People are protesting the military attacks on the people of Gaza.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
Report, Al Mezan, 1 January 2009
3:40pm Gaza Time (+2 GMT):
The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) has continued its military operations in the Gaza Strip for the sixth consecutive day. Air strikes and attacks from ground forces and naval vessels have continued around the clock. The vast majority of their targets have been civilian objects, and most of the casualties have been civilians. Attacks have particularly targeted houses of individuals Israel claims are connected with resistance groups. Other attacks hit the parliament and other government facilities.
The most significant attacks by IOF today was an air raid that targeted the houses of Abu al-Jabin family and Nizzar Rayyan, who is a leader in the Hamas movement. At approximately 2:40pm today, Israeli aircrafts fired five heavy missiles at the two houses, which are located in the middle of Jabaliya refugee camp -- one of the most densely-populated places in the world -- killing at least eight people, including 49-year-old Rayyan, his wife Nawal Rayyan, his six-year-old son Abdul-Rahman Rayyan, and another woman related to him, 49-year-old Sabah Abdul-Rahman Rayyan. Ten houses were destroyed completely and dozens others were damaged. The number of casualties in this attack is expected to rise.
Other heavy air raids targeted populated areas throughout the Gaza Strip last night and today. At approximately 11:30pm yesterday, 31 December 2008, Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a park in the al-Shabora refugee camp, killing many civilians and destroying dozens of homes. During the drafting of this press release, the IOF launched an air raid at the Hawouz Hill, opposite to the al-Nada Towers in Beit Hanoun, killing a woman and a girl child.
According to the monitoring of Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, 337 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by the IOF since the start of the ongoing Operation Cast Lead. The number people who have been injured is more than 1,100, including 105 children and 52 women. Today at dawn, the corpses of two brothers were found under the rubble of Waid Society, which was hit on 27 December 2008. Hundred of houses have been destroyed and thousands damaged, causing thousands of people to be forcefully displaced in the Gaza Strip.
According to its monitoring, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights asserts that the IOF has perpetrated grave breaches of international humanitarian law (IHL), amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity, in the course of its ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip. The IOF has focused, and continues to focus, its attacks on civilian objects, particularly houses, police stations, public facilities and mosques. It has also attacked medical crews. In doing so, the IOF has shown despicable disregard to civilian life.
Al Mezan, therefore, deplores the inaction on the part of the international community, which only has only allowed for, and perhaps encouraged, such violations of IHL and human rights standards, including the perpetration of war crimes in Gaza. Al Mezan renews its calls upon the international community to uphold its legal and ethical obligations by taking concrete, effective measures to ensure Israel's compliance with the applicable rules of international law, and to ensure the protection of civilians and civilian objects in Gaza. Al Mezan finds it ironic that international community continues to call for such compliance while it must act to ensure it, to protect and aid civilians, and to prevent the perpetration of grave breaches of IHL.
As a first step, the Center calls for an urgent convention of the conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilians in Times of war, of 1949, to consider the continuous breaches by Israel of its obligations under the Convention and take the necessary measures to ensure respect of its rules with regard to the Israeli military actions in Gaza. Civil society organizations are also called upon to exert pressure on their governments so that they act in conformity with their human rights and humanitarian obligations.
The real goal of the slaughter in Gaza
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 1 January 2009
Ever since Hamas triumphed in the Palestinian elections nearly three years ago, the story in Israel has been that a full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip was imminent. But even when public pressure mounted for a decisive blow against Hamas, the government backed off from a frontal assault.
Now the world waits for Ehud Barak, the defense minister, to send in the tanks and troops as the logic of this operation is pushing inexorably towards a ground war. Nonetheless, officials have been stalling. Significant ground forces are massed on Gaza's border, but still the talk in Israel is of "exit strategies," lulls and renewed ceasefires.
Even if Israeli tanks do lumber into the enclave, will they dare to move into the real battlegrounds of central Gaza? Or will they simply be used, as they have been in the past, to terrorize the civilian population on the peripheries?
Israelis are aware of the official reason for Barak's reticence to follow the air strikes with a large-scale ground war. They have been endlessly reminded that the worst losses sustained by the army in the second Palestinian intifada took place in 2002 during the invasion of Jenin refugee camp.
Gaza, as Israelis know only too well, is one mammoth refugee camp. Its narrow alleys, incapable of being negotiated by Merkava tanks, will force Israeli soldiers out into the open. Gaza, in the Israeli imagination, is a death trap.
Similarly, no one has forgotten the heavy toll on Israeli soldiers during the ground war with Hizballah in 2006. In a country such as Israel, with a citizen army, the public has become positively phobic of a war in which large numbers of its sons will be placed in the firing line.
That fear is only heightened by reports in the Israeli media that Hamas is praying for the chance to engage Israel's army in serious combat. The decision to sacrifice many soldiers in Gaza is not one Barak, leader of the Labor Party, will take lightly with an election in six weeks.
But there is another concern that has given him equal cause to hesitate.
Despite the popular rhetoric in Israel, no senior official really believes Hamas can be destroyed, either from the air or with brigades of troops. It is simply too entrenched in Gaza.
That conclusion is acknowledged in the tepid rationales offered so far for Israel's operations. "Creating calm in the country's south" and "changing the security environment" have been preferred over previous favorites, such as "rooting out the infrastructure of terror."
An invasion whose real objective was the toppling of Hamas would, as Barak and his officials understand, require the permanent military reoccupation of Gaza.
But overturning the disengagement from Gaza -- the 2005 brainchild of Ariel Sharon, the prime minister at the time -- would entail a huge military and financial commitment from Israel. It would once again have to assume responsibility for the welfare of the local civilian population, and the army would be forced into treacherous policing of Gaza's teeming camps.
In effect, an invasion of Gaza to overthrow Hamas would be a reversal of the trend in Israeli policy since the Oslo process of the early 1990s.
It was then that Israel allowed the long-exiled Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, to return to the occupied territories in the new role of head of the Palestinian Authority. Naively, Arafat assumed he was leading a government-in-waiting. In truth, he simply became Israel's chief security contractor.
Arafat was tolerated during the 1990s because he did little to stop Israel's effective annexation of large parts of the West Bank through the rapid expansion of settlements and increasingly harsh movement restrictions on Palestinians. Instead, he concentrated on building up the security forces of his Fatah loyalists, containing Hamas and preparing for a statehood that never arrived.
When the second Palestinian intifada broke out, Arafat proved he had outlived his usefulness to Israel. His Palestinian Authority was gradually emasculated.
Since Arafat's death and the disengagement from Gaza, Israel has sought to consolidate the physical separation of the Strip from the much-coveted West Bank. Even if not originally desired by Israel, Hamas's takeover of Gaza has contributed significantly to that goal.
Israel is now faced by two Palestinian national movements. The Fatah one, based in the West Bank and led by a weak president, Mahmoud Abbas, is largely discredited and compliant. The other, Hamas, based in Gaza, has grown in confidence as it claims to be the true guardian of resistance to the occupation.
Unable to destroy Hamas, Israel is now considering whether to live with the armed group next door.
Hamas has proved it can enforce its rule in Gaza much as Arafat once did in both occupied territories. The question being debated in Israel's cabinet and war rooms is whether, like Arafat, Hamas can be made to collude with the occupation. It has proved it is strong, but can it be made useful to Israel, too?
In practice that would mean taming Hamas rather than crushing it. Whereas Israel is trying to build up Fatah in the West Bank with carrots, it is using the current slaughter in Gaza as a big stick with which to beat Hamas into compliance.
The ultimate objective is another truce stopping the rocket fire out of the Strip, like the six-month ceasefire that just ended, but on terms even more favorable to Israel.
The savage blockade that has deprived Gaza's population of essentials for many months failed to achieve that goal. Instead, Hamas quickly took charge of the smuggling tunnels that became a lifeline for Gazans. The tunnels raised Hamas's finances and popularity in equal measure.
It should come as no surprise that Israel has barely bothered to hit the Hamas leadership or its military wing. Instead it has bombed the tunnels, Hamas's treasure chest, and it has killed substantial numbers of ordinary policemen, the guarantors of law and order in Gaza. Latest reports suggest Israel is now planning to expand its air strikes to Hamas's welfare organizations, the charities that are the base of its popularity.
The air campaign is paring down Hamas's ability to function effectively as the ruler of Gaza. It is undermining Hamas's political power bases. The lesson is not that Hamas can be destroyed militarily but that it that can be weakened domestically.
Israel apparently hopes to persuade the Hamas leadership, as it did Arafat for a while, that its best interests are served by cooperating with Israel. The message is: forget about your popular mandate to resist the occupation and concentrate instead on remaining in power with our help.
In the fog of war, events may yet escalate in such a way that a serious ground invasion cannot be avoided, especially if Hamas continues to fire rockets into Israel. But whatever happens, Israel and Hamas are almost certain in the end to agree to another ceasefire.
The issue will be whether in doing so, Hamas, like Arafat before it, loses sight of its primary task: to force Israel to end its occupation.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jkcook.net .
This article originally appeared in The National published in Abu Dhabi and is republished with permission.
Is the UN complicit in Israel's massacre in Gaza?
Omar Barghouti, The Electronic Intifada, 1 January 2009
Who will be held accountable for complicity in the massacring? (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)
A friend forwarded to me the most original greeting for the New Year: "I wish in 2009 a horrible year for all war criminals and their accomplices." I could not but think of whether some United Nations officials can be counted among such "accomplices."
Over the last two days, various UN officials stated that the percentage of civilians among those Palestinians killed in the current Israeli war of aggression on Gaza is about "25 percent" and is "likely to increase." Assuming the best of intentions, stating such a painfully low figure reflects shabby research or scandalous incompetence. At worst, it reveals intentional deception and misinformation that can only benefit the already massive and well-oiled Israeli public relations machine.
The UN's complicity in Israel's propaganda war is the latest, albeit hardly ever mentioned, dimension of the international organization's utter failure in defending its principles, foremost among which are the prevention of war and the promotion of peace, when performing such a duty is expected to stir the wrath of the US master and the uniquely influential Israel lobby. Not only has the UN Secretary-General betrayed the very Charter of the UN and all relevant international law principles by failing to even condemn Israel's massacre of civilians and targeting of civilian institutions and residential neighborhoods; the entire UN system has so far dealt with it as a "war" between two relatively symmetric forces, where the mightier side has sufficient justification to "defend itself," but should do so more proportionately, while the weaker side is chiefly responsible for triggering the "armed conflict."
Now, senior UN officials, excluding the particularly courageous and principled UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, Richard Falk, and a few others, are only focusing on "women and children" victims of the massacre, implying, even if unintentionally, that all Palestinian men in Gaza are fair game for the Israeli killing machine. The tens of Palestinian civilian policemen that were butchered in the opening hours of the massive Israeli attack by dozens of fighter jets were, thus, conveniently dismissed by such irresponsible UN figures of casualties as Hamas "fighters," more or less, that may be targeted with impunity. This is not to mention the scores of male teachers, doctors, workers, farmers and unemployed who were killed by Israel's indiscriminate bombing in their workplaces, public offices, homes or streets and were not accounted for as civilian victims of Israel's belligerent murder spree.
Above everything else, this UN discourse not only reduces close to half a million Palestinian men in that wretched, tormented and occupied coastal strip to "militants," radical "fighters," or whatever other nouns in currency nowadays in the astoundingly, but characteristically, biased western media coverage of the Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, as some international law experts have described them; it also treats them as already condemned criminals that deserve the capital punishment Israel has meted out on them. I am not an expert on the history of the UN, but I suspect this sets a new low, a precedent in dehumanizing an entire adult male population in a region of "conflict," thereby justifying their fatal targeting or, at least, silently condoning it. But this should surprise no one as the same UN leaders have for 18 months watched in eerie silence or even indirectly justified, one way or another, Israel's siege of Gaza which was described by Falk as a "prelude to genocide" and compared by him to Nazi crimes.
If one wants to be truly magnanimous and give those UN officials the benefit of the doubt -- not something I would recommend at all, given the scale of the massacre and their verifiable complicity -- one has to assume that they are quite confused as to how best to categorize the thousands of Palestinian victims of Israel's war on Gaza, whether those injured or killed. A casual overview of Israeli army press statements and human rights organizations' reports, however, will immediately dismiss the possibility that the UN figure of 25 percent was the product of clinical incompetence or technical ineptness, widely recognized trademarks of the organization.
A recent article published in The Washington Post, for instance, quoted a senior Israeli military official saying: "There are many aspects to Hamas, and we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel." An Israeli army spokeswoman went further, stating "Anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target." Given that, in the ghetto of Gaza, Hamas is effectively the "ruling" party -- it was democratically elected, after all -- and its network of social and charitable organizations are the largest provider of social services to the impoverished and besieged population, all of Gaza's civilian infrastructure, public schools, hospitals, universities, law and order organs, traffic police, sewage treatment and water purification stations, ministries providing vital services to the public, mosques, public theaters and many non-governmental institutions can technically be considered "affiliated" with Hamas.
Lest the reader feel that this is an exaggeration, today, in the first hours of the first day of the new year, the Israeli air force already bombed the following "targets" in Gaza: the Palestinian Legislative Council, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Justice. Earlier, several mosques were pulverized to the ground. So were main buildings in the Islamic University of Gaza, which serves 20,000 students. Ambulances and private homes were not spared either.
Even B'Tselem, Israel's leading human rights organization that often issues sanitized, "balanced" or selective reports focusing on Israel's less criminal behavior in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, was compelled to conclude that the Israeli army was intentionally targeting "what appear to be clear civilian objects" that are not "engaged in military action against Israel," without making the distinction between male and female civilians. A statement from the organization on 31 December said.
For example, the military bombed the main police building in Gaza and killed, according to reports, 42 Palestinians who were in a training course and were standing in formation at the time of the bombing. Participants in the course study first-aid, handling of public disturbances, human rights, public-safety exercises, and so forth. Following the course, the police officers are assigned to various arms of the police force in Gaza responsible for maintaining public order.
Another example is yesterday's bombing of the government offices. These offices included the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Labor, Construction and Housing. An announcement made by the [Israeli army] Spokesperson's Office regarding this attack stated that, 'the attack was carried out in response to the ongoing rocket and mortar-shell fire carried out by Hamas over Israeli territory, and in the framework of [Israeli army] operations to strike at Hamas governmental infrastructure and members active in the organization.'
Just to drive the point closer to home for an average western reader who may have internalized over the years a perception of Israelis -- inaccurately and quite deliberately depicted by Israeli and western propaganda as part of the "west" -- as full humans and Palestinians, along with almost all global southerners, as relative humans, perhaps the following mirroring exercise is necessary.
Imagine if the Palestinian resistance, in exercising its otherwise perfectly legitimate, UN-sanctioned right to fight Israel's occupation and apartheid, were to regard all institutions "affiliated" with the Israeli government as legitimate targets, justifying the bombing of universities, hospitals, civilian ministries, publicly-run synagogues, neighborhoods where government or army officials live or work, and other civilian "targets," killing in five days only 1,600 Israelis and wounding 8,000 (four times the current toll in Gaza, given that Israel's population is four times as large).
What would the UN do? Would UN officials only count Israeli women and children victims? Would they call on both parties to "exercise restraint" or to end "the violence"? Morally, and even legally, this is not even a fair reversal of roles, for Israel, no matter what, remains the occupier and settler-colonial oppressor, while the indigenous Palestinians remain the colonized and oppressed.
The truth is the UN leadership, in the unipolar world that we are still living in and is perhaps on its way to be transformed to more multipolar space, has effectively turned into a rubber stamp bureau for US dictates. Ban Ki-moon will go down in history as the most subservient and morally unqualified Secretary-General to ever lead the international organization. The only question remaining is whether one day he and his senior staff will stand trial for being accomplices in Israel's war crimes, together with leaders of the US, the EU and many Arab regimes. In a more just world, governed by the rule of law, not the US-dominated rule of the jungle, they should.
Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights activist and commentator.
Israelis nab 15 Palestinians in West Bank
Thu, 01 Jan 2009 12:41:35 GMT
The Israeli military says its forces have raided different cities of the West Bank, arresting 15 Palestinians amid attacks on the Gaza Strip.
A spokesman for the Israeli army said that the troops made the arrests during their raids on the West Bank cities of Nablus, al-Khalil and East al-Quds early morning.
On Wednesday, the forces arrested twenty-two Palestinians including two children from the West bank.
The Israeli army regularly arrests Palestinians during overnight operations in the West Bank towns despite a valid security agreement with the Palestinian National Authority.
Israel has not halted its arrest of the Palestinians in the West Bank that is controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA), while it justifies its massacre in the Gaza Strip as fighting against Hamas.
MSH/RA
