the radio spectrum that would have allowed the creation of a new Palestinian mobile phone company, Wataniyya: the product of a joint venture between Qatari investors and the Palestine Investment Fund, to which Abbas himself and one of his wealthy sons have personal connections. Palestinians have suggested that simple corruption and cronyism may have motivated Abbas's decision. The PA and the circle of officials attached to it have certainly had their share of corruption charges -- most shockingly, perhaps, when Ahmed Qureia, then the so-called Prime Minister of the PA (again, "so-called" because Prime Ministers usually have countries to govern, and the PA is anything but a country), was accused of selling cement to the Israelis to build their wall in the West Bank. The corruption of the PA and the narrow circle of Fateh party officials running it, clinging to it, and benefiting from it, is one of the main reasons why Fateh was swept from office in the 2006 Palestinian elections in favor of Hamas: most people then were voting against Fateh and its corruption and general hopelessness, rather than for Hamas (which had, and has, little to offer other than simply not being Fateh: a credit which goes only so far).
It's possible, of course, that corruption and cronyism were not the motivating factors for Abbas's decision to withdraw Palestinian support for the Goldstone report. There are two other possibilities.
One of these is simple incompetence: that Abbas and his associates are so lacking in intelligence, imagination and political skill that they just bungled the whole affair. This is certainly not out of the question: Abbas himself is an extraordinarily unprepossessing and profoundly compromised man, and his circle of associates -- including men like Mohammad Dahlan and Saeb Ereikat -- hardly inspire any more confidence than Abbas himself. Quite apart from their sheer disregard for Palestinian suffering in Gaza (seeking redress for which ought to be their main priority), it ought to be clear that a party to a negotiation that wantonly throws a rarely-held card out of the window while attempting (or at least claiming) to negotiate is, to put it mildly, not qualified to negotiate in the first place, let alone to claim to "lead" a defiant and unvanquished people like the Palestinians. If the Ramallah leadership is really as hopelessly incompetent as this scenario would have it, that's reason enough for their removal from office, if not the dissolution of the PA itself. (It's difficult, though, to "dismiss from office" someone like Abbas who is not actually in office in the first place -- he is there because the Israelis and the Americans want him to be there, because the election for his successor after his term expired has been deferred at the behest of Washington and Tel Aviv, and not because he holds any legitimate mandate from the Palestinian people themselves, the overwhelming majority of whom have no faith in him whatsoever, as opinion polls have regularly found).
Another -- and I think more likely -- possibility is that Abbas, the PA and the essentially defunct PLO are not (and never were, at least since the time of Yasser Arafat's death) interested in serious negotiations with Israel that could have led to the creation of a genuine Palestinian state in the occupied territories. After all, one of the main criticisms of the Oslo Accords of 1993-95 which created the PA, is that, far from ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory, they merely served to shift the day-to-day burden and cost of administering the occupation to the newly-established PA, while allowing Israel to go on demolishing Palestinian homes, expropriating Palestinian land, and building Jewish colonies in the occupied territories in contravention of international law. Oslo formally separated the three main chunks of Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967 (Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem) from each other and the outside world, and, additionally, broke the West Bank itself into Areas A, B and C. It was only in Area A (about 18 percent of the total) that the PA had any kind of practical presence on the ground, and in Area C (60 percent of the West Bank), the PA had no role or presence at all -- and that's where Israel was (and still is) busy demolishing, expropriating and building. Oslo and the PA, in other words, far from ending the occupation and laying the basis for the creation of an independent Palestinian state, actually allowed Israel to consolidate the occupation and further cement its grip on Palestinian land. Which is exactly why the population of Jewish colonists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem doubled during the period of Oslo and has been increasing ever since -- and today numbers almost half a million.
As this latest episode so amply demonstrates, the PA serves Israel by facilitating the occupation -- which is why Israel invented it in the first place, just as, historically speaking, colonial powers have always attempted to create or coerce local elites into helping them deal with the population at large: an approach perhaps most gracefully summarized in Macaulay's Minute on Indian Educationhttp://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html of 1835 ("We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect"). Why would the PA want to bring to an end an arrangement from which it benefits? As the French scholar Regis Debray points out, the status quo provides the PA elites in Ramallah "with a living, status, dignity and a raison d'être," and probably (e.g., if the mobile phone contract rumors prove to be true) much more in the way of emoluments besides that.
Even if one were to grant the PA and Abbas and his associates the benefit of the doubt, and say that they really have their people's best interests at heart, it still remains the case that the PA, even under the best-case scenario, can claim to represent only a minority of the Palestinian people, since only a minority of Palestinians live in the occupied territories: the majority live either in the exile imposed on them by force during the creation of Israel in 1948, or (in the case of those Palestinians who survived that year's ethnic cleansing and remained in their homes) as second-class, non-Jewish citizens of the would-be Jewish state, which systematically discriminates against them simply because they are not Jewish.
These, then, are the possibilities before us: not only does the PA not represent the Palestinian people, it is also, on top of that, either corrupt to an almost unimaginable level; or it is profoundly incompetent and guilty of squandering the rights and hopes of a people that it is unentitled to claim to lead; or it is interested not in its people's rights and hopes but rather in perpetuating its own status as the day-to-day caretaker of a permanent Israeli occupation -- in which case it is no less collaborationist than the Vichy "government" of Nazi-occupied France in the 1940s. Corruption; incompetence; collaboration: ah, the agony of choice.
In the unlikely event that Abbas and his associates were to declare the "independence" of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, as has been suggested by the current so-called Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad (another man whose claim to office has no legitimacy, since his arbitrary appointment, by Abbas, to replace the legitimately elected Hamas leadership -- whatever one thinks of it -- was never confirmed by the Palestinian Legislative Assembly, many of the members of which are in Israeli jails), it ought to be clearer than ever that such a "state" would offer Palestinians only more of the same choices (corruption, compromise, collaboration), while continuing to serve Israel's interests, if not actually to take direct orders from Washington and Tel Aviv.
In any case, the Palestinian cause is a struggle for freedom and justice, not for the creation of a statelet in the occupied territories that would, as I said -- even in the best circumstances -- only address the interests of that minority of the Palestinian people who live there.
What, then, are we to conclude from all this?
Above all, that no Palestinian ought to look to the official leadership as a source of guidance and direction: it has betrayed the people and proved itself totally unworthy of their trust -- indeed, many Palestinians, including Abdelbari Atwan, editor of the newspaper al-quds al-arabi, are demanding that those behind this recent decision be apprehended and put on trial. And of course with a leadership this corrupt, inept or collaborationist, Palestinians can hardly expect better treatment from Washington and Tel Aviv than they are getting from Ramallah. And the Hamas opposition and its alternative leadership has little more to offer in the long run other than resistance for the sake of resistance, which is not, in itself, a blueprint for freedom and justice, and in any case has nothing to offer to Christian or secular Palestinians (and hardly much more than that to offer Muslim ones either, for that matter).
The second immediate conclusion to be drawn from this experience is that, as more and more Palestinians are demanding, the PA ought to be dissolved once and for all -- the sooner, the better. This latest action really ought to be the last in a long and dismal record proving that the PA has not only not served the interests of the Palestinian people, but that, on the contrary, it fundamentally serves the needs and requirements of Israel.
Bereft of any credible or legitimate leadership, the Palestinian people will have to look to themselves to continue their struggle for freedom, justice and equality. Indeed, their struggle has been at its best, for example, during the first intifada of the 1980s, when the official leadership -- at the time in exile in Tunis -- was actually least involved in it. No wonder, then, that the Israeli response to the grassroots autonomy of the first intifada was to usher the official leadership back into Palestine; the first intifada then stalled, and things have gone downhill ever since.
In looking for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then, we should once and for all stop looking to governments and officials (elected or otherwise), in the US, Israel, or among the Palestinians themselves. As the Obama administration has already demonstrated, the US government, in the present political conjuncture, will never put peace and justice in Palestine ahead of internal domestic pressures and politics; the Israeli government will not for one moment back down from its continually expanding colonization plan in the West Bank and East Jerusalem until it is compelled by outside pressure to do otherwise; and the Palestinian government -- well, there is no such thing. There is a people living partly under military occupation; partly in enforced exile; and partly as a racialized and discriminated-against minority inside Israel. What they need is to refocus their struggle in ways that they can all identify with, collectively and equally, and, moreover, in ways that people of good will around the world -- who have repeatedly demonstrated in their tens of thousands in support of justice for Palestine.
Indeed, the Palestinians are not alone: they have the support of people around the entire world. And it is to that reserve of good will and good faith among ordinary people around the world that the Palestinians must also look, then. As the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa demonstrated, governments not only can, but do, act, when ordinary people of good will make them act. In fact, even as governments have dithered, a vibrant global campaign to boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions on Israel in order to bring it into compliance with international law and in order to realize the rights of the Palestinian people (all of it) has been recording one success after another, reminding us all that boycotts really do work.
This is the direction in which all Palestinians, bereft of leadership, must now throw themselves. And their demand must be something that addresses and unifies the rights of all segments of the Palestinian people, not just those suffering under occupation, as well as addressing and recognizing the rights of Jewish Israelis -- something that most decent people in the world can readily identify with: justice, equality, one-person-one-vote: in other words, the creation of one democratic and secular state in which Palestinians and Israelis can live equally in a just and lasting peace. For without justice there will be no peace.Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saree-makdisi/last-straw-for-the-palest_b_309585.html
Saree Makdisi
Professor of English, University of California
The 575-page Report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which was led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, confirmed the already densely documented reports published by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International. Those reports had, in turn, systematically confirmed Palestinian claims that Israel had, for example, recklessly and indiscriminately used white phosphorous on the packed residential districts of Gaza; indiscriminately targeted civilian objects including UN schools (as documented by the widely circulated -- other than in the US -- photographs of an Israeli phosphorous strike on a UN school in Gaza); used Palestinian civilians as human shields; and collectively punished the population of Gaza by imposing on them a suffocating siege, cutting off vital supplies of food, medicine, and fuel (not just during the recent assault and on to this day, but, to a greater or lesser extent, since 2005, and even, arguably, since 1991, when the Israelis first methodically sealed off the hapless territory from the outside world).
The Amnesty report, published in July, found that "hundreds of civilians were killed in attacks carried out using high-precision weapons -- air-delivered bombs and missiles, and tank shells. Others, including women and children, were shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers. Aerial bombardments launched from Israeli F-16 combat aircraft targeted and destroyed civilian homes without warning, killing and injuring scores of their inhabitants, often while they slept. Children playing on the roofs of their homes or in the street and other civilians going about their daily business, as well as medical staff attending the wounded were killed in broad daylight by Hellfire and other highly accurate missiles launched from helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, and by precision projectiles fired from tanks."
The Goldstone report (though it remarkably reserves its strongest language for Palestinian rocket attacks that killed 3 Israeli civilians, compared to the 1,400 Palestinians killed in Gaza, the vast majority civilians, and a third of them children) reiterates many of the same conclusions, and reports on case after case where Israeli forces launched "intentional attacks against the civilian population and civilian objects," including "the shooting of civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so. The facts gathered by the Mission indicate that all the [latter] attacks occurred under circumstances in which the Israeli forces were in control of the area and had previously entered into contact with or at least observed the persons they subsequently attacked, so that they must have been aware of their civilian status." These incidents -- all of which constitute war crimes -- indicate, according to the Goldstone report, "that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population."
Indeed, among its other findings, the Goldstone report corroborates the well-documented reports (all of them summarily dismissed by the Israeli army, which considers itself "the most moral army in the world") that Israeli soldiers themselves admitted to the brutality of the bombardment of Gaza, and left behind them -- as unmistakable evidence of their officially-encouraged attitude towards Palestinians -- both racist slogans (e.g., "We came to annihilate you; Death to the Arabs; Kahane was right; No tolerance, we came to liquidate") and human feces smeared on the walls of the Palestinian homes they looted and vandalized. "You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them," one Israeli soldier confessed of the prevailing Israeli army attitude toward the Palestinians of Gaza, which was fueled in part by the proclamations of the army's rabbinical corps, which compared Palestinians to the biblical Philistines and urged that Israeli soldiers "show no mercy."
None of the conclusions of all these reports ought to come as a surprise. The Israeli army itself had openly proclaimed, months before the bombing even started, that its strategy in both Lebanon and Palestine has been premised since 2006 on the sweeping and indiscriminate use of massive firepower: the so-called "Dahiyeh Doctrine," referring to the Dahiyeh, or southern suburb of Beirut, which the Israelis razed to the ground in their 2006 war on Lebanon, as they also did to many villages in the south of that country. "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction," one Israeli general (Gadi Eisenkot) announced -- with contemptuous disregard for the law of war. "From our perspective, these are military bases," he added. "This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized."
Other than planning for -- and attempting (to its own satisfaction at least) to legitimate -- the massive and necessarily indiscriminate use of force, the Israeli military legal establishment had specifically authorized premeditated attacks, such as the one that killed dozens of unarmed Gaza policemen parading in their graduation ceremony, with which Israel kicked off its bombardment on 27 December 2008, that inherently involved manifest violations of the principles of proportionality and discrimination that are the pillars of international humanitarian law.
Moreover, not only the Amnesty and Goldstone reports but Israeli commanders themselves openly said that overwhelming and indiscriminate force was used -- deliberately, and in a premeditated fashion -- again, in total disregard for the principles of proportionality and discrimination. "At the start of the ground offensive, senior command decided to avoid endangering the lives of soldiers, even at the price of seriously harming the civilian population," one Israeli media report revealed. "This is why the IDF [Israeli army] made use of massive force during its advance in the Strip. As a Golani brigade commander explained, if there is any concern that a house is booby-trapped, even if it is filled with civilians, it should be targeted and hit, to ensure that it is not mined -- only then should it be approached. Without going into the moral aspects, such fighting tactics explain why there were no instances in which there was a need to assault homes where Hamas fighters were holed up."
Ultimately, all that these inquiries, including Goldstone's, have done is merely to confirm Israel's own (repeatedly flaunted) contempt for international humanitarian law.
Needless to say, from the beginning, Israel utterly refused to cooperate with the Goldstone inquiry, dismissing it -- as it has dismissed all previous attempts to investigate its conduct or to hold it accountable to the principles of international humanitarian law -- as "unfair" and "unbalanced" (as though there were anything "balanced" about the conflict between the sheer force of an occupying power and an essentially defenseless occupied people). Among the many previous investigative commissions which Israel has either summarily dismissed or refused to cooperate with are the investigation led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu into the Israeli killing of 19 members of a Palestinian family in Gaza in 2008; the commission appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2002 to investigate the indiscriminate destruction of civilian areas in the Israeli assault on Jenin refugee camp that spring (the actions of which a separate investigation, by Amnesty International, found amounted "to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes"); and the UN investigation of the Israeli artillery massacre of over a hundred Lebanese civilians huddling in a shelter at a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon in 1995, which found that "it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors," as the Israeli army said at the time -- as, indeed, it always says is the case when its soldiers kill dozens of civilians: not once has Israel actually held any of its officers or soldiers accountable for such crimes. In all previous cases, Israel's adamant refusal to be held accountable to the law has been upheld by the US, and the Obama administration proved that it had no intention of breaking that particular tradition this time either.
Nevertheless, as Professor Richard Falk (the UN's Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories) points out, the Goldstone report could have provided a basis for referring Israel's conduct durng the war in Gaza to the International Criminal Court or other international courts, or to the establishment of a war crimes tribunal along the lines of those established after the catastrophes of Bosnia and Rwanda. That would have been the best way to finally hold Israel accountable for its grave breaches of international humanitarian law, its war crimes, and its crimes against humanity (not least the sealing off an entire civilian population from the outside world, denying it the ability to flee to safety, and then subjecting that same, defenseless, shelterless population -- most of it composed of children -- to an indiscriminate round-the-clock bombardment).
The process of referral depended, however, on obtaining a vote within the UN to have the Goldstone report referred to the Security Council for further deliberation, the creation of a war crimes tribunal, and so on. And all of that depended in turn on the support of Palestinian diplomats appointed by and accountable to Mahmoud Abbas.
But it is now clear that the Palestinian team representing Mahmoud Abbas at the UN (for they certainly do not represent the Palestinian people) has, on his instructions, dropped its support for the resolution that might have set the legal machinery of the international judicial system in motion. Other states can hardly be expected to stand up to US pressure and support a resolution on behalf of Palestinian rights that the Palestinian delegation itself is unwilling to support -- why should Venezuela or Nigeria or Pakistan be more Palestinian than the Palestinians?
Reports have been circulating in the Arab, Israeli and European media that Abbas and his associates may have been prompted to take this extraordinary action because Israel had been threatening, had they continued with their support of the UN resolution, to withhold its release of a share of the radio spectrum that would have allowed the creation of a new Palestinian mobile phone company, Wataniyya: the product of a joint venture between Qatari investors and the Palestine Investment Fund, to which Abbas himself and one of his wealthy sons have personal connections. Palestinians have suggested that simple corruption and cronyism may have motivated Abbas's decision. The PA and the circle of officials attached to it have certainly had their share of corruption charges -- most shockingly, perhaps, when Ahmed Qureia, then the so-called Prime Minister of the PA (again, "so-called" because Prime Ministers usually have countries to govern, and the PA is anything but a country), was accused of selling cement to the Israelis to build their wall in the West Bank. The corruption of the PA and the narrow circle of Fateh party officials running it, clinging to it, and benefiting from it, is one of the main reasons why Fateh was swept from office in the 2006 Palestinian elections in favor of Hamas: most people then were voting against Fateh and its corruption and general hopelessness, rather than for Hamas (which had, and has, little to offer other than simply not being Fateh: a credit which goes only so far).
It's possible, of course, that corruption and cronyism were not the motivating factors for Abbas's decision to withdraw Palestinian support for the Goldstone report. There are two other possibilities.
One of these is simple incompetence: that Abbas and his associates are so lacking in intelligence, imagination and political skill that they just bungled the whole affair. This is certainly not out of the question: Abbas himself is an extraordinarily unprepossessing and profoundly compromised man, and his circle of associates -- including men like Mohammad Dahlan and Saeb Ereikat -- hardly inspire any more confidence than Abbas himself. Quite apart from their sheer disregard for Palestinian suffering in Gaza (seeking redress for which ought to be their main priority), it ought to be clear that a party to a negotiation that wantonly throws a rarely-held card out of the window while attempting (or at least claiming) to negotiate is, to put it mildly, not qualified to negotiate in the first place, let alone to claim to "lead" a defiant and unvanquished people like the Palestinians. If the Ramallah leadership is really as hopelessly incompetent as this scenario would have it, that's reason enough for their removal from office, if not the dissolution of the PA itself. (It's difficult, though, to "dismiss from office" someone like Abbas who is not actually in office in the first place -- he is there because the Israelis and the Americans want him to be there, because the election for his successor after his term expired has been deferred at the behest of Washington and Tel Aviv, and not because he holds any legitimate mandate from the Palestinian people themselves, the overwhelming majority of whom have no faith in him whatsoever, as opinion polls have regularly found).
Another -- and I think more likely -- possibility is that Abbas, the PA and the essentially defunct PLO are not (and never were, at least since the time of Yasser Arafat's death) interested in serious negotiations with Israel that could have led to the creation of a genuine Palestinian state in the occupied territories. After all, one of the main criticisms of the Oslo Accords of 1993-95 which created the PA, is that, far from ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory, they merely served to shift the day-to-day burden and cost of administering the occupation to the newly-established PA, while allowing Israel to go on demolishing Palestinian homes, expropriating Palestinian land, and building Jewish colonies in the occupied territories in contravention of international law. Oslo formally separated the three main chunks of Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967 (Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem) from each other and the outside world, and, additionally, broke the West Bank itself into Areas A, B and C. It was only in Area A (about 18 percent of the total) that the PA had any kind of practical presence on the ground, and in Area C (60 percent of the West Bank), the PA had no role or presence at all -- and that's where Israel was (and still is) busy demolishing, expropriating and building. Oslo and the PA, in other words, far from ending the occupation and laying the basis for the creation of an independent Palestinian state, actually allowed Israel to consolidate the occupation and further cement its grip on Palestinian land. Which is exactly why the population of Jewish colonists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem doubled during the period of Oslo and has been increasing ever since -- and today numbers almost half a million.
As this latest episode so amply demonstrates, the PA serves Israel by facilitating the occupation -- which is why Israel invented it in the first place, just as, historically speaking, colonial powers have always attempted to create or coerce local elites into helping them deal with the population at large: an approach perhaps most gracefully summarized in Macaulay's Minute on Indian Educationhttp://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html of 1835 ("We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect"). Why would the PA want to bring to an end an arrangement from which it benefits? As the French scholar Regis Debray points out, the status quo provides the PA elites in Ramallah "with a living, status, dignity and a raison d'être," and probably (e.g., if the mobile phone contract rumors prove to be true) much more in the way of emoluments besides that.
Even if one were to grant the PA and Abbas and his associates the benefit of the doubt, and say that they really have their people's best interests at heart, it still remains the case that the PA, even under the best-case scenario, can claim to represent only a minority of the Palestinian people, since only a minority of Palestinians live in the occupied territories: the majority live either in the exile imposed on them by force during the creation of Israel in 1948, or (in the case of those Palestinians who survived that year's ethnic cleansing and remained in their homes) as second-class, non-Jewish citizens of the would-be Jewish state, which systematically discriminates against them simply because they are not Jewish.
These, then, are the possibilities before us: not only does the PA not represent the Palestinian people, it is also, on top of that, either corrupt to an almost unimaginable level; or it is profoundly incompetent and guilty of squandering the rights and hopes of a people that it is unentitled to claim to lead; or it is interested not in its people's rights and hopes but rather in perpetuating its own status as the day-to-day caretaker of a permanent Israeli occupation -- in which case it is no less collaborationist than the Vichy "government" of Nazi-occupied France in the 1940s. Corruption; incompetence; collaboration: ah, the agony of choice.
In the unlikely event that Abbas and his associates were to declare the "independence" of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, as has been suggested by the current so-called Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad (another man whose claim to office has no legitimacy, since his arbitrary appointment, by Abbas, to replace the legitimately elected Hamas leadership -- whatever one thinks of it -- was never confirmed by the Palestinian Legislative Assembly, many of the members of which are in Israeli jails), it ought to be clearer than ever that such a "state" would offer Palestinians only more of the same choices (corruption, compromise, collaboration), while continuing to serve Israel's interests, if not actually to take direct orders from Washington and Tel Aviv.
In any case, the Palestinian cause is a struggle for freedom and justice, not for the creation of a statelet in the occupied territories that would, as I said -- even in the best circumstances -- only address the interests of that minority of the Palestinian people who live there.
What, then, are we to conclude from all this?
Above all, that no Palestinian ought to look to the official leadership as a source of guidance and direction: it has betrayed the people and proved itself totally unworthy of their trust -- indeed, many Palestinians, including Abdelbari Atwan, editor of the newspaper al-quds al-arabi, are demanding that those behind this recent decision be apprehended and put on trial. And of course with a leadership this corrupt, inept or collaborationist, Palestinians can hardly expect better treatment from Washington and Tel Aviv than they are getting from Ramallah. And the Hamas opposition and its alternative leadership has little more to offer in the long run other than resistance for the sake of resistance, which is not, in itself, a blueprint for freedom and justice, and in any case has nothing to offer to Christian or secular Palestinians (and hardly much more than that to offer Muslim ones either, for that matter).
The second immediate conclusion to be drawn from this experience is that, as more and more Palestinians are demanding, the PA ought to be dissolved once and for all -- the sooner, the better. This latest action really ought to be the last in a long and dismal record proving that the PA has not only not served the interests of the Palestinian people, but that, on the contrary, it fundamentally serves the needs and requirements of Israel.
Bereft of any credible or legitimate leadership, the Palestinian people will have to look to themselves to continue their struggle for freedom, justice and equality. Indeed, their struggle has been at its best, for example, during the first intifada of the 1980s, when the official leadership -- at the time in exile in Tunis -- was actually least involved in it. No wonder, then, that the Israeli response to the grassroots autonomy of the first intifada was to usher the official leadership back into Palestine; the first intifada then stalled, and things have gone downhill ever since.
In looking for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then, we should once and for all stop looking to governments and officials (elected or otherwise), in the US, Israel, or among the Palestinians themselves. As the Obama administration has already demonstrated, the US government, in the present political conjuncture, will never put peace and justice in Palestine ahead of internal domestic pressures and politics; the Israeli government will not for one moment back down from its continually expanding colonization plan in the West Bank and East Jerusalem until it is compelled by outside pressure to do otherwise; and the Palestinian government -- well, there is no such thing. There is a people living partly under military occupation; partly in enforced exile; and partly as a racialized and discriminated-against minority inside Israel. What they need is to refocus their struggle in ways that they can all identify with, collectively and equally, and, moreover, in ways that people of good will around the world -- who have repeatedly demonstrated in their tens of thousands in support of justice for Palestine.
Indeed, the Palestinians are not alone: they have the support of people around the entire world. And it is to that reserve of good will and good faith among ordinary people around the world that the Palestinians must also look, then. As the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa demonstrated, governments not only can, but do, act, when ordinary people of good will make them act. In fact, even as governments have dithered, a vibrant global campaign to boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions on Israel in order to bring it into compliance with international law and in order to realize the rights of the Palestinian people (all of it) has been recording one success after another, reminding us all that boycotts really do work.
This is the direction in which all Palestinians, bereft of leadership, must now throw themselves. And their demand must be something that addresses and unifies the rights of all segments of the Palestinian people, not just those suffering under occupation, as well as addressing and recognizing the rights of Jewish Israelis -- something that most decent people in the world can readily identify with: justice, equality, one-person-one-vote: in other words, the creation of one democratic and secular state in which Palestinians and Israelis can live equally in a just and lasting peace. For without justice there will be no peace.Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saree-makdisi/last-straw-for-the-palest_b_309585.html
Monday 13 April 2009
Friday 23 January 2009
Friday 16 January 2009
I got mad
I got mad yesterday. I could not reach my sister, Samia, who lives in Sabra neighbourhood in Gaza city. Her apartment is very close to UNRWA headquarters which was hit by Israeli occupation forces phosphorous shells when they pushed deeper into Gaza City. I tried in vain to reach her by phone. I tried all her numbers, the landline, the mobile, her husband mobile, her neighbor land line etc but there was no answer. What would be the reasons? What happened to them? Are they still alive? Or what? Did they evacuate the house and run for their life looking for a safer place? But there is no safe place in Gaza anymore. So what could be the reason?
She is due in ten days. Her family already suffers from acute shortage of water and food supplies. There have no electricity but only an hour today, no cooking gas and no candles. The batteries of the radio are getting so weak. They have almost nothing but their will, dignity and steadfastness. Last time when I called her she told me many stories.
Among these stories was about Her children who are getting so scared from the bombardment. It reached the stage that her daughter, Noor, aged14, locked the flat door and hid the key so that her dad doesn’t go to the mosque for Friday prayer. The girl thinks that if he goes he won’t return. She is right. Tens of people were killed in mosques, many in market. Others were killed in schools and some in hospitals. The United Nations centers have been shelled. All the places that suppose to be safe places are shelled. Then where is she?
After several attempts, I reached my family in Khan Younis. Like me they were too worried about Samia. But when they released the state that I am at My mother started to calm me down saying that it is communication problem. And while realizing that this justification is accurate particularly after the Israeli shelled all the power units and all stations that strengthen the reception, I remained worried.
Nasser my husband called me. Before uttering any word, I asked him what happened. He said bad news. I said what? He said his cousin Shihda in Rafah was killed. Shihda, A bright engineer aged 28 was the third son to be killed to the family during this Intifada. How would be the situation of his mother now? I was with her when her son Karam, aged 13 killed in 2000. How will she cope? What shall I tell her when I call her? What words? What prayers? What and then what? May Allah be with her.
Al-jazeera broadcasted a scream of woman saying that a pregnant lady has been killed in their building. With the woman there were 3 children. Could she be my sister? She is pregnant and she has 3 children. I got mad again.I had another telephone call. It was Our neighbor, Ashraf, in Zahra town that is very close to what used to be Netazarim colony or settlement. Asraf, flat was bombed and he ask if he can live in our flat. Of course i said. You should not call me for such thing. Consider it your home. Then he said can Saeb family stay as well. I said of course. Then the call ended as the battery was too weak.
Then another call. I was so scared to take it. I was afraid to get mote terrible news. I was hesitant and so scared to take the call and therefore I missed it. Then I collapsed crying. Then I had a text message. It was from my sister Lubna in Khan younis. She wrote 5 words “don’t worry, Samia is safe.” With these words my tears fall like a river. Thank god. Thank God.
She is due in ten days. Her family already suffers from acute shortage of water and food supplies. There have no electricity but only an hour today, no cooking gas and no candles. The batteries of the radio are getting so weak. They have almost nothing but their will, dignity and steadfastness. Last time when I called her she told me many stories.
Among these stories was about Her children who are getting so scared from the bombardment. It reached the stage that her daughter, Noor, aged14, locked the flat door and hid the key so that her dad doesn’t go to the mosque for Friday prayer. The girl thinks that if he goes he won’t return. She is right. Tens of people were killed in mosques, many in market. Others were killed in schools and some in hospitals. The United Nations centers have been shelled. All the places that suppose to be safe places are shelled. Then where is she?
After several attempts, I reached my family in Khan Younis. Like me they were too worried about Samia. But when they released the state that I am at My mother started to calm me down saying that it is communication problem. And while realizing that this justification is accurate particularly after the Israeli shelled all the power units and all stations that strengthen the reception, I remained worried.
Nasser my husband called me. Before uttering any word, I asked him what happened. He said bad news. I said what? He said his cousin Shihda in Rafah was killed. Shihda, A bright engineer aged 28 was the third son to be killed to the family during this Intifada. How would be the situation of his mother now? I was with her when her son Karam, aged 13 killed in 2000. How will she cope? What shall I tell her when I call her? What words? What prayers? What and then what? May Allah be with her.
Al-jazeera broadcasted a scream of woman saying that a pregnant lady has been killed in their building. With the woman there were 3 children. Could she be my sister? She is pregnant and she has 3 children. I got mad again.I had another telephone call. It was Our neighbor, Ashraf, in Zahra town that is very close to what used to be Netazarim colony or settlement. Asraf, flat was bombed and he ask if he can live in our flat. Of course i said. You should not call me for such thing. Consider it your home. Then he said can Saeb family stay as well. I said of course. Then the call ended as the battery was too weak.
Then another call. I was so scared to take it. I was afraid to get mote terrible news. I was hesitant and so scared to take the call and therefore I missed it. Then I collapsed crying. Then I had a text message. It was from my sister Lubna in Khan younis. She wrote 5 words “don’t worry, Samia is safe.” With these words my tears fall like a river. Thank god. Thank God.
Monday 12 January 2009
There is no safe place in gaza
Yesterday, a close and old friend sent me an e-mail from Paris asking about me and my family. At the beginning I got puzzled of what to write to her. The situation back home is horrible. There in no accurate words to describe it. Some people call it massacre, annihilation, war crimes and I feel that none of these words describe what is going on.
Israel succeeded to dehumanize Palestinians to the extent that the world is now accepting their slaughter with no comment. They are nothing but mere terrorists who aim to destroy the Western civilization. More than that Israel succeeded to terrorize the world governments and to large extent their civic institutions with its two main issues the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Anyone who dares to open his or her mouth to protest against Israelis polices in Occupied Palestine is usually hit by one of those accusations.
We called my husband’s sister, Majdiya, aged 62 years who lives in beach camp. She is usually a strong woman. However, today being a grandmother and mother with too many mouths to feed and too many youth to fear to loose and too little food remained and no security or safety of what so ever to protect her family, she kept silent for a while. Then she asked me:
“What does the Israeli government want from us”? What do they mean by killing our kids, shelling our schools, mosques, universities, water wells, fields, homes, orphanage? Isn’t it enough what they took in 1948 and killed in 1956 and reoccupied in 67? Wasn’t it enough the horror of first intifada and second intifada, the blockade of Gaza, the shortage of fuel, food, water and electricity? Gaza is already hell. What do they want from us more than the hell and the prison that they put us in. In previous wars when there was shelling we used to escape for our life. But now we cannot. We are trapped in a big prison. Getting out of home means putting ourselves a target to planes, drones, or artillery shells.
More silence then the same question was repeated by Majdiya. What do they want from us? Nothing left to give them. They took everything: land, orchids, and places that used to be called home. They destroyed our future, freedom and dignity. Only the air that remains for us to breathe and if I am sure if they succeed to find away to deprive us from it they will do.There were no answers from my side. And my answer in fact doesn’t change the situation and after all my call is to make sure that she and family are OK and not to make statements.
I am sick and I am so frustrated and after every call with family and friends I cry. Then I charge my batteries and call the next family and try to find words and justifications and ask for patience and more patience. I try to give hope while in my heart i know there is no hope. I try to find words but there are no words that can explain the loss from our side and the crimes of the other side. The number of death toll keeps going up. And with every victim there is a story. And behind every story there is a crime. And behind every crime there is a free criminal that threatens not only Palestinians but also the world peace and more importantly the entire humanity.
Israel succeeded to dehumanize Palestinians to the extent that the world is now accepting their slaughter with no comment. They are nothing but mere terrorists who aim to destroy the Western civilization. More than that Israel succeeded to terrorize the world governments and to large extent their civic institutions with its two main issues the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Anyone who dares to open his or her mouth to protest against Israelis polices in Occupied Palestine is usually hit by one of those accusations.
We called my husband’s sister, Majdiya, aged 62 years who lives in beach camp. She is usually a strong woman. However, today being a grandmother and mother with too many mouths to feed and too many youth to fear to loose and too little food remained and no security or safety of what so ever to protect her family, she kept silent for a while. Then she asked me:
“What does the Israeli government want from us”? What do they mean by killing our kids, shelling our schools, mosques, universities, water wells, fields, homes, orphanage? Isn’t it enough what they took in 1948 and killed in 1956 and reoccupied in 67? Wasn’t it enough the horror of first intifada and second intifada, the blockade of Gaza, the shortage of fuel, food, water and electricity? Gaza is already hell. What do they want from us more than the hell and the prison that they put us in. In previous wars when there was shelling we used to escape for our life. But now we cannot. We are trapped in a big prison. Getting out of home means putting ourselves a target to planes, drones, or artillery shells.
More silence then the same question was repeated by Majdiya. What do they want from us? Nothing left to give them. They took everything: land, orchids, and places that used to be called home. They destroyed our future, freedom and dignity. Only the air that remains for us to breathe and if I am sure if they succeed to find away to deprive us from it they will do.There were no answers from my side. And my answer in fact doesn’t change the situation and after all my call is to make sure that she and family are OK and not to make statements.
I am sick and I am so frustrated and after every call with family and friends I cry. Then I charge my batteries and call the next family and try to find words and justifications and ask for patience and more patience. I try to give hope while in my heart i know there is no hope. I try to find words but there are no words that can explain the loss from our side and the crimes of the other side. The number of death toll keeps going up. And with every victim there is a story. And behind every story there is a crime. And behind every crime there is a free criminal that threatens not only Palestinians but also the world peace and more importantly the entire humanity.
Friday 9 January 2009
PCHR
PCHR Palestinian Centre for Human Rights LTD (non profit)
Press Release
Ref: 07/2009
Date: 08 January 2009
Time: 12:30 GMT
Thirteenth Day of Continuous IOF Attacks Across the Gaza Strip
38 Palestinians killed during the reporting period, including 11 children and six women.
The total number of victims now stands at 712, including 169 children, 46 women, six medical personnel and one Palestinian journalist.
As the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) continue their indiscriminate attacks in the Gaza Strip for the thirteenth consecutive day, the number of Palestinian civilian deaths continues to rise amidst massive destruction of buildings and property.
Investigations conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) indicate that more than 90% of the Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip in the last three days have been unarmed civilians, including a large number of children. Israel continues to show no mercy in its military campaign, intent on destroying entire areas populated by civilians. Witnesses on the ground have confirmed that IOF are targeting civilians, including medical personnel. The entire Gaza Strip is now under IOF bombardment, and IOF are targeting schools run by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), as well as mosques and hospitals. During the last twenty four hours, three sisters were killed in Abed Rabbo in east Jabalia, and a father, his 3 sons and their cousin were all killed whilst driving in a car in Beit Lahia.
PCHR are investigating, and documenting, Israeli war crimes being committed against the population of the Gaza Strip throughout this military operation. This is a summary of the crimes committed by IOF in the Gaza Strip during the last 24 hours.
Press Release
Ref: 07/2009
Date: 08 January 2009
Time: 12:30 GMT
Thirteenth Day of Continuous IOF Attacks Across the Gaza Strip
38 Palestinians killed during the reporting period, including 11 children and six women.
The total number of victims now stands at 712, including 169 children, 46 women, six medical personnel and one Palestinian journalist.
As the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) continue their indiscriminate attacks in the Gaza Strip for the thirteenth consecutive day, the number of Palestinian civilian deaths continues to rise amidst massive destruction of buildings and property.
Investigations conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) indicate that more than 90% of the Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip in the last three days have been unarmed civilians, including a large number of children. Israel continues to show no mercy in its military campaign, intent on destroying entire areas populated by civilians. Witnesses on the ground have confirmed that IOF are targeting civilians, including medical personnel. The entire Gaza Strip is now under IOF bombardment, and IOF are targeting schools run by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), as well as mosques and hospitals. During the last twenty four hours, three sisters were killed in Abed Rabbo in east Jabalia, and a father, his 3 sons and their cousin were all killed whilst driving in a car in Beit Lahia.
PCHR are investigating, and documenting, Israeli war crimes being committed against the population of the Gaza Strip throughout this military operation. This is a summary of the crimes committed by IOF in the Gaza Strip during the last 24 hours.
Too much to mourn in Gaza
Eva Bartlett writing from the occupied Gaza Strip,
Live from Palestine, 8 January 2009
The Deeb family was preparing bread when they were killed in their home by Israeli shelling. After finishing a shift with the Palestine Red Crescent Society yesterday morning, we went to the United Nations-administered al-Fakhoura school in Jabaliya, which was bombed by Israeli forces, killing at least 40 displaced people who were taking shelter there. When we arrived, prayers were happening in the street in front of the school. I'd seen prayers in open, outdoor places in Palestine and Egypt. But these days, when I see a mass of people praying, in front of al-Shifa hospital, in the streets of Jabaliya, I think of the mosques that have been bombed, and of the loss of lives and sanctuaries. And yesterday I thought of the loss of another safe haven.The grief was very evident, as was the indignation: "Where are we supposed to stay," one man demanded. "How many deaths is enough? How many?" It's the question that has resounded in my mind since the attacks on 27 December.Across Fakhoura street from the school, about 15 meters down a drive, a gaping hole in the Deeb family house revealed what had been happening when it was hit by a shell. Rounds of bread dough lay where they'd been rolled out to bake. Amal Deeb was in her 30s, a surviving family member told us. When the missile struck, it killed her and nine others in the extended family's house, including two boys and three girls. Another four were injured, one having both legs amputated.
Approaching the house, the stench of blood was still strong, and was visible in patches and pools amid the rubble of the room. Later, in Jabaliya's Kamal Adwan hospital, 19-year-old Ahlam lay conscious but unsmiling, unresponsive.
Gazans are united in mourning. Returning to the street in front of the Fakoura school, mourners had gathered, ready to march, to carry the dead and their pieces to their overcrowded resting place. Flags of all colors mixed in this funeral march: no one party dominated, it was collective grief under collective punishment.So many people had joined the procession through the narrow streets that the funeral split, taking different streets, to reach the cemetery. At the entrance to the cemetery, decorated cement slabs mark the older graves, laid at a time when cement and space were available. The most recently buried bodies, instead, show in sandy humps, buried just low enough to be covered but not properly so. Cement blocks mark some graves, leaves and vines on others. And some were just barely visible, by the raise in earth. But it was too packed, too hard to estimate where a grave might be, no possibility of a respectfully-spaced arrangement."Watch where you step," Mahmoud, a friend, told me, pointing to a barely-noticeable grave of a child.The enormity of the deaths hit me. After 12 days of killing and psychological warfare, I'd become less shocked at the sight of pieces of bodies, a little numb, like a doctor might, or a person subjected to this time and again. I was and I remain horrified at the ongoing slaughter, at the images of children's bodies being pulled from the rubble astonished it could continue -- but adapted to the fact that there would be bodies, maimed, lives ruined.
I stood among sandy makeshift graves, watching men digging with their hands, others carrying corpses on any plank long enough -- corrugated tin, scraps of wood, stretchers -- to be hastily buried. As the drones still flew overhead and tank shelling could be heard 100s of meters beyond, it all become too much again. I wept for all the dead and the wounded psyches of a people who know their blood flows freely and will continue to do so.
The dead are hastily buried. Hatem, the other day, told me to be strong as Palestinians, for Palestinians. And I try, though each day brings assassinations no one could have imagined. Out of touch with all the other fragmented areas of Gaza, I read of the Samuni family and see photos of a baby girl pulled from the rubble of a house shelled by an Israeli warplane. Mohamed, a photojournalist, has photographed many of those killed in Israel's bombings of houses. And today Hatem crumbled, though he is strong. It's all too much.
Nidal, a Palestine Red Crescent Society medic, told how he was at the Fakhoura school when it was shelled. His aunt and uncle live nearby and he'd been visiting friends at the school. "I was there, talking with friends, only a little away from where two of the missiles hit. The people standing between me and the missiles were like a shield. They were shredded. About 20 of them," he said.Like many Palestinians I've met, Nidal has a prior history of loss, even before this latest phenomenal assault on civilians. Only 20 years old, Nidal has already had his father and brother killed, martyred it is said here, by sniper's bullets. His right hand testifies his part in the story: "Three years ago, the Israeli army had invaded our region [Jabaliya]. One soldier threw a sound bomb at us and I picked it up to throw away. It went off in my hand before I could throw it away." Sound bombs are used against nonviolent demonstrations against Israel's wall in the occupied West Bank villages of Bilin and Nilin, and many youths learn at a young age how to chuck them away. But Nidal's stubs of fingers show that he wasn't so lucky. However, he is luckier than his father and brother. And luckier than two of his cousins, his aunt's sons, who were in the area where missiles were dropped at the UN school. They, 12 and 27 years old, were killed.
Osama gave his testimony as a medic at the scene after the multiple missile shelling. "When we arrived, I saw dead bodies everywhere. More than 30. Dead children, grandparents ... Pieces of flesh all over. And blood. It was very crowded, and difficult to carry out the injured and martyred. There were also dead animals among the humans. I helped carry 15 dead. I had to change my clothes three times. These people thought they were safe in the UN school, but the Israeli army killed them, in cold blood," he said.
Mohammed K., a volunteer with the Palestine Red Crescent Society, was elsewhere when the UN safe haven was shelled. "We were in Jabaliya, at the UN 'G' school, to interview the displaced people taking shelter there. We wanted to find out how many people were staying there, where they'd left from and why exactly, and how safe they felt in the school. While we were there, we heard the explosions, saw the smoke, and wondered what had been hit.
It was Fakhoura."All images copyright Eva Bartlett.Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who spent eight months in 2007 living in West Bank communities and four months in Cairo and at the Rafah crossing. She is currently based in the Gaza Strip after having arrived with the 3rd Free Gaza Movement boat in November. She has been working with the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza, accompanying ambulances while witnessing and documenting the ongoing Israeli air strikes and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who spent eight months in 2007 living in West Bank communities and four months in Cairo and at the Rafah crossing. She is currently based in the Gaza Strip after having arrived with the 3rd Free Gaza Movement boat in November. She has been working with the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza, accompanying ambulances while witnessing and documenting the ongoing Israeli air strikes and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10146.shtml
Live from Palestine, 8 January 2009
The Deeb family was preparing bread when they were killed in their home by Israeli shelling. After finishing a shift with the Palestine Red Crescent Society yesterday morning, we went to the United Nations-administered al-Fakhoura school in Jabaliya, which was bombed by Israeli forces, killing at least 40 displaced people who were taking shelter there. When we arrived, prayers were happening in the street in front of the school. I'd seen prayers in open, outdoor places in Palestine and Egypt. But these days, when I see a mass of people praying, in front of al-Shifa hospital, in the streets of Jabaliya, I think of the mosques that have been bombed, and of the loss of lives and sanctuaries. And yesterday I thought of the loss of another safe haven.The grief was very evident, as was the indignation: "Where are we supposed to stay," one man demanded. "How many deaths is enough? How many?" It's the question that has resounded in my mind since the attacks on 27 December.Across Fakhoura street from the school, about 15 meters down a drive, a gaping hole in the Deeb family house revealed what had been happening when it was hit by a shell. Rounds of bread dough lay where they'd been rolled out to bake. Amal Deeb was in her 30s, a surviving family member told us. When the missile struck, it killed her and nine others in the extended family's house, including two boys and three girls. Another four were injured, one having both legs amputated.
Approaching the house, the stench of blood was still strong, and was visible in patches and pools amid the rubble of the room. Later, in Jabaliya's Kamal Adwan hospital, 19-year-old Ahlam lay conscious but unsmiling, unresponsive.
Gazans are united in mourning. Returning to the street in front of the Fakoura school, mourners had gathered, ready to march, to carry the dead and their pieces to their overcrowded resting place. Flags of all colors mixed in this funeral march: no one party dominated, it was collective grief under collective punishment.So many people had joined the procession through the narrow streets that the funeral split, taking different streets, to reach the cemetery. At the entrance to the cemetery, decorated cement slabs mark the older graves, laid at a time when cement and space were available. The most recently buried bodies, instead, show in sandy humps, buried just low enough to be covered but not properly so. Cement blocks mark some graves, leaves and vines on others. And some were just barely visible, by the raise in earth. But it was too packed, too hard to estimate where a grave might be, no possibility of a respectfully-spaced arrangement."Watch where you step," Mahmoud, a friend, told me, pointing to a barely-noticeable grave of a child.The enormity of the deaths hit me. After 12 days of killing and psychological warfare, I'd become less shocked at the sight of pieces of bodies, a little numb, like a doctor might, or a person subjected to this time and again. I was and I remain horrified at the ongoing slaughter, at the images of children's bodies being pulled from the rubble astonished it could continue -- but adapted to the fact that there would be bodies, maimed, lives ruined.
I stood among sandy makeshift graves, watching men digging with their hands, others carrying corpses on any plank long enough -- corrugated tin, scraps of wood, stretchers -- to be hastily buried. As the drones still flew overhead and tank shelling could be heard 100s of meters beyond, it all become too much again. I wept for all the dead and the wounded psyches of a people who know their blood flows freely and will continue to do so.
The dead are hastily buried. Hatem, the other day, told me to be strong as Palestinians, for Palestinians. And I try, though each day brings assassinations no one could have imagined. Out of touch with all the other fragmented areas of Gaza, I read of the Samuni family and see photos of a baby girl pulled from the rubble of a house shelled by an Israeli warplane. Mohamed, a photojournalist, has photographed many of those killed in Israel's bombings of houses. And today Hatem crumbled, though he is strong. It's all too much.
Nidal, a Palestine Red Crescent Society medic, told how he was at the Fakhoura school when it was shelled. His aunt and uncle live nearby and he'd been visiting friends at the school. "I was there, talking with friends, only a little away from where two of the missiles hit. The people standing between me and the missiles were like a shield. They were shredded. About 20 of them," he said.Like many Palestinians I've met, Nidal has a prior history of loss, even before this latest phenomenal assault on civilians. Only 20 years old, Nidal has already had his father and brother killed, martyred it is said here, by sniper's bullets. His right hand testifies his part in the story: "Three years ago, the Israeli army had invaded our region [Jabaliya]. One soldier threw a sound bomb at us and I picked it up to throw away. It went off in my hand before I could throw it away." Sound bombs are used against nonviolent demonstrations against Israel's wall in the occupied West Bank villages of Bilin and Nilin, and many youths learn at a young age how to chuck them away. But Nidal's stubs of fingers show that he wasn't so lucky. However, he is luckier than his father and brother. And luckier than two of his cousins, his aunt's sons, who were in the area where missiles were dropped at the UN school. They, 12 and 27 years old, were killed.
Osama gave his testimony as a medic at the scene after the multiple missile shelling. "When we arrived, I saw dead bodies everywhere. More than 30. Dead children, grandparents ... Pieces of flesh all over. And blood. It was very crowded, and difficult to carry out the injured and martyred. There were also dead animals among the humans. I helped carry 15 dead. I had to change my clothes three times. These people thought they were safe in the UN school, but the Israeli army killed them, in cold blood," he said.
Mohammed K., a volunteer with the Palestine Red Crescent Society, was elsewhere when the UN safe haven was shelled. "We were in Jabaliya, at the UN 'G' school, to interview the displaced people taking shelter there. We wanted to find out how many people were staying there, where they'd left from and why exactly, and how safe they felt in the school. While we were there, we heard the explosions, saw the smoke, and wondered what had been hit.
It was Fakhoura."All images copyright Eva Bartlett.Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who spent eight months in 2007 living in West Bank communities and four months in Cairo and at the Rafah crossing. She is currently based in the Gaza Strip after having arrived with the 3rd Free Gaza Movement boat in November. She has been working with the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza, accompanying ambulances while witnessing and documenting the ongoing Israeli air strikes and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who spent eight months in 2007 living in West Bank communities and four months in Cairo and at the Rafah crossing. She is currently based in the Gaza Strip after having arrived with the 3rd Free Gaza Movement boat in November. She has been working with the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza, accompanying ambulances while witnessing and documenting the ongoing Israeli air strikes and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10146.shtml
Thursday 8 January 2009
"I Am Still Alive"
Testimony 1: Carnage at Al-Fakhoura School , Jabalia.
"I was working at the [Kamal Edwan] Hospital here in Jabalia, when the ambulances arrived with the dead and injured from Al-Fakhoura school. Most of the dead were women and children, and most of the survivors had terrible shrapnel wounds. We had to turn the maternity ward into a surgical theatre so that we could try to save more lives."
Ayman Al-Majdalawi is a nurse from Jabalia in the Northern Gaza Strip. Yesterday, January 6, he was on duty at Kamal Edwan hospital when the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) fired four artillery shells towards nearby Al-Fakhoura school. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) had just transformed the school into a temporary shelter for dozens of local families, who, like thousands of other local residents, had been driven out of their homes by the IOF's continuing military onslaught. One of the four artillery shells struck the house of Samir Deeb, instantly killing him, his wife, three of his children, five of his brother's children and two female relatives. The other three artillery shells exploded next to Al-Fakhoura school, causing carnage in and around the crowded school. Twenty seven civilians were killed instantly, and more than fifty injured. Women, men and children had limbs torn from their bodies by the force of the explosions.
"The ambulance drivers told me the Israelis were shooting at them as they were trying to evacuate the dead and injured" says Ayman Al-Majdalawi. "When the ambulances arrived at Kamal Edwan, there was chaos. This is a small hospital, and we were trying to save as many people as we could - but a lot of them had already lost arms or legs, and they were bleeding heavily. It was horrific."
Under customary international law, it is illegal to target civilian objects, including schools, hospitals and United Nations facilities. IOF claimed Al-Fakhoura school was targeted because Hamas militants had fired [at IOF] from the school. However, under customary international law, an attacking force is obliged to take the necessary precautions to protect the civilian population against the dangers resulting from military operations. Given the densely-populated, residential nature of the area surrounding the school, an artillery attack in the vicinity could reasonably be expected to cause excessive civilian casualties. As John Ging, UNRWA Director of Operations in the Gaza Strip noted "it was entirely inevitable if artillery shells landed in that area there would be a high number of casualties."
John Ging also stated that his agency had provided the Israelis with exact geographical coordinates of all UN facilities in Gaza , including Al-Fakhoura school. He refuted IOF claims that Hamas gunmen had fired at them from the school. "I can tell you categorically that there was no military activity in that school at the time of the tragedy" he said. "They were innocent people."
Since the Israeli Occupation Forces unleashed 'Operation Cast Lead' on December 27, 2008, at least 682 Palestinians have been killed inside the Gaza Strip, including at least 158 children and 41 women. Another 2,950 adults and children have been maimed and injured, leaving Gaza hospitals at the brink of total collapse. Israeli war planes and tanks are indiscriminately bombing and shelling civilian houses and facilities across the entire Gaza Strip, whilst heavily armed IOF troops shoot to kill on the streets.
Hundreds of thousands of Gazan families are trapped inside their homes, without electricity water or adequate food, terrified of being killed, or buried alive. Meanwhile medical staff like Ayman Al-Majdalawi are risking their lives to reach, and rescue, the dead and injured. "No-where in Gaza safe" he says. "Our ambulances are in danger, and some of the injured people have bled to death because we couldn't reach them. I try to go to other hospitals if I am needed, but it is very dangerous, and like everyone else, we are very frightened."
Tuesday 6 January 2009
47 people has been killed since the morning
Another family has been murdered few minutes ago while sitting at their home in Gaza as a result of the Israeli barbaric shelling. 13 people including 6 children from Al Daya family have been recovered from under the rubbles of their home. There are still another 11 family memebrs missing.
Another 3 people from Sultan family were killed in a UN school in Gaza city this morning including a child. This family has left their home and got to the UN school seeking a shelter. but it seems there is no safe place in Gaza. Wherever Gazans escape death is following them. no matter if it is a mosque, a school, home, street, hospital or market.
Another old woman was killed this morning in Rafah. Another 9 from the middle camps and 7 from the north. Oh my God. how many will be killed today? How many have been killed yesterday? How many will be killed tomorrow? Why the world is so silent towards these crimes? When will they wake up? Who will protect Palestinian civilians? who will protect my community? who will protect the humanity? Can any one answer me? This is herrofic. This is massacare.
Where can Palestinian go? Who will protect Palestinains?
Another 3 people from Sultan family were killed in a UN school in Gaza city this morning including a child. This family has left their home and got to the UN school seeking a shelter. but it seems there is no safe place in Gaza. Wherever Gazans escape death is following them. no matter if it is a mosque, a school, home, street, hospital or market.
Another old woman was killed this morning in Rafah. Another 9 from the middle camps and 7 from the north. Oh my God. how many will be killed today? How many have been killed yesterday? How many will be killed tomorrow? Why the world is so silent towards these crimes? When will they wake up? Who will protect Palestinian civilians? who will protect my community? who will protect the humanity? Can any one answer me? This is herrofic. This is massacare.
Where can Palestinian go? Who will protect Palestinains?
The report of the Palestinian Center for human rights
PCHRPalestinian Centre for Human Rights LTD (non profit)
Press Release
Date: 4 January 2009
On the 9th Day of the Offensive on the Gaza Strip, Israel Practices State Terrorism;
The Number of Palestinians Killed Rises to 424, Mostly Civilians, Including 88 Children and 19 Women
Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have continued their war on the Gaza Strip for the 9th consecutive day, causing more deaths and casualties among Palestinian civilians. IOF warplanes have launched more strikes against several civilian facilities in the context of their war on the Gaza Strip. On Saturday evening, 3 January 2009, IOF heavy military vehicles started to move into the Gaza Strip from several directions. Since the beginning of the ground operation, IOF have intensively shelled Palestinian residential area from the land, the sea and the air. They have partitioned the Gaza Strip into a number of sections isolated from one another. The northern Gaza Strip and Gaza City have been a scene of the most violent attacks. IOF military vehicles have continued to move from the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel towards Palestinian communities under cover of unprecedented artillery shelling, which endanger the lives of Palestinian civilians. Facts on the ground indicate that complete families have been killed or wounded by IOF.
In one of the horrible crimes committed by IOF in the past 24 hours, IOF warplanes bombarded a mosque in Jabalya town in the northern Gaza Strip, while Palestinian civilians were praying inside it. As a result, 15 civilians, including 4 children, were killed and 27 others were wounded. According to field information available to PCHR, ambulances and medical crews are facing extreme difficulties in attending the wounded, as they have been subjected to IOF shelling and gunfire, so there may a number of Palestinian who have been killed or wounded, but have not been evacuated to hospitals. Additionally, there are a number of Palestinians who have been killed or wounded at the time of this writing, but their numbers are not available at the moment.
Press Release
Date: 4 January 2009
On the 9th Day of the Offensive on the Gaza Strip, Israel Practices State Terrorism;
The Number of Palestinians Killed Rises to 424, Mostly Civilians, Including 88 Children and 19 Women
Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have continued their war on the Gaza Strip for the 9th consecutive day, causing more deaths and casualties among Palestinian civilians. IOF warplanes have launched more strikes against several civilian facilities in the context of their war on the Gaza Strip. On Saturday evening, 3 January 2009, IOF heavy military vehicles started to move into the Gaza Strip from several directions. Since the beginning of the ground operation, IOF have intensively shelled Palestinian residential area from the land, the sea and the air. They have partitioned the Gaza Strip into a number of sections isolated from one another. The northern Gaza Strip and Gaza City have been a scene of the most violent attacks. IOF military vehicles have continued to move from the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel towards Palestinian communities under cover of unprecedented artillery shelling, which endanger the lives of Palestinian civilians. Facts on the ground indicate that complete families have been killed or wounded by IOF.
In one of the horrible crimes committed by IOF in the past 24 hours, IOF warplanes bombarded a mosque in Jabalya town in the northern Gaza Strip, while Palestinian civilians were praying inside it. As a result, 15 civilians, including 4 children, were killed and 27 others were wounded. According to field information available to PCHR, ambulances and medical crews are facing extreme difficulties in attending the wounded, as they have been subjected to IOF shelling and gunfire, so there may a number of Palestinian who have been killed or wounded, but have not been evacuated to hospitals. Additionally, there are a number of Palestinians who have been killed or wounded at the time of this writing, but their numbers are not available at the moment.
Monday 5 January 2009
Land, sea, sky: all will kill you
Karma Nabulsi
The Guardian, Saturday 3 January 2009
Last Saturday, the first day of massive air strikes on Gaza, I finally get through to my old friend Mohammed. We speak for a few moments, he reassures me he is OK, he asks about my now-delayed trip to Gaza, and suddenly I ask: "What is that noise?" It is a sort of distant keening, like the roar of approaching traffic, or a series of waves hitting a rocky shore. "I am at the cemetery, Karma", he says, "I am burying my family." He now sounds exhausted. He repeats, over and over again in his steady, tired voice as if it were a prayer: "This is our life. This is our life. This is our life."
I had just come off the phone with Jamal, who at that moment was in another cemetery in Jabaliya camp, burying three members of his own family. They included two of his nieces, one married to a police cadet. All were at the graduating ceremony in the crowded police station when F16s targeted them that Saturday morning, massacring more than 45 citizens in an instant, mortally wounding dozens more. Police stations across Gaza were similarly struck. Under the laws of war (or international humanitarian law as it is more commonly known), policemen, traffic cops, security guards: all are non-combatants, and classified as civilians under the Geneva conventions. But more to the point, Palestinian non-combatants are not mere civilians, but possess something more real, more alive, more sovereign than a distancing legal classification: the people in Gaza are citizens. Some work in the various civic institutions across the Strip, but most simply use them on a daily basis: their schools, police stations, hospitals, their ministries.
Later on that first day I finally reach Khalil, who runs a prisoners' human rights association in Gaza. He was trying to organise a press conference. It was chaotic: he was shouting, he couldn't finish his sentences or form words. When I told him what I had just heard, he told me that he too had just come from the cemetery. His cousin, Sharif Abu Shammala, 26 years old, had recently got a job as a guard at the university. He had been asked to go in that morning to sign his worksheet at the local police station; he had felt lucky to find the work.
For the one and a half million Palestinian citizens living in Gaza, ways to absorb and describe their daily predicament - these collective and individual experiences of extreme violence - had already been used up by the two years of siege that preceded this week's carnage. Hanging out with Mohammed at his office in Gaza City six months ago, mostly just watching him smoke one cigarette after another, he abruptly leant over his desk and said to me: "Everyone is dead. There is no life in Gaza. Capital has left. Ask someone passing by: where are you going? They will answer: I don't know. What are you doing? I don't know. Gaza today is a place of aimless roaming."
On this New Year's Day at his home in Sheikh Radwan, his walls tremble from the F16 aerial bombardment under way in his neighbourhood. The intensity of it courses down the line into my ear, his voice a cloud of smoke. His house is just next to the mosque. Earlier this week, his wife's cousin in Jabaliya refugee camp lost five of her children: they lived next to a mosque the Israeli air force had bombed. "So where can I sleep, my children sleep?" he asks down the phone. "I don't know how to tell you what this is like, as I have stopped sleeping, myself. We cannot go out, we cannot stay in: nowhere is safe. But I think I would rather die at home."
I first met international law professor Richard Falk when he was a member of the Seán MacBride commission of inquiry into the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The UN rapporteur of human rights to the Palestinian territories, he has studied massive bombardment of this type many times before. Yet he too struggled to put words on to the singular horror unfolding: "It is macabre ... I don't know of anything that exactly fits this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog in modern times." He says he cannot think of another occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances: "The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law ... warrant the characterisation of a crime against humanity."
A friend of mine, a brilliant and experienced journalist from Gaza, has been covering these indescribable things in her job for an American newspaper. She tells me: "I don't know what to do. I feel overwhelmed by what I am seeing, and what they are doing: I simply can't understand the enormity of what I witness in the hospitals, where they keep bringing in children, or out in the streets - they are killing all of us. I don't know how to write about it." She feels utterly weighed down by the fact that the Israeli government have refused to allow international journalists into Gaza to see what she is seeing. Despite her bewilderment she, like all the other citizens of Gaza I speak with this week, seem to know exactly what to do: although filled with fear, they run to volunteer, help pull neighbours from under the rubble, offer to assist at the hospital (where more than half of the staff is now voluntary), write it all down, as best they can, for a newspaper.
Only a gifted few have found for us the words we keep seeking, and indeed Palestinian poetry of siege has a tradition going back generations. Mahmoud Darwish wrote some for an earlier Israeli siege, 26 years ago in Beirut:
The Earth is closing on uspushing us through the last passageand we tear off our limbs to pass throughThe Earth is squeezing usI wish we were its wheatso we could die and live againI wish the Earth was our motherso she'd be kind to us
During that siege, in the daily bombardment from F16 fighter planes, entire buildings would come down around you - six, seven stories high, hundreds of neighbours, colleagues, and friends disappearing forever under a tonne of rubble and plumes of smoke. We stopped racing down to the cellar: better to sleep up on the roof. This week the citizens of Gaza find themselves seized with the same dread choices. On Wednesday night one colleague, Fawwaz, a professor of economics, was trapped under the rubble of his house near the ministry of foreign affairs. He managed to text a friend to send emergency workers to rescue him. Haider, another university colleague, tells me about it in wonder. He hasn't known where to place himself inside his flat: all parts of it have been struck with building debris and huge flying shards of glass. He is sitting outside in his car while we speak, although I can't see that this is the right move. Many now sleep on the roofs, he says, as if their visible presence may deter the Apache helicopters, earsplitting drones, and fighter planes that are demolishing everything in their path - more than 400 buildings in six days.
The recently completed building of the ministry of education (paid for by European donors) is damaged; the ministry of justice, the foreign ministry utterly destroyed: all national institutions of the Palestinian Authority, none military. On New Year's Day, Khalil tells me in a voice gone hard with a combination of anger and despair: "When we heard the news last night that the British government are giving something like €9m [£8.65m] for humanitarian assistance, all of us understood immediately that this Israeli war against our citizens will not stop but will continue, and that the donation is the invoice. We understood the Europeans will pay the price - with us". He is roaming around his office as we are chatting, assessing the damage to it: he works just across from the Palestinian Legislative Council, where the democratically elected parliament sat; now flattened by Israeli aircraft. Every neighbourhood in Gaza is a mixture of homes, shops, police stations, mosques, ministries, local associations, hospitals, and clinics. Everyone is connected and fastened down right where they are, and no citizen is safe in today's occupied Gaza from the Israeli military, whose reach is everywhere.
As a way to share time on the phone, while my friend Houda's neighbourhood was under aerial assault for more than 40 minutes, she and I discussed at length comparisons between previous Israeli military sieges we had been under. The carefully planned and premeditated strategy of terrorising an entire population by intensive and heavy bombardment of both military and civic institutions - destroying the entire civic infrastructure of a people - was identical. What is unprecedented here is that in Gaza there is nowhere to evacuate people to safety: they are imprisoned on all sides, with an acute awareness of the impossibility of escape. Land, sea, sky: all will kill you.
My friend As'ad is a professor of phonetics at one of the universities in Gaza. He had been giving the students poetry to read these last months, and this summer told me about a class where they had worked on a piece by the late Palestinian poet Abu Salma. "It spoke to our situation so powerfully that all at once they began to sing it: 'Everyone has a home, dreams, and an appearance. And I, carrying the history of my homeland, trip ... wretched and dusty in every path.'" He told me yesterday on the phone, when I finally reached him after days of trying: "They bombed the chemistry lab at the university. I have a phonetics lab. Will they bomb that too?"
Before this week's war on the citizens of Gaza, the government of Israel and its war machine had been attempting to fragment the soul and break the spirit of one and a half million Palestinians through an all-encompassing military siege of epic proportions. The theory behind besieging a population is to annihilate temporal and spatial domains, and by so doing slowly strangulate a people's will.
Siege puts extreme pressure on time, both external and internal, and on space: everything halts. Nothing comes in, nothing comes out. No batteries, no writing paper, no gauze for the hospitals, no medicines, no surgical gloves even - for these things, say the Israeli military, cannot be classified as humanitarian. Under siege no one can find space to think lucidly, for the aim is to take away the very horizon where thoughts form their reasoning, a plan, a direction to move in. Things become misshapen, ill-formed, turn in on themselves. Freedom, as we know, is the space inside the person that the siege wishes to obliterate, so that it becomes hard to breathe, to organise, above all to hope. Not achieving its aim, and even now with no international action to put a stop to it, the siege this week reached its natural zenith. Western governments, having overtly supported the blockade for two years, now fasten their shocked gaze upon the tormented and devastated Gaza they have created, as if they were mere spectators.
I wish we were pictures on the rocksfor our dreams to carry as mirrors.We saw the faces of those who will throwour children out of the window of this last space.Our star will hang up mirrors.Where should we go after the last frontiers?Where should the birds fly after the last sky?Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?We will write our names with scarlet steam.
We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.We will die here, here in the last passage.Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree. (Mahmoud Darwish)
This week Palestinians have created an astonishing history with their stamina, their resilience, their unwillingness to surrender, their luminous humanity. Gaza was always a place representing cosmopolitan hybridity at its best. And the weight of its dense and beautiful history over thousands of years has, by its nature, revealed to those watching the uncivilised and cruel character of this high-tech bombardment against them. I tell each of my friends, in the hours of conversation, how the quality of their capacity as citizens inspires a response that honours this common humanity.
From the start of the attack, Palestinians living in the cities and refugee camps across the West Bank and the Arab world took to the streets in their tens of thousands in a fierce demand for national unity. More than 100,000 people erupted on to the streets of Cairo; the same in Amman. Earlier this week I regaled my friend Ziad, who lives in Rafah refugee camp, with an account of how, at the demonstration in London on Sunday, a young man threw his shoe over the gates of the Israeli embassy. Rushed by police (who perhaps thought it was a bomb), the mass of British protesters poured off the pavement to envelop him. Ziad laughed for ages and then said quietly, "God only knows, he must be from Gaza."
The Guardian, Saturday 3 January 2009
Last Saturday, the first day of massive air strikes on Gaza, I finally get through to my old friend Mohammed. We speak for a few moments, he reassures me he is OK, he asks about my now-delayed trip to Gaza, and suddenly I ask: "What is that noise?" It is a sort of distant keening, like the roar of approaching traffic, or a series of waves hitting a rocky shore. "I am at the cemetery, Karma", he says, "I am burying my family." He now sounds exhausted. He repeats, over and over again in his steady, tired voice as if it were a prayer: "This is our life. This is our life. This is our life."
I had just come off the phone with Jamal, who at that moment was in another cemetery in Jabaliya camp, burying three members of his own family. They included two of his nieces, one married to a police cadet. All were at the graduating ceremony in the crowded police station when F16s targeted them that Saturday morning, massacring more than 45 citizens in an instant, mortally wounding dozens more. Police stations across Gaza were similarly struck. Under the laws of war (or international humanitarian law as it is more commonly known), policemen, traffic cops, security guards: all are non-combatants, and classified as civilians under the Geneva conventions. But more to the point, Palestinian non-combatants are not mere civilians, but possess something more real, more alive, more sovereign than a distancing legal classification: the people in Gaza are citizens. Some work in the various civic institutions across the Strip, but most simply use them on a daily basis: their schools, police stations, hospitals, their ministries.
Later on that first day I finally reach Khalil, who runs a prisoners' human rights association in Gaza. He was trying to organise a press conference. It was chaotic: he was shouting, he couldn't finish his sentences or form words. When I told him what I had just heard, he told me that he too had just come from the cemetery. His cousin, Sharif Abu Shammala, 26 years old, had recently got a job as a guard at the university. He had been asked to go in that morning to sign his worksheet at the local police station; he had felt lucky to find the work.
For the one and a half million Palestinian citizens living in Gaza, ways to absorb and describe their daily predicament - these collective and individual experiences of extreme violence - had already been used up by the two years of siege that preceded this week's carnage. Hanging out with Mohammed at his office in Gaza City six months ago, mostly just watching him smoke one cigarette after another, he abruptly leant over his desk and said to me: "Everyone is dead. There is no life in Gaza. Capital has left. Ask someone passing by: where are you going? They will answer: I don't know. What are you doing? I don't know. Gaza today is a place of aimless roaming."
On this New Year's Day at his home in Sheikh Radwan, his walls tremble from the F16 aerial bombardment under way in his neighbourhood. The intensity of it courses down the line into my ear, his voice a cloud of smoke. His house is just next to the mosque. Earlier this week, his wife's cousin in Jabaliya refugee camp lost five of her children: they lived next to a mosque the Israeli air force had bombed. "So where can I sleep, my children sleep?" he asks down the phone. "I don't know how to tell you what this is like, as I have stopped sleeping, myself. We cannot go out, we cannot stay in: nowhere is safe. But I think I would rather die at home."
I first met international law professor Richard Falk when he was a member of the Seán MacBride commission of inquiry into the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The UN rapporteur of human rights to the Palestinian territories, he has studied massive bombardment of this type many times before. Yet he too struggled to put words on to the singular horror unfolding: "It is macabre ... I don't know of anything that exactly fits this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog in modern times." He says he cannot think of another occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances: "The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law ... warrant the characterisation of a crime against humanity."
A friend of mine, a brilliant and experienced journalist from Gaza, has been covering these indescribable things in her job for an American newspaper. She tells me: "I don't know what to do. I feel overwhelmed by what I am seeing, and what they are doing: I simply can't understand the enormity of what I witness in the hospitals, where they keep bringing in children, or out in the streets - they are killing all of us. I don't know how to write about it." She feels utterly weighed down by the fact that the Israeli government have refused to allow international journalists into Gaza to see what she is seeing. Despite her bewilderment she, like all the other citizens of Gaza I speak with this week, seem to know exactly what to do: although filled with fear, they run to volunteer, help pull neighbours from under the rubble, offer to assist at the hospital (where more than half of the staff is now voluntary), write it all down, as best they can, for a newspaper.
Only a gifted few have found for us the words we keep seeking, and indeed Palestinian poetry of siege has a tradition going back generations. Mahmoud Darwish wrote some for an earlier Israeli siege, 26 years ago in Beirut:
The Earth is closing on uspushing us through the last passageand we tear off our limbs to pass throughThe Earth is squeezing usI wish we were its wheatso we could die and live againI wish the Earth was our motherso she'd be kind to us
During that siege, in the daily bombardment from F16 fighter planes, entire buildings would come down around you - six, seven stories high, hundreds of neighbours, colleagues, and friends disappearing forever under a tonne of rubble and plumes of smoke. We stopped racing down to the cellar: better to sleep up on the roof. This week the citizens of Gaza find themselves seized with the same dread choices. On Wednesday night one colleague, Fawwaz, a professor of economics, was trapped under the rubble of his house near the ministry of foreign affairs. He managed to text a friend to send emergency workers to rescue him. Haider, another university colleague, tells me about it in wonder. He hasn't known where to place himself inside his flat: all parts of it have been struck with building debris and huge flying shards of glass. He is sitting outside in his car while we speak, although I can't see that this is the right move. Many now sleep on the roofs, he says, as if their visible presence may deter the Apache helicopters, earsplitting drones, and fighter planes that are demolishing everything in their path - more than 400 buildings in six days.
The recently completed building of the ministry of education (paid for by European donors) is damaged; the ministry of justice, the foreign ministry utterly destroyed: all national institutions of the Palestinian Authority, none military. On New Year's Day, Khalil tells me in a voice gone hard with a combination of anger and despair: "When we heard the news last night that the British government are giving something like €9m [£8.65m] for humanitarian assistance, all of us understood immediately that this Israeli war against our citizens will not stop but will continue, and that the donation is the invoice. We understood the Europeans will pay the price - with us". He is roaming around his office as we are chatting, assessing the damage to it: he works just across from the Palestinian Legislative Council, where the democratically elected parliament sat; now flattened by Israeli aircraft. Every neighbourhood in Gaza is a mixture of homes, shops, police stations, mosques, ministries, local associations, hospitals, and clinics. Everyone is connected and fastened down right where they are, and no citizen is safe in today's occupied Gaza from the Israeli military, whose reach is everywhere.
As a way to share time on the phone, while my friend Houda's neighbourhood was under aerial assault for more than 40 minutes, she and I discussed at length comparisons between previous Israeli military sieges we had been under. The carefully planned and premeditated strategy of terrorising an entire population by intensive and heavy bombardment of both military and civic institutions - destroying the entire civic infrastructure of a people - was identical. What is unprecedented here is that in Gaza there is nowhere to evacuate people to safety: they are imprisoned on all sides, with an acute awareness of the impossibility of escape. Land, sea, sky: all will kill you.
My friend As'ad is a professor of phonetics at one of the universities in Gaza. He had been giving the students poetry to read these last months, and this summer told me about a class where they had worked on a piece by the late Palestinian poet Abu Salma. "It spoke to our situation so powerfully that all at once they began to sing it: 'Everyone has a home, dreams, and an appearance. And I, carrying the history of my homeland, trip ... wretched and dusty in every path.'" He told me yesterday on the phone, when I finally reached him after days of trying: "They bombed the chemistry lab at the university. I have a phonetics lab. Will they bomb that too?"
Before this week's war on the citizens of Gaza, the government of Israel and its war machine had been attempting to fragment the soul and break the spirit of one and a half million Palestinians through an all-encompassing military siege of epic proportions. The theory behind besieging a population is to annihilate temporal and spatial domains, and by so doing slowly strangulate a people's will.
Siege puts extreme pressure on time, both external and internal, and on space: everything halts. Nothing comes in, nothing comes out. No batteries, no writing paper, no gauze for the hospitals, no medicines, no surgical gloves even - for these things, say the Israeli military, cannot be classified as humanitarian. Under siege no one can find space to think lucidly, for the aim is to take away the very horizon where thoughts form their reasoning, a plan, a direction to move in. Things become misshapen, ill-formed, turn in on themselves. Freedom, as we know, is the space inside the person that the siege wishes to obliterate, so that it becomes hard to breathe, to organise, above all to hope. Not achieving its aim, and even now with no international action to put a stop to it, the siege this week reached its natural zenith. Western governments, having overtly supported the blockade for two years, now fasten their shocked gaze upon the tormented and devastated Gaza they have created, as if they were mere spectators.
I wish we were pictures on the rocksfor our dreams to carry as mirrors.We saw the faces of those who will throwour children out of the window of this last space.Our star will hang up mirrors.Where should we go after the last frontiers?Where should the birds fly after the last sky?Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?We will write our names with scarlet steam.
We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.We will die here, here in the last passage.Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree. (Mahmoud Darwish)
This week Palestinians have created an astonishing history with their stamina, their resilience, their unwillingness to surrender, their luminous humanity. Gaza was always a place representing cosmopolitan hybridity at its best. And the weight of its dense and beautiful history over thousands of years has, by its nature, revealed to those watching the uncivilised and cruel character of this high-tech bombardment against them. I tell each of my friends, in the hours of conversation, how the quality of their capacity as citizens inspires a response that honours this common humanity.
From the start of the attack, Palestinians living in the cities and refugee camps across the West Bank and the Arab world took to the streets in their tens of thousands in a fierce demand for national unity. More than 100,000 people erupted on to the streets of Cairo; the same in Amman. Earlier this week I regaled my friend Ziad, who lives in Rafah refugee camp, with an account of how, at the demonstration in London on Sunday, a young man threw his shoe over the gates of the Israeli embassy. Rushed by police (who perhaps thought it was a bomb), the mass of British protesters poured off the pavement to envelop him. Ziad laughed for ages and then said quietly, "God only knows, he must be from Gaza."
Sunday 4 January 2009
Press release: The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights/GazaRef: 02/2009
Date: 03 January 2009
Time: 14:00 GMT
IOF Offensive on the Gaza Strip Continues for the 8th Consecutive Day;
Date: 03 January 2009
Time: 14:00 GMT
IOF Offensive on the Gaza Strip Continues for the 8th Consecutive Day;
The Number of Palestinians Killed Rises to 372, Mostly Civilians, Including 75 Children and 16 Women, and the Number of House Bombarded Mounts to 73 IOF have continued their offensive on the Gaza Strip for the 8th consecutive day, causing more deaths and casualties among Palestinian civilians, especially children. IOF warplanes have launched more strikes against several civilian facilities in the context of the most aggressive war against the Gaza Strip since it was occupied in 1967. Facts on the ground indicate that all population of the Gaza Strip are targeted and there is a clear intention to destroy all aspects of life and means of subsistence through the use of the most destructive arsenal and the psychological war through leaflets dropped from the air demanding Palestinian civilians to leave their areas of residence. PCHR has closely followed up the developments of the IOF offensive on the Gaza Strip. Development in the past 24 hours have been:
Northern Gaza Strip
· At approximately 14:00 on Friday, 2 January 2009, medical sources in an Egyptian hospital declared that Bilal Suhail Ghabayen, 19, died from a wound he had sustained on 29 December 2008, when IOF warplanes attacked a crowd of Palestinian civilians near a workshop belonging to the Ghabayen family. Two civilians were killed in the attack while they were trying to vacate the workshop.
· At approximately 19:25 on the same day, an IOF warplane fired a missile at Sami Ibrahim Lubbad, a member of the Palestinian resistance, near Sheikh Zayed housing project in Beit Lahia town. He was instantly killed and a civilian bystander was wounded.
· At approximately 03:45 on Saturday, 3 January 2009, an IOF warplane fired a missile at the American School to the west of Beit Lahia town. The school was destroyed and one of its guards, 25-year-old Salem Hamad Abu Qulaiq, was killed.
· At approximately 04:10 also on Saturday, IOF warplanes bombarded a 2-storey house belonging to Rezeq Abu Ghubait in Tal al-Za'tar neighborhood in the north of Jabalya. The house, which had been already evacuated, was destroyed and a number of neighboring house were heavily damaged. No casualties were reported.
Gaza City
· At approximately 09:10 on Friday, 2 January 2008, an IOF warplane fired a missile at a bird farm belonging to Zaki Mahmoud Ja'rour in al-Yarmouk area in the center of Gaza City. As a result, 16-year-old Christine Wadee' al-Turk, whose house is near the bird farm, died from a heart attack.
· At approximately 13:20 also on Friday, IOF tanks positioned to the east of al-Shoja'eya neighborhood in the east of Gaza City, fired a number of shells at Palestinian houses in the neighborhood. As a result, 10-year-old Hamada Ibrahim Musabbeh was seriously wounded when he was near his house. His feet were amputated. An hour later, he was pronounced dead.
· At approximately 13:30, IOF warplanes bombarded a house belonging to Hamdi Jom'a al-Dardassawi in al-Tawahin Street in al-Shoja'eya neighborhood in the east of Gaza City. As a result, the house was heavily damaged and the owner's daughter, 13-year-old Sojoud, was wounded.
· At approximately 22:10 also on Friday, IOF warplanes bombarded a 4-storey house belonging to Ya'qoub Mohammed Dababesh, in which 20 people live, in Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in the north of Gaza City. The house was destroyed, a number of neighboring houses were damaged and 8 Palestinian civilians were wounded, including a paramedic, 25-year-old 'Eid Ramadan Ahmed, who was attempting to evacuate an old man from a house in the area.
· At approximately 03:00 on Saturday, 3 January 2009, an IOF warplane fired a missile at Mamdouh 'Omar al-Jammal, 25, a leader of the 'Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas, in Tal al-Hawa neighborhood in the south of Gaza City. He was seriously wounded. He died from his wound later.
· At approximately 03:30 also on Saturday, an IOF warplane bombarded a training site of the 'Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas in SheikhRadwan neighborhood. No casualties were reported.
Central Gaza Strip
· At approximately 13:30 on Friday, 2 January 2009, an IOF drone fired 2 missiles at a 5-storey house belonging to the heirs of Mohammed 'Abdul Hadi 'Aaqel, in which 62 people lie, in al-Nussairat refugee camp. The house was damaged. At approximately 16:00, IOF warplanes bombarded the house again. The upper thee floors were destroyed and 12 neighboring houses were damaged.
· At approximately 13:55 also on Friday, an IOF warplane fired a missile at a house belonging to Sami Khalil al-Khaldi, 33, in al-Nussairat refugee camp. The house was damaged. Two hours layer, IOF warplanes bombarded the house again. The house was destroyed and a number of neighboring houses were damaged.
· At approximately 16:30 also on Friday, an IOF warplane fired 2 missiles at a spae area in Juhor al-Dik area, southeast of Gaza City. As a result, Tahani Kamal 'Abdul 'Aziz Abu 'Aayesh, 23, was killed when she was near her house. Another 6 civilians, including a child, were also wounded. Additionally, 3 houses were heavily damaged.
· At approximately 16:40 also on Friday, an IOF warplane bombarded al-Zahraa' Bridge, which links al-Zahraa' town with al-Nussairat refugee camp. Majed Khalil al-Bardawil, 30, who was traveling in a civilian car in the area, was seriously wounded. He was later pronounced dead.
· At approximately 17:00 also on Friday, an IOF warplane bombarded the building of Public Works Department to the southwest of Gaza City. The building was destroyed.
· At approximately 18:00 also on Friday, an IOF drone fired a missile at a civilian car in the west of al-Nussairat refugee camp. The driver and a passing civilian were wounded.
· At approximately 19:50, IOF gunboats bombarded Palestinian houses in al-Sawarha area in the west of al-Nussairat refugee camp. Three greenhouses belonging to the Shallat clan were destroyed. The area has been repeatedly bombarded.
· At approximately 20:00 also on Friday, an IOF warplane bombarded an agricultural store on a tract of land belonging to 'Aabed Abu Mahadi in the west of al-Nussairat refugee camp. The store was destroyed.
· At approximately 09:00 on Saturday, 3 January 2009, IOF gunboats bombarded Palestinian houses in al-Sawarha area in the west of al-Nussairat refugee camp. A Palestinian civilian was wounded and 2 houses were damaged.
Khan Yunis
· At approximately 13:50 on Friday, 2 January 2009, an IOF warplane fired a missile at 3 Palestinian children (2 brothers and their cousin), who were playing on a branch road in al-Qarara village, east of Khan Yunis. The three children were killed:
1. Mohammed Eyad 'Abed Rabbu al-Astal, 12;
2. 'Abed Rabbu Eyad 'Abed Rabbu al-Astal, 8; and
3. 'Abdul Sattar Waleed al-Astal, 10.
According to a relative of the children, no gunmen were present in the area, which is nearly 4 kilometers away from the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, when the IOF warplane attacked the children.
· At approximately 14:10 also on Friday, IOF warplanes bombarded a house belonging to he Abu Mousa family in Khan Yunis refugee camp. The house was damaged and 5 of its residents, including 2 women, were wounded.
· On Friday evening, medical sources at an Egyptian hospital declared that Hammad 'Ouda Abu al-Fita, 34, a member of the civil defense, died from a previous wound. Abu al-Fita, his brother and a relative of him were wounded when they attempted to rescue 14-year-old Sami Tarraf al-Astal, as IOF warplanes bombarded a space area near their houses. Al-Astal and another civilian were killed, and the three civilians who attempted to rescue the child were wounded.
· At approximately 13:40 also on Friday, IOF warplanes bombarded a police station at Bani Suhila intersection in the east of Khan Yunis. A passing Palestinian civilian was wounded and a secondary school in the area was damaged.
· At approximately 00:10 on Saturday, 3 January 2009, IOF warplanes attacked a number of activists of the Palestinian resistance in the east of Khan Yunis. No casualties were reported.
· At approximately 07:00 also on Saturday, IOF warplanes dropped a box of leaflets ordering Palestinian civilians to evacuate their houses. The leaflets state:
"To residents of the area: Due to terrorist actions launched by terrorists from your area of residence against the State of Israel, the Israeli military has been forced to immediately respond and act in your area of residence. For your safety, you are required to leave the area immediately."
Rafah
· At approximately 13:30 on Friday, 2 January 2009, IOF warplanes bombarded a site of the 'Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas in Tal al-Sultan neighborhood in the west of Rafah. No casualties were reported.
· At approximately 13:40 also on Friday, IOF warplanes bombarded a civil defense station at the beach. The station was destroyed, but no casualties were reported.
· At approximately 14:20 also on Friday, IOF warplanes dropped leaflets throughout Rafah, demanding the population to cooperate with them to get rid of Hamas.
· At approximately 16:20 also on Friday, IOF warplanes started to bombard the remainders of Gaza International Airport in the east of Rafah. The bombardment continued sporadically until 00:45 on Saturday, 3 January 2009.
In light of crimes committed by IOF against the Palestinian civilian population and property in the Gaza Strip, PCHR:
1) Condemns these crimes, which are part of a series of continuous crimes committed by IOF in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) with total disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians, considering them a form of collective punishment against the Palestinian civilian population in violation of article 33 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.
2) Holds Israel responsible for the lives of Palestinian civilians in all circumstances. Under the international law, the existence of armed resistance does not in any case justify the use of such excessive force disproportionately and indiscriminately.
3) Warns that the lives of Palestinian civilians are endangered in light of threats vowed by Israeli political and military officials to expand military operations against the population of the Gaza Strip.
4) Calls upon the international community to immediately intervene to stop such crimes, and calls upon the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Convention, Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, to fulfill their obligation under article 1 of the Convention to ensure respect for the Convention in all circumstances, as well as their obligation under article 146 to search for and prosecute those who are responsible for perpetrating grave breaches of the Convention, as such breaches constitute war crimes according to article 147 of the Convention and the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I).
How would you feel if !!
If it was your university!!
If it was your school!!!
If it was your church or Synagogue !!
If it was your nation!!
If they were your children!!
If it was your home!! How would you feel?
Friday 2 January 2009
What a nightmare?
Oh, my God, What a nightmare? When will it end mum? That was my 12 years old daughter, Ghaida, screams when she watched at Al-jazeera screen the scene of Dr. Nizar Rayan home in Jabaliya camp after being bombarded by the Israeli air strike with one ton bomb. Her tears followed and so were her questions. After people’s homes, what will be their next targets? Are there any shelters or safe places for our people in Gaza? Last week, my granny, Alia, said that there is no fuel, no electricity, no gas and no sufficient medical services. Is this still the case these days? How can we help? Why doesn’t the world help? Something must be done to end this war and now.
Rayan’s 16 family members including 11 children and 4 women were wiped off from the face of earth in on minute. In humanitarian law, this is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is a wilful killing of civilian population and extensive destruction of their property. The justification for this crime came from Haim Ramon, a senior member of the Israeli government. He said, “We are trying to hit everybody who is a leader of the organization and today we hit one of their leaders.” End of the statement.
Rayan’s 16 family members including 11 children and 4 women were wiped off from the face of earth in on minute. In humanitarian law, this is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is a wilful killing of civilian population and extensive destruction of their property. The justification for this crime came from Haim Ramon, a senior member of the Israeli government. He said, “We are trying to hit everybody who is a leader of the organization and today we hit one of their leaders.” End of the statement.
One must stop and think about Ramons’ words. Isn’t it considered an open invitation of collective killing for Palestinian civilians no matter of their number, age and place? If it is not understood in this context then can anyone explain to Palestinians in what context should they understand his words?
Can anyone explain to Ba’lusha family that lost 5 children while sleeping in their beds, Hamdan family that lost three children while escaping the shelling of donkey cart and Al-astal family that lost 3 of their children today while getting bread and many other countless families the guilt they committed in order to be slaughtered in that barbaric way? And can anyone tell the Palestinians civilians in Gaza how come such statement has again gone unnoticed as if the Palestinians don’t belong to the 21century family of humanity.
But on the other hand: was it the first statement or invitation issued by Israeli leader for calling for such crimes? Was Rayan’s family the first Palestinian family killed by this so called the only democratic state in the ME? Has today’s world reaction differed from previous reactions when it other crimes committed against Palestinians? And If streets, mosques, schools, universities, hospitals and homes are not safe places for people then can anyone tell the Palestinians where to go to find a safe shelter? The shelling is devastating and the loss is so unbearable. So far there have been 430 killed, over 2280 wounded among them around 250 very critical situations.
But on the other hand: was it the first statement or invitation issued by Israeli leader for calling for such crimes? Was Rayan’s family the first Palestinian family killed by this so called the only democratic state in the ME? Has today’s world reaction differed from previous reactions when it other crimes committed against Palestinians? And If streets, mosques, schools, universities, hospitals and homes are not safe places for people then can anyone tell the Palestinians where to go to find a safe shelter? The shelling is devastating and the loss is so unbearable. So far there have been 430 killed, over 2280 wounded among them around 250 very critical situations.
If sderot people with fuel, electricity, water, hospitals, ambulances, medical care and shelters are crying for lack of protection because of Palestinians crude rockets then what Palestinians on the other side of the borders should say?
If Israel uses Apache, F16, warships and tones of bombs to shell civilians in order to defend its people then what kinds of self-defence does the world expect from starved and besieged Palestinians on the other side of the border?
There's been demos all over the world to deny the war against the Palestinians of gaza. There was one here in London on Sunday, one on Monday, and again there is another one tomorrow. People are so enraged and so lost about what they can do. But they all know that something ought to be done. Even a child like my daughter realise this fact. The question that imposes itself in this juncture is when world governments would see and act to end this un-equivalent war? How many families need to be wiped before the so called international community wake up? and how many more Palestinians need to be murdered before they open their eyes?
There's been demos all over the world to deny the war against the Palestinians of gaza. There was one here in London on Sunday, one on Monday, and again there is another one tomorrow. People are so enraged and so lost about what they can do. But they all know that something ought to be done. Even a child like my daughter realise this fact. The question that imposes itself in this juncture is when world governments would see and act to end this un-equivalent war? How many families need to be wiped before the so called international community wake up? and how many more Palestinians need to be murdered before they open their eyes?
Thursday 1 January 2009
I can't hug my mother in Gaza
One of three children from a single family killed during an Israeli missile strike is buried in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah, 29 December 2008. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)There is nothing worse in life than being glued to the TV screen, watching one's nation being slaughtered on an hourly basis while able to do nothing. There is nothing more painful in this universe than hearing the tears and cries of one's mother on the phone and be unable to hug her, to wipe her tears or to comfort her with any words or means. There is nothing more terrifying than living through every night in fear that the coming morning will bring the worst possible news a person can bear, that a member of one's immediate family has been killed. And last but not least there is nothing more horrible on this globe than something happening to a family member when he or she is barred from returning to his or her family and home.
Like many other members of my community, I wonder what is happening to humanity in the 21st century that makes it deaf to the cries of Gaza's children and of its entire population, trapped in their open-air prison for more than two years now. Why is this so-called free world blind, deaf and dumb towards these atrocities, again and again?
There must be something wrong when families all over the world gather to celebrate the eve of a new year while Palestinian families remain shattered and scattered. There must be something wrong when five sisters of the Balousha family -- Jawaher, Dunia, Samar, Ikram and Tahreer, all children -- were buried under the rubble of their home in Jabaliya camp when their home was bombed by Israeli war jets, and no world leader has condemned this barbaric crime. There must be something wrong when Gaza universities, mosques, United Nations and government schools, homes, clinics, ministries and charities are bombarded from US-manufactured and -supplied F-16 war planes on the pretext of stopping the rockets coming out of Gaza.
How can the world accept the Israeli claim that this bloodiest of air strikes, the worst in Gaza since 1967, is an act of self-defense against the crude rockets launched by Hamas and other resistance groups? Does the world ever dig deeper behind the reasons for the launching of these rockets after they were fired so rarely during the past six months of the cease fire brokered in June by Egypt? Does the world know that ending the siege imposed on Gaza's 1.5 million people, opening the borders and stopping Israel's ongoing invasions and killings, which were the Palestinians' three main conditions for truce, have not been fulfilled by Israel? All international and human rights reports released during the past few months confirm this unequivocally. During the truce, 23 Palestinians were killed by Israel and Gaza's borders remained sealed, and the entire population was starved.
Is this really a war against Hamas and the rockets it launches from Gaza or is it something else? Is the goal of the aggression to bring peace to the people of Sderot or is it to destroy any potential opportunity for peace? And if Hamas and other resistance groups are terrorist organizations because they demand an end to the siege on Gaza and opening the borders for basic humanitarian needs, then doesn't the near-starvation of a population, the lethal power cuts, the bombing of infrastructure and the killing of hundreds of Palestinians make Israel a terrorist state as well? If Israel has the right to such heavy-handed self-defense exercised against the civilian population of Gaza, how would the world wish the Palestinians to defend themselves and end the siege? And if the world understands that protecting civilians involves the bombing of other civilians by F-16 jet fighters, then how would the world want the people under occupation and siege to defend themselves?
Like the people of British, the US, the UK, and elsewhere, the Palestinians are humans and belong to humanity. The blood of all Palestinians including those in Gaza is just as valuable as the blood of Israelis. If these barbaric acts and this systematic, criminal destruction of a nation are acceptable to the world then Palestinians, as all oppressed people in the world, have every right to declare the death of humanity. Ghada Ageel is a third-generation Palestinian refugee. She grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza and is currently in the United Kingdom and cannot return to Gaza because of the closure of Gaza's borders by Israel
Like many other members of my community, I wonder what is happening to humanity in the 21st century that makes it deaf to the cries of Gaza's children and of its entire population, trapped in their open-air prison for more than two years now. Why is this so-called free world blind, deaf and dumb towards these atrocities, again and again?
There must be something wrong when families all over the world gather to celebrate the eve of a new year while Palestinian families remain shattered and scattered. There must be something wrong when five sisters of the Balousha family -- Jawaher, Dunia, Samar, Ikram and Tahreer, all children -- were buried under the rubble of their home in Jabaliya camp when their home was bombed by Israeli war jets, and no world leader has condemned this barbaric crime. There must be something wrong when Gaza universities, mosques, United Nations and government schools, homes, clinics, ministries and charities are bombarded from US-manufactured and -supplied F-16 war planes on the pretext of stopping the rockets coming out of Gaza.
How can the world accept the Israeli claim that this bloodiest of air strikes, the worst in Gaza since 1967, is an act of self-defense against the crude rockets launched by Hamas and other resistance groups? Does the world ever dig deeper behind the reasons for the launching of these rockets after they were fired so rarely during the past six months of the cease fire brokered in June by Egypt? Does the world know that ending the siege imposed on Gaza's 1.5 million people, opening the borders and stopping Israel's ongoing invasions and killings, which were the Palestinians' three main conditions for truce, have not been fulfilled by Israel? All international and human rights reports released during the past few months confirm this unequivocally. During the truce, 23 Palestinians were killed by Israel and Gaza's borders remained sealed, and the entire population was starved.
Is this really a war against Hamas and the rockets it launches from Gaza or is it something else? Is the goal of the aggression to bring peace to the people of Sderot or is it to destroy any potential opportunity for peace? And if Hamas and other resistance groups are terrorist organizations because they demand an end to the siege on Gaza and opening the borders for basic humanitarian needs, then doesn't the near-starvation of a population, the lethal power cuts, the bombing of infrastructure and the killing of hundreds of Palestinians make Israel a terrorist state as well? If Israel has the right to such heavy-handed self-defense exercised against the civilian population of Gaza, how would the world wish the Palestinians to defend themselves and end the siege? And if the world understands that protecting civilians involves the bombing of other civilians by F-16 jet fighters, then how would the world want the people under occupation and siege to defend themselves?
Like the people of British, the US, the UK, and elsewhere, the Palestinians are humans and belong to humanity. The blood of all Palestinians including those in Gaza is just as valuable as the blood of Israelis. If these barbaric acts and this systematic, criminal destruction of a nation are acceptable to the world then Palestinians, as all oppressed people in the world, have every right to declare the death of humanity. Ghada Ageel is a third-generation Palestinian refugee. She grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza and is currently in the United Kingdom and cannot return to Gaza because of the closure of Gaza's borders by Israel
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Palestinian refugees sit at Khan Younis refugee camp
