News From Gaza

[Challenger78]

Then be over, and out. Consideration for what Sa9id said would much elevate this discussion. I'll just provide this link for more open and inquisitive minds than yours, Geoff:

The Edward Said Archive: إدوارد سعيد​

Thanks for the link, I'm still working through his book "the Palestinian question"

 

[Challenger78]

Update: Israeli troop casualties stand at 3, making a total of 5 over the past week, wheres palestinians stand at 54-117.. Of course the numbers don't add up, but the world pretends it does.

 

[S.A.M.]

Of course it was!

Kind of hard to disguise oneself with self-identificative dress being mandatory and all. What was the other state that did that, more recently? A 20th-century one, I think it was.

Hmm do you know the dress style of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Palestine at the time of western exploration post Napolean?

Hehe. "Said Said: Said said!" I'm over Saidism, thanks.

Not surprising.

"Remember the solidarity shown to Palestine here and everywhere... and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights."

--Prof. Edward W. Said (1935-2003)

As for Israeli intentions:

Israel's large-scale incursion into the northern Gaza Strip - dubbed Operation Hot Winter - represents a significant battle in a steadily unfolding war.

By occupying two areas in the vicinity of Jabaliya and Beit Hanoun the aim of this brigade-sized raid was to disrupt rocket fire by Palestinian militants and to inflict significant casualties on Hamas's military wing.

For Hamas, the goal was to endure, to fight back, and to maintain the rocket fire into southern Israel.

Israeli military officials acknowledge that the raid of the last few days was a smaller dress-rehearsal for a much larger operation for which planning is already well-underway.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7275364.stm

Oh look, they are fighting back against occupation! How dare they!!! Time for another Hot Winter. That should teach them peace.

 

[Arsalan]

I don't know if you're stupid for not understanding what I'm saying, or just an asshole for splitting hairs...

1) Hamas should have more casualties

That wont lead to anything. And arent members of hamas Palestinians as well? Just as IDF members are Israelis

2) That boy should be recognized as someone who was martyred by Hamas. He is a victim of what Mahmoud Abbas called "useless provacations" of Israel by Hamas by daily bombardment of Israeli population centers with increasingly powerful rockets.

Useless provocations? Let me quote a friend from another forum: I wonder how all the friends of Israel on this thread would feel, if a religious group came to this country, bible in hand, saying this is the land that [insert religious blokes name] promised them, and backed by the worlds most powerful nation, massacred us in our thousands, and herded the rest of us into Wales where we forced to live in sub-human conditions, starving, with no medicine, with our water supply and power controlled by the new occupiers, and our sea and airspace controlled by our occupiers? If you picked up arms and fought these occupiers, would you be a terrorist?

 

[otheadp]

That wont lead to anything. And arent members of hamas Palestinians as well? Just as IDF members are Israelis

I don't see your point.

Let me quote a friend from another forum: I wonder how all the friends of Israel on this thread would feel, if a religious group came to this country, bible in hand...

1) Moral relativism
2) Twisted and inaccurate

Hence no response from me.

 

[spidergoat]

Am I the only one here that thinks this Israeli / Palestine thing is a little comical? Think about. It’s a tribal war that’s been going on for more than a thousand years. Both sides want different results, but they keep doing the same thing over and over again. I kill you and you kill me. I bomb you and you bomb me. I said it before and I will say it again. The only solution to the problem is for both sides to come together and create one secular government. Their passports should indicate that they are citizens of the nation of Israeli / Palestine or Palestine / Israel. The Israelis and the Palestinians don’t deserve any peace if they can’t learn how to share the same land without blowing each other up.

I would say more like 70 years, and one state isn't practically possible.

 

[q0101]

I would say more like 70 years, and one state isn't practically possible.

The current conflict in between the Israelis and the Palestinians began in the 1900’s, but I was referring to the animosity between Muslims and Jews. And one state may not be practically possible, but I believe that it is the only solution.

 

[Arsalan]

The current conflict in between the Israelis and the Palestinians began in the 1900’s, but I was referring to the animosity between Muslims and Jews. And one state may not be practically possible, but I believe that it is the only solution.

"The animosity" between Jews and Muslims is a recent fabrication of the anti-Islam brigade. I suggest you read "What Islam did for us" to get an academic point of view about the relation between Jews and Muslims and how it has always been one about mutual respect and tolerance. Yes there have been tensions here and there but thats normal for any scoiety.

 

[Arsalan]

Is that what they said? Thatll help progress in that area :bugeye:

 

[hypewaders]

You're right. I'm just feeling a little pissed-off tonight.

 

[James R]

Members are reminded that sciforums is an English-language forum.

I have received a complaint about otheadp posting offensive language in arabic.

You will not get away with insulting other members, advocating violence, posting pornographic material and breaching other forum rules by doing so in another language.

If it comes to my attention that members are using other languages to breach forum posting guidelines, I will personally make sure that offending members are banned for a long time.

 

[Arsalan]

That's a tangent man. Cant respond to the subject? Though I can follow your tangent and bring you an infinitely worse bunch of examples of Muslim-on-Muslim hate (and I don't just mean ideological disagreements...)

Ofcourse there is. Im not saying there isnt. What im saying is its a fabrication that there was this large scale animosity. And I cant respond to the subject? Youre the one who who comes up with a wrong definition of a false subject.

 

[S.A.M.]

Surprise! Surprise!

Israel plans to reoccupy Gaza.

Israel has informed foreign diplomats that it would reoccupy Hamas-ruled Gaza if necessary, though it prefers not to do so, the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday, as the IDF operated against defiant Gaza rocket squads.

I can actually see an upside to this.

ie no blocking of medical access or sanitation.

no missile strikes

But I also see higher civilian deaths from the military being inside and constantly oppressing the people.

I wonder what the international community will do now.

Perhaps its time the Palestinians petitioned the UN for restitution.

I wonder if that was the intent all along, leaving Gaza and then putting a blockade on it to invite retribution then move in again and kill at ease, while declaiming the "necessity" for occupation.

Fayyad to ask Rice for guarantees that Gaza offensive won't happen again

Rice started a Middle East tour on Tuesday and is scheduled to visit Ramallah in the afternoon to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Premier Fayyad before heading for Jerusalem for talks with Israeli officials.

"The main issue in the talks here will be the ongoing Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and the need for a U.S. intervention to stop the aggression and secure they will not happen again," said Riyadh al-Maliki, information minister and Palestinian government spokesman.

Abbas announced halting the U.S.-sponsored peace talks between the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and Israel in the wake of a series of Israeli attacks since Wednesday in the Gaza Strip, which left more than 120 Palestinians killed and is the worst violence in years.

Isn't it ironic asking the US for reassurance? After all, they are doing the same thing in Iraq since 5 years.

As usual it is the civilians of Gaza who suffer. And suffer. And continue to suffer.

More occupation is not what they need.



Sorrow, panic amid carnage in Gaza town

Gaza seems fated to suffer yet more killing and yet more sorrow. Already yesterday, there was more than enough sorrow to go around.

What follows is just one tale of grief, among many.

As Abu Shbak spoke early yesterday, he was surrounded by dozens of men, all huddled on green-plastic chairs in the shadow of a two-storey house with beige stucco walls.

They had come to grieve the deaths of Jacqueline Abu Shbak, 16, and her 14-year-old brother, Eyad, both cousins of Ahmed Abu Shbak.

Upstairs, in the kitchen of a second-floor apartment, egg shells still sat on a counter near bullet holes in an opaque window above the sink.

Outside, hundreds of dollops of blood splattered stone steps down to the lane off Zimmo St. – a lane transformed into an urban war zone early Saturday as invading Israelis battled Palestinian militants.

Soon after the shooting broke out, Ahmed hurried downstairs in his own home, meaning to check on his relatives across the lane.

He opened his front door just as his 12-year-old cousin Mohammed appeared in the doorway opposite.

"Come!" shouted the child.

"My brother is hurt. Come! Come!"

Despite the gunfire, Ahmed darted across and hurried upstairs, where both Jacqueline and Eyad were sprawled on the living-room floor. Their father was not at home.

"I saw the girl," said Ahmed.

"She was bleeding from the head."

Both teenagers had been shot, apparently by Israeli snipers who had taken over a three-storey building up the lane, but were still breathing.

Meanwhile, gunfire barked through the darkness outside, and it was now, Ahmed says, that he lost his nerve.

Shaken and panicky, he tried his best but could not seem to lift even one of the youngsters.

But he collected himself and ran outside where he persuaded a Palestinian fighter to help him. Together, they carried the injured teenagers down the stairwell and then about 100 metres west. He screamed for an ambulance.

Ahmed rode with Eyad in an ambulance to Shifa Hospital, where the boy died. Jacqueline was no luckier.

Why do IDF snipers target children in the heads?

This issue has come up again and again

And so many children

The numbers are staggering; one in five Palestinian dead is a child. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) says at least 408 Palestinian children have been killed since the beginning of the intifada in September 2000. Nearly half were killed in the Gaza strip, and most of those died in two refugee camps in the south, Khan Yunis and Rafah. The PCHR says they were victims of "indiscriminate shooting, excessive force, a shoot-to-kill policy and the deliberate targeting of children".

The military says it is difficult to distinguish between youths and men who might be Palestinian fighters, but the statistics show that nearly a quarter of the children killed were under 12

As Gideon Levy said last December:

"It was a pretty quiet year, relatively speaking. Only 457 Palestinians and 10 Israelis were killed, according to the B'Tselem human rights organization, including the victims of Qassam rockets. Fewer casualties than in many previous years. However, it was still a terrible year: 92 Palestinian children were killed (fortunately, not a single Israeli child was killed by Palestinians, despite the Qassams). One-fifth of the Palestinians killed were children and teens - a disproportionate, almost unprecedented number. The Jewish year of 5767. Almost 100 children, who were alive and playing last New Year, didn't survive to see this one."

Disturbing image of dead Palestinian children
With a policy like this, how can you fail?

It was the summer of 2002, and Assaf and his armoured unit had been ordered to enter the Gaza town of Dir al Balah following the firing of mortars into nearby Jewish settlements. His orders were, he told the Guardian, "'Every person you see on the street, kill him'. And we would just do it."

On the plus side, not all Israeli soldiers are willing to keep silent.

http://www.shovrimshtika.org/articles_e.asp

 

[chuuush]

HAARETZ 28/09/2007
Twilight Zone / The children of 5767
By Gideon Levy

It was a pretty quiet year, relatively speaking. Only 457 Palestinians and 10 Israelis were killed, according to the B'Tselem human rights organization, including the victims of Qassam rockets. Fewer casualties than in many previous years. However, it was still a terrible year: 92 Palestinian children were killed (fortunately, not a single Israeli child was killed by Palestinians, despite the Qassams). One-fifth of the Palestinians killed were children and teens - a disproportionate, almost unprecedented number. The Jewish year of 5767. Almost 100 children, who were alive and playing last New Year, didn't survive to see this one.

One year. Close to 8,000 kilometers were covered in the newspaper's small, armored Rover - not including the hundreds of kilometers in the old yellow Mercedes taxi belonging to Munir and Sa'id, our dedicated drivers in Gaza. This is how we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the occupation. No one can argue anymore that it's only a temporary, passing phenomenon. Israel is the occupation. The occupation is Israel.

We set out each week in the footsteps of the fighters, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, trying to document the deeds of Israel Defense Forces soldiers, Border Police officers, Shin Bet security service investigators and Civil Administration personnel - the mighty occupation army that leaves behind in its wake horrific killing and destruction, this year as every year, for four decades.
Advertisement
And this was the year of the children that were killed. We didn't get to all of their homes, only to some; homes of bereavement where parents weep bitterly over their children, who were climbing a fig tree in the yard, or sitting on a bench in the street, or preparing for an exam, or on their way home from school, or sleeping peacefully in the false security of their homes.

A few of them also threw a rock at an armored vehicle or touched a forbidden fence. All came under live fire, some of which was deliberately aimed at them, cutting them down in their youth. From Mohammed (al-Zakh) to Mahmoud (al-Qarinawi), from the boy who was buried twice in Gaza to the boy who was buried in Israel. These are the stories of the children of 5767.

The first of them was buried twice. Abdullah al-Zakh identified half of the body of his son Mahmoud, in the morgue refrigerator of Shifa Hospital in Gaza, by the boy's belt and the socks on his feet. This was shortly before last Rosh Hashanah. The next day, when the Israel Defense Forces "successfully" completed Operation Locked Kindergarten, as it was called, leaving behind 22 dead and a razed neighborhood, and left Sajiyeh in Gaza, the bereaved father found the remaining parts of the body and brought them for a belated burial.

Mahmoud was 14 when he died. He was killed three days before the start of the school year. Thus we ushered in Rosh Hashanah 5767. In Shifa we saw children whose legs were amputated, who were paralyzed or on respirators. Families were killed in their sleep, or while riding on donkeys, or working in the fields. Operation Locked Kindergarten and Operation Summer Rains. Remember? Five children were killed in the first operation, with the dreadful name. For a week, the people of Sajiyeh lived in fear the likes of which Sderot residents have never experienced - not to belittle their anxiety, that is.

The day after Rosh Hashanah we traveled to Rafah. Dam Hamad, 14, had been killed in her sleep, in her mother's arms, by an Israeli rocket strike that sent a concrete pillar crashing down on her head. She was the only daughter of her paralyzed mother, her whole world. In the family's impoverished home in the Brazil neighborhood, at the edge of Rafah, we met the mother who lay in a heap in bed; everything she had in the world was gone. Outside, I remarked to the reporter from French television who accompanied me that this was one of those moments when I felt ashamed to be an Israeli. The next day he called and said: "They didn't broadcast what you said, for fear of the Jewish viewers in France."

Soon afterward we went back to Jerusalem to visit Maria Aman, the amazing little girl from Gaza, who lost nearly everyone in her life to a missile strike gone awry that wiped out her innocent family, including her mother, while riding in their car. Her devoted father Hamdi remains by her side. For a year and a half, she has been cared for at the wonderful Alyn Hospital, where she has learned to feed a parrot with her mouth and to operate her wheelchair using her chin. All the rest of her limbs are paralyzed. She is connected day and night to a respirator. Still, she is a cheerful and neatly groomed child whose father fears the day they might be sent back to Gaza.

For now, they remain in Israel. Many Israelis have devoted themselves to Maria and come to visit her regularly. A few weeks ago, broadcast journalist Leah Lior took her in her car to see the sea in Tel Aviv. It was a Saturday night, and the area was crowded with people out for a good time, but the girl in the wheelchair attracted attention. Some people recognized her and stopped to say hello and wish her well. Who knows? Maybe the pilot who fired the missile at her car happened to be passing by, too.

Not everyone has been fortunate enough to receive the treatment that Maria has had. In mid-November, a few days after the bombardment of Beit Hanoun - remember that? - we arrived in the battered and bleeding town: 22 killed in a moment, 11 shells dropped on a densely packed town. Islam, 14, sat there dressed in black, grieving for her eight relatives that had been killed, including her mother and grandmother. Those disabled by this bombardment didn't get to go to Alyn.

Two days before the shelling of Beit Hanoun, our forces also fired a missile that hit the minibus transporting children to the Indira Gandhi kindergarten in Beit Lahia. Two kids, passersby, were killed on the spot. The teacher, Najwa Khalif, died a few days later. She was wounded in clear view of her 20 small pupils, who were sitting in the minibus. After her death, the children drew a picture: a row of children lying bleeding, their teacher in the front, and an Israeli plane bombing them. At the Indira Gandhi kindergarten, we had to bid good-bye to Gaza, too: Since then, we haven't been able to cross into the Strip.

But the children have come to us. In November, 31 children were killed in Gaza. One of them, Ayman al-Mahdi, died in Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, where he had been rushed in grave condition. Only his uncle was permitted to stay with him during his final days. A fifth-grader, Ayman had been sitting with friends on a bench on a street in Jabalya, right by his school. A bullet fired from a tank struck him. He was just 10 years old.

IDF troops killed children in the West Bank, too. Jamil Jabaji, a boy who tended horses in the new Askar refugee camp, was shot in the head. He was 14 when he was killed, last December. He and his friends were throwing rocks at the armored vehicle that passed by the camp, located near Nablus. The driver provoked the children, slowing down and speeding up, slowing down and speeding up, until finally a soldier got out, aimed at the boy's head and fired. Jamil's horses were left in their stable, and his family was left to mourn.

And what did 16-year-old Taha al-Jawi do to get himself killed? The IDF claimed that he tried to sabotage the barbed-wire fence surrounding the abandoned Atarot airport; his friends said he was just playing soccer and had gone to chase after the ball. Whatever the circumstances, the response from the soldiers was quick and decisive: a bullet in the leg that caused him to bleed to death, lying in a muddy ditch by the side of the road. Not a word of regret, not a word of condemnation from the IDF spokesman, when we asked for a comment. Live fire directed at unarmed children who weren't endangering anyone, with no prior warning.

Abir Aramin was even younger; she was just 11. The daughter of an activist in the Combatants for Peace organization, in January she left her school in Anata and was on the way to buy candy in a little shop. She was fired upon from a Border Police vehicle. Bassam, her father, told us back then with bloodshot eyes and in a strangled voice: "I told myself that I don't want to take revenge. Revenge will be for this 'hero,' who was so 'threatened' by my daughter that he shot and killed her, to stand trial for it." But just a few days ago the authorities announced that the case was being closed: The Border Police apparently acted appropriately.

"I'm not going to exploit my daughter's blood for political purposes. This is a human outcry. I'm not going to lose my mind just because I lost my heart," the grieving father, who has many Israeli friends, also told us.

In Nablus, we documented the use of children as human shields - the use of the so-called "neighbor procedure" - involving an 11-year-old girl, a 12-year-old boy and a 15-year-old boy. So what if the High Court of Justice has outlawed it? We also recorded the story of the death of baby Khaled, whose parents, Sana and Daoud Fakih, tried to rush him to the hospital in the middle of the night, a time when Palestinian babies apparently mustn't get sick: The baby died at the checkpoint.

In Kafr al-Shuhada (the "martyrs' village") south of Jenin, in March, 15-year-old Ahmed Asasa was fleeing from soldiers who had entered the village. A sniper's bullet caught him in the neck.

Bushra Bargis hadn't even left her home. In late April she was studying for a big test, notebooks in hand, pacing around her room in the Jenin refugee camp in the early evening, when a sniper shot her in the forehead from quite far away. Her bloodstained notebooks bore witness to her final moments.

And what about the unborn babies? They weren't safe either. A bullet in the back of Maha Qatuni, a woman who was seven months pregnant and got up during the night to protect her children in their home, struck her fetus in the womb, shattering its head. The wounded mother lay in the Rafidiya Hospital in Nablus, hooked up to numerous tubes. She was going to name the baby Daoud. Does killing a fetus count as murder? And how "old" was the deceased? He was certainly the youngest of the many children Israel killed in the past year.

Happy New Year.

...

 

[hypewaders]

Very heavy, chuuush. I've just been reading some vivid observations like that over at Sam's most recent link, while referring to Google Earth to enhance my awareness of the locations involved. If you haven't looked Gaza over closely from the air, you're missing a poignant picture of systematic oppression. If only the world could have seen Europe this way in the 1940s, I don't think we'd be discussing the siege of Palestinian ghettos today. There's a lot of badness happening in Gaza we should be paying much closer attention to- especially we USAmericans whose policies are enabling this carnage.

 

[S.A.M.]

Yes, its so incredibly painful to imagine the life of those poor people and what they must go through each and every day of their lives, while the world is complicit in its silence. :bawl:

 

[chuuush]

Very heavy, chuuush. I've just been reading some vivid observations like that over at Sam's most recent link, while referring to Google Earth to enhance my awareness of the locations involved. If you haven't looked Gaza over closely from the air, you're missing a poignant picture of systematic oppression. If only the world could have seen Europe this way in the 1940s, I don't think we'd be discussing the siege of Palestinian ghettos today. There's a lot of badness happening in Gaza we should be paying much closer attention to- especially we USAmericans whose policies are enabling this carnage.

Believe me, I knew it was hard there, but this article brought tears to my eyes. If their own people (with that limited access mentioned there) confess to such atrocities, what should the whole pictue be like. It is unimaginable. It is sheer barbarity

 

[hypewaders]

Sam: "Yes, its so incredibly painful to imagine the life of those poor people and what they must go through each and every day of their lives, while the world is complicit in its silence." :bawl:

It hurts a lot. When I was a kid, I saw houses flattened, and people killed in Lebanon, and I felt the helplessness, and the anger. There is something even more coldly systematic, and even more sickening to me about what is happening in Gaza today. It's really painful to acknowledge what's going on, and it's difficult to think clearly about what to do about it.

chuuush: "It is sheer barbarity"

It needs to stop.

 

[S.A.M.]

Believe me, I know it was hard there, but this article brought tears to my eyes. If their own people (with that limited access mentioned there) confess to such atrocities, what should the whole pictue be like. It is unimaginable. It is sheer barbarity

It hurts a lot. When I was a kid, I saw houses flattened, and people killed in Lebanon, and I felt the helplessness, and the anger. There is something even more coldly systematic, and even more sickening to me about what is happening in Gaza today. It's really painful to acknowledge what's going on, and it's difficult to think clearly about what to do about it.

Yes, I know exactly what you both mean. Thank God there are people like Gideon Levy who can bring the injustice to light. At least its not all completely lost and unacknowledged. One wonders how many stories like that never see daylight.

When I think of over 4 million people living like this every day for so many years, I wonder at their strength and tolerance. Truly, I don't know what I would do in a situation like that.

 

[John99]

When I think of over 4 million people living like this every day for so many years, I wonder at their strength and tolerance. Truly, I don't know what I would do in a situation like that.

Thats why we need to be on the same page to stop this stuff from happening, but THATS NOT HAPPENING.