Israel in coordinated missile attacks on Gaza

[Barking_Mad]

From the Oxfam website

The air, the sea and the earth in Gaza city are now occupied by the Israeli military. They occupy Gazans’ minds, nerves and ears too. In a bid to stop my children twitching, jerking, trembling and waking at every sound of an attack during their few hours sleep and their many waking hours, I put cotton wool in their ears - it has not worked. I wonder what damage is being done to my children’s tiny hearts, theirs are not as big as mine, they can cope less with the stress that is being put on them.

We ran out of fuel for our generator, which meant that we were confined to a small room filled with eleven people, with little light for three days. We have not had water either; our well can only pump water if it has electricity which most of the Gaza strip has been denied since this nightmare started.

Unlike many other families, we were fortunate yesterday to find twenty litres of benzene to power our generator. No fuel has come in since the onset of this attack on Gaza so we had to pay seven times its usual price.

We have one day left of food and the nappies I bought two weeks ago are nearly gone. They are not good quality as little has been able to enter this strip of land since the blockade was imposed on us eighteen months ago. Bad quality nappies means unpleasant leakages, and for the last few days the little ones have had to be bathed in freezing cold water.

My sister who was with us the last time I wrote decided to return home in spite of our protests. She feared that with food reserves running out we might have to eat one meal a day rather than the two we have been having of late. At home she has a little food left, enough to keep her and her family going for a while longer.

We are now eleven, huddled together in my parents’ dining room. My brother and I and our families moved there, thinking that the first floor may be the safest option. There is a saying in Arabic, which says, ‘ death in a group is a mercy’, I guess if we die together maybe just maybe we will feel less of the pain than in doing so alone.

I have had 8 hours sleep since the beginning of this conflict; we can hear attacks almost every minute.

I think to myself, if one of us is injured or needs medical attention what will happen? Ambulances are finding it difficult to reach civilians, roads are blocked by rubble, Israeli forces in their path… you could bleed to death… even if they did get to us, maybe we would be bombed on our way to the hospital… if we did reach the hospital there might not be enough room to treat us… little medication or equipment we need or any electricity to fuel the life saving equipment… we would not even be able to get out of Gaza for the life saving treatment we needed.

Hospitals are now running on back up generators making life even more difficult for the doctors who are trying to cope with the influx of those injured. If fuel runs out for the generators, those on life saving equipment will perish.

I heard a woman calling up the radio today, ambulance services could not reach her. I guess she thought the radio station might be able to do something. She was wailing down the phone “our home is on fire, my children are dying! Help me!” I do not know what happened to her and her children, I do not want to imagine.

I spend much of my time thinking that this could be the last hour of my existence. As I try to fall asleep, I hear on the radio the numbers of people who have died rising by the hour. I wonder if tomorrow morning, I will be part of that bodycount, of the next breaking news… will be just another number to all those watching the death and destruction in Gaza… or maybe the fact that I work for Oxfam will mean that I will be a name and not just a number… I might be talked about for a minute and moments later forgotten, like all those other people who have had their lives taken away from them.

I am not afraid of dying - I know that one day we all must die. But not like this, not sitting idly in my home with my children in my arms waiting for our lives to be taken away. I am disgusted by this injustice.

What is the international community waiting for, to see even more dismembered people, and families erased before they act? Time is ticking by and the numbers of dead and injured are increasing… what are they waiting for?

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/pressoffice/?p=2954

 

[winjer]

espacially when it does little in forms of real aid, eg funds for war victims, etc.

Evidence? Or just lies?

 

[durruti02]

Where have i identified fascism in the jewish community? Or denied racism within the muslim community? Never, you pathetic, lying, liberal shit.

you pretend that Finsbury Park mosque was not run by hamza .. you know nothing .. you argue for giving Hamas bigger missiles! lol

 

[winjer]

I did express outrage at Hamas using Gaza Hospital as a missile store

Again: source?

 

[ViolentPanda]

Evidence? Or just lies?

He's making assumptions based on the fact that when he says "the left", he's generally referring (erroneously, as they're about as "left" as Genghis Khan) to the Swappies and their ilk.

 

[durruti02]

oh you disingenuous tosser. When YOU claimed to have opposed both the NF and the 'racist mosque' Hamza was OUTSIDE the mosque, he'd been kicked out. So your post if bullshit.

whatever .. lol .. you thought he was never ran FPM .. fool .. and yes i would not defend him .. he is scum .. the sort of scum that leftist idiots like you end up defending .. and you wonder why the public give you short shrift! and thebnp are gaining votes??

 

[ViolentPanda]

you pretend that Finsbury Park mosque was not run by hamza .. you know nothing .. you argue for giving Hamas bigger missiles! lol

Finsbury Park mosque wasn't run by Hamza though was it? It's "management" was taken over for a while by Hizb activists, but they were sent on their way pretty quickly. Hamza preached inside the mosque far fewer times than he preached outside it.

 

[durruti02]

Who are you to make demands of me?
Anyone who knows me knows that I am against fundamentalism (religious or political), racism and fascism, whoever the proponents are. make of that what you will, pinhead.

They also know that I operate on facts, not "facts" gleaned from a quick google, but facts found by cross-referencing and cross-checking sources. Can you say the same?

so you condemn hamas then?


p.s. i am same as you .. some one with beliefs knowledeg who wishes to argue about and change the world .. so yes i also operate on facts .. like most people though i DO use the internet .. IF there are facts that i have used that are wrong please say so .. i have not yet had this happen ..

 

[durruti02]

Yes, you di say that. You said sending rockets into israel, in response to many many israeli attacks, was an escalation and wrong. And those rockets WEREN'T definitely the work of Hamass, they were probably the work of ordinary palestinians who have just had enough. Your pseudo-support for the palestinians is entirely superficial, and based upon them fighting back only in ways YOU approve of. Shameful.

would you say that to the PLO and Abbas who agree with his position? or are they just now collaboraters! lol

 

[belboid]

whatever .. lol .. you thought he was never ran FPM .. fool .. and yes i would not defend him .. he is scum .. the sort of scum that leftist idiots like you end up defending .. and you wonder why the public give you short shrift! and thebnp are gaining votes??

I take it your brain is still on holiday, this is why you have (very belatedly) to try to rewrite history.

Lets go back for you, oh hard of thinking one.

You objected to Hamas because - as YOU said - they didnt target there weapons well enough. A traditional argument for liberals masquerading as anarchists (see also In Bloom) as well as ultra-zionists masquerading as liberals (a la Zachor). If you honestly hold that view, that the only problem was the targetting, then what you would logically want is for them to have better weapons, supplied either thru government or workers aid of some ilk. That you didnt do that simply marks out just one of your many hypocrisies.

No wonder the public ignores you completely, a two-faced, liberal, fool.

As to Hamza, again I repeat, that YOU were talking about when he was outisde the mosque, and hence NOT in control of it, dont try and change your argument now.

 

[Spion]

so you condemn hamas then?

What do you mean by 'condemn' Hamas?

Give me a yes or no for each of these . . .

When they fire rockets at Sderot, Ashqelon etc?
When they fire mortars/rockets at advancing IDF troops inside Gaza?
When they fire small arms at the IDF inside Gaza?
When they act against democratic and TU action in Gaza?

 

[ViolentPanda]

Again: source?

Well, ya see winjer, Gazan hospitals have these pesky things called oxygen cylinders, that they don't really use for patient care, and merely have around as parts for home-made "rockets". That's evidence enough for any reasonable person, surely?

 

[belboid]

would you say that to the PLO and Abbas who agree with his position? or are they just now collaboraters! lol

whose position? you're making less sense than normal now. if you must go thru every post when you eventually return to threads, you could do everyone the common decency of making them make sense, and maybe making them into two or three posts so that there is some kind of consistent argument to them.

 

[ViolentPanda]

so you condemn hamas then?

You've already asked this and I've already answered.

p.s. i am same as you ..

No, you're not.

some one with beliefs knowledeg who wishes to argue about and change the world .. so yes i also operate on facts ..
like most people though i DO use the internet .. IF there are facts that i have used that are wrong please say so .. i have not yet had this happen ..

You entirely missed the point, didn't you? It isn't about "facts", it's about how you arrive at them.

 

[TomUS]

Ceasefire coming?:

Israel said Wednesday that it "welcomes" an Egyptian-French ceasefire proposal for Gaza as long as such a deal guarantees a halt to militant rockets and weapons smuggling, in a possible sign that a bloody 12-day offensive could be winding down.

Hamas, for its part, said it would only support a deal if it included an opening of Gaza's borders.

In Turkey, meanwhile, a diplomat said that country will be given the task of constructing an international force for Gaza.

Both Israel and Hamas appeared to seek guarantees about the details of a cease-fire, before agreeing to halt the fighting.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090107/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians

 

[Barking_Mad]

BBC reporting there is a ceasefire but Israel is still shelling.

*cough*

 

[durruti02]

I agree they are anti-working class, but:

1. If A racist aggressor is set on physically destroying your ethnic group and this 'anti-working class' organisation is one of those physically standing in the way of the destruction of all classes of your people then - in that act - they should be supported/worked with.
2. Now, I don't know the exact class breakdown of the Hamas membership and staff but I suspect that a lot of their people *are* working class. It is also the case that in their social programmes they certainly work with the w/c and poor communities of Gaza.

What's the conclusion of this? Hamas need to be beaten politically and their w/c, urban poor, peasant supporters convinced of their ultimately cross-class aims. But you won't get to do any of that if you stand on the sidelines and let the IDF decimate you.

interesting post spion .. yes standing on the sidelines does you know good but .. i was around NI solidairty stuff and not sure if you aware of the impossibility of working in these environments .. as you know Sf/IRA regulalry murdered political opponents ( and vice versa) ..

would you join hamas then? (or SF/IRA) .. no, i know it is harder and seems utopian but a principled positinof doing something that IS positive ( and people in northen ireland did manage to do somethings outside of the nationalist dispute)

but for us here we are NOT there

so we are NOT trying to convince palestinians of a or b

we are trying to change this country ... and really that is in the long term much more useful for palestine tbh .. but we will not build change on being dishonest and formulationsof critical or otherwise support or whatever .. we NEED to be clear ALL nationalism will cause these same problems and ALL need to be opposed

p.s. how can you argue against a bnp supportter in leeds if you walk past on a demo with people supportting hamas?

 

[treelover]

btw, on Indymedia, there are calls to physically attack a 'zionist' meeting tomorrow and a poster notes a jewish friend being shouted at with anti-semetic remarks, looks like it is not just Hamas that hates jews, wonder if Respect, SWP, etc will comdemn all that

 

[durruti02]

Good. Kill as many Hamas as possible. I never thought I would say that but I don't see any alternative.

Killing as many Hamas members and their supporters as the IDF can is the way to go now. I can't think of any nation or people or religious grouping who would tolerate what Hamas are, do, and intend to be without retaliating in some way.

You cannot negotiate with fascists whoever they are and whatever colour or creed they are. You can only either kill or contain them.

I like any reasonable person are grieving for the loss of innocent lives but I'm afraid that is war. The Israeli miiltary despite its undoubted military technology is at the service of a nation that is surrounded by enemies. I wouldn't remove that nations right to defend itself.

Israel and other nations opposed to the fascism of Hamas need to join together publically or privately to support the removal of Hamas. Hamas have cheated the Palestinian people who do deserve to be compsated for the Nakba and peace will only come after Hamas are destroyed. I'm quite happy to say that Israel should dismantle its settlements in the West Bank but that will never be enough for Hamas and its front groups. Nothing less than regional and then world domination will suffice - surely that reminds of similar parties of the past?

The only chance of peace is through a military victory against Hamas. I hate war as much as the next reasonable person but sometimes you have to fight. Yes I agree that Fatah isn't ideal but its a lot better than what the poor fucking Palestinians have been coerced, bribed and inveigled into voting for and supporting.

Anti Zionists -- Fuck you.

by what right does one nationalist have to condemn another

 

[treelover]

What's the conclusion of this? Hamas need to be beaten politically and their w/c, urban poor, peasant supporters convinced of their ultimately cross-class aims. But you won't get to do any of that if you stand on the sidelines and let the IDF decimate you.

So, are you going over there Spion, with your AK47, or is it all gesture politics?

 

[durruti02]

Abbas condemning the barbarity of Israeli actions at the long awaited meeting of the UN security council now.

http://www.streamick.com/index.php?tv=presstv

he has also attacked hamas

 

[durruti02]

1414 posts have been written on this topic... the vast majority of them is posts arguying over the hamas – israeli state views and positions, but I think we have failed to address the problem correctly, because for me the problem is the PEOPLE and how they live, and not their rulers.... As an anti authoritarian I am NEVER going to support a regime, especially because it is always them, the state, that create all the problems, not the people. I do not believe that a israeli worker or farmer, really has a problem with a palestinian one, or the opposite... This can be proven by the thousands of israeli people that demonstrate in Telaviv and elsewhere against this war as well as the big number of israeli soldiers that have refused to fight and are now in prison. The palestinian people, not Hamas, are in deep humanitarian crisis. They live in very bad conditions in poverty anyway, and these attacks and the blockade are creating an ever bigger problem to their suffering.

Personally I do not believe that Hamas are such a big threat for Israel. They are a number of fighters, with limited resources and guns, with no modern technology, and I believe that if Israel really wanted they could eliminate Hamas, by finding their members with all the surveylance equipment they have and by hitting main strategic targets like training camps and other Hamas buildings.This is clearly not happening though... During the last 60 years, always with the excuse of fighting against terrorism, Israel attacks Palestine, killing thousands civilians. It is clear that their motives are different, and this circle of violence will not stop, if this specific point exactly will not be tackled.

It has allready been explained, that ideologies as zionism and islamic fantamentalism, are promoted to people as "religions", in order them to accept the policies of their rulers, either Hamas or the israeli state, without questioning....

We shoud demand with even bigger pressure the immediate cease fire in the area... This war will definately not solve anything, but only add more suffering to the local populations. This is only a step though to a big road ahead.... The real goal must always be to improve people relations to make israeli and palestinian people to be able to live together, and then themselves will demand from their rulers and the state the end of this war.

This may sound idealistic or utopic but this is the only proper solution to the problem... Just a creation of 2 states will not really solve anything, palestinians and israeli may have then their own state but problems between them will still exist, especially as Israel controlls a lot of the resources.

you post infrequently but always clearly and imho correctly

 

[durruti02]

JOHNNY LIE ALERT!

No Arab army invaded (15 May 48) until AFTER the Haganah/IDF had ethnically cleansed around 200 Palestinian villages and several large towns, and in the case of Haifa (22 April 48) actually driving Arabs into the sea.

I'd say check the dates, but I know you won't

“During the morning [the Jews] were continually shooting down on all Arabs who moved both in Wadi Nisnas and the Old City. This included completely indiscriminate and revolting machine gun fire, mortar fire and sniping on women and children sheltering in churches and attempting to get out . . . through the gates into the docks . . The 40 Royal Marine Commando who control the docks . . . sent the Arabs through in batches but there was considerable congestion outside the East Gate of hysterical Arab women and children and old people on whom the Jews opened up mercilessly with fire. Two [Royal Marine] officers were seriously wounded.” (Tactical HQ, 1st Coldstream Guards, ‘Battalion Sitrep’ 22 April 1948, 16.30hrs, PRO WO 261-297, cited in B Morris, the Birth of . . . p191)

btw benny morris know thinks all ( or more anyway) arabs should have been 'cleansed'

 

[Spion]

interesting post spion .. yes standing on the sidelines does you know good but .. i was around NI solidairty stuff and not sure if you aware of the impossibility of working in these environments .. as you know Sf/IRA regulalry murdered political opponents ( and vice versa) ..?

Yes, been there done that

would you join hamas then..?

I really do despair at your ability to understand people sometimes. What do you fucking think after reading the post you said was 'interesting? Eh?

Now answer this:

What do you mean by 'condemn' Hamas?

Give me a yes or no for each of these . . .

When they fire rockets at Sderot, Ashqelon etc?
When they fire mortars/rockets at advancing IDF troops inside Gaza?
When they fire small arms at the IDF inside Gaza?
When they act against democratic and TU action in Gaza?

 

[nino_savatte]

Well, Helen Suzman, no naive women her, spoke out againt the excesses of the ANC armed Wing (including torture) and she was there unlike the many keyboard general here who wish Hamas success.

btw, 50 odd pages, no wonder no one supports the left anymore if it can only focuses on international events, espacially when it does little in forms of real aid, eg funds for war victims, etc.

Another poster who, rather than use his head or read, would rather engage in smears. Oh, if life were only as simple as you.

Do you support genocide, treelover? Or is it the case that you approve of genocide in certain situations? Did you swallow all of Regev's words whole without asking questions? Yes, you did.

 

[Spion]

btw benny morris know thinks all ( or more anyway) arabs should have been 'cleansed'

I know. His historical research is not in doubt tho. His criticism is that the Zionist militias didn't go far enough

 

[Barking_Mad]

Robert Fisk

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.

What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror". The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.

I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.

The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.

Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.

And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.

Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer

Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...ate-the-west-so-much-we-will-ask-1230046.html

 

[Spion]

p.s. how can you argue against a bnp supportter in leeds if you walk past on a demo with people supportting hamas?

The same way I'd put my argument to anyone - that the palestinians are refugees who have been ethnically cleansed and are now being ground into the dirt.

What difference does it make that this person is a BNP supporter?

 

[Spion]

So, are you going over there Spion, with your AK47, or is it all gesture politics?

When pathetic individuals like you haven't got an argument you turn to quips meant to close down debate. It's your sort that made Stalin and Hitler what they were - the spineless who went along with it

 

[durruti02]

Finsbury Park mosque wasn't run by Hamza though was it? It's "management" was taken over for a while by Hizb activists, but they were sent on their way pretty quickly. Hamza preached inside the mosque far fewer times than he preached outside it.

wrong nieve whatever .. hamza was a key part of it in those years and several years so clearly not 'sent on there way pretty quickly' .. yet again i ask why do you want to pretend otherwise?