Tuesday, January 20, 2009

This girl's photo is one I can't stop coming back to... A sense of guilt and shame, at the world community which has fiddled as Gaza burned and our impotence in the face of these crimes, makes me unable to make her invisible..
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See photos of Gaza from the relief organization Care.
And Photos of Gaza from Save the Children
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"The front page of the Beirut daily As-Safir said it all yesterday. Across the top was a terrible photograph of the bloated body of a Palestinian man newly discovered in the ruins of his home while two male members of his family shrieked and roared their grief. Below, at half the size, was a photograph from Israel of Western leaders joking with Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister." Robert Fisk

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Paul Kaye lost his mother-in-law to a Hamas rocket, and he describes his family's sadness at what Israel is doing:

"My wife says she feels scared and lost and full of guilt. "It's my country and I see myself as Israeli not Jewish," she keeps shouting at me. Does that make you feel better or worse about what's going on, I ask? "That's worse!" she says, "because Israel is nothing to do with God." I digest this, but don't even know where to begin to start unravelling that statement." continue

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The Observer reports that eyewitnesses in Gaza say that Israeli Soldiers:
  • attempted to bulldoze houses with civilians inside;
  • killed civilians trying to escape under the protection of white flags;
  • opened fire on an ambulance attempting to reach the wounded;
  • used indiscriminate force in a civilian area and fired white phosphorus shells continue

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Caoimhe Butterly, An Irish Human Rights activist riding with ambulances in Gaza reports:

"The morgues of Gaza's hospitals are over-flowing. The bodies in their blood-soaked white shrouds cover the entire floor space of the Shifa hospital morgue. Some are intact, most horribly deformed, limbs twisted into unnatural positions, chest cavities exposed, heads blown off, skulls crushed in. Family members wait outside to identify and claim a brother, husband, father, mother, wife, child." continue

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Despite the fluffing of feathers that comes with Israel continuously saying it 'withdrew' from Gaza in 2005, Ralph Nader writes:

"In 2006, the Israelis added to their unrelieved control of air, water and land around the open-air prison by establishing a blockade. The natives became restless. Under international law, a blockade is an act of war. Primitive rockets, called by reporters "wildly inaccurate" were fired into Israel. During this same period, Israeli soldiers and artillery and missiles would go into Gaza at will and take far more lives and cause far more injuries than those incurred by those rockets. Civilians-especially children, the infirm and elderly-died or suffered week after week for lack of medicines, medical equipment, food, electricity, fuel and water which were embargoed by the Israelis."continue

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Who Violated the ceasefire? A Chronology of events assembled from the news and human rights oranisation by Howard Friel

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Israel's disconnect: Surgical strikes and careful warnings to civilians are what the IDF claims. As I learned in Lebanon, the reality is far different Julie Flint, The Guardian.

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Video of a boy wounded by the white phosphorus that Israel is being accused of using

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2 comments:

nibaq said...

When the IDF first started bomb Gaza the first thing that came to my mind was Gandhi's view of the holocaust:

"Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions". That collective suicide would have been a heroic response that would have "aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence".

- Gandhi

Back then there was no internet so that everyone can see what was really occurring real time Yet with the world seeing the accounts of the people in Gaza, this did not change the actions of the IDF.

The world requires now a heroic response from the people of Gaza for real peace to take place.

kwtia said...

Nibaq,
I dunno if I agree that collective suicide is an answer to anything, but I do think that collective acts of non-violence can move mountains and even better move hearts made of stone.

Anonymous,
Thanks for coming by, I will check out the link.