Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumNot about tunnels: Israeli tanks take aim at central Gaza
http://972mag.com/not-about-tunnels-israeli-tanks-take-aim-at-central-gaza/94582/A colleague in Gaza City’s Tal el Hawa neighborhood reported before dawn this morning that Israeli tank shells were falling all around the apartment building where he and his wife were hunkered in a hallway, contemplating where they could flee come sunrise. Between them and the Mediterranean sea to their west are fewer kilometers than those separating them from Shejaeiya to the east, where days earlier, Israeli tanks had reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble.
“They’re doing to us like they did to Shejaeiya,” my colleague said. Although the sun has barely risen in Gaza and the damage not yet fully surveyed, by all accounts, last night’s bombardment was the fiercest yet in central Gaza—and this time it came from tanks, too.
I strain to grasp the tactic. Hadn’t Benjamin Netanyahu, just hours earlier, forecast further violence by vowing to destroy Hamas tunnels? Never mind that the tunnels had only recently figured into his rationale for what Germany’s largest-circulation daily, Sueddeutsche Seitung, called the “Gaza-krieg.” If “destroying tunnels” was Netanyahu’s casus belli, what on earth were Israeli tanks doing so close to Gaza City, in the heart of the Strip?
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oberliner
(58,724 posts)Is that the same as 972mag dumping?
R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)How was your convalescence?
4now
(1,596 posts)
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)of this conflict with over 125 dead, the power station knocked and Israel claims to hit Haniya's private residence
had coverage of some of this, just what we saw was bad enough. Along with supplies the palestinians need a lot of xanax to calm their nerves.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)For the third time in five years, Israel is engaging in a large-scale assault on the Gaza Strip. In three weeks of indiscriminate bombardment, it has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians and injured more than 6,000, the vast majority of them civilians, and an appalling number children, who make up most of Gaza’s population, and who, even when not physically maimed, have been terrorized in their hundreds of thousands. Forty-seven Israelis — almost all of them soldiers — have been killed in turn.
On top of the casualty figures, the scale of material devastation is enormous. The UN estimates that the homes of more than 3,600 families have been heavily damaged or totally destroyed, leaving 22,000 people homeless. Israel claims that it has warned people to flee; more than 200,000 have done so, which would be reckoned a human calamity in Chicago or London but, happening in Gaza, raises scarcely an eyebrow around the world. According to the UN, however, Israel has blanketed almost half of the territory with such warnings, and it has refused to let people out of Gaza to seek shelter, so in fact terrified families have essentially nowhere to go, and have been cut down by Israeli shrapnel and flechette darts when they flee. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are now effectively cut off from water, sewage and electrical services — in a modern urban environment, in the middle of a hot Mediterranean summer.
All of this, we are relentlessly told by Israel’s once well-oiled but nowadays creaking and spluttering propaganda machine, is to prevent rocket attacks into Israel. Time and time again, in 2008-9, in 2012 and again now, it has meticulously been documented that the surest way to prevent rocket attacks on Israel is for Israel itself to abide by ceasefire obligations that, each time, it disregards. Time and time again, however, Israel and its dwindling band of supporters in Europe and the U.S. weave tangled webs of hopelessly convoluted and mendacious distortions of simple chronology, vainly attempting to reverse the relationship of cause and effect, and to rewrite the sequence of events on the fly.
The current flareup, as on previous occasions, is the direct result not of the rocket attacks about which we have heard so much but rather of massive Israeli provocations: in this case, the extraordinary intensification of Israeli harassment of Palestinians in the West Bank, involving the shooting in cold blood of unarmed civilians — including children — and the arbitrary arrest and detention, over a two-week stretch, of almost a thousand Palestinians on the flimsy pretext that they were somehow involved in the kidnap of three young Israeli settlers whom the government knew (though it cynically used press censorship to withhold the news from its public) to have been murdered within hours. The West Bank violence culminated in the kidnapping and burning alive of a Palestinian teenager by Jewish activists whipped into a frenzy by their own government, which finally, by way of relief, turned to Gaza once again as a convenient outlet for Israeli anger and frustration, Hamas having provided by then the necessary pretext in the form of all-too-predictable rocket attacks in response to the dramatic Israeli escalation in the West Bank.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/28938042-452/israel-rewrites-history-on-the-fly.html#.U9gQrYBdXtg
bemildred
(90,061 posts)At 12:30 pm today, a few dozen people laid down in the street at the intersection of 43rd Street and Second Avenue, stopping traffic from reaching the 42nd Street block housing the Israeli Consulate. Around them, a hundred or so people chanted from the sidewalks for the end of the occupation and the slaughter in Gaza. The writer Norman Finkelstein, a fierce critic of both Israel and of the BDS movement, had called the protest the day before. “A lot of people feel that going to a demonstration every three days doesn’t rise to the occasion, the immensity of the horror,” he told me. He noted that the Israeli bombing of Gaza is now in its twenty-first day, “which means it’s one day short of Cast Lead,” the assault on Gaza that began at the end of 2008. And there is no sign that this war is going to stop anytime soon.
The action didn’t last long. After issuing a few warnings for the demonstrators to move, the police swooped in, handcuffing people and carrying those who let their bodies go limp. Traffic was stopped for, at most, twenty minutes. Still, it didn’t seem like a futile effort, because this is a moment when it’s particularly important to break through the illusion, which pervades our politics, that American support for Israel and its war in Gaza is unshakable.
Already, there are anecdotal signs that conventional New York opinion, which tends to be liberal on everything except Palestine, is starting to shift. “If Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television then he should stop killing so many of them,” wrote Benjamin Wallace-Wells in a piece on New York magazine’s website last week, a sentiment that would have been hard to imagine coming from that publication a few years ago. Today, the magazine’s DC columnist Jonathan Chait, an occasionally hawkish veteran of The New Republic, has a post titled, “Why I Have Become Less Pro-Israel.” According to a recent CNN poll, while a majority of Americans continue to support Israel, 38 percent have an unfavorable opinion of the country, up fourteen points since February.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/180808/why-it-matters-norman-finkelstein-just-got-arrested-outside-israeli-consulate
bemildred
(90,061 posts)When they reached Gaza, the three shipments were received by the Palestinian Red Crescent.
"We have received medicine supplies from the state of Turkey," Safaa Hawar, who is responsible for warehouses at the Palestinian Red Crescent, told Anadolu Agency.
She said the supplies included antibiotics, surgery requirements, and medicines containing Penicillin.
Hawar added that the Turkish shipments arrived to Gaza through the Karam Abu Salem crossing in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
http://en.apa.az/news/214526
bemildred
(90,061 posts)GAZA/JERUSALEM: Israel knocked out Gaza's only power plant and pounded dozens of other high-profile targets on Tuesday, while Egyptian mediators prepared a revised proposal for halting its war with Islamist guerrillas in the enclave.
Israel's Channel Two TV said progress was being made on such a deal in Cairo, where a Palestinian delegation is expected later on Tuesday, although the station retracted an earlier report that a truce had already been provisionally agreed.
Health officials said at least 85 Palestinians died in some of heaviest bombardments from air, sea and land since Israel's offensive began on July 8 in response to rocket salvoes fired by Gaza's dominant Hamas Islamists and their guerrilla allies.
Local hospital officials put the total number of Palestinian dead in the conflict at 1,200, most of them civilians. On the Israeli side, 53 soldiers and three civilians have been killed.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/israel-intensifies-gaza-assault-egypt
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Chile recalled its ambassador to Israel for questioning on Tuesday, in a demonstration of opposition to Israel’s military action in Gaza, the Santiago Times reports.
“In the face of intensifying Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip, the government of Chile — in coordination with other administrations in the region — has resolved to recall the Chilean ambassador in Tel Aviv, Jorge Montero, to Santiago for consultations,” said a statement released by the Foreign Ministry.
According to the Santiago Times , on July 12, the Senate voted unanimously to request that President Michelle Bachelet withdraw Montero from Israel. On Sunday, Sen. Alejandro Navarro renewed calls for Montero’s recall, claiming his presence in Israel made Chile “complicit in the savagery and war crimes” of Israeli military action.
“Chile observes with great concern and disappointment that [Israeli] military operations — which at this stage constitute a collective punishment of the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza — do not respect the fundamental norms of international humanitarian law as demonstrated by the more than 1000 victims, including women and children, as well as attacks on schools and hospitals,” the foreign ministry’s statement continued.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/183499
bemildred
(90,061 posts)GAZA CITY — Israel’s assault on Gaza has hit a new level of intensity as its navy, artillery, drones and F16s rain fire on residents across the besieged strip.
As the dust cleared this morning after a night of bombardment that felt as if it would never end, Gaza’s main power plant was out of commission and the already brittle civilian infrastructure lay in shards. The Gaza City port had been bombed and the finance ministry was flattened. Tens of thousands more people had fled their homes as Israeli flares lit up the night sky, and shells and rockets pounded residences, businesses and government buildings. By Tuesday afternoon over 100 more Gazans had been added to the list of more than 1,000 who had died earlier in what Israel calls Operation Protective Edge.
Although the stated aim of Israel’s offensive is to end the threat of rockets and missiles launched from Gaza, and to destroy the system of underground tunnels Hamas has built as part of a guerrilla campaign, it is civilians that have mostly been killed or had their homes, businesses and communities obliterated. Few in Gaza will see a campaign that has now targeted civilian infrastructure as anything less than collective punishment for having a leadership that fights back.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/29/israel-s-escalating-offensive-is-tearing-down-gaza-s-infrastructure.html