Pictures you won’t find in the New York Times

It was just before noon when I heard the first explosion. I rushed to my window, 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, 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 Hussni 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.

6 locations were hit during the air raid on Gaza city. The images are probably not broadcasted in US media. There are piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit. As you look at them you can see that a few of the young men are still alive, someone lifts a hand here, and another raise his head there. They probably died within moments because their bodies are burned, most have lost limbs, some have their guts hanging out and they’re all lying in pools of blood. Outside my home, (which is close to the 2 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, it makes them an easy target, but they were waiting for buses to take them home. 7 were killed, 4 students and 3 of our neighbors kids, young men who were from the same family (Rayes) 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 3 Rayes boys, They spent all their time together when they were alive, they died together and now their 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. (more…)

I believe the Israeli airstrikes are clear violations of international humanitarian law. While the Palestinian rocket fire against civilian targets in Israel may be illegal, that does not give Israel the right to violate the Geneva Conventions. The airstrikes represent:

¶Collective punishment (the civilian population is being punished for actions of a few militants).

¶Unlawful attack on civilians in a protected population (the strikes are targeting civilian areas, Gaza being one of the most densely populated areas in the Middle East).

¶Disproportionate military action (Israel has destroyed the entire security infrastructure of 1.5 million people).

In addition, earlier Israeli actions, like the closing of Gaza’s borders, have led to severe shortages of medicine and fuel, so ambulances can’t respond to the injured, hospitals can’t adequately receive or treat the wounded, and doctors are unable to provide sufficient medical care.

Israel is using F-16 fighter jets and weapons provided by the United States. We must stop military aid to Israel.

Phyllis Bennis

Washington, Dec. 29, 2008

The writer, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, is the author of a book about understanding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Israel prevents toddler in need of surgery from returning home from Gaza to West Bank (more…)

Days after sending aircraft to strike Hamas militants in Gaza, the Israeli government is launching a campaign to dominate the blogosphere. (more…)

The United States Contributes $85 Million for Humanitarian Assistance to Palestinian Refugees

And how much does Israel receive in American foreign aid, loan guarantees and arms shipments?

“It’s impossible to hold peace negotiations with Israel while its army is committing massacres against our people in the Gaza Strip,” Qureia was quoted as saying. “U.S.-sponsored talks with Israel are now suspended due to the bloody scene that the Gaza Strip is witnessing.” (more…)

Whatever their original intentions, the occupation created its own logic of suppression, first breeding discontent and then rebellion. It doesn’t matter whether that rebellion takes the form of stone-throwing or rocket launching; the Israeli response will always be wildly disproportionate, further damning the prospect for rational solutions. And uncritically underwriting that disproportionate Israeli response to any and all dissent will be the United States, the supplier of those F-16s doing so much damage in Gaza today. (more…)

“Many people died while they were waiting to enter the operating rooms. Some died in the lobby of the hospital waiting to enter the reception area,” said Hussein Ashor, the hospital’s director. “There were not enough beds, so we pulled out the curtains and lay them on the ground, and we put patients on the curtains. The floor of the reception was covered with blood.” (more…)

And so this is an unnecessary, cruel and cynical war — a war that could have been avoided if our leaders had shown courage during the months of the cease-fire to truly work toward creating better lives for people whose only crime is that they live in the south. (more…)

The cease-fire itself was morally dubious and legally asymmetrical. (more…)

Morally dubious and legally asymmetrical? Sounds like the Israeli occupation to me… But Dershowitz would never say that.

Unfortunately, the Palestinians weren’t really ready to take responsibility in Gaza. (more…)

How can they take responsibility when Israel has yet to end the occupation and invades on a daily basis? Besides, when has Israel ever taken responsibility for oppressing the Palestinians these 41 years?

This genius is going back to Stanford to write her lousy memoirs… I can’t wait.

Røde Kors starter i dag på opfordring af danskerne en indsamling til fordel for ofrene i Gaza-konflikten. (more…)

Israel’s highly efficient air assault on Hamas, which began on Saturday, was his first move. Most of Hamas’s security and governmental compounds were turned into rubble and several hundred Hamas fighters were killed. (more…)

Look how Benny Morris manipulates information to praise Israeli aggression. Many of the Hamas policemen killed by Israel are guilty of nothing more than being paid by the Hamas government to control traffic. They are not affiliated with the Qassam brigades and the rocket launching crowd… Many have conflicting political views with Hamas, but in a region without opportunity, they leap at the chance of earning a salary as policemen. Yet, Israel regards all policemen as terrorists and in effect, they regard everyone in Gaza as terrorists. You can almost hear the glee in Morris’s voice as the body count comes in… But this is from a man who condones ethnic cleansing after all.

It is not rational to believe that the Palestinians in the occupied territories will be terrorized by force and violence, by cruelty, by starvation or by slaughter into a docile acceptance of the Israeli occupation. There is no evidence that that could possibly happen and mountains of evidence to the contrary. (more…)

In the run-up to the election, observed Michael Warschawski, a founder of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, “all Israeli leaders are competing over who is the toughest and who is ready to kill more.” (more…)

The following intervention was submitted to the UN Human Rights Council on 30 December 2008:

Dear Member State of the UN Human Rights Council,

Representing the Palestinian human rights community, we write to you with an urgent request for intervention by the UN Human Rights Council to put an end to the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) as a result of the Israeli occupying forces’ ongoing attacks on the Gaza Strip. At least 310 persons, including 37 children, have been killed and more than 1,000 Palestinians have been injured. The civilian population of the occupied Gaza Strip will inevitably continue to suffer heavy losses without the external intervention of the international community; this is confirmed by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s assertion that this is a “war to the bitter end.”

Grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention amounting to war crimes, have been committed, including, willful killing and the extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Furthermore, the continuing collective punishment of the Gaza Strip has left medical services unable to deal with the increasing number of victims. (more…)

But, in the long run, it is difficult to see Hamas not benefiting the same way Hezbollah benefited from the 2006 war. Their aura as resistance fighters can only be strengthened. (more…)

Israel has rejected calls for an immediate temporary ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip after five consecutive days of aerial assault. (more…)

Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah said Saturday that they were prepared to assume control over the Gaza Strip if Israel succeeds in overthrowing the Hamas government. (more…)

The battered Gaza Strip has turned into a giant funeral procession as tens of thousands of people came out to bury the victims of a massive Israeli bombardment of the overcrowded sliver of land. (more…)

“The situation is absolutely disastrous,” U.N. official Christopher Gunness told CNN on Sunday, as a second day of aerial attacks brought the death toll in Gaza close to 300. Hundreds more people have been injured. (more…)

Israel vows to continue mammoth bombing

Israel took extraordinary care to lull Hamas into a sense of complacency ahead of its deadly onslaught of the Gaza Strip, officials and media said on Sunday. Disinformation and secrecy were essential elements that Israel took in the week before the bombardment to coax Palestinians into believing that no major attack was imminent, they said. (more…)

“Seventy policemen were killed there, not all Hamas members,” said S., who opposes Hamas. “And even those who supported Hamas were young men looking for a job, a salary. They wanted to live. And therefore, they died. Seventy in one blow. This assault is not against Hamas. It’s against all of us, the entire nation. And no Palestinian will consent to having his people and his homeland destroyed in this way.” (more…)

I apologize for the lack of activity for the past week on this website; I am currently without a stable internet connection and cursing myself that I am unable to follow Israel’s atrocities more closely. Naturally, I am concerned for my friends suffering this nightmare and I have not managed to be in contact with many of them. One can only imagine what kinds of horrors they are enduring. I have written several rants, but none seemed fit to publish… I have far too many thoughts in my head at the moment.

PCHR condemns in the strongest terms the war waged by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) against the Gaza Strip through a wide scale aerial offensive, which has so far targeted dozens of police headquarters and stations, public and governmental buildings and security sites throughout the Gaza Strip. PCHR calls upon the international community, particularly the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, and international organizations to immediately intervene to stop the killings being committed by IOF in the Gaza Strip, and to put an end to the current unprecedented deterioration in the human rights situation and humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip.

According to initial information available to PCHR, at least 190 Palestinians, many of whom are policemen including Major General Tawfiq Jaber, chief of the Palestinian police in the Gaza Strip, have been killed while they were inside and in the vicinity of police stations. Hundreds of others have been also wounded. Many of the wounded are in critical conditions receiving medical treatment at hospitals in the Gaza Strip, which cannot absorb large numbers of the wounded due to the chronic siege imposed by IOF on the Gaza Strip, which has negatively impacted health conditions and limited the capabilities of hospitals to provide minimum services to the Palestinian civilian population. (more…)

I am off to the U.S. to spend Christmas with my family… so for the next three or four days, I may not be posting. I will try to get back soon, but the posting may be spontaneous and random…

The new year will bring many interesting developments. I will be returning to the Gaza Strip in February (just around the time I finish my Masters thesis) and Ilektra may be moving to Brussels for a traineeship with the European Union.

Stay in touch and have a nice holiday season!

An Israeli infantry patrol crossed into Lebanon and kidnapped two Lebanese citizens from their olive grove near the southern village of Blida on Friday.
The two were only identified as members of the Tarraf family. (more…)

Rick Warren Is Not Change We Can Believe In

British citizens are to be formally advised by the government not to buy property in settlements in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, a move that marks a proactive shift of its position on a core issue of the Middle East conflict. (more…)

“With this ill-considered action, Israel put itself in the company of countries like Burma and North Korea in denying entry to UN human rights experts,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division. “Strongly disagreeing with Professor Falk’s views is no good reason for denying him entry, treating him in a punitive and degrading manner, and refusing to allow him to do his work on behalf of the UN.” (more…)

Last week, a report by the US senate armed services committee involving both Republicans and Democrats said the abuse of detainees in Guantanamo Bay “cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own”. (more…)

President-elect Barack Obama took only a few days after his election victory before tossing his most liberal supporters overboard. While loading up his administration with war-hawks of various stripes, including Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton, he left antiwar activists weeping in their blogs. (more…)

Rights groups B’Tselem and Hamoked released a report last year entitled “Absolute Prohibition: The Torture and Ill-Treatment of Palestinian Detainees” in which they accused the court ruling of “legitimizing severe acts, contrary to international law, which does not acknowledge any exceptions to the prohibition on torture and ill-treatment.” (more…)

But would any inaugural committee say to Jewish Americans, “We’re opening with an anti-Semite but closing the program with a rabbi, so don’t worry”? (more…)

A deadly United States military raid on a house near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan became a new source of tension on Thursday, with the Americans calling it a successful counterterrorism strike and the Afghans saying it left three innocent civilians dead and two wounded, including a 4-year-old boy bitten by an attack dog. (more…)

On Thursday, Dana M. Perino, the White House press secretary, said President Bush had urged the Iraqis “not to overreact, because he was not bothered by the incident, although it’s not appropriate for people to throw shoes at a press conference, at any leader.” (more…)

I disagree—the shoe is the least Bush deserves for the nightmare he unleashed in Iraq. He should have been dodging bricks.

Documents signed in strange places – and crooked deals – are not unusual in the lucrative and clandestine trade in Palestinian-owned land. Another recent challenge to a settler land deal in the town of Hebron involved forged documents, and a third revolved around Israeli businessmen who set up a notary with a prostitute, filmed their encounter, and then blackmailed the man into signing a sales document in Cyprus. (more…)

U.S. military leaders and Pentagon officials have made it clear through public statements and deliberately leaked stories in recent weeks that they plan to violate a central provision of the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement requiring the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops from Iraqi cities by mid-2009 by reclassifying combat troops as support troops. (more…)

Some time before Israelis vote in February, Mr Obama should spell out precisely the sort of peace America envisages: two states sharing Jerusalem, with a border very close to the pre-1967 armistice line, not one that lets Israel keep its settlement blocks deep in the West Bank. Just as Hamas needs to hear that Israel is not going to disappear, so Israel—especially if it elects a Likud government—needs to hear that America will not let it hold those settlements for ever. (more…)

Eighteen months after Hamas evicted Fatah forces from Gaza, the prospects for restoring Palestinian unity are more elusive than ever, with both factions believing that time is on their side, according to a new report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) released Wednesday. (more…)

The Soviets had nearly 400,000 Soviet and Afghan soldiers at their disposal – more than twice what the US and NATO have here – and yet they still failed, he notes. (more…)

Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, has ordered his staff to draw up plans to close the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. (more…)

Muntader is my brother and I know him very well. He does not apologise,” Udai al-Zaidi said. (more…)

Sounds like a childhood regret…

Den irakiske journalist, der kastede sine sko efter præsident Bush, beder om at blive benådet. (more…)

The weeds are already growing rampant at the notorious “Camp X-Ray,” and President-elect Barack Obama plans to shut down the entire detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Now the Pentagon is inviting journalists to tour the camp one last time.

One would imagine a trip to the world’s best-known and most notorious prison could be an unpleasant experience. Everyone knows the horror stories from Guantanamo: how the prisoners were chained on the flight to Cuba, and how they arrived at the camp half-frozen, their eyes blindfolded and completely disoriented. They didn’t know where they were at the time, and many of them are still there today, in the prison where the United States keeps its terror suspects.

A special group recently embarked on a trip to Guantanamo that would prove to be significantly more comfortable. The group met at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in the early morning hours, where a North American Airlines charter flight was already waiting. The destination, with the airport code NBW, well removed from the rule of US constitutional law, is known simply as GTMO in military slang. The boarding pass was first of many amusing souvenirs of the trip. (more…)

We can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding. (more…)

There is almost no international support for sending a peacekeeping force to Somalia as the United States has proposed, the United Nations secretary general said Wednesday. (more…)

After backing the overthrow of Somalia’s government by Ethiopian forces, the United States wants the international community to step in and stabilize the country? Nice one.

Complaints about the corruption, dilution or fundamental impiety of Christmas have been made for centuries. The Puritans so mistrusted the holiday that its celebration was outlawed in 17th-century Boston. Around the same time, the German theologian Paul Ernst Jablonski asserted that Christmas amounted to a paganization of the authentic faith because the date, Dec. 25, had been appropriated from a festival for a Roman solar god. (more…)

“Mashaal can’t tolerate the fact that other Hamas leaders are stealing the show,” the sources said. “Ismail Haniyeh, for example, is much more popular among the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip than Mashaal.” (more…)

This is what has happened to the fight against Israeli occupation—it has become power struggle for control of Gaza.

If only Bush had stuck to his acting career.

Le lancer de chaussures du journaliste Mountazer Al-Zaïdi sur George Bush est d’ores et déjà qualifié de “moment historique” sur la blogosphère irakienne. Les vidéos de la séquence, les parodies et les jeux circulent de site en site et des blogueurs qui n’avaient pas posté depuis longtemps se sont remis à l’ouvrage. (more…)

“We demand that the settlement expansion stop,” he said, adding that settlements distance the opportunities for a just and comprehensive peace. (more…)

The United Nations has halted the distribution of food aid in the Gaza Strip after its stocks of wheat flour ran out.

The UN Relief and Works Agency said on Thursday that “irregular border access” meant deliveries had been unable to reach the improverished territory, where about 750,000 people depend on food assistance. (more…)

Recent winners have included Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the American soldier and the online public. (more…)

Do I really need to comment on this? Putin and the American solidier…?

Over the last eight years, Cheney’s scowling visage has been the more true and honest face of the Bush administration. Unlike Bush, when discussing the national security policies of the US Cheney rarely bothered with transparently disingenuous appeals to democracy-building, dealing instead in appeals to fear and raw assertions of power. (more…)

Obama had thousands of clergy to choose from, and the choice of Warren is not only a slap in the face to progressive ministers toiling on the front lines of advocacy and service, but a bow to the continuing influence of the religious right in American politics. Warren vocally opposes gay marriage, does not believe in evolution, has compared abortion to the Holocaust and backed the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (more…)

George W. Bush. US president: January 20, 2001 – January 19, 2009. Born of privilege. Unimpressive by every measure. A history of underachievement. Chosen by big money. Arranged through electoral fraud. Installed by the Supreme Court. (more…)

It is not clear how the US might replace Blackwater. (more…)

Is is just so difficult to find eager young killers willing to work for a paltry six-figure income these day.

I mean, the people of Somalia deserve better than this. (more…)

A city judge in Georgia has in the past eight days barred two Muslim women wearing Islamic headscarves from entering his courtroom, jailing one, and prompting an inquiry from the civil rights office at the US department of justice. (more…)

The legislative session became so tumultuous that it prompted the speaker of Parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, to announce his resignation, according to The Associated Press. (more…)

An Israeli military court sentenced Dr. Aziz Dweik, the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) Speaker, to three years in prison, two years of suspended imprisonment, and a New Israel Shekel 6,000 (USD 1,500) bail. Israeli Occupation Forces arrested Dr. Dweik on Saturday 6 August 2006 in the midst of a campaign of arrests that targeted dozens of ministers and elected officials. On 29 June 2006 alone, IOF arrested eight ministers and 21 PLC members. (more…)

A Palestinian man has been killed and two others injured in an Israeli air raid on the town of Beit Lahiya, Gazan medics have said. (more…)

The controversial American private security contractor Blackwater Worldwide, which was involved in the shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians last year, should be dismissed by the US Government, an advisory panel to the State Department said yesterday. (more…)

An Israeli court has acquitted Julian Soufir despite confessing to the murder of the Arab Jerusalemite Tayseer Karki, 35, with a knife almost a year and a half ago. (more…)

Two combat soldiers in the haredi infantry unit of the Nahal Brigade were arrested this week on suspicion of having beaten a Palestinian policeman at a checkpoint, Ynet discovered Monday. (more…)

QUESTION: But he wasn’t a guest. We’re occupiers.

PERINO: No, we’re not. We are absolutely a guest. (more…)

The Shoe Heard Round the World

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 Council on Foreign Relations 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.” (more…)

Iraqis doubt U.S. can, or will, honor withdrawal dates (more…)

U.S. military operations, including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have cost $904 billion since 2001 and could top $1.7 trillion by 2018, even with big cuts in overseas troop deployments, a report said on Monday. (more…)

Torture and other forms of abuse in Iraqi detention facilities, frequently to elicit confessions in early stages of detention, are well documented. The reliance on confessions in the court’s proceedings, coupled with the absence of physical or other corroborating evidence, raises the possibility of serious miscarriages of justice. In at least 10 investigative hearings and two trials that Human Rights Watch observed, defendants renounced confessions submitted as evidence. In most of those cases, the defendants said they had been physically abused or threatened by interrogators. (more…)

Download the full report in PDF.

Thousands of Iraqis on Monday demanded the release of Muntazer al-Zaydi, the journalist who threw his shoes at US President George W. Bush. (more…)

Yet they have been declining for many years. Some have been broken up and sold as more expensive private goods, especially for the well-to do – bottled water, private schools, security guards, and health clubs, for example. Others, like clean air, have fallen prey to deregulation. Others have been wacked by budget axes; the current recession is forcing states and locales to axe even more. Still others, such as universal health care and pre-schools, never fully emerged to begin with. (more…)

Both shoes missed their target – one went high, and the president ducked the other – and Bush did his best to laugh the whole incident off. “I saw his sole,” he joked. But Bush is unlikely to escape the image of a US president cowering behind a lectern watched by an unflinching Maliki. The humiliating scene is already a YouTube hit. (more…)

The brother of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at US President George W Bush has said that the reporter has been beaten in custody. (more…)

I’m sure this is what Bush intended when he promised to bring democracy to Iraq. Ah, freedom smells great!

But the lowly shoe and the Iraqi who threw both of his at President Bush, with widely admired aim, were embraced around the Arab world on Monday as symbols of rage at a still unpopular war. (more…)