Israelis Terrorize Civilians, Vandalize Media, Bomb Charities
Ehud Olmert: ‘I Want No One to Sleep at Night in Gaza’
03/07/2006 Palestine Media Center – PMC
Using the release of the Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit as pretext, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert unleashed his occupation forces to reoccupy Gaza Strip, terrorize Palestinian civilians with sonic booms, thin them to starvation, disrupt traffic, electricity supply, and access to water, bomb soccer fields, schools, TV stations, cultural centers and charities, vandalize hospitals, and kidnap mafia-like cabinet ministers, mayors and parliamentarians, revoke Palestinian residency in Jerusalem, and bomb the offices of prime and interior ministers.
Olmert told his Cabinet on Sunday: “I take personal responsibility for what is happening in Gaza. I want no one to sleep at night in Gaza.”
The Washington Post, or “Pravda on the Potomac”, as Stephen Cohen refers to it in “The New American Cold War,” should send Jackson Diehl to Gaza, in order to better explain, from a first-person perspective, the “diplomatic” nuances of terrorising children and their families.
Ahmed Amr: Treason of the International Community
Come to Gaza and be a witness to what the ‘international community’ really looks like. Listen to their dispassionate voices blaming the victims and calling for ‘restraint.’ Look closely and see the casual gaze in their eyes. Watch the over paid and over fed bureaucrats of the United Nations take a nap while a man made health disaster unfolds in front of their nose. As an act of charity, they are probably making plans to clean up the debris after Olmert’s blood lust is satiated.
Take a virtual tour of Gaza and say hello to the child who just woke up screaming because his bedroom window was shattered by the sonic boom of an Israeli jet financed by American tax dollars. This tormented land is the perfect place to be introduced to the collective treason of intellectuals and journalists from around the planet who, by their silence, have endorsed genocide on an installment plan tailored to fit Israel’s unlimited capacity for inflicting harm on their colonial subjects.
Gaza is the name of an excellent school where you can get first hand experience about what transpired sight unseen in Rwanda, Bosnia and East Timor. Bring your children along so they may develop an appetite to indulge in a feast of indifference.
-Ahmed Amr is the editor of NileMedia.com
Virginia Tilley: Starving in the Dark
30 June 2006 Counterpunch
And yet, even all this misery is overshadowed by a grimmer fact: no water. Gaza’s public water supply is pumped by electricity. The taps, too, are dry. No sewage system. And again, word is that the electricity is out for at least six months.
The Gaza aquifer is already contaminated with sea water and sewage, due to over-pumping (partly by those now-abandoned Israeli settlements) and the grossly inadequate sewage system. To be drinkable, well water is purified through machinery run by electricity. Otherwise, the brackish water must at least be boiled before it can be consumed, but this requires electricity or gas. And people will soon have neither.
Drinking unpurified water means sickness, even cholera. If cholera breaks out, it will spread like wildfire in a population so densely packed and lacking fuel or water for sanitation. And the hospitals and clinics aren’t functioning, either, because there is no electricity.
Finally, people can’t leave. None of the neighboring countries have resources to absorb a million desperate and impoverished refugees: logistically and politically, the flood would entirely destabilize Egypt, for example. But Palestinians in Gaza can’t seek sanctuary with their relatives in the West Bank, either, because they can’t get out of Gaza to get there. They can’t even go over the border into Egypt and around through Jordan, because Israel will no longer allow people with Gaza identification cards to enter the West Bank. In any case, a cordon of Palestinian police are blocking people from trying to scramble over the Egyptian border–and war refugees have tried, through a hole blown open by militants, clutching packages and children.
In short, over a million civilians are now trapped, hunkered in their homes listening to Israeli shells, while facing the awful prospect, within days or weeks, of having to give toxic water to their children that may consign them to quick but agonizing deaths.
One woman near the Rafah border, taking care of her nephews, spoke to BBC: “If I am frightened in front of them I think they will die of fear.” If the international community does nothing, her children may soon die anyway.
Diehl should go to Gaza immediately, and drink it all in.