Today in Palestine

Saturday, 1 March 2008

41 dead in Gaza brings toll to 75 since Wednesday

Sanah’s brother was wailing and screaming for his sister as ambulance staff gathered up parts of her dismembered body, asking “Where are the rest?” 17-year-old Jacqueline Mohammed Abu Shbak saw her 14-year-old brother Iyad struck down by an Israeli artillery shell. As she rushed towards him Israeli soldiers shot her in the heart. 19 children have been killed since Wednesday, including a 2-day-old baby. Seven children were killed on Saturday alone. Medical sources also confirmed that more than 200 citizens have been injured since Wednesday, 120 of whom were wounded in the ongoing Israeli aggression on Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip that began early on Saturday morning.
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=28097

Al Mezan: Israel kills at least 31 Gazans today, including eight children

Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) escalated the attacks and ground incursions against Gaza today. Many attacks hit civilian homes and other objects, killing 31 Palestinians, including eight children. Among the civilian casualties are 13 civilians (six children) who were killed inside their homes. In the early morning hours today, IOF troops entered the eastern suburbs of Jabalia under the cover of helicopters. Helicopters opened heavy machine gun fire at ambulances as they tried to collect the injured.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9355.shtml

Israel kills some more children

GAZA CITY, 1 March (IPS) - Tamer was nine, and no child soldier. He did not live in the area from where homemade rockets are launched into Israeli territory. The day he was killed, he was at least two kilometers from the place Israeli troops had entered Gaza, and met with return fire by Palestinian resistance. His tragedy was that the family home was near Deir al-Balah in the middle of the Gaza Strip, close to the area the Israelis have set up as their Kussfim base. “We were all inside the house when shooting started,” Tamer’s aunt Etaf tells IPS. Members of the family decided to crawl out into the rain after a bullet hit a gas cylinder, Etaf said. “But Israeli soldiers continued to fire on us from a tank and Hummer military jeep.”
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9356.shtml

2 IDF soldiers, 50 Palestinians die in Gaza clashes on Saturday

in an ongoing IDF ground incursion near the northern Gaza Strip town of Jabaliya. Sergeants Eran Dangor, 20, of Jerusalem, and Doron Asulin, 20, of Be’er Sheva, were killed by Palestinian gunfire in two separate incidents early Saturday morning. Five other IDF soldiers were wounded during the fighting. Palestinians say that 10 civilians, including five children and three women, were among the dead in the raid that began before dawn Saturday. IAF planes launched missiles at groups of armed Palestinians during the clashes. The dead Palestinian civilians are believed to include a 17-year-old girl and her 16-year-old brother, a 45-year-old man and his 20-year-old son, and two sisters thought to be in their early 20s. An IDF spokesperson said the army would look into reports of tank shells hitting houses. “Ambulances tried to come, but they came under fire. ... We are in a real war,” said Tareq Dardouna.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959558.html

Direct from Mohammed Omer in Rafah

I had a long day, an awful day, taking photos and writing from on the ground in Gaza City and northern Gaza. I met with two children who survived Wednesday’s Jabalyia soccer bombing: the other 4 kids were, as you likely know, killed. One of the children I saw had no flesh on their legs, had burns all over their bodies from the tank’s shelling. This was one of the scariest things I have seen yet, and I have seen a lot more than that. . . .
http://palestinianpundit.blogspot.com/2008/03/direct-from-mohammed-omer-in-rafah.html

Hamas: 91 killed in Israeli raids in February

including eight from the West Bank and 83 from the Gaza Strip. Hamas told Ma’an that 35 of the 91 martyrs belonged to the Al-Qassam Brigades, 20 were from the resistance factions and the other 36 were Palestinian citizens. They also said that 427 Palestinians were arrested in February, 94 from the Gaza Strip and 332 from the West Bank. A Palestinian woman was also arrested in Jerusalem.
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=28086

Nearly 70 Palestinians dead as ’shoah’ imminent

[MIFTAH’s summary of the past week’s events in Gaza/Israel, day by day]
http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=16337&CategoryId=10

Al-Haq: Wilful killing, not collateral damage – Israel’s war crimes in the Gaza Strip must be prosecuted
As a Palestinian organisation dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights and international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Al-Haq is extremely concerned about the constant escalation of Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, which are exacting a heavy toll on the civilian population, in particular amongst children. The use of unrestrained force against a civilian population in response to the unlawful rocket attacks carried out by Palestinian armed groups is a blatant violation of the laws of war
http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=16336&CategoryId=32

Abbas: What is happening in Gaza is worse than a holocaust

“It’s inconceivable that the Israeli reaction to missiles, which we condemn, should be so huge and terrible,” he added. “I’m sorry that Israel is now using the word that has been a pariah word for more than 60 years. The word is Holocaust. We call on the world to respond,” Abbas said. “We need the world to see what is going on and who is committing international terrorism,” he went on. . . The United States has urged Israel to “consider the consequences” of its actions.
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=28092

Bishara accuses Abbas of involvement in the IOF aggression in Gaza

"DOHA, (PIC)- Dr. Azmi Bishara, the prominent Palestinian leader in the 1948 occupied lands, told Al-Jazeera TV network on Saturday that the one (Abbas) who affirms to the world that Al-Qaeda is present in Gaza is considered a participant in the Gaza bloodbath and is providing a cover up for the spate of murders launched by the IOF troops against the Palestinian people.
http://palestinianpundit.blogspot.com/2008/03/bishara-accuses-abbas-of-involvement-in.html

Abu Marzouk: Gaza genocide carried out in coordination with Washington

"DAMASCUS, (PIC)— Dr. Mousa Abu Marzouk, the deputy political chairman of Hamas, has charged that the IOF massacres in Gaza were carried out in coordination with the American administration and regional forces that brought back to memory the Lebanon war in 2006.
http://palestinianpundit.blogspot.com/2008/03/abu-marzouk-gaza-genocide-carried-out.html

Analysis: Gaza raids met by loud silence from Arab world – by Zvi Bar’el

As the death toll in Israel Defense Forces raids against miltiants firing rockets from Gaza climbed to more than 50 Saturday, Palestinian Information Minister Riad al-Malki responded by saying “Hamas gave Israel an excuse to start a war in Gaza.” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also responded along these lines by saying that the “operation in Gaza is not just a reaction to the rocket barrage.” Both comments can be interpreted as Palestinian backing of the Israel Defense Forces ground incursion in the Strip. The very mild Egyptian reaction and the conspicuous absence of a convicting Arab voice also indicate that the IDF raid is perceived by the Arab world to be first and foremost a war against Hamas, not the “real Holocaust” of the Palestinian people - as Khaled Mesh’al claimed on Saturday. The fact that Al Jazeera devoted a whole episode of a popular debate show to the question “Why are the Palestinians keeping silent about the situation in Gaza?” also serves to prove this point.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959611.html

Five hurt in Ashkelon as close to 50 rockets hit southern Israel

On Saturday afternoon, three people were wounded when rockets hit the marina in Ashkelon, some 15 kilometers from the Gaza Strip. One of the three sustained moderate wounds, while the other two were lightly hurt. A number of people at the scene of the attack were treated for shock. Earlier, four rockets slammed into the town, one of which scored a direct hit on a house. The three other rockets hit a residential neighborhood. Two people were wounded while two more were treated for shock. “There’s growing rage among the residents which is understandable and we will allow them to express it within the rule of law,” Haim Blumenfeld, the commander of the Ashkelon police station, said.
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959172.html

Sleepless in Palestine – by Nidal Sakr

One “unlawful” settler killed in over 9 months, and we never hear the end of it. But with over thirty indigenous women and children murdered, we only read about the new one hundred F-35 Joint Strike Fighters US is supplying Israel, as if thirty dead in a day is just not enough. It seems we ought to find a solution. One solution is that we all find a rehab program to enroll in. A rehab so we may one day be able to fit back into a species called “human.”
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=28096

Israeli minister threatens ’holocaust’ as public demands ceasefire – by Ali Abunimah

Israeli officials began damage limitation efforts after the country’s deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip with a ’holocaust’. The comments came a day after Israeli occupation forces killed 31 Palestinians, nine of them children, one a six-month-old baby, in a series of air raids across the Gaza Strip. The BBC later reported that “many of Mr. Vilnai’s colleagues have quickly distanced themselves from his comments and also tried to downplay them saying he did not mean genocide.” An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Arye Mekel, claimed that Vilnai used the word “in the sense of a disaster or a catastrophe, and not in the sense of a holocaust.”
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9354.shtml

Jews and the Gaza holocaust – by Khalid Amayreh

In June, 1942, in reprisal for the assassination of the Nazi commander Reinhard Heydrich, the Germans carried out a murderous rampage of murder and terror throughout Czechoslovakia. The small Czech village of Lidice bore the brunt of the German revenge, with the SS killing all the men, deported all women and children and razed the village to the ground. . . . Now what is the difference between these Nazi atrocities and what Israel, the “only democracy in the Middle East” is doing in the Gaza Strip, where “the most moral army in the world” is slaughtering babies as young as six months’ old?
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2bcOd87MDI46m9rUxJEpMO%2bi1s7QMI52sW%2fxY1vZm9U%2bNEklscOzXEHdJfSvhA0XjbTvXOt2gUUd16YBomtonWR1BG0ANoOqkyUDxjz9jDx0oKXq918w3%2b%2fXdU8LqOSnQYDe5A%3d

Far from glow of Annapolis, Rice heads to Mideast

with U.S. credibility at stake and peace talks stymied by escalating violence in Hamas-run Gaza. Three months ago, Israelis and Palestinians pledged at a peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, that they would seek a deal by the end of the Bush administration in January 2009. Rice’s goal on this trip would be to keep talks moving between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and pro-Western Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. She also will try to get both sides to take immediate steps to improve security on the ground, particularly in Gaza
http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=16331&CategoryId=5

The pledge of ’never again’ doesn’t apply to Palestinians

The Palestinians are being systematically destroyed and shown no mercy. And, most of the world continues to remain silent.The United States has, as was only to be expected, quickly placed the blame on the Palestinians. This seems to be the de facto justification for the collective punishment of the people of Gaza. It also falls into the familiar pattern of highlighting Palestinian violence, keeping silence about the Israeli violence and the reasons for the Palestinian violence in the first place.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=107359&d=1&m=3&y=2008

Analysis: Uncompromising Hamas is in trouble – by Amos Harel

The decision to put Ashkelon, and its 120,000 residents, within permanent range of their rockets from Gaza may turn out to have been a mistake on their part. Hamas is in trouble. This stems not only from the losses it is suffering, but also from a decline in its level of support among the Gazan public. A., who lives in Gaza, blames Hamas for ruining ties with every country in the world, except two: Syria and Iran. “They led us to isaster, and the price is being paid by the ordinary citizens. We have no dreams of a Palestinian state, Jerusalem or the right of return. All we want is a few hours without the electricity being cut and gasoline for our car.” M. added a caveat: “You need to understand that however angry people are with Hamas, their anger at Israel is greater.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959398.html

Grandmother: ’Could they really kill a baby in his bed?’

Five-month-old Muhammad Nasser Al-Bur’i was asleep in his parent’s bed in the family’s home when the Israeli missile aimed at the ministry of interior building in Gaza City struck on Wednesday evening. His mother had only just left the room when the tin roof collapsed and Muhammad was suffocated by the dust which filled the house as the Israeli planes shelled the nearby ministry. Muhammad was Eman and Nasser Al-Bur’i’s only child. They had been married for five years before their longed-for child was born. His incredulous grandmother Um Nasser said, “Could they really kill a baby in his bed? May God give us enough patience to cope with the Zionists’ oppression and the world’s silence.”
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=28077

Gaza buries its dead

Overwhelmed with sadness and anger, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip held funeral processions of a number of victims killed in the ongoing Israeli raids on the Gaza Strip on Thursday and Friday. One funeral was of four children from the Darduna and Hammuda families, who were killed in an Israeli air raid on Jabalia on Thursday afternoon.
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=28081

An explosive, dangerous balance – by Meron Benvenisti

It is hard to say who was responsible for fueling the recent uproar over warnings that Palestinian protesters would try to break through the borders and checkpoints of the Gaza Strip. Was it the defense establishment, or perhaps the media? In any case, the hysteria-mongers succeeded all too well, for the mountain became a molehill. The artillery batteries and thousands of Israeli soldiers who stood before a few thousand Palestinian children turned the Israeli response into a fiasco. Of course, it was impossible to admit afterward that the defense minister and military chiefs had panicked.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959550.html

The harsh truth about Gaza – by Eitan Haber

Politicians and military officers, mostly retired, will spread across all television screens and radio stations in the coming days and attempt to present the recipe for Israel’s salvation: Occupy Gaza, attack a neighborhood, destroy a district, kill Hamas leaders. Yet the cruel, harsh, difficult-to-digest truth is as follows: At this time there is no suitable solution to the Qassam problem. Yet the even harsher truth is that there is no other way: Ultimately, the IDF will apparently have to reoccupy Gaza, or a large part of it.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3513001,00.html

FACTBOX: Israel’s options on Gaza

[None of those listed, of course, include stopping the killing of Palestinians, ending the blockade, negotiating with Hamas, allowing passage between Gaza and the West Bank, having normal borders between Gaza and Egypt and between Gaza and Israel, allowing Palestinians to control the population registry, or giving any measure of justice to Palestinians. How surprising that none of their options will work.]
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL2713748320080229

Listen to the shunned – by Joharah Baker

Palestinians have been screaming it from the rooftops for several decades; human rights groups have highlighted it time and time again and global voices of conscience have held demonstrations, sit-ins, solidarity rallies and have written books espousing it. We are talking about the foundations of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the core of all the subsequent ills it has produced. The Israeli occupation – illegal, belligerent and all-oppressing – is the source of almost all that has gone wrong. Remove it and the rest will naturally fall into place.
http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=16302&CategoryID=13

Egypt plans to provide all of Gaza’s electricity

Egypt is working on a plan with the Palestinians to supply all the besieged Gaza Strip’s electricity needs and wean it off its reliance on Israel for power, an Egyptian energy official said Thursday. Under the plan, Egypt - which already supplies a small part of Gaza’s electricity - would increase the number of power lines linking it to Gaza and provide Palestinians with some 250 megawatts, said Izzat Ibrahim, a senior official of Sinai’s National Electricity Power Company.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959249.html

Al Mezan report: Israeli siege creates drinking water crisis in Gaza

Israel’s restrictions on movement, which were tightened since 14 June 2007, caused a shortage in hypochlorite, a substance that is commonly used to clean drinking water. As a result, the 52 out of 140 water wells had to stop pumping. Water from these wells is too polluted and cannot be safe for human consumption, even after boiling it.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9353.shtml

Settlers dig tunnels under Muslim areas of Jerusalem

Jewish settler groups are digging an extensive tunnel network under Muslim areas of Jerusalem’s Old City while building a ring of settlements around it to bolster their claim to the disputed city in any future peace deal, anti-settlement campaigners have told The Times. One group, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said that settler tunnels could one day extend under the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, and claimed that extremists could use the access route to attack the structure in an attempt to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Settler groups flatly deny such allegations.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3463264.ece

ISM: Villagers of Bil’in hold funeral march for the children killed in Gaza
(includes video)

The demonstration was small but creative, with different organizations taking part in a funeral march towards the wall. A small coffin and a bundle were used to represent the 6-month old baby recently killed in Gaza. The flags of Hamas and Fatah were flown next to each other, and next to Palestinian flags, while the villagers sang songs of national unity. Activists also unfurled a meters-long banner of black, giving the march its proper solemnity
http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2008/03/01/villagers-of-bilin-hold-funeral-march-for-the-children-killed-in-gaza/

Arab-Israelis protest in Nazareth after Israel bans memorial

After the Israeli government banned a memorial service to honor recently deceased Palestinian leader George Habash, Arab-Israelis in Nazareth held a protest on Friday afternoon. Friday’s protest came after a petition was filed with the Israeli High Court asking that the court overturn a decision by the Nazareth police to ban a memorial service for George Habash. The petition was denied
http://www.imemc.org/article/53164

Fuel prices to rise in Palestinian territories

Fuel prices in the Palestinian territories will rise by 3.5% starting on Sunday. Ma’an’s reporter said that one litre of unleaded benzine (95 octane) will be 6.32 NIS [about US$1.73] and a litre of benzene (96 octane) will be 6.34 NIS. These prices are for self-service, and for regular service 12 NIS should be added per litre.
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=28066

Israeli forces prevent farmers near Bethlehem from reaching their vineyards Friday

The vineyards are under threat of confiscation once the separation wall is completed. Ma’an’s reporter said that the Israeli forces closed the entrance to Al-Ma’sara with barbed wire, preventing dozens of people from reaching their land. The Israeli soldiers attacked Palestinians and foreign solidarity activists and expelled them from the area.
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=28082

Hebron police destroy 300 illegal cars

Palestinian police affiliated to the Ramallah-based caretaker government on Thursday destroyed more than 300 unregistered cars seized in the West Bank town of Hebron. Hebron governor Hussain Al-A’raj said he was pleased that the Palestinian police had resumed its role in keeping law and order.
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=28055

Twilight Zone / ’My wife will die in the car’ – by Gideon Levy

They wanted to spend their old age together. An elderly couple, Fauziyah al-Darek, 66, and her husband, Mahmoud Qab, 70. They wanted to continue to enjoy their only daughter and their three young grandchildren in their modest home in Dir al-Ghusun. But now Mahmoud, a widower, sits on a white plastic chair in the center of the guest room in his house, a kaffiyeh wrapped around his bony face, alone Fauziyah died because of the insensitivity of soldiers who would not allow her to be rushed to the hospital in Tul Karm after she suffered a serious heart attack.. “Get out of here, we don’t care if your wife dies,” one of them said.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959228.html

Reading the tea leaves – by Seth Freedman

The differing aspirations of Israeli and Palestinian children attending the same charity highlight the dangers of equating their suffering – The Arad students chose to focus on themselves when it came to discussing their aspirations and dreams. They wrote of their desire to become footballers, actors, models and singers, with several of them poignantly expressing their wish that their parents will come into money and be able to raise themselves out of destitution. The Palestinian children, on the other hand, eschewed their own personal dreams in place of writing how desperately they wished for their country to be freed from the yoke of occupation. They spoke of their desire to return to their ancestral villages and their wish to see their family’s expropriated fields and olive groves handed back to their rightful owners.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/seth_freedman/2008/02/reading_the_tea_leaves.html

Palestinian priest’s views spur criticism

The Rev. Naim Ateek is a white-haired, American-trained Anglican priest who supports nonviolent solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and often speaks of his dream of a world in which Israeli and Palestinian states exist peacefully, side by side. Ateek is also the founder of Sabeel, a Palestinian liberation theology movement based in Jerusalem. Critics say Ateek uses imagery, such as references to the crucifixion, that vilifies Israel and they contend that the conferences he is associated with present speakers and material that are biased against the Jewish state.
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/03/01/metro/me-beliefs1

Academic freedom? Not for Arabs in Israel – by Jonathan Cook

In the strange world of Israeli academia, an Arab college lecturer is being dismissed from his job because he refused to declare his “respect for the uniform of the Israeli army”. The bizarre demand was made of Nizar Hassan, director of several award-winning films, after he criticised a Jewish student who arrived in his film studies class at Sapir College in the Negev for wearing his uniform and carrying a gun. In another recent incident at Sapir, lecturer Shlomit Tamari told a Bedouin student to remove her head-covering, telling her it was a sign of her oppression.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cook02292008.html

The comfortable occupation – by Neri Livneh

But in Jerusalem there is no need for a personal encounter to feel that with every move you are stepping not only on history, but also on the rights of the previous inhabitants. This feeling is particularly acute if you live in Mamila, or when you go to the Income Tax Authority office located where the village of Deir Yassin once stood. . . And that’s how [Tel Aviv] stayed in my mind - a city where the only time is the present perfect continuous, devoid of the oppressiveness of the past but also of roots, a somewhat synthetic place. That is, until I read Alon Hilu’s new and extraordinary “Ahuzat Dajani” ("The House of Dajani").
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959236.html

The gardens of the devil – by Robert Fisk

The first time I saw one, my first instinct was to pick it up. It shone in the sunlight, bright green, something new and fresh amid the dry grass of the south Lebanon hills. The little cluster bomblet seemed to have been made to hold in the hand. No wonder the little children died. Israel rained more than a million bomblets into the orchards and fields of southern Lebanon in 2006 – after the ceasefire to the 34-day Israel-Hizbollah conflict had been announced. So far, post-war, they have killed more than 40 men, women and children.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080229_the_gardens_of_the_devil/

Bush administration won’t take sides in terrorism case against Palestinians

The Bush administration said yesterday it is concerned that lawsuits by victims of terrorism could harm the “financial and political viability” of the Palestinian Authority, and asserted its interest in continuing to monitor such lawsuits. But it told a federal judge it will not offer an opinion on whether he should nullify a $174 million judgment.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022903464.html?hpid=sec-world

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