China will oppose discussing the Goldstone report at the United Nations Security Council, Chinese members of parliament told a delegation of visiting Israeli officials in Beijing on Wednesday. (full article…)

“What peace process are they talking about? There isn’t one. The Israeli foreign minister doesn’t want one at all.” (full article…)

I sincerely believed that because of my own record and the terms of the mission’s mandate we would receive the cooperation of the Israeli government. Its refusal to cooperate was a grave error. My plea for cooperation was repeated before and during the investigation and it sits, plain as day, in the appendices of the Gaza report for those who actually bother to read it. (full article…)

For those who criticize the Goldstone report for not addressing Sderot in detail, just remember that it was the Israeli government that denied Goldstone access and would not allow him to investigate Palestinian rocket attacks…

A U.N. investigation into explosions in south Lebanon indicated on Sunday that Israel had planted spy devices on Lebanese land in what a senior U.N. official said would be a violation of a ceasefire agreement.

The UNIFIL peacekeeping force in Lebanon said its preliminary probe into two explosions in the south showed they had been caused by the detonation of underground sensor devices.

…

UNIFIL was investigating what had caused the devices to blow up. A Lebanese security official said they appeared to have been detonated by remote control from Israel after their discovery by Lebanese security forces. (full article…)

One of the taboo topics in the American media is how the U.S. Government routinely violates the principles we espouse for, and try to impose on, the rest of the world. We systematically torture Muslims and then cover it up and protect our torturers while preaching accountability and the rule of law; we condemn deprivations of due process while maintaining and expanding lawless prison systems for Muslims; we demand adherence to U.N. dictates and international law while blocking investigations into U.N. reports of war crimes and possible “crimes against humanity” by our allies; we righteously oppose aggression while invading and simultaneously occupying numerous countries, while threatening to attack still more, and arming countries like Israel to the teeth to wage still other attacks, etc. etc. (full article…)

American officials say Washington will likely exercise its veto power if report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza is brought to a Security Council vote. (full article…)

The abstaining countries included: Bosnia, Burkina-Faso, Cameron, Gabon, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Belgium, South Korea, Slovenia and Uruguay. (full article…)

The political echelon in Jerusalem has decided to use the explosion that occurred at the Hezbollah member’s house in Tyre this week to divert international attention from the Gaza war report to be debated in the UN starting Wednesday. Israel is hoping to put the spotlight on Hezbollah’s violation of Resolution 1701 that ended the Second Lebanon War. (full article…)

“We are facing very large challenges. The first is renewing peace talks; they should be renewed without any preconditions,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Likud faction meeting on Monday.
(full article…)

He added, “However, the peace process will not go forward unless the Goldstone Report is dropped. That’s our only precondition, even if in principle we agree that there should be no preconditions…”

One element of the blackmail, which reportedly has been exercised by the Israelis on the Palestinian Authority in order to persuade them not to go forward with consideration of the Goldstone report in Geneva, was a denial of the granting of a license to a second Palestinian cell phone company in the Occupied Territories. (full article…)

How does Obama’s suppression of Israeli war crimes in the Goldstone Report factor into his silly prize?

Stockholm’s foreign minister urges UN human rights council to discuss report probing Gaza war despite expressed reservations as to its credibility (full article…)

A member of President Mahmoud Abbas’ inner circle says the Palestinian leadership made a mistake by suspending action on a Gaza war crimes report . (full article…)

This entire episode makes we wonder if the U.S. is opening a way for Mohammed Dahlan to push Abbas aside.

In a startling shift, the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council dropped its efforts to forward a report accusing Israel of possible war crimes to the Security Council, under pressure from the United States, diplomats said Thursday. (full article…)

It was misleading for the commission to examine only the 13 months from June 2008 to July 2009, she said. Palestinians in Gaza had fired rockets into Israel for eight years. (full article…)

“A culture of impunity in the region has existed for too long,” Goldstone, a former UN war crimes prosecutor, told the UN Human Rights Council.

“The lack of accountability for war crimes and possible war crimes against humanity has reached a crisis point; the ongoing lack of justice is undermining any hope for a successful peace process and reinforcing an environment that fosters violence.” (full article…)

Barack Obama has talked down the importance of sealing a global deal on climate change before the end of the year, world leaders said yesterday. (full article…)

No less demagogic was his attack on the Iranian regime. They shoot demonstrators there, he protested vehemently. As if they don’t do that in our Bil’in and Na’alin.

Then came the kicker: Operation Cast Lead was a pinpoint attack. Israel telephoned thousands of people to tell them to leave their homes. Where to, Mr. Prime Minister? Into the sea? He said the IDF, which killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, exhibited unprecedented restraint. (full article…)

Nonetheless, it was disappointing that the Obama administration felt it had to denounce the report within days of its release, despite Goldstone’s impeccable credentials (former member of South Africa’s Constitutional Court and chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda) and his strong Zionist convictions. Israeli PM Netanyahu hasn’t been doing Obama any favors of late, and the release of the report would have been a golden opportunity for Obama to play a little hardball and remind him that stiffing your principal patron has a price. And the Administration didn’t even have to endorse the report; all they had to do was refrain from criticizing it. (full article…)

Arab states in the United Nations nuclear assembly on Friday won narrow approval of a resolution urging Israel to put all its atomic sites under the world body’s inspection and join the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Israel deplored the measure for singling it out while many of its neighbors remained hostile to its existence, and said it would not cooperate with it. (full article…)

Yeah, poor Israel has been singled out—even though not one of its neighbors has nuclear capabilities. Even if we count Iran, they are at least part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and cooperate with the IAEA. Poor Israel, being singled out like this…

They expected the military operation to be condemned as grossly disproportionate. They expected Israel to be lambasted for not taking sufficient care to avoid civilian casualties. But they never imagined that the report would accuse the Jewish state of intentionally aiming at civilians. (full article…)

In the most recent fighting, the army carried out three air raids and blew up houses in Saada city – under government control – on Friday.

About 87 people died on Wednesday in an air raid at a makeshift camp for displaced persons in Harf Sufyan in Saada.

Navi Pillay, the chief of the UN human rights commission, said in Geneva that an inquiry into the air raid should take place and called the casualty reports “deeply disturbing”. (full article…)

The Economist’s reporting on the Middle East has been declining for the past year, but since when is the newspaper in the practice of apologizing for Israel? This came as quite a shock after years of what I considered to be fairly well-balanced and objective coverage — certainly the best coverage out of the Western mainstream media.

Israel has argued that Hamas fighters endangered civilians by basing themselves around schools, mosques and hospitals. The mission had Hamas’s co-operation, but its fact-finders could detect little or no evidence for this—despite plenty of reports in the public domain to support it. The report does criticise Hamas for firing rockets indiscriminately into Israel and for using the conflict as cover to settle scores with its Palestinian rivals. But its seemingly willful blindness to other evidence makes that look like a dash for political cover. (full article…)

Here the author (who I can only suspect has been hired within the past year) criticizes the Goldstone report for overlooking “plenty of reports in the public domain” which attest to Hamas’ alleged practice of hiding in civilian areas. Which reports? The author doesn’t say. I certainly haven’t come across any such reports. In fact, I have read multiple reports stating precisely the opposite — that there is no evidence Hamas deliberately used civilian areas — which the Goldstone report simply confirms. Also, the author accuses the investigators of “willful blindness to other evidence”—evidence the author then conveniently fails to specify.

The author then attempts to minimize Israeli atrocities by suggesting that we should be grateful they didn’t kill more civilians!

As many as 1,400 people died in the fighting. It is a grisly thought, but if Israel really had wanted to make Palestinian civilians suffer, the toll could have been vastly higher. (full article…)

So because Israel decided against dropping a nuclear bomb, The Economist takes this as evidence that Israel did not intentionally target civilians. Did they read the Goldstone report? In fact, did they read their own reporting at the time?

The, just before concluding with some banal remarks about the future of peace talks, the same article contains this gem:

Israel is pursuing 23 criminal investigations so far into the Gaza operations. It must finish the job. Unlike Syria, say, Israel is a democracy that claims to live by the rule of law. It needs to make its case by moral force as well as by force of arms. (full article…)

What? First of all, The Economist knows very well how Israeli investigations are typically conducted. In the rare case that soldiers (and never the commanders) are found guilty of excessive force or downright sadism, they usually receive ridiculously light sentences which are (more often than not) commuted after only a few months.

Secondly, on the issue of Israeli democracy, The Economist must maintain at least the guise of neutrality. So what if Israel calls itself a democracy? Do we accept this at face value now? Many countries use this term without a scrap of justification in their actions. And I’m positive the Syrian government would certainly claim that it lives “by the rule of law” as the author puts it…

This article is far below the standards I have grown accustomed to in The Economist. I must say, this is a disappointing development.

We have long expressed our very serious concern with the mandate that was given (to Goldstone’s team) by the Human Rights Council prior to our joining the Council, which we viewed as unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable. (full article…)

Strange, the same adjectives have been used to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“The mandate of the Goldstone Commission was one-sided from the outset. The initiative to establish the commission came from the UN Human Rights Council which is known for its routine condemnation of Israel.” (full article…)

“Any comparison of Israel’s fight on terror with recent conflicts in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. immediately shows that Israel holds itself to the highest ethical standard.” (full article…)

“It wasn’t easy [for him],” Nicole Goldstone said. “My father did not expect to see and hear what he saw and heard.” (full article…)

President Shimon Peres said Wednesday that the Goldstone report, which accuses Israel of committing war crimes during its military offensive in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip earlier this year, “makes a mockery of history.” (full article…)

Israel called the Goldstone Commission Report “nauseating” on Tuesday … (more…)

The report, the bulk of which focused on the Israeli violations, said that during the war, Israeli forces engaged in a deliberate policy of collective punishment in furtherance of “an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population” through blockades and the destruction of food, water and sanitation systems of its people.

In one case, armored bulldozers of the Israeli forces systematically flattened the chicken coops of a farm that reportedly supplied 10 percent of the Gazan egg market, killing all 31,000 chickens inside. In another, the forces carried out a strike on a sewage plant wall, sending 200,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into neighboring farmland, the report said. The panel did not find a justifiable reason for the Israelis’ actions in either case. (more…)

The United Nations’ investigation into Israel’s recent massacre in Gaza has now concluded. In general I think the release of their 500+ page report is an important step forward in the process of holding Israel accountable for its horrendous actions earlier this year. Judge Richard Goldstone (whom I met at a talk in San Diego years ago) is a principled man; his South African background makes him acutely aware of racial oppression and his prosecution of war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia must have prepared him for his work in the Middle East. Despite Israeli obstruction and opposition every step of the way, Goldstone pushed ahead and attempted to conduct a professionally thorough investigation.

The report concludes in rather strong terms:

From the facts gathered, the Mission found that the following grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention were committed by Israeli forces in Gaza: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. As grave breaches these acts give rise to individual criminal responsibility. The Mission notes that the use of human shields also constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. (par. 1732)

They go on to make some minor criticism of the treatment of Palestinian detainees by the Israeli military as well as the suppression of critical media outlets within Israel.

More importantly, the team rejects Israeli accusations that Hamas members were “hiding” in civilian areas.

The Mission found no evidence to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or that they forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks. The Mission also found no evidence that members of Palestinian armed groups engaged in combat in civilian dress. Although in the one incident of an Israeli attack on a mosque it investigated the Mission found that there was no indication that that mosque was used for military purposes or to shield military activities, the Mission cannot exclude that this might have occurred in other cases. (par. 1750)

Although Judge Goldstone has predicted that no prosecutions will take place for Israeli crimes, one hopes that if Israel refuses to investigate the allegations this report makes, that the International Criminal Court (ICC) will press ahead with their own investigation. There is a possibility this may happen… which would be a sign of great progress for that body. Although Israel is not a member of the ICC, I think it would be an important step towards greater jurisdiction for the court. Rather than punishing only the petty dictators or génocidaires of various 3rd world countries, the ICC could demonstrate that the leaders of the rich world are not entirely immune from the repercussions of their murderous romps. And Zionists are afraid of this:

Attorney Michael Sefarad, who specializes in human rights international law, was more cautious: “The Goldstone report is highly unusual, since it states Israel’s inquests into the operation were unworthy. The bottom line is that this report brings us one step closer to seeing foreign courts hear war crimes cases involving Israeli officials.” (more…)

On a final note, it should be said that while the report does criticize Palestinian rocket attacks targeting civilian areas, this issue takes a very minor role in the report. Not in this case, but I think too often the United Nations (and the Western media) attempts to apply flimsy standards of parity between Israeli and Palestinian actions. Sure, rocket attacks are war crimes… but there can be no serious comparison between the crimes of the occupant and the crimes of the occupied [Norman Finkelstein discussed the matter with Amy Goodman the other day]. Besides the clear disparity in economic and infrastructural terms, the occupation is the single greatest source of violence relevant to the conflict. Israel’s ongoing economic/military siege and the near-daily invasion of Palestinian land does not excuse rocket attacks, but neither does it put them on equal footing. I understand the need for this universality under international law, but realistically we would never dream of arguing that the participants in the Warsaw ghetto uprising were equally culpable for war crimes as were the Nazis during WWII.

Download the full report here.

“It is clear that the (rockets) were fired from an area located south of the Litani River in violation of UN Resolution 1701.” (more…)

You can download the 2009 Arab Human Development Report here – but if you do, I suggest that you spend more time reading it that the correspondents of Ha’aretz apparently did. I came across an editorial entitled, “It’s a sorry plight to be a citizen in many Arab states”—a self-styled distillation of the report’s findings… Yet while the report spent most of it’s time addressing the problems of human security in Iraq, Somalia and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Zvi Bar’el of Ha’aretz includes only the following token reference to the conditions in Palestine:

The report notes that during the past seven years some 78,000 homes were demolished or damaged in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The infrastructure suffered damage to the tune of $728 million. Economic growth during those years was negative, standing at minus 2.9 percent annually. About a fourth of the workforce in the territories is unemployed. Yearly per capita income stabilized at $1,178 in 2007, about a third less than in the peak year of 1999. (more…)

So who’s behind these terrible conditions? There’s no mention of Israel’s responsibility for any (let alone all) of this. In fact, there’s no mention of Israel in the entire article! Turning to the actual report, it quickly becomes clear why this is. Israel is identified again and again in the report as the primary cause of Palestine’s poor education, miserable infrastructure and generally awful humanitarian conditions. Just a few of the points that Ha’aretz was willing to ignore:

>>> “In … the Occupied Palestinian Territory … people’s basic rights to self-determination and peace have been forcibly annulled. They face threats to their lives, freedom, livelihoods, education, nutrition, health and physical environment from outside forces whose presence wreaks institutional, structural and material violence on them every day” (p. 14).

>>> “Palestinian farmers suffer because Israeli settlers monopolize most ground water sources” (p. 49).

>>> “Food conditions have deteriorated for most Palestinians, but those in Gaza are particularly affected as a result of Israeli restrictions on the movement of goods and persons and as a result of the blockade (p. 126).

>>> “Most threats to Palestinian human security come from Israeli forces” (p. 170).

>>> “Forty one years of occupation, as well as the expansion of Israeli settlements, have prevented Palestinians from controlling their own affairs, and render illusory any notion of the economy as a means of meeting their most basic needs” (p. 177).

>>> “A 2003 World Bank report on the state of the Palestinian economy two years after the Al Aqsa intifada noted a sharp decline in all major economic indicators … The report added that the chief cause of the Palestinian crisis was
Israel’s blockade” (p. 178).

>>> “The Palestinians have paid a heavy price for exercising their democratic
rights via the ballot box” as Israeli punishment for electing Hamas has taken the form of “a total blockade, obstructing all communication with the outside world for whatever purpose” (p. 179).

>>> “In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the absence of a budget in 2006 and the Western boycott of the Palestinian government caused an acute educational crisis” (p. 182).

Fighting between Islamist militias and government-aligned forces has caused 204,000 people to flee Mogadishu since May and forced the closure of some of the Somali capital’s few health centres, the UN refugee agency said today. (more…)

Israel has pledged to pay compensation for material damage it caused by shelling UN property during its Gaza offensive more than six months ago, a UN official said on Friday. (more…)

“Such a pattern of continuing blockade under these conditions amounts to such a serious violation of the Geneva Conventions as to constitute a continuing crime against humanity,” Falk said in a statement released in Geneva. (more…)

The report, ‘Shackling as a Form of Torture and Abuse’, based on the evidence of over 500 prisoners, was released in advance of the UN International Day in Support of Torture Victims Friday, Jun. 26. It follows a report published in May by the UN Committee Against Torture that had criticised the continued mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners by Israel. The UN report also condemned Israel’s refusal to allow access to a secret detention centre known only as ‘Facility 1391′. (more…)

“People who order or inflict torture cannot be exonerated, and the roles of certain lawyers, as well as doctors who have attended torture sessions, should also be scrutinized,” Pillay, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement dedicated to victims of torture. (more…)

With a population of around 20,800, Palau is one of the world’s least-populated countries. It was a US trust territory until it gained independence in 1994 and still maintains close ties to the US, as well as relying significantly on American aid. (more…)

Makes you wonder why Palau always sides with Israel and the U.S. in the U.N. General Assembly against virtually all other member countries.

Israel has refused to cooperate with investigation of its conduct during an offensive on Gaza earlier this year, depriving Judge Richard Goldstone and his team access to military sources and victims of ongoing rocket attacks. (more…)

Israel consistently complains that the UN fails to investigate rocket attacks against Israeli civilians while it unduly criticizes the Jewish state—yet now it comes out that Israel is blocking these investigations!

Such investigations, the summary states, should be carried out by an “impartial inquiry mandated, and adequately resourced, to investigate allegations of violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza and southern Israel by the [Israeli army] and by Hamas and other Palestinian militants.”

The board of inquiry corroborated the already existing masses of evidence collected by local and international human rights organizations, eyewitness accounts from UN and other humanitarian personnel, and the legal examination by the distinguished (but vilified by Israel and the US) UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk.

And yet none of this death and destruction, not the use of white phosphorus in flagrant violation of international law, not even against the UN (if that is all the secretary-general cares about) merited any further examination. (more…)

When the 192-nation General Assembly meets next week to elect 18 new members to the Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC), most of the candidates will win their seats without breaking a political sweat because of the almost entirely non-competitive nature of the vote. (more…)

For Ban [Ki-Moon], then, Israeli bombing is good — although he would like perhaps to see a little bit less. But, in tune with his political masters, he considers Palestinians to have no right to any form of self-defense against the Israeli occupation, constant aggression and the Israeli, internationally-supported, deadly siege, with whatever means they have at their disposal. (more…)

The country’s gates were closed to the UN fact-finding mission headed by Jewish South African Richard Goldstone, as if it were Zimbabwe or North Korea, as if it had much to hide. The president brusquely rebuked the UN’s Ban Ki-moon and suggested he visits Auschwitz, until eventually the secretary general was forced to shrink from supporting his organization’s damning report.

Anyone who dared investigate and report was branded anti-Semitic. (more…)

Only 13% of the Bethlehem area is under the control of the Palestinian Authority – a new report released by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Thursday said. (more…)

But in a covering letter attached to his own 27-page summary of the report, leaked last night, the secretary-general bluntly rejected [the UN report's] recommendations for further investigations into whether Israel had breached international law during the offensive, including by its use of white phosphorus. (more…)

In Nu’man, one of the villages the UN says is “living in limbo”, the situation is particularly dire. The village is surrounded on three sides by Israel’s West Bank barrier and on another by the Israeli settlement of Har Homa. The village entrance is blocked by an Israeli checkpoint to anyone other than Nu’man residents. Permits are not given for new homes in the village, and the younger generation is being forced out. Israel annexed Nu’man to Jerusalem after the 1967 war, but never gave its people Jerusalem residency. (more…)

Countless fruit groves across the Gaza Strip are now gone, entire farms bulldozed. The remains of thousands of destroyed homes emit toxic asbestos, while dilapidated infrastructure dumps raw sewage into the Mediterranean Sea. An already deepening environmental crisis in the besieged Gaza Strip has been further compounded by the recent war. (more…)

I’m sure you’ll hear Western “liberal intellectuals” lament the environmental devastation in Gaza as they wax poetic over Ethan Bronner’s description of Israel’s “anguished” killing of Palestinian civilians. Whereas civilian deaths fail to animate these people, perhaps a fashionable topic like environmental devastation will inspire some indignance.

The UN said it was particularly concerned about areas facing mass demolition, including Bustan in Silwan, just south of the old city, where the threatened destruction of 90 houses would lead to the displacement of 1,000 Palestinians. (more…)

The demand for the establishment of a Palestinian state, speaking of the recent Durban II conference, is another type of anti-Semitic trick against us. With all the giant states in the Middle East, it is the Jewish State that is required to share with the Palestinians the little territory that we have. (more…)

Environmental hazards in the Gaza Strip, such as sewage contamination, have intensfied since Israel’s recent war on Hamas there because even basic infrastructure repairs are stalled by an ongoing border blockade of the territory, the UN’s environment chief said Tuesday. (more…)

The people living in these housing units, belonging to the al-Ghawe and Hanun families, are due to be forcibly removed from their homes this week, as the papers from the Israeli court they were served with are valid between 15 and 22 March. The courts have justified these evictions by saying that the land that the houses are built on is disputed. Yet, the houses were built under a joint construction project by the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956, 11 years before Israel occupied East Jerusalem. (more…)

The UNHCR says that 4.7 million Iraqis have left their homes since the war began, up from 3.8 million two years ago. Iraqis are the leading nationality seeking asylum in Europe. (more…)

On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.

That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee. (more…)

If there is a single act that characterizes the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation, it is waiting: waiting in lines to pass through the hundreds of checkpoints scattered across the West Bank, waiting for Israel to issue an identification card, waiting for permission to travel to the next village or out of the country, waiting for loved ones languishing in Israeli prisons to be released — waiting for peace, waiting for justice.

And for nearly two months, I found myself sharing the experience of waiting — for Israel to allow me into Gaza.

Last year, I spent an extended period of time in Gaza working with the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), helping them to document human rights abuses in the occupied territories. But the abuses I documented then now seem tame in comparison to the recent heights of atrocity Gaza has endured.
(more…)

Israel Defense Forces soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group of UN human rights experts said Monday. (more…)

Report: Israel dropped from new Durban II draft

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited the Gaza Strip last week, called for a “full investigation,” Amnesty International is accusing Israel of “war crimes,” and Louis Michel, the EU’s commissioner for aid to developing countries, says: “It is evident that Israel does not respect international humanitarian law.” (more…)

Schools in the Gaza Strip operated by the United Nations have reopened for the first time since the Israeli offensive against Hamas militants. (more…)

The media continued to make excuses around the Israeli operations in Gaza. What was striking was the attacks on the United Nations facilities, which under other circumstances would have brought outrage in the major media in the United States; certainly if Hamas had accidentally hit a United Nations facility, there would have been charges of atrocities. But each of these attacks, on the civilian populations, on the United Nations, were treated again and again as simply collateral damage, as simply one of the unfortunate outcomes of any military conflict. There was no background on what was going on. There was very little attention to the Vanity Fair piece that described the coup that the United States, Israel, and the Fatah warlord had been planning back in 2006. (more…)

Eighteen-year-old Mona Al-Ashkar says she did not immediately know the first explosion at the United Nations (UN) school in Beit Lahiya had blown her left leg off. There was smoke, then chaos, then the pain and disbelief set in once she realised it was gone – completely severed by the weapon that hit her. (more…)

Despite subsequent probes by the UN and the IDF, which found that there had been no gunmen within the school compound hit by an IDF tank shell that killed up to 40 civilians, the major Hebrew dailies didn’t cover the probes in their news pages. (more…)

“Judicially speaking,” Nowak told the German broadcaster ZDF, “the United States has a clear obligation” to prosecute Rumsfeld and Bush for ordering interrogation methods at Guantanamo that contravened a UN convention on torture.” He added that there were publicly available documents “that prove that these methods of interrogation were intentionally ordered by Rumsfeld.” (more…)

Asked about the “most outrageous” incident he had witnessed, Ging said: “The dead children.” (more…)

UN chief Ban Ki-Moon is apparently “heartbroken” and “grieved” over the Israeli massacre in Gaza, but the rockets in his opinion are “appalling and unacceptable”.

1300 dead over three weeks is “heartbreaking”; four dead from rocket-fire during the same period is “unacceptable”. Yep, that just about sums up Ki-Moon’s usefulness… Pathetic.

Among those who opposed the resolution were the United States and Israel. (more…)

Chris Gunness, an UNRWA spokesman, said that the building had been used to shelter hundreds of people fleeing Israel’s 20-day offensive in Gaza. He said that pallets with supplies desperately needed by Palestinians in Gaza were on fire.

“What more stark symbolism do you need?” he said. “You can’t put out white phosphorus with traditional methods such as fire extinguishers. You need sand, we don’t have sand.” (more…)

The headquarters of the UN refugee agency and a hospital in Gaza were on fire today after being struck by Israeli artillery, injuring several people, a UN spokesman and witnesses said. (more…)

In the face of U.S. denials, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office confirmed Wednesday that he personally intervened to ensure that the U.S. abstained from voting on UN Security Council Resolution 1860 last week. According to Olmert, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forced to abstain from voting on the resolution, which called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and which she was largely responsible for authoring and putting together. (more…)

His itinerary does not include a stop in Gaza because of the ongoing conflict. “I really wanted to visit Gaza at this time to share their sufferings,” he told reporters in Egypt, but said it was impossible because of the current circumstances. (more…)

“On an inter-governmental level, the war crimes process is essentially subject to geopolitical control, which means in practice that the criminal wrongdoing of the most powerful [the U.S. government] and its closest friends [Israel] get a free pass,” Richard Falk, a professor of international law and a U.N. human rights expert, told IPS.

Despite widespread condemnation, this practice of “geopolitical impunity” is likely to shield Israel from formal scrutiny with respect to the alleged crimes of war and crimes against humanity associated with its military operations in Gaza since Dec. 27, he added. (more…)

The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. (more…)

Israeli snipers killed two Palestinian aid workers who were reportedly trying to retrieve the body of a colleague who had been killed in a previous Israeli attack. The killings reportedly came during the three-hour pause to the bombing agreed to by Israel to allow humanitarian relief. (more…)

Last week, an Israeli attack outside a UN school killed nearly 40 people. Israel and Palestinian witnesses said militants carried out an attack from the area moments earlier. But it is Israeli fire, Israeli weapons and Israeli military that do the aiming – and Palestinian women and children being killed at a rate that is sickening world opinion, if not yet world leaders. (more…)

I write the following without the slightest doubt: we’ll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We’ll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we’ll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn’t. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians. (more…)

Israel continued its assault on Hamas forces in Gaza Friday, despite the passage of a UN Security Council resolution calling for “an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire.” (more…)

A United Nations report that Israel ordered civilians into a building and then shelled it marks yet more evidence of widespread targeting of civilians in the Gaza assault. (more…)

The people in the compound, over 1,300 people—by the way, some of those, many of them had been told by the Israeli army to leave their houses and move to a safe place. Of course, Gaza is unique in being a war with a fence around it. But they nonetheless came—frightened, terrified, vulnerable—to our center. They were coming to what they thought was a neutral United Nations shelter, and then the rest is history, forty people killed. (more…)

Christopher Gunness of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said the organization is 99.9 percent certain there were no militants or military activity in its school. (more…)

“It’s quite a horrific situation here. . . . The casualty numbers are mounting,” said Ging. “The innocent people of Gaza want and are entitled to accountability. (more…)