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Israeli onslaught against Gaza continues

26/12/08

Salah Oukal had gone outside to collect herbs for dinner and was harvesting in the dark as the power was out again. It was just before 9pm and he was watering the trees next to his home in Jabaliya, when an Israeli missile struck, killing him instantly. A second missile followed immediately, but it failed to explode. Oukal’s family spent the next hour searching without success for the father-of-seven and the family’s sole provider. Only with the headlights of an ambulance was Oukal’s dismembered body finally retrieved.

Eight-year-old Sari al-Sanana and his friend Safi (nine) lie gravely wounded in the intensive care unit at Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital. The two friends were cycling in an area near Beit Hanoun, not far from the zionist-blockaded border. An Israeli missile landed between the youths, throwing them from their bikes and riddling their bodies with shrapnel. Both boys sustained head trauma. According to witnesses in the area, no rockets were fired by Palestinian resistance groups before the boys were hit.

Mohammad Abd al-Nadi, a journalist for al-Quds Radio, was hit by a missile fired from an unmanned drone as he walked along Salah al-Din Street. He was looking for a taxi in order to cover earlier shelling from a United States-manufactured Apache helicopter in the Beit Hanoun area in which two women were attacked. The drone’s missile left him with a fractured arm, a head injury, and cuts over his body and leg.

Zuhair Washa is the father of nine children. Washa was working on his land in the al-Shejaeya neighbourhood east of Gaza City, a considerable distance from the Israeli border, when an Israeli ground-to-ground missile exploded near him, shattering the bones in the lower half of his right leg. The fractured leg and remaining nerve damage, as well as the wounds to his hands and body, mean that he will be unable to work and support his family for some time.

These are some of the fatalities and injuries sustained by the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, as documented by Canadian human rights worker Eva Bartlett, in the days before the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas’ decision not to renew its truce with Israel.

Towards the end of the six-month long truce, Israel had intensified its attacks on and incursions into Gaza, as well as continuing the inhumane blockade.

Indeed, far from talking peace, Israel’s politicians have used the occasion of an upcoming election to assert their credentials for further tormenting the people of the Strip.

Speaking to members of her Kadima party, zionist foreign minister Tzipi Livni announced recently: “The state of Israel, and a government under me, will make it a strategic objective to topple the Hamas regime in Gaza. The means for doing this should be military, economic and diplomatic.

“Israel must react when it is fired upon, must re-establish its force of dissuasion and stop the rockets. This is what has to be done and this is what I will do.”

Likud party leader Binyamin Netanyahu was no less forthcoming in his desire for more bloodshed in Gaza on a trip to the settler town of Sderot last week.

“Right now we have to go from passive response to active assault,” Netanyahu said.

“In the long-term, the toppling of the Hamas regime is inevitable.”

The audience that the leaders of two of the biggest zionist parties are playing to care little for the rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories; their constant calls for jackboot tactics are an expression of a fascistic settler mentality.

That these politicians get away with such comments in the face of the world is evidence that manipulating the truth about what’s going on in Palestine has been largely successful.

When Livni and Netanyahu fantasise about the “toppling of the Hamas regime” they are talking about a democratically-elected administration.

In the last Palestinian parliamentary elections, in January 2006, Hamas won 76 out of the 132 seats in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Any zionist attempt to remove Hamas from power in Gaza would amount to an undemocratic coup d’etat.

When Livni and Netanyahu salivate over the use of “military” means and “active assaults” against Gaza they do so with utter contempt for the memory of Salah Oukal and for the welfare of young Sari al-Sanana.

They are also ignoring the findings of their own legal personnel.

Earlier this month, a legal adviser to the Israeli ministry of defence, Ahaz Benari, told the defence minister Ehud Barak that “artillery fire is permissible only in relatively open areas,” adding that “artillery fire at urban areas is problematic, if the assessment is that the chance that the shell will hit the launchers is relatively low, while the risk that many civilians will be hurt is substantial.”

Israel’s policy makers and warmongers are perpetrating all of this aggression against a poverty stricken population. According to the United Nations, 80 per cent of people in the Gaza Strip are living below the poverty line – defined as living on less than 2 dollars a day. The vast majority of this poverty is caused by the ongoing economic blockade.

However, if any of these policy makers or war mongers are scratching their heads in wonder at the continuing ability of the Palestinians to resist all that is thrown at them, they should refer to the comments of Hamas representative and democratically-elected Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh: “Nothing can finish off our people.”

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