Palestine News Dispatch: Israel Resumes Gaza Bombardment; Death and Destruction Inconceivable

Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal calls for a Palestinian Intifada in response to the Israeli blockade and aerial bombardments in Gaza. Bombings by Israel killed over 220 on December 27, 2008.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

Sunday, December 28, 2008
05:24 Mecca time, 02:24 GMT

Israel resumes Gaza bombardment

Palestinians across the West Bank demonstrated after Israeli air strikes on Gaza

Israeli warplanes have resumed their air strikes on Gaza, blasting targets all over the Strip, including a mosque and a TV station.

In the first attack early on Sunday, Palestinians said Israeli aircraft bombed a mosque near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

Two bodies were retrieved from the rubble. The blast, just after midnight, blew out windows at the hospital, hospital officials said.

Another target early on Sunday was the Al Aqsa TV station used by Hamas. Its studio building was destroyed, but the station remained on air with a mobile unit.

Palestinians counted about 20 airstrikes in the first hours of Sunday.

No truce

Israel launched Operation Cast Lead on Saturday and threatened that the operation would widen if necessary.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, rejected calls for a new truce, saying Israel "cannot really accept" a ceasefire with Hamas.

"For us to be asked to have a ceasefire with Hamas is like asking you to have a ceasefire with al Qaeda. It's something we cannot really accept," Barak told Fox News from Tel Aviv.

Asked whether Israel would follow up the air strikes with a ground offensive, Barak said: "If boots on the ground will be needed, they will be there.

"Our intention is to totally change the rules of the game," he said.

Earlier on Saturday, Barak vowed to expand Israel's operation if necessary. "There is a time for calm and there is a time for fighting, and now is the time for fighting," he said.

Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister, described the assault as a war on Hamas, the Palestinian faction which took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.

Members of the Israeli cabinet say the attack is in response to an increase in the number of home-made rockets being fired into southern Israel since a ceasefire ended on December 19.

Hamas "not shaken"

Gaza witnesses reported heavy damage after more than 30 missiles were fired from helicopter gunships and fighter jets on about 40 different locations in the strip.

Many of the dead in the series of attacks were police officers, including Tawfiq Jabber, the Gaza chief of police.

The toll is expected to rise further, with bodies still lying buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings. Hospitals, already suffering from shortages due to an 18-month blockade on the Gaza Strip, said they were struggling to cope with the number of injured, which included women and children.

Gaza is densely populated. Its 1.5 million residents are already experiencing shortages in power and basic supplies due to the siege which is widely condemned by human rights movements as a collective punishment.

Ugly massacre

Ismail Haniya, the Hamas leader in Gaza, called the assault Israel's "ugliest massacre".

"I call on Palestinians to remain united and together in the face of this crime, in the face of this massacre and continued aggression, targeting our soil and our citizens," he said.

Olmert, speaking in Tel Aviv on Saturday, said the operation would take time and called on Israelis to be "patient".

"The quiet we offered was answered with mayhem. Our desire for calm was answered with terror," he said.

"You are not our enemies. We do not fight against you," Olmert said in a direct address to Palestinians.

"[Terror organisations] are disastrous for both peoples. Israel is not fighting against the Palestinian people, and the targets attacked today were chosen with the intent of avoiding civilian casualties."

Long operation

Jacky Rowland, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Jerusalam, said: "People have been forewarned about further operations of this intesnsity for many days to come, with more sorties flown by Israeli planes and helicopters and more targets in Gaza.

"In response, more than 50 rockets were fired into Israel today. Defence officials are warning that there could be as many as 200 rockets fired every day into Israel in the days to come."

One Israeli was killed in rocket fire on Saturday.

Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, condemned the attack and demanded an immediate cessation.

Many leaders added their voices to condemn the onslaught, including Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN, who called for an immediate cessation of hostilities.

Mousa Abu Morzouz, the deputy leader of Hamas, said: "Nobody in this world can accept what happened and the Israeli aggression ... [we expect] the international community to stand against this and say that it is not acceptable."

Mustafa Barghouthi, the former Palestinian information minister, said: "This is not an attack on Hamas. It is an attack on the whole population and the free will of the people of Gaza."

He accused Israel of committing "war crimes" and demanded that Abbas and his government stop all relations with Israel.

'Only just beginning'

The Israeli army released a statement on Saturday saying "terrorist installations" were hit and that all Israeli pilots returned unharmed.

Avi Benayahu, an Israeli military spokesman said: "The operation against Hamas is "only just beginning".

The air raids follow a breakdown of a six-month-old Israel-Hamas truce earlier this month.

The ceasefire expired on December 19, with Hamas arguing that Israel had violated the truce by preventing vital supplies from entering the Strip.

Egypt has opened the Rafah crossing with the Gaza Strip to receive injured people, Egyptian officials said. Ambulances have been sent to the crossing and two Egyptian hospitals emptied to take in the wounded.

Hamas won control of the Palestinian Legislative Council in elections in January 2005. The international community refused to accept a Hamas-led government, demanding that the faction recognise Israel and renounce violence. Economic sanctions by the EU and US followed.

Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 after bloody street battles against its rival, Fatah.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies


Diaries: Live from Palestine

"The amount of death and destruction is inconceivable"

Safa Joudeh, Live from Palestine, 27 December 2008
Courtesy of Eletronic Intifada

It was just before noon when I heard the first explosion. I rushed to my window and barely did I get there and look out when I was pushed back by the force and air pressure of another explosion. For a few moments I didn't understand but then I realized that Israeli promises of a wide-scale offensive against the Gaza Strip had materialized. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzpi Livni's statements following a meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the day before yesterday had not been empty threats after all.

What followed seems pretty much surreal at this point. Never had we imagined anything like this. It all happened so fast but the amount of death and destruction is inconceivable, even to me and I'm in the middle of it and a few hours have passed already passed.

Six locations were hit during the air raid on Gaza City. The images are probably not broadcasted on US news channels. There were piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit. As you looked at them you could see that a few of the young men were still alive, someone lifts a hand, and another raises his head.

They probably died within moments because their bodies were burned, most had lost limbs, some of their guts were hanging out and they were all lying in pools of blood. Outside my home which is close to the two largest universities in Gaza, a missile fell on a large group of young men, university students.

They'd been warned not to stand in groups as it makes them an easy target, but they were waiting for buses to take them home. Seven were killed, four students and three of our neighbors' kids, young men who were from the Rayes family and were best friends. As I'm writing this I can hear a funeral procession go by outside; I looked out the window a moment ago and it was the three Rayes boys.

They spent all their time together when they were alive, they died together and now they are sharing the same funeral together. Nothing could stop my 14-year-old brother from rushing out to see the bodies of his friends laying in the street after they were killed. He hasn't spoken a word since.

What did Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert mean when he stated that we the people of Gaza weren't the enemy, that it was Hamas and Islamic Jihad which were being targeted? Was that statement made to infuriate us out of out our state of shock, to pacify any feelings of rage and revenge? To mock us? Were the scores of children on their way home from school and who are now among the dead and the injured, Hamas militants?

A little further down my street about half an hour after the first strike, three schoolgirls happened to be passing by one of the locations when a missile struck the Preventative Security Headquarters building. The girls' bodies were torn into pieces and covered the street from one side to the other.

In all the locations, people are going through the dead, terrified of recognizing a family member among them. The streets are strewn with their bodies, their arms, legs, feet, some with shoes and some without. The city is in a state of alarm, panic and confusion, cell phones aren't working, hospitals and morgues are backed up and some of the dead are still lying in the streets with their families gathered around them, kissing their faces, holding on to them.

Outside the destroyed buildings old men are kneeling on the ground, weeping. Their slim hopes of finding their sons still alive vanish after taking one look at what had become of their office buildings.

And even after the dead are identified, doctors are having a hard time gathering the right body parts in order to hand them over to their families. The hospital hallways look like a slaughterhouse. It's truly worse than any horror movie you could ever imagine. The floor is filled with blood, the injured are propped up against the walls or laid down on the floor, side by side with the dead.

Doctors are working frantically and people with injuries that aren't life-threatening are sent home. A relative of mine was injured by a flying piece of glass from her living room window and she had deep cut right down the middle of her face. She was sent home; too many others needed more urgent medical attention. Her husband, a dentist, took her to his clinic and sewed up her face using local anesthesia.

More than 200 people dead in today's air raids. That means more than 200 funeral processions, a few today, most of them tomorrow, probably. To think that yesterday these families were worried about food and heat and electricity. At this point I think they -- actually all of us -- would gladly have had Hamas forever sign off every last basic right we've been calling for the last few months if it could have stopped this from ever having happened.

The bombing was very close to my home. Most of my extended family live in the area. My family is OK, but two of my uncles' homes were damaged,

We can rest easy, Gazans can mourn tonight. Israel is said to have promised not to wage any more air raids for now. People suspect that the next step will be targeted killings, which will inevitably means scores more of innocent bystanders whose fates have already been sealed.

Safa Joudeh is an master's candidate in public policy at Stony Brook University in the US. She returned to Gaza in September 2007 where she currently works as a freelance journalist.


Sunday, December 28, 2008
04:58 Mecca time, 01:58 GMT

Arab leaders 'to meet' on Gaza

Amr Mussa said Arab foreign ministers will meet on Wednesday

The Arab League will hold summit in Doha on January 2 to discuss the latest violence in the Gaza Strip, Arab diplomats have said.

The announcement was made after ambassadors to the organisation met in Cairo on Saturday.

"An extraordinary Arab summit will be held on Friday in Doha to discuss ways to stop the Israeli attacks on Gaza," a diplomat said.

More than ten Arab states have confirmed participation.

For a summit to be held, at least 14 countries must participate.

The decision was in response to a proposal by Qatar after Israeli air raids killed at least 220 people in Gaza and wounded 700 others.

Arab foreign ministers were due to hold an emergency meeting to take a common position on Israeli raids on Sunday but the meeting was postponed until Wednesday.

Amr Moussa, Arab League Secretary-General, said the meeting was postponed because many ministers were busy in separate meetings of two Arab regional groups - the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Maghreb Union.

"The time worries us very much because of the delay in holding the ministerial meeting but we will not remain silent and consultations are continuing," he said.

In parallel with these Arab meetings, the Arab League has asked Libya to seek an emergency session of the United Nation's Security Council, of which Libya is now the only Arab member.

Source: Agencies