Understanding Gaza

[Oscar]

Sent for publishing January 12, 2009

Gaza and Israel

To the Editor,

As I, along with other warmly dressed, well fed Canadians, filled our shopping carts in our local food store, scenes of the horror and destruction of lives and property in that little strip of land known as Gaza kept crossing my mind.

Gaza borders the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It is home to 1.5 million Palestinians, many are refugees from other parts of the region. 80 per cent of Gaza's working force is unemployed. There is a great deal of poverty and unrest in Gaza. This has prompted Ron Paul, who is a Republican and was a nominee in the recent presidential election, to make this statement about the attacks on Gaza in the House of Representatives: "But I am appalled by the long-standing Israeli blockade of Gaza,--a cruel act of war"

Most of us have seen the media pictures of the rockets being fired into Israel, and the indiscriminate disproportionate bombing, [as if any of this is humanely justified] of the urban areas of Gaza. To date, over 700 Palestinians have been killed, thousands have been injured including many civilians.

To understand the desperation and hopelessness of the Palestinian people of this region, historians tell us that the roots of the present strife began in the late 1800's, when Jewish travelers visited the biblical areas of the holy land, and romanticized about the eventual coming together of the widely dispersed Christian Zionists to the "promised land", which they deemed to be the will of Divine Providence.

The decline of the German Ottoman empire after WW1 saw Great Britain become the jurisdictional power of that region of the Middle East. With the help of Britain, Christian Zionist Theodor Herzl initiated and provided financial help in establishing Jewish settlements in the land that is now known as Israel since 1948. Naturally, many Palestinians resented the take-over.

In the Israel/ Palestine war of 1967, Israel also took over the West Bank from Jordon, and the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem from Egypt.

Christian Zionist's fundamentalists have a large supportive base in the USA. They have allied their religious beliefs of the End Times, i.e., Armageddon, to some of Israeli's political interests who share similar beliefs. This has worked well for the US administration, who has always viewed Israel as the primary base in their aggressive struggle to be the planet's undisputed world power. The US has invested heavily in making Israel the fourth largest military power in the world. Part of that plan was to maintain access to the largest oil resources in the Middle East..

About 20 per cent of the citizens of Israel oppose the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. The US and its allies have demanded that Palestinians unilaterally and without question recognize Israel as a sovereign state. However, Israel has never recognized the right of Palestinians to have a sovereign state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or for that matter anywhere else in the region.

Leo Kurtenbach,
Box 268,
Cudworth, Sask., S0K 1BO
Phone (306) 256 3638

[Oscar]

Prominent Canadians speak out against the war on Gaza
For immediate release Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Media conference: Prominent Canadians speak out against the war on Gaza

Thursday, January 8, 2009 10:30 a.m. (ET)

Mayfair Room, Banquet floor
Intercontinental Toronto Yorkville Hotel
220 Bloor St. West (between Avenue Road & Bedford), Toronto, ON

With the war on Gaza into its twelfth day, prominent Jewish Canadians and others will speak out against the bombing of the Palestinian population, the vast majority of whom are already refugees living in the most dire of circumstances. The media conference participants will speak about the humanitarian catastrophe under the bombs, the lack of action by the Canadian government, and will call for an immediate ceasefire and a lifting of the blockade of Gaza.

Judith Deutsch is President of Science for Peace, Member of the Steering Committee, Independent Jewish Voices, and was a participant in the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme/World Health Organization international conference, "Siege and Mental Health...Walls vs. Bridges," October 27-28, 2008 in Gaza City and Ramallah.

Ursula Franklin is a Pearson Medal of Peace recipient and a Companion of the Order of Canada, a research physicist and author renowned for her work on technology and human rights.

Anton Kuerti is a nationally and internationally acclaimed Canadian concert pianist and recording artist. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a human rights activist.

Michael Mandel is an author and professor of international law at Osgoode Hall Law School. He has taught at several of Italy's major universities and has been a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

David Orchard is a fourth generation farmer, author, and twice a leadership candidate for the former Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (1998 and 2003). In 2008, he was a federal election candidate for the Liberal Party in Saskatchewan.

Judith Weisman is a Toronto psychotherapist, a member of Independent Jewish Voices, and a founding member of Not In Our Name, Jews for a Just Peace and the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation (of Palestine).

[Oscar]

Understanding Gaza. Holocaust denied: the lying silence of those who know

----- Original Message -----
From: Marc Loiselle
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2009 11:58 PM
Subject: Understanding Gaza. Holocaust denied: the lying silence of those who know

It`s a long read, but necessary!! Click on this link to access the article: http://www.antiwar.com/pilger/?articleid=14015

Melva, who sent this to me, is publisher of the WhoLife journal in Saskatoon which had me on the cover of the fall issue holding the old family scythe against one of our Prairie Red Fife heritage wheat fields. You can read what she sent to me and others at page bottom.

This factual and forceful story by renowned journalist, film producer and author John Pilger, (an Australian now living in London, England) is the best description I`ve heard or read about the truth behind the decades old conflict between Israel and Palestine. It`s shocking in what it reveals about the holocaust-like ambitions of Israel for Palestinians.....when put in contrast to what Jewish people suffered between 1939 and 1945 as victims of the Shoa - holocaust.

I heard an elder Jewish man in Montreal this morning say that Israel has no choice but to defend itself. That`s a very ignorant comment when put in the perspective of the reality that John clearly demonstrates in his article.

No mention of Canada in this story, but Steven Harper was given a prestigious award by a Jewish north-american society as something like a `friend and champion of Israel`. Well the present `conservative`government in Canada is as guilty as the US or British politicians in conspiring to destroy Palestinian`s right to a homeland and essentially their right to life as persons! Canadian weapons manufacturers have Israel as a top customer. The Israeli army is using depleted uranium tipped weapons and new very sophisticated and deadly cluster-type bombs supplied by the USA, which is causing so many amputations and killing innocent civilians in the crowded enclave of Gaza where the people are trapped within the border imposed by their belligerent neighbour.

This tragedy really is an important test for the world. Can we put a stop to this and have a lasting solution? Can we establish peace and love instead of perpetuating racism, hatred, and war?

Anyone that professes to support justice, peace and love; that professes to be guided by Christian principles, by Jesus` examples, or by other virtuous examples in God centered faith, or otherwise....must make their voice heard to stop what`s happening in the middle east in particular.

There are special web-based initiatives to give voice to individuals that can sign on to petitions that are really effective. Then there`s contacting our political representatives and leaders, railing against weapons manufacturing and sales, etc.

you can forward this too, please...

With hope,

Marc Loiselle

“It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.” John Pilger, journalist, author and documentary filmmaker
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Melva wrote: January 11, 2009

Hello Dear Friends,

I feel so helpless when I think about and hear about the monstrous events happening in Gaza to the Paletinian people. Tonight I read John Pilger's article about this situation and it helped educate me as to why these things are happening. Our news reports are vague and tell little of the truth of what is going on.

As Pilger asks, why the silence. I have pasted the website with his article below for anyone who wishes to learn more clearly about why things are unfolding the way they are in the Middle East with Israel and Palestine.

After I read the article I bowed my head and felt sad and helpless. The only thing I feel capable of doing is helping to educate folks by sending out this article to my friends and to continue each day to send love and light to all people in the world, that we may all learn to love each other rather than have fear and hate. May the separation end and may oneness be experienced by ALL.

I trust and know that the world is moving towards the light and that we all will one day live in peace and harmony.

May you all be blessed and know that I am grateful to have you in my life.

If you feel moved to share this information, I would be well pleased.

May you keep well and happy.

Cheers, Namaste

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Holocaust denied: the lying silence of those who know

http://www.antiwar.com/pilger/?articleid=14015

January 8, 2009 by John Pilger

"When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia's incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel's right to exist." They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine's right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous "Plan D" resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing." Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them'. The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war … we are appalled."

Every subsequent "war" Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first. Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Schlaim, Noam Chomsky, the late Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan Pappe and Norman Finklestein have dispatched this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism. "It seems," wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on 2 January, "that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system … Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide]."

In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, meet the international standard of the Genocide Convention. "Is it an irresponsible overstatement," asked Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and international law authority at Princeton University, "to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not."

In describing a "holocaust-in-the making," Falk was alluding to the Nazis' establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland. For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews led by Mordechaj Anielewiz fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the Nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew. Today's holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben-Gurion's Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250-pound "smart" GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza, having been approved by a Congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4 billion in war-making "aid," give Washington de facto control. It beggars belief that President-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken on Russia's war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama's silence on Palestine marks his approval, which is to be expected, given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as his secretary of state, chief of staff and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings "Think," her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama's inauguration on 21 January, I trust someone with the brave heart of Muntadar al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: "Gaza!"

The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now "Operation Cast Lead," which is the unfinished "Operation Justified Vengeance." The latter was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with Bush's approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time. In the same year, the authoritative Jane's Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the "green light" to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel's secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of New Labor Party's enduring, cringing complicity in Palestine's agony. However, the 2001 Israeli plan, reported Jane's, needed the "trigger" of a suicide bombing which would cause "numerous deaths and injuries [because] the 'revenge' factor is crucial." This would "motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians." What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Chief of Staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On 23 November, 2001, Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader, Mahmud Abu Hunud, and got their "trigger"; the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.

Something uncannily similar happened on 5 November last, when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda "trigger." A ceasefire initiated and sustained by the Hamas government – which had imprisoned its violators – was shattered by the Israeli attack and homemade rockets were fired into what used to be Palestine before its Arab occupants were "cleansed." The On 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel's charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz.

Behind this sordid game is the "Dagan Plan," named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon in his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organization, Dagan is the author of a "solution" that has seen the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mohammed Abbas is Dagan's achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through a mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in America, that says Hamas is a terrorist organization devoted to Israel's destruction and to "blame" for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, long before its creation. "We have never had it so good," said the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. "The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine." In fact, Hamas's real threat is its example as the Arab world's only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians' oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as "Hamas's seizure of power." Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce as a historic recognition of the "reality" of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, 99 per cent of humanity concurs. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a "monstrosity."

When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a "1948-style solution" – the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller "cantonments" and perhaps finally into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed … Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it."

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. "Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic," she wrote on 31 December. "But I'm not talking about World War Two, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What I'm referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years … Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy doesn't get more anti-Semitic than this." She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young American who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. "I am in the midst of a genocide," wrote Corrie, "which I am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible."

Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of "responsibility." Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform. With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-Semitism. The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.

Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plea for help? Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than "intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries"?

Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third Writers' Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 3,500 jammed the auditorium and a thousand were turned away. Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete; the literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance; false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: "The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are."

If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilized society. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us the power to speak out. For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza: of the people's courage and resistance and their "luminous humanity," as Karma Nabulsi put it. On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No one told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and a few of them climbed on to a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, believing the world will not forget them.

[Oscar]

Depleted uranium found in Gaza victims

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 13:16:21 GMT

http://www.presstv.ir/Detail.aspx?id=80 ... =351020202

Medics tell Press TV they have found traces of depleted uranium in some Gaza residents wounded in Israel's ground offensive on the strip.
Norwegian medics told Press TV correspondent Akram al-Sattari that some of the victims who have been wounded since Israel began its attacks on the Gaza Strip on December 27 have traces of depleted uranium in their bodies.

The report comes after Israeli tanks and troops swept across the border into Gaza on Saturday night, opening a ground operation after eight days of intensive attacks by Israeli air and naval forces on the impoverished region.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned on Sunday that the wide-ranging ground offensive in the Gaza Strip would be "full of surprises."
A ground offensive in the densely-populated Gaza is expected to drastically increase the death toll of the civilian population.

The latest assaults bring the number of Palestinians killed to over 488 with 2790 others wounded. The UN says that about 25 percent of the casualties were civilian deaths - including at least 34 children.

According to Israeli army officials, at least 30 of its soldiers have been wounded since the start of the ground campaign.

Amid global condemnation of the ongoing violence in the region, the UN Security Council failed to agree on a united approach to resolve the crisis.
"Once again, the world is watching in dismay the dysfunctionality of the Security Council," UN General Assembly chief Miguel d'Escoto said Sunday.

According to diplomatic sources, the US blocked a Security Council resolution, with US Deputy Ambassador Alejandro Wolff arguing that an official statement that criticizes both Israel and Hamas would not be helpful.

The White House has so far declined to comment on whether an Israeli ground incursion into Gaza is a justified measure.

AA/DT/CS/MD
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Gaza now Israeli weapons testing lab?

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=82 ... =351020202

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:11:25 GMT

Israel has turned Gaza into a research laboratory to test out its new "extremely nasty" weapons on Palestinians, a medical expert says.

After working for 10 days at the Shifa Hospital in the war-torn Palestinian territory, Dr. Mads Gilbert, a member of a Norwegian triage medical team in Gaza, blasted Israel for conducting experimental military work in the impoverished strip.

"There's a very strong suspicion I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons," Gilbert told reporters at Oslo's Gardermoen airport upon his return home on Monday.

Dr. Gilbert said the kinds of injuries he and his colleague Erik Fosse had seen during their ten-day aid work in Gaza had proven that Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME) was being used in the embattled territory.

DIME, which is an experimental kind of explosive, is believed to have strong biological effects in those who are hit by the "low lethality" weapons.

Survivors close to the lethal range may have their limbs amputated as their soft tissues and bones are shredded to pieces. The victims may also subsequently contract cancer from the micro-shrapnel embedded in their body tissue within just four to six months.

"This is a new generation of very powerful small explosives that detonates with an extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 meters (16-98 feet)," said Gilbert.

"We have not seen the casualties affected directly by the bomb because they are normally torn to pieces and do not survive, but we have seen a number of very brutal amputations... without shrapnel injuries which we strongly suspect must have been caused by the DIME weapons," he added.

The weapon "causes the tissue to be torn from the flesh. It looks very different (from a shrapnel injury). I have seen and treated a lot of different injuries for the last 30 years in different war zones, and this looks completely different," said Fosse, 58.

"If you are in the immediate (vicinity of) a DIME weapon, it's like your legs get torn off. It's an enormous pressure wave and there is no shrapnel," he explained.

Israel had also used the weapon in the 2006 war with Lebanon and previously in Gaza.

"We are not soft-skinned when it comes to war injuries, but these amputations are really extremely nasty and for many of the patients not survivable," he added.

Following reports on the use of suspected chemical weapons in Gaza, the United Nations Human Rights Council decided to dispatch a fact-finding mission to investigate human rights violations committed in the territory.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said on Tuesday that "Accountability must be ensured for violations of international law," suggesting that the Council consider a mission to assess violations committed by both sides in the conflict.

The latest casualty figures according to Health officials have topped 940 since the operation began on 27 December, while some 4,400 others have been wounded.

Senior United Nations officials have expressed grave concern about reports that over 40 per cent of the Palestinians killed in the Israeli offensive, and almost half of the wounded, are women and children.

The new report comes on top of earlier reports which revealed the Israeli military had used controversial white phosphorus shells on Gazans.

The Times said on Thursday that it had identified stockpiles of M825A1, a US-made White Phosphorus munition, from high-resolution pictures taken from Israeli artillery units on the Gaza border.

A phenomenon characteristic of the chemical -- also known by the military as WP or Willie Pete is that it can burn through flesh to the bone and leave bodies "entirely shriveled with black-green skin."

Earlier last week, Gilbert's team, told Press TV that medics had found depleted uraniumin some Gaza residents.

The reports of profound human sufferings come as Israel continues to reject the fact that it has imposed a humanitarian crisis among the battle-hardened 1.5 million population of Gaza.

CS/AA

Press TV 2007. All Rights Reserved.

[Oscar]

Ron Paul on Israel, Obama . . . .


Common sense, isn't it?

I'll let Ron Paul do the speaking.

Except to say that it's a shame that the only news media interested in his pro-American policies are in places like Russia.

WATCH: http://www.brasschecktv.com:80/page/529.html

[Oscar]

Humaniatarian situation in Gaza Day 19
January 14, 2009

'Pitiful' amount of aid reaching Gaza

14 Jan 2009 00:04:45 GMT

Source: International Save the Children Alliance

(January 14 2009) — Save the Children today estimated that only an eighth of the lifesaving supplies of food and medicines needed by the Gazan population have crossed into the besieged territory since the Israeli military operation began December 27. The international aid agency branded the figure “pitiful.”

Furthermore, Save the Children said that the daily three-hour ceasefire designed to allow aid agencies to deliver what little aid was available in Gaza was inadequate, severely hampering humanitarian efforts.

The Israeli government said that by the morning of January 12, it had allowed 900 aid trucks to cross into Gaza since the conflict began. According to Save the Children estimates, at least 7,200 trucks should have been allowed through to ensure the population had the bare minimum of food, fuel and medicine.

http://alertnet.org/thenews/fromthefiel ... 44662e.htm

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Field Update on Gaza from the Humanitarian Coordinator

13 Jan 2009 as of 17:00
Source: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)

Date: 13 Jan 2009

Many food items remain unavailable, including rice, flour, oil, meat, chicken, fish and milk. Bread is in short supply: only nine out of 47 bakeries are currently operational. On 12 January, UNRWA distributed food parcels to 1,916 refugee families throughout the Gaza Strip. Due to the security situation, WFP, who works through partners, has been unable to operate to its full capacity. WFP has reached more than 85,000 out of its regular 265,000 non-refugee beneficiaries since 27 December, and an additional 21,000 non-refugee beneficiaries have received an emergency distribution.

UNIFEM is concerned about the nutritional well-being of the civilian population, notably of the 56 percent under the age of 18 and the daily average of 170 new born and their mothers.

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db9 ... RSS20=22-P

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Gaza And North Gaza Governorates Remain Isolated

January 14, 2009 17:40 PM

(Malaysian National News Agency)

The humanitarian crisis is intensifying and the Palestinian civilian casualty rate is increasing.

Many basic food items, including food for infants and malnourished children, are no longer available.

Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip is causing extensive damage to homes and to public infrastructure and is jeopardizing water, sanitation and medical services.

There are increasing risks of epidemic outbreaks resulting from the disruption of vaccinations, uncollected rubbish piling up in the streets and unsafe drinking water.

Of particular concern is the long-term impact of the conflict on children, who make up 56 percent of the Gaza population.

http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsw ... ?id=383654

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Gaza wrestles with food, power and sewage crises

January 4, 2009, Gulf Times [10 Days ago]

GAZA CITY: Sewage runs in the streets of Gaza, the price of bread has tripled in a week, doctors dread carrying out operations as power fails without warning and they never know whether there will be anaesthesia.

Aid workers, residents and medical staff paint a grim picture of the fight to survive as Israeli warplanes pound the Palestinian enclave daily with missiles and the population lives in fear of an invasion at any moment.

Max Gaylard, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for the Palestinian territories, said on Friday “there is a critical emergency in the Gaza Strip right now... By any definition this is a humanitarian crisis and more.

“Schools are closed, the population is staying home, Gaza is experiencing a food crisis ... hospitals and clinics are absolutely overwhelmed,” he said. “There probably is an air strike every 20 minutes on average, probably intensifying at night,” Gaylard said, adding that rockets fired at Israel by Gaza militants “are indiscriminate and expanding in range.”

Most houses only get water for one or two hours every five days and electricity is even rarer as Gaza’s only power plant has no fuel. UN agencies say there is no food in the markets. “It is desperate now, the pipes were blown up and there is waste everywhere in the streets — human, animal, chemical. There was a funeral today and they had to carry the body through that disgusting stench in the street,” Beit Hanoun resident Hatem al-Aynun said.

According to a daily UN report released on Friday, the main sewage and water pipeline at Beit Hanoun had been hit five times in the previous 48 hours and seven water wells have been “seriously damaged and cannot be repaired due to the bombardments.” The water crisis is felt across Gaza as is the lack of food for the 1.5mn people.

The World Food Programme estimates that 80% of the population is now dependent on food handouts and the figure rises every day as shortages of flour, rice, sugar, milk, canned foods and fresh meat grow worse. “The current situation in Gaza is appalling,” the WFP representative for the territory, Christine van Nieuwenhuyse, said in a statement.

Fewer than 20 bakeries now operate across the territory which has no flour or gas for cooking.

Aid workers say some shop owners are hiding provisions because of the prospect of even greater shortages after any Israeli invasion. Hamas police tour many areas warning store owners not to hide food or increase prices, they said. Some people pay three times the normal price for bread, up to 25 shekels ($6), Oxfam worker Mohamed Ali said. “A lot of people do not eat every day.” “You can queue for up to three hours to get bread, but if the flour has run out people leave with nothing,” said Parek Babra, who works for Relief International, an aid group that distributes medical equipment and other crucial supplies. “Many people are now storing food; tins, oil, anything in case there is an invasion though personally I don’t believe it will happen,” he said.

“There has not been any cooking gas for two months. If you get it on the black market it costs 10 times the normal price.” The half dozen hospitals in Gaza cannot cope with more patients and casualties are overflowing out of regular wards into corridors. At the main Shifa hospital in Gaza City, there are power cuts of at least 20 hours each day. Operating theatres rely on back-up generators. - AFP

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/a ... rent_id=17
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