Please bare with us and take a look at the following image gallery that clearly shows the resembelance between what the nazis have done to the Jews in Europe and what the same Jews are doing nowadays to the Palestinian People.
Click the Slideshow to see or just wait for the next image.
You can also click the individual images below to see a larger image.
IZBIT ABED RABBO, Gaza Strip — It was just after noon on Friday and time for the weekly communal prayer on a day when many Gazans needed divine guidance, but there was no place to pray.
Where the three-story Salahadin mosque once stood in this northern Gaza village, there’s only a mountain of rubble. Residents said that Israeli soldiers demolished the mosque, using dynamite and a bulldozer, two weeks ago during their war on the militant Islamic group Hamas.
So at prayer time in Izbit Abed Rabbo, the first Friday since both Israel and Hamas declared cease-fires, several dozen male worshippers gathered in a sandy clearing near the wreckage of the mosque. Some men laid down mats; others took off their jackets and spread them in the dirt. A few men sat with their knees in the sand and their heads bowed, listening to the sermon.
“My dears, we have to be patient. We have to have some faith in Allah,” said the imam, Mohammed Hamad. “Our prophets before us faced many struggles, and they were patient. We will wait for the compensation from God.”
Israel says its forces crippled Hamas militants and their infrastructure, but they also did staggering damage to places that mark the everyday lives of Gaza’s 1.5 million people. More than 1,300 Gazans, as well as 13 Israelis, died in the conflict.
Salahadin, where Hamad has been the imam for about 15 years, was one of 23 mosques that Palestinian officials say were damaged or destroyed in the offensive, along with 25 schools and hospitals, 1,500 factories and commercial structures and several thousand homes and apartment buildings. On Friday, under threatening skies, many Gazans had no choice but to pray outdoors.
Israel says that Hamas uses civilians as shields, and military officials have released video of weapons stored in mosques.
Residents said that militants didn’t use the Salahadin mosque, however, and that Israeli tactics did the gravest harm to civilians.
Much of Izbit Abed Rabbo, a quiet farming enclave north of Gaza City, was leveled when Israeli tanks and infantry forces rolled through about two weeks ago, residents said. Down the street from the mosque, multi-story homes are in ruins, vehicles crushed and stray possessions, such as shoes and clothing, lie half-trampled in the sand.
Hamad said that gathering for the Friday prayer showed that the village would recover.
“Our prophet Mohammed said that all the earth is for Muslims, so we pray even though the Israelis demolished our mosque,” Hamad said after the sermon. “We are not praying for the mosque walls; we are praying for Allah.”
Many worshippers were returning to the village for the first time since fleeing the Israeli invasion and confronting hard memories.
Said Jalala, a 46-year-old university professor, lost his oldest son in March, when Israeli forces launched a brief incursion that killed nearly 100 Palestinians. This time, Jalala said, Israeli soldiers invaded his home and held him and eight other men hostage for 12 hours, moving them from house to house as warplanes circled overhead, occasionally firing into the surrounding neighborhoods.
One strike left a hole in the side of his three-story, custom-designed home. But he was struck by the devastation of the mosque, where he’d prayed for more than a decade.
“They had a mission this time to destroy mosques, I think,” Jalala said. “Even areas they didn’t enter, they destroyed mosques.”
“They didn’t destroy Hamas; they destroyed the people,” said Hussein al Hawajari, whose 57-year-old mother was killed on the first day of the war when shrapnel from an Israeli airstrike hit her as she walked to the market.
“The children are Hamas? The tree is Hamas? The mosques are Hamas? The animals are Hamas?”
The U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
Mission Statement:
Responding to the call of Palestinian civil society to join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement against Israel, we are a U.S. campaign focused specifically on a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, as delineated by PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel):
“In light of Israel’s persistent violations of international law, and Given that, since 1948, hundreds of UN resolutions have condemned Israel’s colonial and discriminatory policies as illegal and called for immediate, adequate and effective remedies, and Given that all forms of international intervention and peace-making have until now failed to convince or force Israel to comply with humanitarian law, to respect fundamental human rights and to end its occupation and oppression of the people of Palestine, and In view of the fact that people of conscience in the international community have historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott, divestment and sanctions;
Inspired by the struggle of South Africans against apartheid and in the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression, We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.
These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”
[For more information: http://www.pacbi.org/campaign_statement.htm]
PACBI and the entire movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (representing the overwhelming majority among Palestinian civil society parties, unions, networks and organizations) emphasize fundamental Palestinian rights, sanctioned by international law and universal human rights principles that ought to be respected by Israel to end the boycott. We struggle to achieve an end to Israel’s three-tiered injustice and oppression: 1) occupation and colonization in the 1967-occupied Palestinian territory; 2) denial of the refugees’ rights, paramount among which is their right to return to their homes of origin, as per UN General Assembly Resolution 194; and 3) the system of racial discrimination, or apartheid, to which Palestinian (all non-Jewish) citizens of Israel are subjected to.
The principles guiding the PACBI campaign and the three goals outlined above are also points of unity for the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USCACBI). We believe it is time to take a public, principled stance in support of equality, self-determination, human rights (including the right to education), and true democracy, especially in light of the censorship and silencing of the Palestine question in U.S. universities, as well as U.S. society at large. There can be no academic freedom in Israel/Palestine unless all academics are free and all students are free to pursue their academic desires.
If you are committed to these principles of unity, and wish to work on a campaign of boycotting academic and cultural institutions guided by this approach, please join our campaign. [See information below.]
Urgent Appeal:
We are also responding to the Open Letter to International Academic Institutions from the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University in Palestine (January 17, 2009), calling on the international academic community, unions and students “to show support and solidarity with the people of Gaza by calling upon their respective governments to impose immediate boycott, divestment and sanctions against the state of Israel.”
Gaza is but the latest incident in a series of ongoing massacres–from Deir Yassin (1948 ) to Kafr Kassim (1956) to Jenin (2002) to the wars on Lebanon (from 1980s to 2006)—which demonstrate a pattern of violence by a state which will not end its violations of international law without international pressure. As academics working in the U.S., we wish to focus on campaigns in our universities and in institutions of higher education to advocate for compliance with the academic and cultural boycott, a movement that is growing internationally across all segments of global civil society.
This call for an academic and cultural boycott parallels the call in the non-academic world for divestment, boycott and sanctions by trade unions, churches, and other civil society organizations in countries such as the United States, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Norway, the United Kingdom, Brazil, South Africa, and New Zealand.
Endorsement:
As educators and scholars of conscience in the United States, we fully support this call. We urge our colleagues, nationally, regionally, and internationally, to stand up against Israel’s ongoing scholasticide and to support the non-violent call for academic boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions.
If you wish to endorse this call for an academic and cultural boycott, please email us at: uscom4acbi [at] gmail.com. If you are willing to indicate your support publicly, please send us your name and institutional/organizational affiliation (for identification purposes only).
For more information on actions suggested by the boycott campaign, please join one of the discussion groups linked on the top right-hand corner of this website.
Actions you can take:
Since Israeli academic institutions (mostly state-controlled) and the vast majority of Israeli intellectuals and academics have either contributed directly to maintaining, defending or otherwise justifying the above forms of oppression, or have been complicit in them through their silence, we call upon our colleagues to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid, by engaging in the following actions. We aim at the full implementation of all these steps. However, recognizing that different actions may be feasible and appropriate under the many different academic and political circumstances that pertain in US institutions, we urge our colleagues to undertake as many of the following initiatives as possible:
1. Support Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support;
2. Encourage your university and college administrations to institute funding for scholarship sand fellowships for Palestinian students;
3. Request your administration/president to issue a public statement censuring Israeli destruction of and interference with Palestinian schools and universities, archives and research centers, both in Gaza and throughout occupied Palestine.
4. Work toward the condemnation of Israeli policies by pressing for resolutions to be adopted by academic, professional and cultural associations and organizations;
5. Organize teach-ins or similar events with campus and community organizations at which the campaign for the economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel can be fully and openly discussed;
6. Refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions;
7. Advocate a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels, including suspension of all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions;
8. Promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by academic institutions, and place pressure on your own institution to suspend all ties with Israeli universities, including collaborative projects, study abroad, funding and exchanges.
Gaza residents returning to their homes in Zeitun neighborhood find their houses covered with slogans such as ‘Death to Arabs,’ and ‘One down, 999,999 to go.’
Some of the graffiti was written on the ruins of the homes of the al-Samuni family, who lost dozens of its members during the Israeli offensive war on Gaza.
‘Palestinian doctors would not have been able to handle a tumor this size,’ American specialist says after operating on 4-year-old boy at Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital. American doctors careful to stay away from politics, but one of them says regarding Israeli blockade, ‘It’s inhumane … to not allow them to even have basic medical care’
Doctors from the United States who rushed to the Gaza Strip to help the war wounded quickly learned that their challenge went beyond treating shrapnel injuries.
The eight American specialists found themselves operating on patients who had fallen victim to the 20-month-border closure that had crippled Gaza’s health care system even before Israel’s offensive against Gaza.
On Tuesday, the team removed a kidney tumor the size of a honeydew melon from a 4-year-old boy, Abdullah Shawwa, in a five-hour emergency surgery at Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital. The tumor was advanced and without quick intervention, Abdullah would likely have died, said Dr. Ismail Mehr, an anesthesiologist from Hornell, New York. Doctors in Gaza didn’t have the expertise to operate on him and Abdullah’s father had been unable to get him transferred quickly to Israel or Egypt.
Even after the surgery, Abdullah’s prognosis is uncertain. He’ll need followup treatment, including advanced chemotherapy or radiation, which are not available in Gaza. But it’s been difficult for Gaza patients to get out, ever since Israel and Egypt closed the borders in response to the violent Hamas takeover of the territory in June 2007.The closure also dealt a further blow to Gaza’s underdeveloped health care system, which lacks sophisticated equipment and key specialists. Hospitals often operate on generators because of disrupted power supplies, and spare parts for some machines are unavailable.
Britain’s commercial terrestrial broadcasters this evening went ahead with a humanitarian aid appeal for Gaza, despite Sky News joining the BBC in refusing to screen it.
The 2009 massacre in Gaza
Pressure mounted on the BBC throughout the day to back down on its decision to reject the appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella group of humanitarian charities including Oxfam, Save the Children and the Red Cross, but it resisted, saying to broadcast the film risked compromising its impartiality.
To watch the appeal, please click here
The BBC confirmed it had received 15,500 complaints over its decision, while its own staff and broadcasting unions joined in the criticism.
The two-minute appeal, which featured a professional voiceover on top of images of the recent conflict in Gaza, aired first on ITV1 at 6.25pm, just before the channel’s main evening news. It was due to be followed by Channel Five at 7.25pm and Channel 4 at 7.50pm.
Before the appeal aired on ITV1, a continuity announcer warned: “Viewers might find some images distressing.”
At the beginning of the film, the voiceover said: “This is not about the rights and wrongs of the conflict, these people simply need your help.”
However, Sky News this morning joined the BBC in refusing to show the film. “The absolute impartiality of our output is fundamental to Sky News and its journalism,” the head of Sky News, John Ryley, said.
“That is why, after very careful consideration, we have concluded that broadcasting an appeal for Gaza at this time is incompatible with our role in providing balanced and objective reporting of this continuing situation to our audiences in the UK and around the world.”
The BBC director general, Mark Thompson, ruled out a change of policy, saying the corporation had a duty to cover the issue in a “balanced, objective way”.
“Of course, everyone is struck by the human consequences of what has happened,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme. “And we will, I promise you, continue to report that as fully and as compassionately as we can. But we are going to do it in a way where we can hold it up to scrutiny. It’s our job as journalists.”
He denied his “arm had been twisted” by pro-Israeli lobbyists and said the BBC would continue to cover the humanitarian dimension of a “complicated and deeply contentious story”.
However, he conceded that one of the BBC’s initial objections to the DEC appeal – that delivering aid to victims would be difficult – had “diminished” as a barrier.
Most of the hostile reaction from critics of the decision was directed towards the publicly funded BBC. The Stop the War Coalition said there would be a “collective return” of television licences at protests outside Broadcasting House in London and other BBC centres around the country.
A statement from the coalition said that a number of its supporters had already informed them that they had written to the BBC saying they had cancelled their direct debit for their television licence.
The BBC was also condemned by the general secretaries of broadcasting unions the National Union of Journalists and Bectu, who branded the decision not to screen the appeal as “cowardly.”
In a joint letter, Jeremy Dear and Gerry Morrissey – who together represent thousands of BBC staff – said the move risked being seen as “politically motivated”.
“The humanitarian crisis, in which innocent children are suffering, is likely to be prolonged as a result of the corporation’s decision,” they said.
“The justifications given for the decision … appear to us cowardly and in danger of being seen as politically motivated and biased in favour of Israel.
“We, above all, understand the BBC’s need to maintain editorial impartiality and we also understand the pressure journalists and the BBC come under from those who accuse the BBC of bias in reporting the Middle East.
“That said, we agree with those senior BBC journalists who say this is a decision taken as a result of timidity by BBC management in the face of such pressures.
“Far from avoiding the compromise of the BBC’s impartiality, this move has breached those same BBC rules by showing a bias in favour of Israel at the expense of 1.5 million Palestinian civilians suffering an acute humanitarian crisis.”
The two men asked why Israel was being treated differently when the BBC broadcast a DEC appeal about the Burmese cyclone in May 2008 despite it being an ongoing news story.
“Our members feel this makes the BBC appear pro-Israeli and indifferent to the plight of the victims of this conflict,” they said. “How can airing such an appeal risk compromising the BBC’s impartiality? We believe the BBC’s decision not to show the appeal is wrong and we urge you to reconsider.”
Meanwhile, the BBC is facing a growing revolt from its own journalists, with sources reporting “widespread disgust” within its newsrooms. However, BBC staff have said they have been told they face the sack if they speak out on the issue.
Sources said there was “fury” at the BBC News morning meeting today about the decision, with news editors saying they had not been consulted on the move to not show the appeal.
“Feelings are running extremely high and there is widespread disgust at the BBC’s top management,” one BBC News source said. “There is widespread anger and frustration at the BBC’s refusal to allow people to speak out about it.”
Members of the NUJ at London’s Television Centre are expected to tomorrow pass a resolution condemning the BBC’s decision.
Sources within the BBC have questioned whether its internal Balen report into its Middle East coverage, which the corporation has refused to publish, has influenced its decision on the DEC appeal. An appeal to the House of Lords to force the BBC to publish the report is currently ongoing.
The prime minister’s spokesman insisted the government was not going to “second-guess” a decision that was the BBC’s to make. However, he added: “Clearly we support the appeal.” An advert highlighting the DEC appeal was later placed on the Downing Street website.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, an elected body representing Jewish people in the UK, said they would reserve judgment on the appeal until they had seen it.
A spokesman said the organisation did not object in principle to the concept of a Gaza appeal but added that its view would depend on how the plea was executed.
“It’s unreasonable to make a judgment about an appeal that no one has seen,” he said. “It could be 100% reasonable and extremely important or it could be 100% unreasonable and biased – it could go either way.”
The criticism of the BBC comes as more light has been shed on how the BBC reached its decision. The Guardian understands that Thompson consulted members of the BBC’s appeals advisory committee, made up of representatives from NGOs and international charities, who raised concerns about the delivery of aid. He also held a meeting with six senior BBC executives, including deputy director Mark Byford, who voted unanimously to veto the appeal.
• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and thousand more injured as Israel continues to assault the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza — the majority of them children and refugees — from the air, sea and sky.
Palestinian firemen try to extinguish a fire following an Israeli strike in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, 27 December 2008.
On 27 December, Israel began its bombardment on Gaza and then on 3 January began its ground offensive. At the end of 8 January in Gaza, at least 763 Gazans had been killed, including more than 200 children, and more than 3,000 injured since 27 December, according to Al Jazeera.
Israel claims that it is targeting Hamas armed fighters and infrastructure, ostensibly in response to the firing of homemade rockets from Gaza into Israel. However, field investigations by the Gaza-based human rights organization Al Mezanshow that United Nations-administered schools, mosques, universities, emergency medical crews, private homes and other civilian objects have all been in Israel’s sights.
Among those killed on the first day of bombing, when more than 100 tons of bombs were dropped on the tiny coastal enclave, included police officers who were attending a graduation ceremony, school children heading home after a day of study, and other Gazans killed without warning as they were conducting their normal business.
Entire families have been wiped out during the air strikes and shelling, including that of Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan who was extrajudicially executed along with his family in their home in a Gaza refugee camp. More than 40 were killed on 6 January when Israeli forces shelled the United Nations-administered Fakhoura school in the Jabalia refugee camp, where families who had been displaced by the bombing were seeking shelter. The UN has demanded an independent investigation and its spokespersons assert that GPS coordinates of all UN locations were given to Israel to prevent such an atrocity. Israel recanted its claim that resistance fighters released fire on Israeli soldiers from the school, which has been categorically denied by UN officials.
The death toll will most likely rise as corpses are recovered from the rubble of destroyed buildings and the critically injured die of their wounds. The International Committee of the Red Cross has protested Israeli forces preventing them from evacuating casualties. Many will likely die because Gaza’s hospitals — already chronically short of medicines and supplies due to the Israeli siege — are unable to cope with the scale of the catastrophe. Medical workers face grave danger as they respond to the sites of Israeli strikes; according to the World Health Organization, as of 8 January, 21 medical workers had been killed and more than 30 injured since 27 December.
The bloody operation in Gaza comes after the expiration of a six-month-long ceasefire between Israel and resistance groups in Gaza, including Hamas. Israel had broken the ceasefire on 4 November, when it extrajudicially executed six Palestinians in Gaza whom it said was digging tunnels to Israel. During the five previous months of the ceasefire, Hamas had refrained from firing rockets and prevented other groups from doing so. However, Israel failed to ease the nearly two-year-long embargo on the Gaza Strip that has crippled economic life and brought the area to the brink of a humanitarian crisis — one of Israel’s obligations under the ceasefire.
Instead, in Israel, where the fate of the Gaza Strip has become part of politicking as the country gears up for an election, leaders blamed Hamas for the carnage and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert cynically appealed, “to the people of Gaza, you are not our enemy.” While the other three members of the so-called International Quartet for Middle East Peace criticized what they called Israel’s “excessive” use of force, the US refrained from doing so. White House spokesperson Gordon Johndroe stated from Texas, where President George W. Bush was presently vacationing: “Hamas’ continued rocket attacks into Israel must cease if the violence is to stop.”
The ongoing assault on Gaza is the largest Israeli military operation in the territory occupied during the 1967 War. Although Israel unilaterally withdrew its illegal settler population from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it remained the occupying power as it controlled the borders, sea and airspace, as well as the population registry, and regularly carried out sonic booms over the area, terrorizing the population. Israeli forces have also frequently carried out extrajudicial executions of Palestinian activists in Gaza, killing scores of bystanders as well.
Gaza hospitals were unable to cope with the situation as Israel’s closure of the Gaza Strip for a year and a half has prevented the importing of medical supplies and equipment. As the morgues filled to capacity, corpses lined the hallways of Gaza hospitals. Hospitals were forced to turn away many of the injured due to the lack of space and supplies.
The massive air strikes came after a food crisis broke out in Gaza, as Israel’s banning of imports into the Strip have depleted stocks of flour and cooking gas, causing some bakeries — the few still in operation — to resort to baking bread made out of animal feed. On 18 December, the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) was forced to stop its food aid delivery to 750,000 refugees in the Gaza Strip. Though it briefly resumed services in January 2009 after a “humanitarian corridor” was established, and a daily three-hour ceasefire was declared, the United Nations announced it was ceasing all services after Israeli forces targeted and killed a UN aid worker and wounded others on 8 January.
Israel’s measures of collective punishment on the Gaza Strip are resulting in “the breakdown of an entire society,” according to economist Sara Roy, who asks in a commentary published recently by The London Review of Books, “How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel?”
The devastating attack on Gaza was described as “willful killing” by leading Palestinian human rights and civil society organizations, and therefore constitute “a war crime.” The organizations stated: “Both the time and location of these attacks also indicate a malicious intent to inflict as many casualties as possible with many of the police stations located in civilian population centers and the time of the attacks coinciding with the end of the school day resulting in the deaths of numerous children.”
The assault was met with loud calls for a boycott of Israel, including a boycott appeal from by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, which stated on the day of the massacres: “Israel seems intent to mark the end of its 60th year of existence the same way it has established itself — perpetrating massacres against the Palestinian people. In 1948, the majority of the indigenous Palestinian people were ethnically cleansed from their homes and land, partly through massacres like Deir Yassin; today, the Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom are refugees, do not even have the choice to seek refuge elsewhere. Incarcerated behind ghetto walls and brought to the brink of starvation by the siege, they are easy targets for Israel’s indiscriminate bombing.”
And while government leaders and the US president-elect remain resoundingly silent over the ongoing massacres in Gaza (with the exception of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, which removed Israel’s ambassador from the country), millions of people around the world have taken to the streets to express their solidarity with Palestinians under siege. Analysts say that Arab regimes seen as being in collusion or supporting the siege and massacres, such as the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, will not be unscathed by the popular anger towards these policies.
Traffic on Sea Street, a major thoroughfare alongside Gaza’s coastline, includes horses, donkeys pulling carts, cyclists, pedestrians, trucks and cars, mostly older models. Overhead, in stark contrast to the street below, Israel’s ultra-modern unmanned surveillance planes crisscross the skies. F-16s and helicopters can also be heard. Remnants of their deliveries, the casings of missiles, bombs and shells used during the past three weeks of Israeli attacks, are scattered on the ground.
Workers have cleared most of the roads. Now, they are removing massive piles of wreckage and debris, much as people do following an earthquake.
A Palestinian wounded in Israel's assault on Gaza is treated for burns at a hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, 12 January 2009
He and his colleagues are visibly exhausted, following weeks of work in the intensive care and emergency room departments at a hospital that received many more patients than they could help. “Patients died on the floor of the operating room because we had only six operating rooms,” said Dr. Saeed Abuhassan, an intensive care unit doctor who grew up in Chicago. “And really we don’t know enough about the kinds of weapons that have been used against Gaza.”
In 15 years of practice, Dr. Abuhassan says he never saw burns like those he saw here. The burns, blackish in color, reached deep into the muscles and bones. Even after treatment began, the blackish color returned.
Two of the patients were sent to Egypt because they were in such critical condition. They died in Egypt. But when autopsies were done, reports showed that the cause of death was poisoning from elements of white phosphorous that had entered their systems, causing cardiac arrest.
In Gaza City, the burn unit’s harried director, a plastic surgeon and an expert in treating burns, told us that after encountering cases they’d never seen before, doctors at the center performed a biopsy on a patient they believed may have suffered chemical burns and sent the sample to a laboratory in Egypt. The results showed elements of white phosphorous in the tissue.
The doctor was interrupted by a phone call from a farmer who wanted to know whether it was safe to eat the oranges he was collecting from groves that had been uprooted and bombed during the Israeli invasion. The caller said the oranges had an offensive odor and that when the workers picked them up their hands became itchy.
Audrey Stewart, a human rights worker, had just spent the morning with Gaza farmers in Tufaa, a village near the border between Gaza and Israel. Israeli soldiers had first evacuated people, then dynamited the houses, then used bulldozers to clear the land, uprooting the orange tree groves. Many people, including children, were picking through the rubble, salvaging belongings and trying to collect oranges. At one point, people began shouting at Audrey, warning her that she was standing next to an unexploded rocket.
The doctor put his head in his hands, after listening to Audrey’s report. “I told them to wash everything very carefully. But these are new situations. Really, I don’t know how to respond,” he said.
Yet he spoke passionately about what he knew regarding families that had been burned or crushed to death when their homes were bombed. “Were their babies a danger to anyone?” he asked us.
“They are lying to us about democracy and Western values,” he continued, his voice shaking. “If we were sheep and goats, they would be more willing to help us.”
Dr. Saeed Abuhassan was bidding farewell to the doctors he’d worked with in Gaza. He was returning to his work in the United Arab Emirates. But before leaving, he paused to give us a word of advice. “You know, the most important thing you can tell people in your country is that American people paid for many of the weapons used to kill people in Gaza,” said Dr. Saeed Abuhassan. “And this, also, is why it’s worse than an earthquake.”
Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence and can be reached at kathy A T vcnv D O T org.
“Where can I bring him a father from? Where can I bring him a mother from? You tell me!”
These are the desperate words of Subhi Samuni to Al-Jazeera’s Gaza correspondent. Subhi lost 17 members of his immediate family, including the parents of his seven-year-old grandson. Shockingly, even as I write this article, corpses of the Samuni family are still being retrieved from under the rubble — 15 days after the Israeli occupation forces shelled the two houses. The Israeli army locked 120 members of the family in one house for 12 hours before they shelled it.
The 2009 massacre in Gaza
What can one say to comfort a man who has the harrowing task of having to bury his entire family, including his wife, his sons, his daughters and his grandchildren? Tell us and we will relay your words to Uncle Subhi because his loss has made our words of condolences meaningless to our ears.
Think also of words you want to say to 70-year-old Rashid Muhammad, whose 44-year-old son Samir was executed with a single bullet to the heart in front of his wife and children. The Israeli army refused to let an ambulance pick up his corpse for 11 days so his family had to wait for the assault to stop before they could bury him. Rashid had the excruciatingly painful experience of looking at, touching, kissing, and then burying the decomposed body of his son. Tell this family how to make sense of their harsh reality — say something to make the children sleep, to ease the anguish in the father’s heart, to help the wife understand why her husband had to be taken from her.
You might prefer to talk to 14-year-old Amira Qirm, whose house in Gaza City was shelled with artillery and phosphorous bombs — bombs which burnt to death three members of her immediate family: her father, her 12-year-old brother, Alaa, and her 11-year-old sister, Ismat. Alone, injured and terrified, Amira crawled 500 meters on her knees to a house close by — it was empty because the family had fled when the Israeli attack began. She stayed there for four days, surviving only on water, and listening to the sounds of the Israeli killing machine all around her, too afraid to cry out in pain in case the soldiers heard her. When the owner of the house returned to get clothes for his family, he found Amira, weak and close to death. She is now being treated for her injuries in the overcrowded and under-resourced al-Shifa Hospital.
You can try to comfort 10-year-old Muhammad Samuni who was found lying next to the bodies of his mother and siblings, five days after they were killed. He would tell you what he has been telling everyone — that his brother woke suddenly after being asleep for a long time. His brother told him that he was hungry, asked for a tomato to eat and then died. Are there any other 10-year-olds in the world who are asked to carry this experience around with them for the rest of their lives? Of course not — this “privilege” is reserved just for Palestinian children because they were born on the land that Israel wants for itself. But it is these traumatized children who will deny Israel what it wants because their very survival is a challenge to that apartheid state. It is these same children who will surely inherit Palestine: it is their birthright and no assault can change that fact — not today, not ever.
And through it all we were subjected to Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, adamant in her defense of the world’s most “moral” army. “We don’t target civilians” she lied. “We don’t want the Palestinians to leave Gaza. We just want them to move within Gaza itself!” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert too had something to say to Palestinians in Gaza: “We are not your enemy. Hamas is your enemy.”
Amira, Muhammad, Rashid, Subhi and the more than 40,000 families whose houses have been demolished know differently. Those people who rushed to the cemetery after it was bombed and found the body parts of their dead relatives exposed to the elements know differently. They know that they were deliberately targeted because they are Palestinian. All the rest is propaganda to appease the conscience of those with Palestinian blood on their hands — those who are both inside and outside Israel.
For 22 long days and dark nights, Palestinians in Gaza were left alone to face one of the strongest armies in the world — an army that has hundreds of nuclear warheads, thousands of trigger-happy soldiers armed with Merkava tanks, F-16s, Apache helicopters, naval gunships and phosphorous bombs. Twenty-two sleepless nights, 528 hours of constant shelling and shooting, every single minute expecting to be the next victim.
During these 22 days, while morgues overflowed and hospitals struggled to treat the injured, Arab regimes issued tons of statements, condemned and denounced and held one meaningless press conference after another. They even held two summits, the first one convened 19 full days after the assault on Gaza began and the second one the day after Israel had declared a unilateral ceasefire!
The official Arab position vis-a-vis the Palestinians since 1948, with the exception of the progressive nationalist era (1954-1970) has been a lethal cocktail of cowardice and hypocrisy. Their latest collective failure to break the two-year old Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip and their lack of action to support Palestinians under brutal military assault must be questioned.
Arabs must demand answers from the spineless Arab League because there was no brotherly solidarity shown to Gazans during the Israeli assault. There was no pan-Arabism evident in their platitudes. Some, shockingly, even found it an appropriate time to blame Palestinians for the situation they found themselves in, instead of demanding that Israel stop its merciless assault.
In Gaza today, we wonder how the expressions of support for us in the streets of Arab capitals can be translated into action in the absence of democracy. We wonder whether Arab citizens of despotic regimes can nonviolently change the system. We torment ourselves with trying to discern the means that are currently available for democratic political change. With the ongoing massacre in Gaza, and the construction of an apartheid system in Palestine (in all of historic Palestine, including the areas occupied by Israel in 1967), we know that to survive, we must have the support and solidarity of our Arab brothers and sisters. We saw the Arab people rise to that challenge and stand by us for 22 days but we did not see their leaders behind them.
Archbishop Desmund Tutu of South Africa said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” The UN, EU, Arab League and the international community by and large have remained silent in the face of atrocities committed by Apartheid Israel. They are therefore on the side of Israel. Hundreds of dead corpses of children and women have failed to convince them to act. This is what every Palestinian knows today — whether on the streets of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank or refugee camps in the Diaspora.
We are, therefore, left with one option; an option that does not wait for the United Nations Security Council, Arab Summits, or Organization of Islamic Conference to convene: the option of people’s power. This remains the only power capable of counteracting the massive power imbalance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The horror of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa was challenged with a sustained campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions initiated in 1958 and given new urgency in 1960 after the Sharpeville Massacre. This campaign led ultimately to the collapse of white rule in 1994 and the establishment of a multi-racial, democratic state.
Similarly, the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions has been gathering momentum since 2005. Gaza 2009, like Sharpeville 1960, cannot be ignored: it demands a response from all who believe in a common humanity. Now is the time to boycott the apartheid Israeli state, to divest and to impose sanctions against it. This is the only way to ensure the creation of a secular, democratic state for all in historic Palestine.
This is the only answer to Uncle Subhi’s puzzling questions: it is the only way to give his grandson a future, a life of dignity and equality, a life with both peace and justice, because like all children, he deserves nothing less.
Haidar Eid teaches English literature in Gaza City. He is also a political commentator and activist.
Medics working in the Gaza Strip have condemned Israel’s use of suspected “new weapons” that inflict horrific injuries they say most surgeons will not have seen before.
Dr Jan Brommundt, a German doctor working for Medecins du Monde in the south Gazan city of Khan Younis, described the injuries he had seen as “absolutely gruesome”.
Speaking to Al Jazeera on Tuesday, Brommundt said surgeons had reported many cases where casualties had lost both legs rather than one, prompting suspicions that the Israelis were using some form of Dense Inert Metal Explosives (Dime).
When detonated, a Dime device expels a blade of charged tungsten dust that burns and destroys everything within a four-metre radius.
Brommundt also described widespread but previously unseen abdominal injuries that appear minor at first but degenerate within hours causing multi-organ failure.
| “It seems to be some sort of explosive… that disperses tiny particles… that penetrate all organs”
Dr Jan Brommundt |
“Initially everything seems in order… but they will present within one to five hours with an acute abdomen which looks like appendicitus but it turns out on operation that dozens of miniature particles can be found in all of their organs,” he said.”It seems to be some sort of explosive or shell that disperses tiny particles at around 1×1 or 2×1 millimetres that penetrate all organs, these miniature injuries, you are not able to attack them surgically.”
The doctors said many patients succomb to septicaemia and die within 24 hours.
Dr Erik Fosse, a Norwegian surgeon who worked at the Al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza during the Israeli offensive in Gaza, also told Al Jazeera there was a significant increase in double amputations.
“We suspect they [Israel] used Dime weapons because we saw cases of huge amputations or flesh torn off the lower parts of the body,” he said.
“The pressure wave [from a Dime device] moves from the ground upwards and that’s why the majority of patients have huge injuries to the lower part of the body and abdomen.”
Cancer fears
Fosse described the injuries as “extreme” and “much more dramatic” than those inflicted by landmines as “legs are blown off to the groin, it’s like they have been cut to pieces”.
He described them as “new injuries” that most doctors will not have come across, although he noted similar wounds were reported in the 2006 Lebanon war.Noting that Dime explosives are precision weapons that are supposed to minimise civilian casualties, Fosse said: “The problem is that most of the patients I saw were children. If they [the Israelis] are trying to be accurate, it seems obvious these weapons were aimed at children.”
Fosse called on the UN to establish a body in Gaza to monitor survivors to see if they developed cancer, following claims Dime devices contain radioactive material.
Medics and observers have also accused the Israelis of using white phosphorus - banned from use near civilians under international law - in the densely populated Gaza Strip.
Human rights organisation Amnesty International (AI) said on Monday that delegates it sent to Gaza had found “indisputable evidence of widespread use of white phosphorus in densely populated residential areas in Gaza City and in the north”.
“We saw streets and alleyways littered with evidence of the use of white phoshorus, including still burning wedges and the remnants of the shells and canisters fired by the Israeli army,” Christopher Cobb-Smith, a weapons expert touring Gaza as part of AI’s four-person delegation, said.
White phosphorus is a toxic chemical that causes severe burns and sparks fires that are difficult to extinguish.
It is dispersed in artillery shells, bombs and rockets and burns on contact with oxygen and is used to create a smokescreen to hide the movement of troops.
War crimes?
Israel fiercely denies using weapons in such a way as to contravene international law.
Major Avital Leibovich, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military, reiterated Israel was using “munitions that other militaries in the world are using” and that weapons were deployed ”according to international law” .
Pressed on the number of civilian and child casualties in Gaza, she accused Hamas, the Palestinian faction that controls the territory, of hiding fighters within civilian areas and using ordinary Gazans as “human shields”.
| “Israelis in responsible positions, as well as Palestinians … are going to be looking over their shoulders in the days and weeks to come”
Mark Taylor, international law expert |
Leibovich also said the international community needed to ask itself whether Hamas and other Palestinian factions had committed war crimes by firing rockets at Israeli citizens for eight years.More than 1,300 Palestinians have been killed in the 22-day offensive, many of them woman and children, and 5,340 injured. Thirteen Israelis, including 10 soldiers and three civilians, have been killed in the same period.
The number of civilian deaths has provoked an international outcry, with senior UN officials demanding an independent investigation into whether Israel has committed war crimes.
The likelihood of either side being subject to a war-crimes action seems remote as the International Criminal Court (ICC) has no jurisdiction to investigate because the Gaza Strip is not a state.
In addition, Israel has not signed the Rome Statute that enshrined the ICC so any investigation would require a UN Security mandate - likely to be vetoed by Israel’s ally, the US.
However, Mark Taylor, an international law expert, told Al Jazeera that individual commanders and politicians on both sides could be subject to legal actions lodged abroad.
“I think that Israelis in responsible positions, as well as Palestinians in responsible positions, are going to be looking over their shoulders in the days and weeks to come,” he said.
