Gaza (2008-2009)

END THE SAVAGE ISRAELI ASSAULT ON GAZA (2008-2009)

 

After a week long air, naval and artillery attack on the besieged population of Gaza, Israel then initiated a ground attack. This was done with the complicity of the Bush administration that had failed to achieve any progress toward peace during its eight years in office.

Israel’s savage military assault had worsened the humanitarian catastrophe that was created by Israel’s long siege of the territory. Medicines and other essential supplies were in extremely short supply. In the cold of winter, under merciless bombardment, Palestinians were suffering from lack of food, heat, electricity and water.

The Israeli assault on Gaza, ironically coincided with Israel’s celebration of the end of Hanukkah, resulted in the murder of 1,424 (of which 288 were children and 121 were woman) Palestinians and over 5,303 ( of which 1,606 were children and 828 were women) injured. Because of the mass casualties, which were overwhelmingly civilian, the rudimentary hospitals in Gaza were overwhelmed. Due to lack of space, physicians had to complete complex medical procedures on the floors of hospitals. Surgeries were being completed without anesthesia or painkillers.

Israel claimed that it had only been targeting Hamas forces. This was a lie. Israel’s extremist Jewish forces killed, injured, dismembered and disfigured thousands of civilians. Mosques, universities, apartment complexes and government buildings – all owned by the Palestinian people and not Hamas – were destroyed. Israel even bombed schools the United Nations had set up as shelters for civilians; this after the United Nations had provided the coordinates of the schools so that they would not be attacked. Countless civilians, mainly children and women have been killed and injured. The main reason that Israel continued to prevent foreign journalists from entering Gaza was to hide the nature and extent of its atrocities from the world.

Even those who the Israeli government categorizes as “Hamas forces” were often innocent civilians. In the first day of its attack, Israel massacred nearly 100 police cadets attending their own graduation. These civilian police were simply seeking jobs to enable them to feed their families. They were not Hamas operatives. They were recruited to enforce traffic laws and minor criminal matters. Living in Gaza – under Hamas government rule – was simply their destiny. Being slaughtered by Israel’s extremist leaders using U.S. supplied F-16 jet fighters was a willful, planned atrocity.

Gaza is a small, squalid territory, less than 140 square miles. It is twenty-five miles long and between four and seven and a half miles wide. Populated by over 1.5 million people, fifty percent of whom are children, it is one of the most densely populated places on earth. It did not become this way by accident. Nearly 80% of the Palestinians residing in Gaza are refugees. They became refugees in 1948, at the hands of militant Jewish terrorists who ethnically cleansed Palestinians from their lands in preparation for the creation of Israel. Palestinians who were expelled from their homes, or who fled the massacres and bloodshed perpetrated by militant Jewish forces, now reside in Gaza.

For over sixty years, successive Israeli governments – in violation of international law – have prevented surviving Palestinians and their descendents from returning to their homes, farms, orchards, villages and towns in what is now Israel. Palestinians want to return to their homes but they are prevented from doing so by Israel. Successive U.S. governments has willfully failed to enforce international laws and United Nations resolutions that preserve Palestinian rights.

Why have the Palestinians not been allowed to return to their homes? It is simply because they are not Jews. This discriminatory policy is enshrined in Israeli law.

It is ironic that Israel and its supporters – who accuse Hamas of being intolerant religious fanatics – justify their crimes against Palestinians as being the fulfillment of what they believe to be God’s promise to Jews. God, we are supposed to believe, would accept Israel’s ethnic cleansing, theft of land and murder of innocents.

It is even more hypocritical for Israel and its propagandists to accuse Hamas of working to destroy Israel when it was Jewish extremists who carried out the actual destruction of Palestine.

The Palestinians of Gaza have suffered more than just eviction from their homes. Beginning in 1967, they had to endure an Israeli military occupation that lasted over 45 years. An entire generation of Palestinians was made to suffer unspeakable brutality and deprivation because their oppressors considered them to be children of a lesser God.

When the Israeli government pulled its illegal Jewish colonies out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, the world was assured that Palestinians would be free. In fact, Israel only redeployed its military forces to the perimeter of the Gaza Strip, controlling all points of entry and exit. The occupation continued. The world’s largest open air prison was created. The entire Palestinian population was placed under siege, with Israeli limiting the entry of water, food, electricity, medicine and other essentials. Sadly, collective punishment – a war crime under international law – is a practice that has always received the blessing of Israel’s political and religious leaders. Palestinian militias responded to Israel’s illegal actions by desperately lobbing crude rockets over the walls of their Gaza prison.

The Israeli defense minister acknowledged that the massive assault on Gaza was being planned for more than six months. During these same six months, there was an informal truce between Hamas and the Israeli government during which Hamas was successful in preventing most rocket fire. Hamas offered a long term truce if Israel ended its illegal siege. Israel broke the truce by failing to end its siege and by launching an unprovoked and deadly attack against Gazans in early November followed by many more deadly attacks in December.

Israel had no real commitment to the truce because its stated goal has been the destruction of the elected government of Gaza, a goal shared by the Bush administration. Palestinian rocket fire was simply Israel’s convenient excuse to launch a massive attack. Israel, a country the U.S. provides with our most advanced weaponry, claimed that it was threatened by largely primitive, scrap metal rockets. Israel, the fourth strongest military in the world, the owner of hundreds of nuclear weapons, claimed that it was threatened by a population that does not own one jet airplane, one tank, one artillery piece or even one personnel carrier. Israel, which exercised ruthless military rule over a civilian population for 45 years, now claimed it was threatened by that same population, even though it has continued to subject them to a complete siege and blockade.

Compare the proportionality. In only one day of its savage assault, Israel killed and injured more Palestinian children under five years old than all Israelis killed by all Palestinian rocket fire since the Israeli occupation of Gaza began in 1967.

 

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