Israeli aircraft fired missiles near the town of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Thursday.
Does the picture support the caption above, that missiles are being fired near the town?
Mohammed Salem/Reuters
According to Israel National News, “Some 400 artillery shells were fired at northern and southern Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces on Thursday. IDF officials said shelling will continue throughout the night.”
Leaflets follow a night of shelling; just another day at the office:
Around dawn on Thursday, after a night of Israeli shelling, residents in northern Gaza said pink leaflets dropped from the sky warning them of military operations in the area.
“For your own safety, out of our desire not to hurt civilians who are not involved in operations against our soldiers, you have to stop moving around in places where the Israeli Army is working,” said the Israeli military leaflet, in Arabic.
Don’t move or one of the hundreds of missiles being fired in your direction will accidentally kill you? Why did the Jerusalem Post report yesterday that the leaflets were going to warn people to leave the area?
(from my e-mail)
In a TV interview Brig.-General Zvi Fogel said that the goal of the Israeli army should be to make hundred thousands Palestinians in Gaza strip to leave their houses (Channel 1, “Today in the News”, 9 April 2006, 19:00 – http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=13244).
On December 1, 2005 the Israeli journalist Yigal Laviv wrote about a secret Sharon’s plan to “encourage” the ‘transfer” of most of the Gazans if not all of them to Northern Sinai (Inian Merkazi http://www.news-israel.net/news.asp?id=16345).
The aim of the Israeli leadership, I believe, is not just to destroy the Palestinian Authority (PA) as other moves indicate, but to look for opportunities to escalate the ongoing “silent” ethnic cleansing and expel as many Palestinian as possible.
“Silent” ethnic cleansing refers to all the Israeli measures like economic warfare, severe restrictions of movement of persons and goods etc. Measures that have caused for sure since the beginning of the second Intifada in 2000 the death and emigration of many many thousands of Palestinians. Though no concrete figures exist there are reasons to believe that over 500,000 Palestinians have left their homes since 2000.
I have tried again and again to point at the Israeli ethnic cleansing intentions as formulated in what can be considered to be the blue prints of the policy of the Israeli army, Operation Field of Thorns. A plan that was ‘coincidently’ drawn in 1996 only a short time after the recommendations of the US neocons to Benyamin Netanyahu (thence PM) advocating the knocking down of the Oslo process (http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm). Op. Field of Thorns has been implemented step by step since October 2000 and the tempo of carrying out the plan has depended on green lights from the US.
According to the US expert Anthony Cordesman, this plan sees the temporary evacuation of exposed low value isolated settlements (e.g. the settlements in Gaza Strip). The next steps see the elimination of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the “forced evacuations of Palestinians from “sensitive areas.” (a very elastic term). (http://www.acj.org/Jan_17.htm#2 ).
Interesting post in a newsblog warns that Sharon is planning to transfer millions of Palestinians to Gaza and then to Northern Sinai, and ‘dillute’ the west bank. Yigal Laviv claims that this is Sharon’s secret plan, that forms the basis for his new party Kadima (Avanti), and is the reason to Shimon Peres leaving Labor and defecting to support Sharon.
Laviv says that Sharon had to give up his plan to make Jordan the Palestinian state (by overthrowing the kingdom of Hashemites, because they are supported by the USA), and is now looking to the Northern Sinai-Egyptian solution, that he hopes will be supported by the Moslem Brotherhood of Egypt as well. Sharon will thus prevent any meaningful peace arrangements for the next decade or two, until his transfer plan is accomplished. Laviv says that SHaron is inspired by Churchil, especially in terms of his age.