Death in an Israeli Uniform Stalks the Streets of Gaza
07/01/09
Zionist war crimes in the Gaza Strip reached a new level of barbarity in the last 24 hours, with a number of attacks on schools packed with refugees.
In the single deadliest attack of the onslaught so far, Israeli bombs smashed into the al-Fakhora school in Jabaliya, killing more than 40 people who had fled the military advance, most of them women and children. Many of the victims were in the school playground when they were hit by shrapnel.
Hours before, three young men – all cousins – died when the Israelis bombed Asma elementary school in Gaza City. They were among about 400 people who had sought shelter in the school after fleeing their homes in Beit Lahia in the north of the Strip.
All the schools hit are under the jurisdiction of the United Nations, who have identified them as refugee centres to the Israeli military and provided GPS coordinates in an attempt to avoid attacks.
Speaking yesterday [Tuesday] at a hospital in Gaza, the head of the UN refugee agency in Palestine, John Ging, expressed his dismay at the zionist attacks.
“It was entirely inevitable that if artillery shells landed in that area [al-Fakhora school] there would be a high number of casualties,” he said.
“What you have in this hospital is the consequences of political failure and the complete absence of any accountability for actions that are being taken. It’s the rule of the gun now and it has to stop.”
However, the Israeli establishment this morning [Wednesday] showed exactly what they thought of the UN’s demands when more civilian targets were bombed. Four people were killed and eight injured in an Israeli air-strike on a children’s playground in the Sheikh Radwan area. In all, 24 Palestinians were confirmed killed in Israeli bombing on Wednesday morning.
Meanwhile, yesterday, at least 12 members of one family, including seven children aged from one to 12, were killed in an air-strike on their home in Gaza City. The dead also included three women and two men. Nine other people were believed to be trapped in debris from the explosion.
As the zionist violence continues, the director of Gaza’s largest hospital has warned that the already over stretched facility will collapse if they don’t get the fuel they need to power generators.
Israel has maintained its blockade of Gaza since its military assault began, leaving the majority of residents without power and on the brink of starvation.
Hussein Aashour, the director of Ash-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City explained that the hospital is currently caring for 25 premature babies, has 25 patients in the intensive care unit and 300 people using kidney dialysis machines. The lives of all these people will be at grave risk if the hospital’s four operating generators run out of fuel.
Ash-Shifa Hospital was already critically short of medicines and key supplies before the December 27 commencement of major hostilities and now finds itself at breaking point.
According to Hussein, the hospital will not even have the capacity to feed its patients or wash bedclothes unless the situation changes soon.
Although Israel has reportedly agreed to a daily three-hour truce to allow some of these badly needed supplies in, an escalation in its terror campaign was also looming today.
Before a meeting with military leaders, Israeli deputy prime minister Eli Yishai said his goal was to “flatten Gaza so that they don’t mess with us anymore”.
Among the options being considered by the zionist leadership are ordering the Israeli army to fight its way into Gaza’s urban centres and a much longer operation aimed at permanently toppling the democratically-elected Hamas government.
Israel has ignored timid calls by international leaders for a ceasefire, despite the fact that the calls remain fixated on denying the people of Gaza the means of defending themselves under future arrangements.
In the face of this massive military onslaught and the indifference and, at times, open hostility of ‘official’ international opinion, the Palestinian people remain unbowed and unbroken, while the anger of that ‘other’ international opinion continues to grow.
Nearly 100 Israeli soldiers have been killed or injured since their ground offensive began on Saturday [January 3], and Palestinian resistance groups have been constantly defending Gaza neighbourhoods since then.
Speaking from a secret location, Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh said that “the ground aggression on the Gaza Strip is proof that [Israel] has failed to force the population to surrender.”
On the international front, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has expelled the Israeli ambassador and six other diplomatic personnel in protest at the war of aggression.
“The Israeli ambassador is persona-non-grata in Venezuela,” said the Latin American nation’s foreign minister Nicolas Maduro Moros.
In the face of so much media and political distortion of the issue at stake in Gaza, it has been left to Palestinian analyst Azmi Bishara to bring clarity to the situation:
“Usually, people are pushed to collective punishment because they want to punish resistance movements or national liberation movements.
“That's usually what colonial powers did, and that's what Israel is doing.
“Everybody knows that 75 per cent of the people of Gaza are refugees. Everybody knows that Israel disengaged from Gaza militarily, but occupies it economically and politically and, also, it besieges Gaza militarily.
“Israel would say, ‘what would any normal country do if they were threatened by rocket fire? They would act’.
“But Israel is not a normal country, it is an occupying country, a colonial country and the people of Gaza are under siege.
“Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, should be asked, ‘What would you do if your house is besieged and you can't feed your child, can't go to school, and can't take them to the doctors and physicians when they are ill?’.
“I consider Hamas rockets a protest shout, they haven't hurt many, only the few. They are weapons of the poor, used to express their will.
“What brought the war was the siege. When colonial powers have historically gone to occupy countries, siege has always been a weapon. Siege is a military action at the beginning of war.
“When it did not work to break the will of the Palestinian people... Israel realised that the rockets were a response to the siege, and they went to the next phase, which was direct military aggression, which is actually now directed against civilians to punish them for their democratic choice.”