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?
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
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
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Palestinian refugees sit at Khan Younis refugee camp
