Young love in Gaza
On the rehearsal morning about a week before their planned wedding, Mahmoud, 21, got dressed with the help of his younger brother, then sat smiling in the corner as he waited for Rana to come visit to write out invitation cards. Before Israel’s winter invasion of Gaza, it was easy for Mahmoud to recognize Rana from the merest glimpse. After the war he had to find new ways to sense her presence. “Sometimes I know she is around when I hear her giggle, or when I hear her talking to my mother,” he said.
For full article, visit http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10714.shtml
Amnesty International Report: Operation Cast Lead – 22 Days of Death and Destruction
“Soldiers came to the area at night [on 3 January 2009] and at dawn on 4 January many relatives came to my house to stay with us. We though that if we stayed in our house we would be all right. After a while soldiers came to the house and my father spoke to them in Hebrew; he told them: ‘These are my children, my family, there are no terrorists here.’ The soldiers told us to leave our house and go to Wa’el’s house across the road and we obeyed. We were many relatives, about 100 altogether, many of them children. We stayed there all day and all night. We had hardly any food in the house and the children were hungry. Nobody could come to the area, not even ambulances. We were scared. The following morning (5 January) three of my cousins and I tried to go out of the house, to the walled garden to get some tomatoes and some wood to cook something. As soon as we got out of the door we were shelled. My cousins Muhammad and Hamdi were killed and Wa’el and I were injured and we retreated back into the house. Then the house was shelled again – at least two shells – from above. Some 25 people were killed and most of
the others were injured. My little girl, Azza, was killed and my wife was injured. My mother Rahma was holding baby Mahmoud (six months old) and she was killed but she shielded the baby with her body and saved him. My father was killed. Wa’el’s children, a boy and a girl, were both killed. Safa, the wife of my brother Iyad, was killed and Maha, the wife of my brother Hilmi, and their baby son Muhammad were all killed. Why did they shell the house after having put us all in there? We thought we’d all be killed; those of us who could ran out of the house. Many of us were injured; I was injured in the head and blood was pouring down my face as I ran. Nearby there were soldiers in the house of the Sawafiri family and they shouted to us to go back and shot at us, but we kept running. When we got to safety we raised the alarm, called the Red Cross to send an ambulance to the house to get the injured, but the army did not let any ambulances approach the area. We knew there were people still alive in the house because we called the mobile numbers and children answered; they were scared, with dead bodies all around them. Some of the injured died in the house waiting to be rescued. Only three days later could the Red Cross go in, but only on foot as the army did not let the ambulances approach; they found some children still alive and many others dead.”
For full report, click here.
Gideon Levy: Morality’s chief of staff
Allowing a child to drive an IDF-issued all-terrain vehicle? Forbidden. Killing children carrying white flags? Allowed. Lying about allowing your wife to drive an army-issued car? Forbidden. Killing women? Allowed. Administrative minutiae – a wife driving her husband’s car, a son driving an ATV and the hazing of fresh recruits – are grave matters. Mistakenly killing civilians is permitted.
For full article, visit http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1107746.html
Fact finding committee leaves Gaza, disappointed over Israel’s lack of cooperation
Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation and claimed that its own investigation “proved that the Israeli army acted in accordance to international principles, and did not violate the International Law”.
Goldstone, a Jewish South African Judge, was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.
For full article visit http://www.imemc.org/article/60704
Amnesty: Israel violated laws of war in Gaza
“Israeli forces repeatedly breached the laws of war, including by carrying out direct attacks on civilians and civilian buildings and attacks targeting Palestinian militants that caused a disproportionate toll among civilians,” the group said in its annual report on the state of human rights worldwide.
For more, visit http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=38146
Wounded adults and children of the Samouni and Daya families in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City were left among their dead relatives’ bodies in collapsed houses for four days as the ICRC and Palestine Red Crescent Society were denied access to the area by the Israeli army from 3 to 7 January 2009. Of 110 people sheltering in the houses, 30 had been killed. The ICRC said that the Israeli soldiers stationed nearby must have known of the people in the houses but that the wounded died as they waited for medical care due to the slow negotiations for access.
For full report, click here.
International Law Seldom Newsworthy in Gaza War
As of January 13, only two network evening news stories (NBC Nightly News, 1/8/09, 1/11/09) had even mentioned international law—a mere 3 percent of the total stories that NBC, ABC and CBS’s newscasts had broadcast on the Israeli military offensive since it began.
For full article, visit http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3767
Flags display toll of conflict
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Hundreds of red, orange and pink flags lined the HUB lawn Tuesday, representing the Palestinian and Israeli causalities of the bombings in the Gaza Strip.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) members were outside at 8 a.m. to plant the flags and raise awareness for the issue.
“We are here to spread awareness of the occupied Palestinian territory,” said Shadi Ghrayeb (graduate student-engineering).
For full article, visit http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2009/03/25/flags_display_toll_of_conflict.aspx
Human Rights Watch: Photographs of White Phosphorus Use
For more pictures, visit http://www.hrw.org/en/features/israelgaza-photographs-white-phosphorus-use
Johann Hari: Israel’s Voice of Reason? An Exclusive Interview With Amos Oz
Oz is sitting in the coffee shop of Joseph’s bookstore in Golder’s Green, north London, looking older and more fragile than his vigorous black-and-white author’s picture. He is 70 now, his hair wispier and whiter. He greets me with a gravelly voice, and we order black coffees. It seems far away and long ago, but Oz once dreamed of bombing this city. He was once a child of what he calls “the Jewish intifada” – the stone-throwing, death-defying Jewish rebellion against British occupation. He believed the state that would emerge from the rubble would be a model of justice and idealism for all mankind. If you were a child in Gaza now, Mr Oz, would you be dreaming the same dreams against Israel? “I don’t even have to imagine the answer to this question – I know it,” he says. “Because I was a kid in Jerusalem in ’48 when the city was besieged, shelled, starved, [and] the water supply [was] cut off. And I know the horror, and I know the despair, and I know the hopelessness, and I know the anger, and I know the frustration.” He says he was “not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a brainwashed little fanatic, a stone-throwing chauvinist. The first words I ever learnt to say in English were ‘British, go home!'”
For full article, visit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/israels-voice-of-reason-a_b_176724.html
Johann Hari: Israel’s Troops Confirm It: They Were Ordered To Commit Atrocities
None of this had to happen. On the eve of the attack, Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad, said that the way to stop rocket attacks on Israel was to draw Hamas, the elected Palestinian government, into negotiation and compromise – but “Israel, for reasons of its own, did not want to turn the ceasefire into the start of a diplomatic process with Hamas.”
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