Reflections On The Israeli Holocaust In Gaza

[paul wright]

[Disco_Destroyer]

[Disco_Destroyer]

Looks like the Blockade will continue folks and Isreal are not talking to the Palestinians

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5053R720090117

[Disco_Destroyer]

An ultra-Orthodox Jew stands near the site where a rocket fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza landed in the port city of Ashdod January 16, 2009.

Hmm Ultra-Orthadox kinda reminds me of Bill Hicks talking of the Elite Republican Guard

[Disco_Destroyer]

Massive air raid over Gaza kills dozens 17 Jan 2009 In a last minute onslaught, the Israeli army has unleashed a savage crescendo to its three-week long military offensive in Gaza. With a ceasefire looming, which could come as early as Saturday, the Israel army was going all-out to inflict as much damage as it could before hostilities end.
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/index.php?sid=454797

[Mark Gobell]

I bumped into an Gaza Peace demo on Saturday in Cambridge and saw one of the local constabulary's finest pointing a telephoto lens at the crowd.

Asking him politely why was he photographing the peaceful, law abiding gathering of concerned citizens, he replied:

"Persons of interest"

Presumably those persons might be interested in this ickle factoid constable eh. Like, I'm sure many of our brave and courageous police officers are.

[Disco_Destroyer]

Bit like a scientist saying 'Interesting Specimens'?

[Mark Gobell]

Israel admits troops may have used phosphorus shells in Gaza

Amnesty warns Israel could be guilty of war crimes

* Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 January 2009 11.58 GMT

Israel has admitted – after mounting pressure – that its troops may have used white phosphorus shells in contravention of international law, during its three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip.

The Guardian

And Ban Ki-moon is "heartbroken" that the Zio-fascists targeted UN facilities in Gaza . . .

[TonyGosling]

IDF commanders have been hiding their identities in case of later war crimes trials
Israeli commanders in crosshairs for war crimes
Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:43:49 GMT
Israel has taken measures to protect the identity of Gaza war commanders as the case for war crimes in the populated area gains momentum.
Israeli authorities have issued an order banning the publication of the full name and photographs of the field commanders of the Gaza war, the Haaretz reported.
The measure has been taken amid concerns that international bodies and rights groups are planning to take legal actions against the high-ranking Israeli commanders who have been involved in the alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip.
Israel is accused of using controversial weapons against the civilian population of Gaza during its 23-day war against the Hamas government. Rights groups and international bodies say the Israeli acts violated international laws, constituting war crimes.....
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=83570&sectionid=351020202

some stats from the DEC

[outsider]

A very good U-tube video, 30 minutes long: 'Israeli Soldiers Speak Out'; it's not new, but highly relevant (I'm posting it in 'Media' as well):

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=37MFa7ZKQWo

[TonyGosling]

Thanks outsider - uplifting
Almost as uplifting is this one ... as Jon Snow wipes the floor with this utterly unconvincing Israeli government minister over the IDF attack on the Gaza UN headquarters.

Link


This Channel 4 Dispatches special 'Unseen Gaza' shown last week is in itself clear evidence of the the pro Zionist media bias.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unseen-gaza/episode-guide/series-1/ episode-3

Part 1

Link

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8132449999430251419

Part 2
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9074563122846363135

[TonyGosling]

Vehicle + £3k pledges & donations needed.
Palestinian aid convoy leaving UK on 14th February.
http://www.vivapalestina.org/

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZksT4dFwyVY

[paul wright]

The charity side is bollox by the way
Hamas has always received financial aid from the Saudis.
They've plenty of money to give out.
The problem is the Israeli blockade and the destruction of the cement works, flour refinery and all the other infrastructure of Gaza.
What is needed is the disabling of the rogue state, Israel, and its cohort, Egypt.
Though I agree Israel should be made to pay $2 billion in reparations outright. The US taxpayer could no doubt shoulder that little bit extra
Charity pennies wont help otherwise
Dont give a penny. Only make that these controlling b astards pay for their crimes

[TonyGosling]

Amnesty international: Israeli army used flechettes against Gaza civilians

Global Research, January 29, 2009
Al Mezan Center for Human Rights

Apart from white phosphorus, the Israeli army used a variety of other weapons in densely populated civilian areas of Gaza in the three-week conflict that began on 27 December.



Flechettes are 4cm long metal darts that are sharply pointed at the front, with four fins at the rear. Between 5,000 and 8,000 are packed into 120mm shells which are generally fired from tanks. The shells explode in the air and scatter the flechettes in a conical pattern over an area about 300m wide and 100m long.

An anti-personnel weapon designed to penetrate dense vegetation, flechettes should never be used in built-up civilian areas. The Israeli army has used them in Gaza periodically for several years. In most cases their use has resulted in civilians being killed or injured.

Amnesty International's fact-finding team in Gaza first heard about the use of flechettes in the most recent conflict some ten days ago. The father of one of the victims showed the team a flechette which had been taken out of his son's body.

In its latest post on Amnesty International's Livewire blog, the team described how on Monday it visited towns and villages around Gaza and found more hard evidence of the use of flechettes.

In 'Izbat Beit Hanoun, to the south-west of the town of Beit Hanoun, several flechette shells were fired into the main road, killing two people and injuring several others on the morning of 5 January.

Wafa' Nabil Abu Jarad, a 21-year-old pregnant mother of two, was one of those killed. Her husband and her mother-in-law told the team that the family had just had breakfast and were outside the house drinking tea in the sun.

Wafa' and her husband were standing by the corner of the house when they heard a noise, followed by screams. They turned to go back into their house but at that moment Wafa' and several other members of the family were hit by flechettes. Wafa’ was killed outright.

That same day, at the other end of the street, 16-year-old Islam Jaber Abd-al-Dayem was struck in the neck by a flechette. He was taken to the hospital's intensive care unit but died three days later. Mizar, his brother, was injured in the same attack and still has a flechette lodged in his back.

In the village of al-Mughraqa on the morning of 7 January, a shell struck the room where Atta Hassan Aref Azzam was sitting with two of his children, Mohammed, aged 13 and Hassan, aged two and a half. All three were killed. The six other members of the family who were in the house fled to the nearest school for shelter. The team examined the bloodstained wall by which the three were killed. It was full of flechettes.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12094

[Disco_Destroyer]

With Gaza, Journalists Fail Again

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090126_with_gaza_journalists_fai l_again/
Chris Hedges' Columns
http://www.truthdig.com/report/category/hedges/

Posted on Jan 26, 2009


AP photo / Sebastian Scheiner
A rainbow, as if projected by the American media, is seen over the northern Gaza Strip, from the Israel-Gaza Border.

The assault on Gaza exposed not only Israel’s callous disregard for international law but the gutlessness of the American press. There were no major newspapers, television networks or radio stations that challenged Israel’s fabricated version of events that led to the Gaza attack or the daily lies Israel used to justify the unjustifiable. Nearly all reporters were, as during the buildup to the Iraq war, pliant stenographers and echo chambers. If we as journalists have a product to sell, it is credibility. Take that credibility away and we become little more than propagandists and advertisers. By refusing to expose lies we destroy, in the end, ourselves.

All governments lie in wartime. Israel is no exception. Israel waged an effective war of black propaganda. It lied craftily with its glib, well-rehearsed government spokespeople, its ban on all foreign press in Gaza and its confiscation of cell phones and cameras from its own soldiers lest the reality of the attack inadvertently seep out. It was the Arabic network al-Jazeera, along with a handful of local reporters in Gaza, which upheld the honor of our trade, that of giving a voice to those who without our presence would have no voice, that of countering the amplified lies of the powerful with the faint cries and pain of the oppressed. But these examples of journalistic integrity were too few and barely heard by us.

We retreated, as usual, into the moral void of American journalism, the void of balance and objectivity. The ridiculous notion of being unbiased, outside of the flow of human existence, impervious to grief or pain or anger or injustice, allows reporters to coolly give truth and lies equal space and airtime. Balance and objectivity are the antidote to facing unpleasant truths, a way of avoidance, a way to placate the powerful. We record the fury of a Palestinian who has lost his child in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza but make sure to mention Israel’s “security needs,” include statements by Israeli officials who insist there was firing from the home or the mosque or the school and of course note Israel’s right to defend itself. We do this throughout the Middle East. We record the human toll in Iraq, caused by our occupation, but remind everyone that “Saddam killed his own people.” We write about the deaths of families in Afghanistan during an airstrike but never forget to mention that the Taliban “oppresses women.” Their crimes cancel out our crimes. It becomes a moral void. And above all we never forget to mention the “war on terror.” We ask how and who but never, never do we ask why. As long as we speak in the cold, dead language of those in power, the language that says a lie is as valid as a fact, the language where one version of history is as good as another, we are part of the problem, not the solution.

“Bombs and rockets are flying between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza, and once again, The Times is caught in a familiar crossfire, accused from all sides of unfair and inaccurate coverage,” New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt breezily began in writing his assessment of the paper’s coverage, going on to conclude “though the most vociferous supporters of Israel and the Palestinians do not agree, I think The Times, largely barred from the battlefield and reporting amid the chaos of war, has tried its best to do a fair, balanced and complete job—and has largely succeeded.”

The cliché that Israel had a right to defend itself from Hamas rocket attacks—that bombs and rockets were “flying between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza”—was accepted in the press as an undisputed truth. It became the starting point for every hollow discussion of the Israeli attack. It left pundits and columnists chattering about “proportionality,” not legality. Israel was in open violation of international law, specifically Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which calls on an occupying power to respect the safety of occupied civilians. But you would not know this from the press reports. The use of attack aircraft and naval ships, part of the world’s fourth-largest military power, to level densely packed slums of people who were hungry, without power and often water, people surrounded on all sides by the Israeli army, was fatuously described as a war. The news coverage held up the absurd notion that a few Hamas fighters with light weapons and no organization were a counterforce to F-16 fighter jets, tank battalions, thousands of Israeli soldiers, armored personnel carriers, naval ships and Apache attack helicopters. It fit the Israeli narrative. It may have been balanced and objective. But it was not true.

The Hamas rockets are crude, often made from old pipes, and largely ineffectual. The first homemade Qassam rocket was fired across the Israeli border in October 2001. It was not until June 2004 that Israel suffered its first fatality. There are 24 Israelis who have been killed by Hamas rocket fire, compared with 5,000 Palestinian dead, more than half of them in Gaza, at least a third of them children. This does not absolve Hamas from firing rockets at civilian areas, which is a war crime, but it does raise questions about the story line swallowed without reflection by the press. I covered the Kosovo Albanians’ desperate attempts to resist the Serbs, which resulted in a handful of Serb casualties, but no one ever described the lopsided Serbian butchery in Kosovo as a war. It was called genocide, and it led to NATO intervention to halt it.

(Page 2)
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/20090126_with_gaza_journalists_fa il_again/

It was Israel, not Hamas, which violated the truce established last June. This was never made clear in any of the press reports. Hamas agreed to halt rocket fire into Gaza in exchange for an Israeli promise to ease the draconian siege that made the shipment of vital material and food into Gaza nearly impossible. And once the agreement was reached, the Hamas rocket fire ended. Israel, however, never upheld its end of the agreement. It increased the severity of the siege. U.N. agencies complained. International relief organizations condemned the Israeli blockade. And there were even rumblings inside Israel. Shmuel Zakai, an Israeli brigadier general who resigned as commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Gaza Division and was forcibly discharged from the military amid allegations that he leaked information to the media, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Dec. 22 that the Israeli government had made a “central error” during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing “to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip. … [W]hen you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,” Zakai said, “it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire. … You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.”

Israel, we know from papers such as Haaretz, started planning this assault last March. The Israeli army deliberately broke the truce when it carried out an attack on Nov. 4 that killed six Hamas fighters. It timed the attack, the heavy air and naval bombardment and the invasion of Gaza to coincide with the waning weeks of the Bush administration. Israel knew it would be given carte blanche by the White House. Hamas responded to the Nov. 4 provocation in the way Israel anticipated. It fired Qassam rockets and Grad missiles into Israel to retaliate. But even then Hamas offered to extend the truce if Israel would lift the blockade. Israel refused. Operation Cast Lead was unleashed.

Henry Siegman, the director of the U.S./Middle East Project at the Council of Foreign Relations, noted correctly that Israel “could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn’t even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.”

There were a few flashes of integrity in the American press. The Wall Street Journal ran a thoughtful piece, “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas,” on Jan. 24 that was unusual in view of the acceptance in U.S. press coverage that Hamas is nothing more than an Islamo-fascist organization that understands only violence. And some journalists from news organizations such as the BBC did a good job once they were finally permitted to enter Gaza. Jimmy Carter wrote an Op-Ed article in The Washington Post detailing his and the Carter Center’s efforts to prevent the conflict. This article was an important refutation of the Israeli argument, although it was ignored by the rest of the media. But these were isolated cases. The publishers, news executives and editors largely accepted without any real protest Israel’s ban on coverage and allowed Israeli officials to fill their news pages and airtime with fabrications and distortions. And this made the war crimes carried out by the Israeli army easier to commit and prolong.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is acutely aware of Israel’s violations of international law, has already begun to reassure his commanders that they will be protected from war crimes prosecution.

“The commanders and soldiers that were sent on the task in Gaza should know that they are safe from any tribunal and that the State of Israel will assist them in this issue and protect them as they protected us with their bodies during the military operation in Gaza,” he said.

Israel’s brutal military tactics, despite the lack of coverage in the American press, have come under intense international scrutiny. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, blame the high civilian death toll on indiscriminate firing and shelling, as well as the use of white phosphorus shells in civilian areas. Israel has admitted using white phosphorus in Gaza but insists the chemical, used for smoke screens and to mark spots to be shelled or bombed, was not used directly against civilians.

Hamas is an unsavory organization. It has made life miserable for many in Gaza and carried out a series of death-squad-style executions of alleged opponents. But Hamas, elected to power in 2006, also brought effective civil control to Gaza. Gaza, ruled by warring factions, warlords, clans, kidnapping rings and criminal gangs, had descended into chaos under Mahmoud Abbas’ corrupt Fatah-led government. Hamas, once it assumed power, halted suicide bombing attacks on Israel. It ended rocket fire into Israel for almost a year. It upheld its agreement with Israel. Hamas’ willingness to negotiate with Israel, albeit through Egyptian intermediaries, led al-Qaida, which has been working to make inroads among the Palestinians, to condemn the Hamas leadership as collaborators.

Israel and the United States carried out an abortive and desperate attempt to overthrow Hamas by arming and backing a Fatah putsch in June 2007. They wanted to install the pliant Abbas in power. Hamas resisted, often with violent brutality, and expelled Abbas and the Fatah leadership from Gaza to the West Bank. Israel has now decided to do the dirty job itself. It will not work. Israel broke and discredited Yasser Arafat and Fatah in much the same manner. Abbas and Fatah have no authority or credibility left. Abbas is seen by most Palestinians as a pliant Israeli stooge. Israel is now destroying Hamas. Radical Islamic groups, such as al-Qaida, far more violent and irrational, stand poised to replace Hamas. And Israel will one day look wistfully at Hamas just as it does now at Fatah. But by then, with Israel surrounded by radical Islamic regimes in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and even Jordan, as well as fighting a homegrown al-Qaida movement among the Palestinians, it may be too late.

The Israeli government bears the responsibility for its crimes. But by giving credibility to the lies and false narratives Israel uses to justify wholesale slaughter we empower not only Israel’s willful self-destruction but our own. The press, as happened during the buildup to the Iraq war, was again feckless and gutless. It bent to the will of the powerful. It abandoned its sacred contract with its readers, listeners and viewers to always tell the truth. It chattered about nothing. It obscured the facts. It did this while hundreds of women and children were torn to shreds by iron fragmentation bombs in a flagrant violation of international law. And as it failed it lauded itself for doing “a fair, balanced and complete job.”

Chris Hedges’ Truthdig column appears Mondays. He is a veteran journalist and the former New York Times Mideast bureau chief.

[TonyGosling]

BBC: 'Israeli soldiers shot children while eating chocalate and chips'.

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84oQbMavGPs
Israel has never been afraid of fighting dirty. But thanks to the internet, this time the world is watching like never before,
Israel's highly publicised war in Gaza has drawn sharp condemnation from the UN and human rights groups, with UN officials now calling for a war crimes investigation. With the death toll of over 1300 (one-third of whom are children)

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Sir Roger Moore is being urged not to legitimise the Gaza war crimes at this Israeli music festival later in February.

In the spirit of such a noble and brave commitment we appeal to your moral conscience and your record of standing up for principles of human dignity and equality. We sincerely hope that you will withdraw from this event and inform the Israeli organizers and government that you will not attend their festivals as long as Israel continues to deny the Palestinian people its inalienable rights to emancipation and human rights.
http://palsolidarity.org/2009/02/5139

[TonyGosling]

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMi3xS31y1g
Morrissey song - soz, stop me oh, oh, oh, stop me if you've heard it before... but very appropriate for the recent BBC debacle.

http://www.radio4all.net:8080/files/tony@tlio.org.uk/2149-1-dialect200 90214.mp3

[Disco_Destroyer]

Link

[eogz]

Thanks Disco,

I watched this on Informationclearinghouse, the video itself is quite shocking, not from the content, more for the mindless disregard of human lives.

I wonder if it could ever be used as evidence? In a court of law?

[TonyGosling]

Well worth watching.
I recall the Israeli government stating on the record back in the 1990s that they would kill 10 arabs for every Israeli killed. Seems that ratio wasn't enough for the IDF. Have they not simply 'added a nought' and upped the ante now to kill 100 arabs for every Israeli? That's the cold hard kill ratio in Gaza.
Along with that goes the notion that a dead soldier is equivalent to a civilian killed. No distinction between the two, UN Charter & Geneva conventions all out the window.
Notice that?

[TonyGosling]

Israel Guilty of War Crimes; Palestinians are Winning the Legitimacy War: An Interview with UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk
by Corey Balsam, the Alternative Information Center

March 17, 2009

Professor Richard Falk is the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. He is world-renowned as an authority on international law and has authored and co-authored 20 books. Recently, Professor Falk has focused much of his attention on the Israeli massacres in Gaza, alleging that Israel's actions are constitutive of both violations of the laws of war and indicative of crimes against humanity. This is the transcript of a phone interview with him from his home in Santa Barbara, California.

Can you begin by explaining the reasons why you believe that Israel is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity?

http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m52715&hd=&size=1&l=e

Well that's a big question of course. I think that the attack on Gaza initiated on December 27th of last year was a violation of a fundamental norm of the UN Charter, which prohibits non-defensive uses of force. At the Nuremburg trials after World War II, that was treated as a crime against the peace, which was viewed as the most serious of all international crimes.

Following from the attack itself, which was not a justifiable use of force, is the whole question of whether the use of modern weapons in a setting where the civilian population is exposed to the ravages of war can ever be reconciled with the international law of war. I believe it cannot be. That conclusion is somewhat controversial, it hasn't been formally tested in an international tribunal, but I think the inability to prevent civilian casualties has clearly been established by the results of the attacks on Gaza........

[TonyGosling]

Israeli soldiers break ranks over Gaza war
Thu Mar 19, 2009
http://www.reuters.com/article/middleeastCrisis/idUSLJ974036

By Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM, March 19 (Reuters) - Israel's military was rocked on Thursday by Gaza war veterans' accounts of soldiers' killings of civilians and allegations that deep contempt for Palestinians pervaded its ranks.

The soldiers, alumni of a military academy, gathered last month to discuss their experiences in the 22-day Israeli offensive that ended in January, a campaign that Palestinians and human rights groups have said warranted war crimes probes.

Disclosing details of the session, the institution's director said the soldiers pointed to an atmosphere within the military of "unbridled contempt for, and forcefulness against, the Palestinians".

"They talked about unwarranted fire on Palestinian civilians. There was also talk of vandalism to property," Danny Zamir, head of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military programme, told Israel Radio.

Defence Minister Ehud Barak responded to the accusations by repeating Israel's description of its armed forces as the most moral in the world..................

[yeah, right, ed.]

http://www.reuters.com/article/middleeastCrisis/idUSLJ974036

[outsider]

[quote="paul wright'')
'Can someone come up with these attack dogs' criteria?'

Well, here are the 'Rules of Engagement':

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israels-dirty-secr ets-in-gaza-1649527.html

[TonyGosling]

Israel defends use of flesh-eating weapon
Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:05:14 GMT
The 1980 third Convention on Conventional Weapons has banned the use of white phosphorus as a weapon -- even against military targets situated within population centers.
Tel Aviv hits back at a humanitarian report that suggests the Israeli army had 'illegally' shelled Gazans with white phosphorus shells....
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=89698&sectionid=351020202


http://whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES/GazaHolo/index.html

[TonyGosling]

The revelations centre on t-shirt designs made for soldiers that make light of shooting pregnant Palestinian mothers and children and include images of dead babies and destroyed mosques.

The t-shirts were printed for Israeli soldiers at the end of periods of deployment or training courses and were discovered by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

One, printed for a platoon of Israeli snipers depicts an armed Palestinian pregnant women caught in the crosshairs of a rifle, with the disturbing caption in English: "1 shot 2 kills".



Another depicts a child carrying a gun also in the centre of a target.

"The smaller, the harder," read the words on the t-shirt.

According to a soldier interviewed by the newspaper, the message has a double meaning: "It's a kid, so you've got a little more of a problem, morally and also the target is smaller."

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Israeli-Army-T-Shirts-Mock -Killing-Palestinian-Women-And-Children-During-Gaza-Offensive/Article/ 200903315245946?lpos=World_News_Carousel_Region_2

[kbo234]

Israel army: No charges in Gaza probe

By JOSEF FEDERMAN

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli army on Monday closed an investigation into alleged killings of civilians during its offensive in the Gaza Strip, saying soldiers' testimonies were based on hearsay, "purposely exaggerated" and not supported by facts.

Allegations of wrongful shootings emerged from some soldiers speaking in a closed-door meeting at a military prep school. Their accounts, along with their reports of vandalism in Palestinian homes, were published by Israeli media earlier this month.

The army's chief prosecutor angrily accused the soldiers of harming Israel's international image. "It will be difficult to evaluate the damage done to the image and morals of the Israel Defense Forces and its soldiers ... in Israel and the world," Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit said.

Human rights groups accused the military of carrying out a biased and hasty inquiry that ignored key evidence and urged an independent body be formed to investigate Israeli army activity in Gaza.

One case involved the killing of an elderly woman by a rooftop sniper, and the second described a sniper fatally shooting a mother and two children who had entered a no-go zone, according to a transcript of the testimony obtained by The Associated Press.

The soldiers' accounts set off soul-searching in a country where the military is widely revered. They also echoed Palestinian allegations that Israel's assault did not distinguish between civilians and combatants, and fueled assertions by some international rights groups that Israel violated the laws of war.

Israel used unprecedented force during the three-week operation, launched against Gaza's Hamas rulers last December to halt eight years of rocket attacks on Israeli border towns. After a week of aerial bombardments, the military launched a two-week ground offensive.

More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including more than 900 civilians, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which published a list of names of the dead. Israel has said the toll was lower, and the "vast majority" of the dead were militants. But it did not publish a list to support the assertion.

In announcing the findings Monday, the army said the soldiers' testimonies "were purposely exaggerated and made extreme, in order to make a point" to those attending the closed session.

In the case of the elderly woman shot by a sniper, the soldier "was only repeating a rumor he had heard" that she was gunned down without provocation, the army said.

Maj. Yehoshua Gutler, legal assistant to the military's advocate general, said the elderly woman was wearing bulky clothing and the soldiers had reason to believe she was a threat after intelligence reports showed "Hamas was going to use an elderly woman as a suicide bomber as they had in the past."

The woman continued to advance despite repeated calls to stop and warning shots fired in the air, and soldiers had "no choice" but to shoot, Gutler said.

A second soldier had reported a sniper shooting a woman and two children but later clarified his statement to say it was "an incident that he had not witnessed," according to the findings.

Gutler said the investigation showed that the family "was not fired at and not put in peril at any stage and left the premises unharmed." Gutler said a soldier had instead fired at militants in the opposite direction.

In a joint statement, nine Israeli rights groups said the decision to close the investigation without bringing charges "only strengthens the need for the attorney general to allow for an independent nonpartisan investigative body to be established in order to look into all Israeli army activity" in Gaza.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the investigation showed that Israel possesses "the most moral army in the world."

However, Danny Zamir, the military prep school director who urged the inquiry, said it did not address other incidents that raise serious ethical questions, such as the wanton destruction of Palestinian homes.

The army still needs to deal with "the whole way that we and our comrades ... treated .. property, houses, holy books," he said, calling for better training in the military.

In a tour of Gaza last week, the AP saw evidence of vandalism and destruction in Palestinian homes commandeered by the Israeli military. Graffiti in Hebrew was scrawled on walls, trash littered the floors and makeshift sniper holes were stuffed with cloth or plastic in several homes.

The case of a 33-year-old resident of the Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitoun bore some similarities to the soldiers' accounts. Abir Hijeh told the AP she was in a group of civilians that came under Israeli fire after soldiers yelled at them to turn around when they headed the wrong way after being expelled from their homes.

Hijeh's 2-year-old daughter and a 27-year-old neighbor were killed in the incident, which was confirmed by two area hospitals and a second witness.

The military has not directly commented on this case, but said all possible deviations from army rules would be investigated.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said it is investigating a number of cases in which civilians came under fire while trying to leave the war zone.

Senior researcher Fred Abrahams said the group has so far confirmed six separate cases involving the deaths of 10 Palestinians. He said some shootings apparently were the result of a breakdown in communication between army units.

"I don't believe there was a policy to shoot at civilians," he said. "But even the cases of miscommunication must be thoroughly investigated because we have the outlines of a pattern."

AP correspondent Ian Deitch in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[Disco_Destroyer]

Archive of news from Palestine etc. one sided and

Warning Very Graphic

http://www.thewe.cc/weplanet/news/middle_east/palestine/lest_we_forget .html

http://www.thewe.cc/

and like the pic above on the left some are of dubious quality, but then propaganda is propaganda

[TonyGosling]

Ahhhhh so that's why the BBC haven't reported this story then
Israel will not cooperate with UN Gaza inquiry
JERUSALEM, April 15 (Reuters) - Israel does not plan to cooperate with a U.N. agency's investigation into alleged war crimes by Israeli troops and Hamas militants during fighting in Gaza, an Israeli government official said on Wednesday....
http://www.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUSLF401659._CH_.2400

Zionist BBC rebukes its Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen for anti-Israel comments
BBC rebukes its Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen for anti-Israel comments

By Paul Revoir - Last updated at 12:37 AM on 16th April 2009

The BBC's Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen faced calls to quit tonight after he was criticised for breaching the broadcaster's rules on accuracy and impartiality in two reports about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

An inquiry found that a reference to 'Zionism's innate instinct to push out the frontier' in an article for the BBC's website breached guidelines.

In addition, a suggestion that Israel was 'in defiance of everyone's interpretation of international law except its own' was said to have been 'imprecise'..........


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1170239/BBC-rebukes-Middle-Eas t-correspondent-Jeremy-Bowen-anti-Israel-comments.html

[Disco_Destroyer]

MIDEAST: Aid Rots Outside Gaza
By Erin Cunningham

Aid meant for Gaza going waste in Egypt.

Credit:Erin Cunningham

AL-ARISH, Egypt, Apr 15 (IPS) - Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of aid intended for the Gaza Strip is piling up in cities across Egypt's North Sinai region, despite recent calls from the United Nations to ease aid flow restrictions to the embattled territory in the wake of Operation Cast Lead.

Food, medicine, blankets, infant food and other supplies for Gaza's 1.5 million people, coming from governments and non-governmental agencies around the world, are being stored in warehouses, parking lots, stadiums and on airport runways across Egypt's North Sinai governorate.

Egypt shares a 14-kilometre border with Gaza that has been closed more or less permanently since the Islamist movement Hamas took control of the territory in June 2007.

Flour, pasta, sugar, coffee, chocolate, tomato sauce, lentils, date bars, juice, chickpeas, blankets, hospital beds, catheter tubes and other humanitarian- based items are all sitting in at least eight storage points in and around Al- Arish, a city in North Sinai approximately 50 kilometres from Gaza's border.

Three months after the end of the war, much of the aid has either rotted or been irreparably damaged as a result of both rain and sunshine, and Egypt's refusal to open the Rafah crossing.

"To be honest, most of this aid will never make it to Gaza," a local government official told IPS on condition of anonymity. "A lot of the food here will have to be thrown away."

The Gaza Strip was the target of Israel's three-week Operation Cast Lead, where both the enclave's civilian population and an already decrepit infrastructure were pummelled by powerful Israeli weaponry, leaving some 1,400 dead and over 5,000 injured by the time a unilateral ceasefire was called by Israel Jan. 18.

The United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) head in Gaza, John Ging, told IPS last week that the stranglehold on relief efforts in the post-war period was having devastating consequences, both physical and emotional, on the strip's population.

The last Situation Report released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Mar. 30 stated that the "amounts and types of deliveries reaching Gaza continue being subject to random restrictions and unpredictable clearance procedures, creating major logistical problems for humanitarian agencies."

Food aid and other essential humanitarian supplies for Gaza began pouring into Egypt at the outset of the war, and medical supplies were routed through Rafah - Gaza's only crossing that bypasses Israel - throughout the assault, while food aid was directed through Israel.

All aid meant for Gaza via Egypt must currently pass through either Al-Auja or Kerem Abu Sellem, Egypt's commercial crossings with Israel, and is subject to both Israeli-Egyptian trade specifications and Israeli import law.

Much of what is being stored in North Sinai - including food items like lentils, pasta, chickpeas, and juice - has been deemed by Israel to be "non- essential" to life in the Gaza Strip.

Two thousand "family boxes" - containing essential supplies for Palestinian families and donated by the Italian NGO Music for Peace - were recently rejected at the Al-Auja crossing by Israeli authorities because they each contained a jar of honey, the NGO's President, Stefano Robera, told IPS in Al- Arish.

Representatives from international NGOs currently in both Al-Arish and Rafah say not even a sliver of the aid donated is going through any of Egypt's transit points, despite assurances by the Egyptian government that the Rafah crossing remains open for "humanitarian considerations".

OCHA says Rafah was closed to all cargo for the month of March, and was opened for just two days to send blankets and mattresses into the Gaza Strip.

Since Dec. 27, 2008, the day Israel launched its war, just 43 trucks of what OCHA calls "human food products" were sent into the Gaza Strip via Rafah. The first truckload was sent in Jan. 10, 2009, more than two weeks after the war began.

Some organisations coordinating their aid through Egypt say North Sinai governor Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha asked them to simply donate the goods to local NGOs. Other witnesses told IPS that Egyptian security forces tasked with guarding aid supplies have been giving it away to residents of Al-Arish.

The Rafah border crossing opened in November 2005 when Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) signed an Agreement on Movement and Access as part of Israel's "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip.

In coordination with the PA, Egypt allowed passengers, cargo and humanitarian aid to pass under the supervision of both EU monitors and Israeli security. When Hamas, the Islamist movement democratically elected in 2006, seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, Egypt closed its border with the coastal enclave.

The Egyptian government has since refused to open the Rafah crossing to any cargo or non-medical humanitarian aid, leaving the supplies in a state of political limbo and Gaza's population grappling with the after-effects of both deadly war and continued economic siege.

Human rights organisations have recently said that not only Israel but Egypt, the EU and the U.S. could be in violation of international law for failing to adhere to the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access, and consequently violating the basic human rights of Gaza's 1.5 million people - particularly in the post-war period. (END/2009)
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46504