Thursday 25th of April 2024
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full circle ......

the sorcerer's apprentice ......

Israeli forces have widened their attacks in the Gaza Strip to include Khan Younis in the south, reports say.

The fresh attack follows heavy fighting overnight near Gaza City in the north.

At least 20 Palestinians were killed on Tuesday and three Israeli soldiers were killed by fire from one of their own tanks in northern Gaza.

Palestinian medical officials say at least 110 people have died since the ground assault began while Israel says it has killed 130 Hamas fighters.

About 560 Palestinians have been killed since Israel moved to end rocket attacks from Gaza 11 days ago, Palestinian medical officials say. The UN says at least 25% of those are civilians.

At least three Palestinians were killed on Tuesday when an Israeli air strike hit a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip, UN officials said.

Other people were killed as Israeli shell-fire and air strikes hit the Gaza coast, Gaza City and Jebaliya refugee camp in the north of the territory.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7812979.stm

bomber olmert

Israel has agreed to set up a "humanitarian corridor" in the Gaza Strip, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said.

Israel's military will open up "areas for limited periods of time, during which the population will be able to receive the aid", it said.

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Gus: "Then we bomb the hell out of them!.... "

school's out...

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have told the United Nations they support a new Egyptian plan for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The plan, put forward by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak after talks with French President Nicholas Sarkozy this morning, calls for an immediate truce in the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

The ceasefire proposal came after at least 30 Palestinians died in an Israeli attack at a United Nations-run school in the coastal enclave on Tuesday. Israel said the artillery strike was targeting Hamas fighters who launching mortar bombs from inside the school.

winning hearts and minds from the dead...

Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask

Wednesday, 7 January 2009
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?

Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?

What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. "Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.

a gangster state...

How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions

    * Avi Shlaim
    * The Guardian, Wednesday 7 January 2009

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

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read more at the Guardian and see toon at top. I deliberately made the cap hide the eyes of Ehud Olmert, as if in his quest for whatever, he was deliberately unable to see the tragedies he was unleashing onto the Palestinians, with the greatest of Moralised Excuses and Armed Pontification re they started first...

Did they?

david vs goliath .....

Comparison of the military strengths of the Palestinians & Israel .....

http://imeu.net/news/article0015300.shtml?source=cmailer

surgical butchery

Israel has said it was investigating the incidents but has repeatedly insisted Hamas is to blame for civilian deaths because the Islamist fighters operate from densely populated areas.

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Hello, the only place in Gaza where "Islamist fighters" can operate is... 

From Ghazzah to Rafa, the Gaza strip is one densely populated space. On the south, the Egyptian desert, on the north and east, Israeli farms, and on the west an ocean controlled by Israel. Sure there are a few open fields in Gaza in which the "fighters" could be bombed with more ease but... Israel is dreaming...

"Israel has never agreed for any outside influence to decide on its right to defend its citizens," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, according to a statement from his office.

Yes it has — by the sheer fact of accepting US weapons, many of which it does not pay full price for, and for being part of the world community. And this "attack" is not a case of defending its citizens... Mind you Hamas also rejects the UN resolution for a cease fire because "it is not in the best interest of the Palestinian people." Of course the best interest of "the Palestinian people" is to be totally butchered by far superior forces... All immature idiot bullies. It seems they all deserve each others until someone become reasonable on both side. That will be the day...

 

war crimes...

Israel faces the prospect of intervention by international courts amid growing calls that its actions in Gaza are a violation of world humanitarian and criminal law.

The UN general assembly, which is meeting this week to discuss the issue, will consider requesting an advisory opinion from the international court of justice, the Guardian has learned.

"There is a well-grounded view that both the initial attacks on Gaza and the tactics being used by Israel are serious violations of the UN charter, the Geneva conventions, international law and international humanitarian law," said Richard Falk, the UN's special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories and professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University.

forsaken impartiality

From the BBC

The BBC is continuing to resist pressure over its decision not to air an appeal for aid to Gaza, as the Archbishop of York joined its critics.

...

Dr John Sentamu said it was "not a row about impartiality but rather about humanity".

In a statement, he said: "This situation is akin to that of British military hospitals who treat prisoners of war as a result of their duty under the Geneva convention.

"They do so because they identify need rather than cause.

"This is not an appeal by Hamas asking for arms but by the Disasters Emergency Committee asking for relief. By declining their request, the BBC has already taken sides and forsaken impartiality."

 

see toon at top

peacemaking .....

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Thursday that all of Jerusalem will always remain under Israeli sovereignty, taking a hard line on a key Israeli-Palestinian peace issue just hours after his forces removed an unauthorized settlement outpost in the West Bank.

The twin moves came a day after Netanyahu returned from talks in Washington, where President Barack Obama backed creation of a Palestinian state and urged an end to Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank, setting up a potential confrontation between Israel and the U.S.

Netanyahu has refused to endorse Palestinian statehood, and his uncompromising statement about Jerusalem focused attention on another issue that could cause friction between Israel and Obama's administration.

The U.S. has long held that the future of Jerusalem must be decided in negotiations, but Netanyahu offered no flexibility.

"United Jerusalem is Israel's capital," Netanyahu said. "Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided."

http://www.truthout.org/052209L?n