Images, recordings, stories and reports are emerging from the Gaza Strip, after the pullout of Israeli troops has allowed relatively free access to areas that endured weeks of intense violence, either from the air, from ground forces, or from both.The image at left is of 15 year-old Ayman al-Najar at the Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. He has severe injuries, including chemical burns, after Israeli bombing in the village of Khoza'a, Gaza.
Israeli forces used tons of white phosphorus munitions in clear violation of international laws, and in violation of the terms under which Israeli military forces obtained the munitions from the United States. Scores of civilian dead and several hundred of the civilians injured by Israeli forces, were subjected to this particular war crime.
Your Alaska senators, Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski, have always voted to replenish Israeli cluster bombs, mines and other weapons, even after clearly illegal use of such weapons, as in the 2006 Lebanon invasion.
U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki-moon, after inspecting white phosphorus damage to U.N. facilities in Gaza City yesterday, stated, "I have seen only a fraction of the destruction. This is shocking and alarming. These are heartbreaking scenes I have seen and I am deeply grieved by what I have seen today."
Up until his Gaza tour, Ban Ki-moon had not been very critical of Israeli action. He's now joining other international figures in demanding full international access to the Strip, without Israeli interference in aid distribution.
I've read many heartbreaking stories from Gaza over the past three weeks. This, from a story by Donald Macintyre, in today's U.K. Independent, is the most recent:
A Palestinian father has claimed that he saw two of his young daughters shot dead and another critically injured by an Israeli soldier who emerged from a stationary tank and opened fire as the family obeyed an order from the Israeli forces to leave their home.
Khaled Abed Rabbo said Amal, aged two and Suad, seven, were killed by fire from the soldier's semi-automatic rifle. His third daughter, Samer, four, has been evacuated to intensive care in a Belgian hospital after suffering critical spinal injuries which he said were inflicted in the attack early in Israel's ground offensive.
Mr Abed Rabbo stood near the wreckage off his subsequently destroyed home on the eastern edge of the northern Gaza town of Jabalya yesterday and described how a tank had parked outside the building at 12.50pm on 7 January and ordered the family in Arabic through a megaphone to leave building. He said his 60-year-old mother had also been shot at as she left waving her white headscarf with her son, daughter in law and her three grandchildren.
"Two soldiers were on the tank eating chips, then one man came out of the tank with a rifle and started shooting the kids," Mr Abed Rabbo, who receives a salary as a policeman from the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in Ramallah said. The family say they think the weapon used by the soldier was an M16 and that the first to be shot was Amal. Mr Abed Rabbo said that Suad was then shot with what he claimed were 12 bullets, and then Samer.
The soldier who fired the rifle had what Mr Abed Rabbo thought were ringlets visible below his helmet, he said. The small minority of ultra-Orthodox Jews who serve in the army are in a unit which did not take part in the Gaza offensive and only a very small number of settlers who also favour that hairstyle serve in other units.
The Israeli military forces used immense amounts of white phosphorus and other munitions in their siege, bombing and assault upon Gaza. As in late 2006, after the Hezbollah War, Israel will expect our congress and President to replenish this arsenal, perhaps upgrading it, as well.
In the past I have called Senators Stevens or Murkowksi, to encourage them to vote against replenishment of Israeli munitions that have been used illegally against civilians. This time, I will be calling Sen. Mark Begich about this too.
Please join me!
image - International Solidarity Movement
6 comments:
I hope that we are not refurbishing either side. I am writing letters and encouraging them to GTF out of the conflicts-- both sides should be limited to using rocks and sticks.
Is it not at all the most evil of ironies that Isrealis would be doing this to another group of people - much like the Nazis did to Jews in the ghettos and later concentration camps? Am I naive to think this is a wicked way of history playing out before another generation? I shake my head in an effort ot see it differently...but my eyes always settle right square back to history's lesson of politically-funded genocide seemingly lost...again.
pres. carter wrote that book a couple years ago comparing relationship of the palestinians and israel to south africa in the apartheid era. quite an eye opener -- changed the way i thought about it. and no one from the MSM would even talk to him about it.
So we need to make sure our Alaska legislators know that, even though Israel certainly has a right to protect itself, it has no right whatsoever to commit war crimes in our names, by using weapons we willingly provide.
"Israel certainly has a right to protect itself, it has no right whatsoever to commit war crimes in our names, by using weapons we willingly provide."
AMEN BROTHER PHIL!
Phil, your inconsistency is showing,
You're complaining about Stevens handing out the means for continuing war crimes year after year?
how's that square with your call to pardon Stevens?
You can't hardly cry about him providing for war crimes and at the same time, tell us he should be granted a pardon.
Well, you could try to do that, but the ill-contrived logic you'd advance to justify it wouldn't pass muster.
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