An armed Palestinian fighter in Gaza. The Israeli blockade has increased tensions and the abandonment of a ceasefire on the part of Hamas.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
23:01 Mecca time, 20:01 GMT
Hamas declares end to Israel truce
Palestinian groups say they have been training and re-arming during the truce
Palestinian group Hamas has declared that the six-month ceasefire between Israel and the Gaza Strip is over.
The ceasefire officially ended at daybreak in Gaza on Friday and came after armed Palestinian groups admitted that they had been using the truce to train and better arm themselves.
The Izz-al-din al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Hamas movement, blamed Israel for the failure of the truce.
"The ceasefire is over and there won't be a renewal because the Zionist enemy has not respected its conditions," the group said on its website.
The announcement followed talks between various Palestinian factions within the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
"The first day since the end of the truce has actually been marked by relative calm," Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin reported from Gaza.
But Palestinians fear the ceasefire's end will mean the resumption of daily Israeli incursions and air raids across the territory, our correspondent said.
Two rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel shortly after Hamas declared that the ceasefire had ended, the Israeli military said.
No injuries or material damage were caused by the rockets, an Israeli military spokeswoman said.
Escalation fears
While Hamas stopped short of threatening an escalation in military action and neither side has said it will go on the offensive, Fawzi Barhum, a Hamas spokesman, underlined that Hamas has "the right to respond to any Zionist aggression against the Palestinian people".
Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, had indicated earlier that Israel would respond if attacked.
"When the situation requires us to, we will act ... we are not afraid of launching a large-scale military operation in Gaza, but there is no need to rush into it," he said.
Al Jazeera's Jacky Rowland, reporting from Jerusalem, said Israel had been keen to extend the Egyptian-brokered truce - particularly as the country is expected to hold a general election in February.
Hamas and the Israelis have blamed each other for violating the ceasefire agreed to in June, with Israel saying it would re-open border crossings and end military operations when Gazan fighters stopped launching rocket attacks on southern Israel.
Abu Ahmed, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad's military wing, the al-Quds Brigades, said that his group had strengthened during the truce.
"During the calm we trained and prepared ourselves for the period after the calm. We will deploy to the front lines along the border and reinforce our positions there with new weapons that we have brought," he said.
Israel has long complained that Palestinian armed groups use periods of ceasefire to regroup and procure more weapons.
'Human crisis'
Meanwhile, a UN report said that Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip had created a "profound human dignity crisis".
The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said unemployment now stands at 49 per cent, up from 32 per cent a year ago.
Many residents of Gaza City are without power for up to 16 hours a day and half the residents receive water only once a week for a few hours, the report said. Eighty per cent of the drinking water is substandard.
The report came after the UN agency stoppped food aid to about half of the strip's 1.5 million people after the blockade caused it to run out of wheat flour.
Robert Serry, the UN envoy to the Middle East, warned that "a major escalation of violence would have grave consequences for the protection of civilians in Israel and Gaza".
"A priority must be to ensure calm in and around Gaza and urgently improve humanitarian conditions," he said.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
Israel's 'Crime Against Humanity'
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
December 19, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/113143/
Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw.
“This is a stain on what is left of Israeli morality,” I was told by Richard N. Veits, the former U.S. ambassador to Jordan who led a delegation from the U.S. Council for the National Interest Foundation to Gaza to meet Hamas leaders this past summer. “I am almost breathless discussing this subject. It is so myopic. Washington, of course, is a handmaiden to all this. The Israeli manipulation of a population in this manner is comparable to some of the crimes that took place against civilian populations fifty years ago.”
The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, calls what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza “a crime against humanity.” Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as “a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” He has asked for “the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.”
Falk, while condemning the rocket attacks by the militant group Hamas, which he points out are also criminal violations of international law, goes on to say that “such Palestinian behavior does not legalize Israel’s imposition of a collective punishment of a life- and health-threatening character on the people of Gaza, and should not distract the U.N. or international society from discharging their fundamental moral and legal duty to render protection to the Palestinian people.”
“It is an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe that each day poses the entire 1.5 million Gazans to an unspeakable ordeal, to a struggle to survive in terms of their health,” Falk said when I reached him by phone in California shortly before he left for Israel. “This is an increasingly precarious condition. A recent study reports that 46 percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a number of different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There are widespread mental disorders, especially among young people without the will to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12 have been found to have no will to live.”
Gaza now spends 12 hours a day without power, which can be a death sentence to the severely ill in hospitals. There are few drugs and little medicine, including no cancer or cystic fibrosis medication. Hospitals have generators but often lack fuel. Medical equipment, including one of Gaza’s three CT scanners, has been destroyed by power surges and fluctuations. Medical staff cannot control the temperature of incubators for newborns. And Israel has revoked most exit visas, meaning some of those who need specialized care, including cancer patients and those in need of kidney dialysis, have died. Of the 230 Gazans estimated to have died last year because they were denied proper medical care, several spent their final hours at Israeli crossing points where they were refused entry into Israel. The statistics gathered on children—half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 17—are increasingly grim. About 45 percent of children in Gaza have iron deficiency from a lack of fruit and vegetables, and 18 percent have stunted growth.
“It is macabre,” Falk said. “I don’t know of anything that exactly fits this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog in modern times.”
“There is no structure of an occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances,” the rapporteur added. “The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law, the impact on the health, lives and survival and the overall conditions warrant the characterization of a crime against humanity. This occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli military and civilian authorities. They are responsible and should be held accountable.”
The point of this Israeli siege, ostensibly, is to break Hamas, the radical Islamic group that was elected to power in 2007. But Hamas has repeatedly proposed long-term truces with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent truce. During the last cease-fire, established through Egyptian intermediaries in July, Hamas upheld the truce although Israel refused to ease the blockade. It was Israel that, on Nov. 4, initiated an armed attack that violated the truce and killed six Palestinians. It was only then that Hamas resumed firing rockets at Israel. Palestinians have launched more than 200 rockets on Israel since the latest round of violence began. There have been no Israeli casualties.
“This is a crime of survival,” Falk said of the rocket attacks. “Israel has put the Gazans in a set of circumstances where they either have to accept whatever is imposed on them or resist in any way available to them. That is a horrible dilemma to impose upon a people. This does not alleviate the Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, for accountability for doing these acts involving rocket fire, but it also imposes some responsibility on Israel for creating these circumstances.”
Israel seeks to break the will of the Palestinians to resist. The Israeli government has demonstrated little interest in diplomacy or a peaceful solution. The rapid expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank is an effort to thwart the possibility of a two-state solution by gobbling up vast tracts of Palestinian real estate. Israel also appears to want to thrust the impoverished Gaza Strip onto Egypt. There are now dozens of tunnels, the principal means for food and goods, connecting Gaza to Egypt. Israel permits the tunnels to operate, most likely as part of an effort to further cut Gaza off from Israel.
“Israel, all along, has not been prepared to enter into diplomatic process that gives the Palestinians a viable state,” Falk said. “They [the Israelis] feel time is on their side. They feel they can create enough facts on the ground so people will come to the conclusion a viable state cannot emerge.”
The use of terror and hunger to break a hostile population is one of the oldest forms of warfare. I watched the Bosnian Serbs employ the same tactic in Sarajevo. Those who orchestrate such sieges do not grasp the terrible rage born of long humiliation, indiscriminate violence and abuse. A father or a mother whose child dies because of a lack of vaccines or proper medical care does not forget. A boy whose ill grandmother dies while detained at an Israel checkpoint does not forget. All who endure humiliation, abuse and the murder of family members do not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those who, eventually, stumble out into the daylight. Is it any wonder that 71 percent of children interviewed at a school in Gaza recently said they wanted to be a “martyr”?
The Israelis in Gaza, like the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, are foolishly breeding the next generation of militants and Islamic radicals. Jihadists, enraged by the injustices done by Israel and the United States, seek to carry out reciprocal acts of savagery, even at the cost of their own lives. The violence unleashed on Palestinian children will, one day, be the violence unleashed on Israeli children. This is the tragedy of Gaza. This is the tragedy of Israel.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
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