Interesting article Lessluv.. thanks for sharing.

Israel to treat more injured Gazans

Over 400 Palestinians have been killed and some 1,700 wounded since the beginning of IDF Operation Cast Lead last Saturday. The offensive targets Hamas in the Strip.

Earlier in the week, a seven-year-old Gaza boy who suffered a serious head wound in IAF air strikes was rushed through the Erez Crossing and taken to Schneider Children´s Medical Center in Petah Tikva.

The boy, whose transfer was facilitated by the Peres Peace Center, was in critical condition in the intensive care unit on Wednesday night.

Meanwhile, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, which favors the transfer of Gaza civilians hurt in the bombings, said the Palestinian Authority is unwilling to pay for their medical care in Israel because Hamas is responsible.

The PHR-Israel has urged the PA to facilitate such transfers immediately and argue later about who would finance the treatment to save their lives.

Three other wounded children were also transferred via the Erez Crossing, with help from UNRWA.

Twenty Gazans suffering from serious illnesses unrelated to the fighting were allowed through on Wednesday for treatment in Israeli hospitals.

a source for my persecutor LIR

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1230733148165&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

 finally something objective on this subject.

i should add that this article now demonizes britain

That is worse than DRESDEN, at least people could flee there, but this is unspeakable, you comment is correct, Catwoman, NEREDE ALLAH???

Do Israel pilots feel happy killing innocent women and children?

OH, YES, THEY ARE, RABBIS TURNED ON  LOUSSPEAKERS AND FELT HAPPY WITH ALL THE OTHER FANATICS

Do Israel pilots feel happy killing innocent women and children?

A Palestinian in Gaza chronicles life under Israeli bombardment

Palestinians survey the aftermath of an Israeli missile strike on the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza. Photograph: Khalil Kamra/AP

Saturday 27 DecemberI go to visit friends in the Block J neighbourhood in Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip. While I am in a friend´s house, my phone rings. It´s a friend from Gaza City, calling for a chat. Suddenly I hear the sound of an explosion at his end. At the same time I hear an explosion in Rafah too. Just outside, somewhere near. My friend says: "Fida, they are attacking nearby." I say: "They are attacking here too."

 

I run into the street and everybody is running, children and grown-ups, all looking to see if their relatives and friends are alive. It is the time for children to go to school for the second shift, after the first shift finishes at 11.30am.Naama is aged 13. This is what she tells me: "I was sitting in the classroom with my friends when the attack happened. We were scared and we ran out of our school. Our headmaster asked us to go home. We saw fire everywhere."

People are looking at the remains of a police station. There are still bodies under the wreckage. It is scary because the attack isn´t over, and from where we are we can see an Israeli airplane attacking another police station.

At the hospital, I speak to a wounded police officer, aged 39. "We were at the police station," he said. "The Israeli planes came and suddenly the building collapsed on us. I saw four dead bodies near me. They were in pieces. Outside there were more bodies. Everyone was shouting. I lost consciousness and then found myself in hospital."

Later I am at home with my family. We´ve just received a phone call on our land line. It´s the Israeli defence ministry, and they say that any house that has guns or weapons will be targeted next, without warning and without any announcement. Just to let you know, we don´t have any weapons in our house. If we die please defend my family.

Sunday 28 December

I wake up at 7am after an Israeli F-16 attack. Our house is shaking. We all try to imagine what has happened, but we want to at least know where the attack was. It is so scary. We try to open the main door to our flat, but it´s stuck shut after the attack. I have to climb out of the window to leave the house. I am shocked when I find out our neighbour´s pharmacy was the target. It is just 60 metres from our house. They targeted a pharmacy. I still can´t believe it.

Om Mohammed says: "They [Israeli forces] attack everywhere. They have gone crazy. The Gaza Strip is just going to die ... it´s going to die. We were sleeping. Suddenly we heard a bomb. We woke up and we didn´t know where to go. We couldn´t see through the dust. We called to each other. We thought our house had been hit, not the street. What can I say? You saw it with your own eyes. What is our guilt? Are we terrorists? I don´t carry a gun, neither does my girl.

"There´s no medicine. No drinks, no water, no gas. We are suffering from hunger. They attack us. What does Israel want? Can it be worse than this? I don´t think so. Would they accept this for themselves?

"Look at the children. What are they guilty of? They were sleeping at 7am. All the night they didn´t sleep. This child was traumatised during the attack. Do they have rockets to attack with?"

Monday 29 December

The Israeli army is destroying the tunnels that go from Rafah into Egypt. For the past year and a half the Israeli government has intensified the economic blockade of Gaza by closing all the border crossings that allow aid and essential supplies to reach Palestinians in Gaza. This forced Palestinians to dig tunnels to Egypt to survive. From our house we can hear the explosions and the house is shaking.At night we can´t go out. No one goes out. If you go out you will risk your life. You don´t know where the bombs will fall. My mother is so sad. She watches me writing my reports and says: "Fida, will it make any difference?"

Before the attack started we got some food aid from the EU. It´s not much, but it´s enough, we´re not starving. But some of our friends have nothing. My mum warns me: "Fida, don´t leave the house, it´s too dangerous outside." Then she goes out to share our food with the neighbours who have nothing.

Wednesday 31 December

11.40pm: a powerful air strike somewhere nearby. I was sleeping but the blast wakes me up. I see my mum looking from the window. She points at one of the refugee camps. "The attack was there," she said.

I went back to sleep – not because I don´t care, but because I can´t deal with it. If the attack was really aimed at one of the camps that means hundreds are going to be injured or even killed, the houses destroyed. I really can´t imagine it.

Thursday 1 January

In the morning I get up early and call a friend who lives in Alshabora camp. He confirms the attack had hit there and I go to meet him.

It looks like an earthquake. Many houses have been damaged, and many people have been wounded. The people who had escaped injury were trying to clean the place up – they have nowhere else to go. But the biggest shock is when I ask about the target. It was the children´s playground.

"We heard a strong explosion happen, but with all the smoke and the dust we couldn´t see well, and the electricity was off," I am told by a small child.

"We saw everything fall down – the window broke on us. We went downstairs, and people were saying that the playground´s been targeted. This park is not a member of Hamas, it´s a park for playing. It´s for civilians – so why did they attack it?," asks one 12-year-old girl who lives nearby.

The target was a civilian area – but there was no warning, not one phone call from the Israeli army to tell civilians to beware.

I visit the main hospital in Rafah. There are so many injured people, most of them children. In one ward, I meet four children aged five or six. They are in deep shock. They can´t speak, they just look at you.

Only one child could say his name: "Abdel Rahman". That´s all he can say. Otherwise, he just stares. He´s five. His ear was wounded by shrapnel, his head is covered by bandages.

There is a 16-year-old girl also suffering from shrapnel injuries. Three of her brothers were killed; all her family were injured. She looks like a zombie and says nothing at all. Her mother is dying in the intensive care unit.

The hospital manger, Abu Youssef Alnajar, gives the statistics for 1 January: two dead – a young man aged 22 and a woman aged 33; 59 injured – 16 children, 18 women and the rest old people. Most of them had been sleeping when the bombs dropped.

I go back home and the first thing I do is take a shower. I feel really upset after what I have seen. As always I am trying to cope with the situation but sometimes it is too much to deal with.

A short message to the pilots in the Israeli F-16s: does it make you feel happy to kill Palestinian children and women? Do you feel it´s your duty? Killing every child and woman, man and teenager in Gaza? I don´t know what exactly you feel, what exactly you think, but please think of your mother and sister, your son and daughter.

Friday 2 January

I am in the hospital again. An ambulance crew has been called out to help an injured man somewhere near the ruins of the old Gaza airport. He´s a civilian, one of the bedouin who tend their sheep in that area. Four shepherds saw an explosion and went to investigate – when they arrived at the scene there was a second bomb and they were injured. An ambulance managed to rescue three of the men. But one of their friends is still there, bleeding.

The ambulance crew are afraid to go back for him. The wounded man is just 50 metres away from the green line so they are afraid the Israeli soldiers will target them.Outside there are still planes in the air. I have just heard a big explosion on the border area.

• Fida Qishta is a freelance Palestinian television producer and writer based in Gaza´s southern township of Rafah

 

 

Since 1991, the U.S. has released the radioactive atomicity equivalent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs into the global atmosphere. That is 10 times the amount released during atmospheric testing which was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs. Thus, the U.S. has permanently contaminated the global atmosphere with radioactive pollution having a half-life of 2.5 billion years.  Imagine what it has done to the atmosphere and environs of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. 

DU weapons are very effective kinetic energy penetrators, but are even more effective bio-weapons. On the battlefield, DU weaponry has three effects on living systems: it is a heavy metal "chemical" poison, it is a "radioactive" poison and it has a "particulate" effect due to the very tiny size of the particles— 0.1 microns and smaller. Cancer starts with one alpha particle under the right conditions. One gram of DU is the size of a period in this sentence and releases 12,000 alpha particles per second.

Today, more than one out of every three veterans from the first Gulf War is permanently disabled. Terry Jemison of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs said that of the 592,561 discharged veterans from the 1991 war in Iraq, 179,310 are receiving disability compensation and another 24,763 cases are pending. In August of 2004, Jemison stated in that the number of Gulf-era veterans on medical disability has reached 518,000 and that the number of those who have died from “Gulf War Syndrome” is estimated at 10,000.

The "epigenetic damage" (damage to DNA) done by DU has resulted in many grossly deformed children born in areas where tons of DU have contaminated the environment and the local population. According to the scientists, these malformations of humans will continue for at least the next FOUR BILLION YEARS, based on the half-life projections of the contaminants in DU. In southern Iraq, where scientists are reporting five times higher levels of gamma radiation in the air, disfiguring and deadly cancers, leukemia, birth defects, diabetics and death are increasing exponentially.  When children are born in Iraq, the mothers ask not “Is my child a boy or girl?”  They ask “Is my precious child normal?”

An untold number of American children have also been born with severe birth defects as a result of DU contamination. In some studies of our soldiers who had normal babies before the war, a highly significant percent of their post-war babies are born with severe birth defects - missing brains, eyes, organs, legs and arms – Thalidomide resurrected.

DU is the Trojan horse of nuclear war - a silent, constant presence that keeps “gifting” – and keeps killing. There is no way to clean it up, and no way to turn it off.  Its deadly effects last to eternity. Sad to say, because of our DOD’s fixation on the use of DU weaponry, areas in Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are now uninhabitable

A line from one of America’s favorite hymns, “O Beautiful for Spacious Skies,” seems particularly appropriate here:  “America, America, God mend thine every flaw/Confirm thy soul in self-control/Thy liberty in Law.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gaza-sliced-in-two-by-israels-land-assault-1225794.html

Residents in areas under fire – for example in northern Gaza where the Israeli military focused a major incursion around the towns of Beit Lahiya, Jabaliya and Beit Hanoun – were prevented from leaving the besieged territory. The UN Relief and Works Agency reported that 3,000 internally displaced Gazans had arrived at seven shelters around the Strip. Oxfam said last night that a paramedic from an ambulance service it funds was killed in Beit Lahiya and two other medics injured while trying to evacuate an injured person. The ambulance had been shelled, Oxfam said

Reinforcing the Israeli government´s earlier rejection of international ceasefire calls, Israel´s veteran President Shimon Peres told the US news network ABC: "We don´t intend either to occupy Gaza nor to crush Hamas, but to crush terror. And Hamas needs a real and serious lesson. They are now getting it."

Yesterday´s deaths followed the worst single group of civilian casualties on Saturday night, just before the ground offensive, when 15 Palestinians were killed and more than 25 were injured in the bombing of the Ibrahim Al Makadima Mosque in Beit Lahiya. The Israeli military has not yet produced an official explanation of the incident, though officials said that two Hamas gunmen outside the mosque had been targeted and that the attack on them had triggered "secondary explosions".

an 8 series documentary on arab history:

1. The Question of Arab Unity – Why Unity?

partea 1

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=nwpx-mJgy38

partea 2

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=AUZhfv- 68Fs

2. The Question of Arab Unity – The Unity Betrayed

partea 1

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=MbGl_vXUAyk

3. partea 2

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=1FVRRqNsjOU

4. The Question of Arab Unity – Trials and Tribulations

partea 1

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=BgM-6e5pnH0

partea 2

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=3IWN1Z5_ MuQ

5. The Question of Arab Unity – A Cause for Arab Unity

partea 1

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=KbjoH0DS5Pw

partea 2

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=-t3kfyL_ P5E

Israel Has No Intention of Granting a Palestinian State

If Hamas Did Not Exist

By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN

Let us get one thing perfectly straight. If the wholesale mutilation and degradation of the Gaza Strip is going to continue; if Israel’s will is at one with that of the United States; if the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and all the international legal agencies and organizations spread across the globe are going to continue to sit by like hollow mannequins doing nothing but making repeated “calls” for a “ceasefire” on “both sides”; if the cowardly, obsequious and supine Arab States are going to stand by watching their brethren get slaughtered by the hour while the world’s bullying Superpower eyes them threateningly from Washington lest they say something a little to their disliking; then let us at least tell the truth why this hell on earth is taking place.

The state terror unleashed from the skies and on the ground against the Gaza Strip as we speak has nothing to do with Hamas. It has nothing to do with “Terror”. It has nothing to do with the long-term “security” of the Jewish State or with Hizbullah or Syria or Iran except insofar as it is aggravating the conditions that have led up to this crisis today. It has nothing to do with some conjured-up “war” – a cynical and overused euphemism that amounts to little more the wholesale enslavement of any nation that dares claim its sovereign rights; that dares assert that its resources are its own; that doesn’t want one of the Empire’s obscene military bases sitting on its cherished land.

This crisis has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, justice or peace. It is not about Mahmoud Zahhar or Khalid Mash’al or Ismail Haniyeh. It is not about Hassan Nasrallah or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are all circumstantial players who have gained a role in the current tempest only now that the situation has been allowed for 61 years to develop into the catastrophe that it is today. The Islamist factor has colored and will continue to color the atmosphere of the crisis; it has enlisted the current leaders and mobilized wide sectors of the world’s population. The primary symbols today are Islamic – the mosques, the Qur’an, the references to the Prophet Muhammad and to Jihad. But these symbols could disappear and the impasse would continue.

There was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the day; when few Palestinians wanted anything to do with Islamist policies and politics. Such politics have nothing to do with primitive rockets being fired over the border, or smuggling tunnels and black-market weapons; just as Arafat’s Fatah had little to do with stones and suicide bombings. The associations are coincidental; the creations of a given political environment. They are the result of something entirely different than what the lying politicians and their analysts are telling you. They have become part of the landscape of human events in the modern Middle East today; but incidentals wholly as lethal, or as recalcitrant, deadly, angry or incorrigible could just as soon have been in their places.

Strip away the clichés and the vacuous newspeak blaring out across the servile media and its pathetic corps of voluntary state servants in the Western world and what you will find is the naked desire for hegemony; for power over the weak and dominion over the world’s wealth. Worse yet you will find that the selfishness, the hatred and indifference, the racism and bigotry, the egotism and hedonism that we try so hard to cover up with our sophisticated jargon, our refined academic theories and models actually help to guide our basest and ugliest desires. The callousness with which we in indulge in them all are endemic to our very culture; thriving here like flies on a corpse.

Strip away the current symbols and language of the victims of our selfish and devastating whims and you will find the simple, impassioned and unaffected cries of the downtrodden; of the ‘wretched of the earth’ begging you to cease your cold aggression against their children and their homes; their families and their villages; begging you to leave them alone to have their fish and their bread, their oranges, their olives and their thyme; asking you first politely and then with increasing disbelief why you cannot let them live undisturbed on the land of their ancestors; unexploited, free of the fear of expulsion; of ravishment and devastation; free of permits and roadblocks and checkpoints and crossings; of monstrous concrete walls, guard towers, concrete bunkers, and barbed wire; of tanks and prisons and torture and death. Why is life without these policies and instruments of hell impossible?

The answer is because Israel has no intention of allowing a viable, sovereign Palestinian state on its borders. It had no intention of allowing it in 1948 when it grabbed 24 per cent more land than what it was allotted legally, if unfairly, by UN Resolution 181. It had no intention of allowing it throughout the massacres and ploys of the 1950s. It had no intention of allowing two states when it conquered the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine in 1967 and reinterpreted UN Security Council Resolution 248 to its own liking despite the overwhelming international consensus stating that Israel would receive full international recognition within secure and recognized borders if it withdrew from the lands it had only recently occupied.

It had no intention of acknowledging Palestinian national rights at the United Nations in 1974, when –alone with the United States—it voted against a two-state solution. It had no intention of allowing a comprehensive peace settlement when Egypt stood ready to deliver but received, and obediently accepted, a separate peace exclusive of the rights of Palestinians and the remaining peoples of the region. It had no intention of working toward a just two-state solution in 1978 or 1982 when it invaded, fire-bombed, blasted and bulldozed Beirut so that it might annex the West Bank without hassle. It had no intention of granting a Palestinian state in 1987 when the first Intifada spread across occupied Palestine, into the Diaspora and the into the spirits of the global dispossessed, or when Israel deliberately aided the newly formed Hamas movement so that it might undermine the strength of the more secular-nationalist factions.

Israel had no intention of granting a Palestinian state at Madrid or at Oslo where the PLO was superseded by the quivering, quisling Palestinian Authority, too many of whose cronies grasped at the wealth and prestige it gave them at the expense of their own kin. As Israel beamed into the world’s satellites and microphones its desire for peace and a two-state solution, it more than doubled the number of illegal Jewish settlements on the ground in the West Bank and around East Jerusalem, annexing them as it built and continues to build a superstructure of bypass roads and highways over the remaining, severed cities and villages of earthly Palestine. It has annexed the Jordan valley, the international border of Jordan, expelling any ‘locals’ inhabiting that land. It speaks with a viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security.

Through the home demolitions, the assaults on civil society that attempted to cast Palestinian history and culture into a chasm of oblivion; through the unspeakable destruction of the refugee camp sieges and infrastructure bombardments of the second Intifada, through assassinations and summary executions, past the grandiose farce of disengagement and up to the nullification of free, fair and democratic Palestinian elections Israel has made its view known again and again in the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.

Israel, with the unconditional and approving support of the United States, has made it dramatically clear to the entire world over and over and over again, repeating in action after action that it will accept no viable Palestinian state next to its borders. What will it take for the rest of us to hear? What will it take to end the criminal silence of the ‘international community’? What will it take to see past the lies and indoctrination to what is taking place before us day after day in full view of the eyes of the world? The more horrific the actions on the ground, the more insistent are the words of peace. To listen and watch without hearing or seeing allows the indifference, the ignorance and complicity to continue and deepens with each grave our collective shame.

The destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately control. Any individual, leader, faction or movement that fails to accede to Israel’s demands or that seeks genuine sovereignty and the equality of all nations in the region; any government or popular movement that demands the applicability of international humanitarian law and of the universal declaration of human rights for its own people will be unacceptable for the Jewish State. Those dreaming of one state must be forced to ask themselves what Israel would do to a population of 4 million Palestinians within its borders when it commits on a daily, if not hourly basis, crimes against their collective humanity while they live alongside its borders? What will suddenly make the raison d’etre, the self-proclaimed purpose of Israel’s reason for being change if the Palestinian territories are annexed to it outright?

The lifeblood of the Palestinian National Movement flows through the streets of Gaza today. Every drop that falls waters the soil of vengeance, bitterness and hatred not only in Palestine but across the Middle East and much of the world. We do have a choice over whether or not this should continue. Now is the time to make it.

Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached at amadea311@earthlink.net

The death and life of my father

For Fares Akram, The Independent´s reporter in Gaza, the Israeli invasion became a personal tragedy when he discovered his father was one of the first casualties of the ground war

The phone call came at around 4.20pm on Saturday. A bomb had been dropped on the house at our small farm in northern Gaza. ..

But shortly before sunset on Saturday, .. my father´s life extinguished at the age of 48. ... It was one of those F16 airstrikes that killed my father.

..."Just a pile of flesh," my uncle, who found him in the rubble, said later with brutal honesty.

....

My father, Akrem al-Ghoul, was no militant. Born in Gaza and educated in Egypt, he was a lawyer and a judge who worked for the Palestinian Authority. After Hamas took over, he quit and turned to agriculture. Dad´s father, Fares, who had been driven out of his home in what is now Israeli Ashkelon in 1948, had bought the land in the 1960s.

During the second intifada and until the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the farm was taken over by Israeli settlers, but after 2005 we went there every holiday. ........

My grief carries no desire for revenge, which I know to be always in vain. But, in truth, as a grieving son, I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza. What is the difference between the pilot who blew my father to pieces and the militant who fires a small rocket? I have no answers but, just as I am to become a father, I have lost my father.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news........e-of-my-father-1225793.html

why does everybody send links? dont you know nobody cares  about links

I think you are right on that..That is the reason I am trying to give a brief summary