Accumulating Lies

Gaza Homes Destruction ‘Wanton’

BBC News

Human rights investigators say Israeli forces engaged in "wanton destruction" of Palestinian homes during the recent conflict in Gaza. 

Amnesty International has told the BBC News website the methods used raised concerns about war crimes.

Israel's military said buildings were destroyed because of military "operational needs". The Israeli Defense Forces said they operated in accordance with international law during the conflict. 

However, the use of mines to destroy homes contradicted this claim, the head of the Amnesty International fact-finding mission to southern Israel and Gaza, Donatella Rovera, has argued.

Israeli troops had to leave their vehicles to plant the mines, indicating that they faced no danger and that there was no military or operational justification, she said.

Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group that gathers and circulates the testimonies of Israeli soldiers, has also told the BBC News website that its findings from the Gaza war suggested many demolitions had been carried out when there was no immediate threat.

"From the testimonies that we've gathered, lots of demolitions - buildings demolished either by bulldozers or explosives - were done after the area was under Israeli control," said Yehuda Shaul, one of the group's members.

Destruction of civilian property is not illegal in itself under international law, but it must be justifiable on military grounds - for example if the building was booby trapped or being used as cover for enemy fighters.

Thousands of buildings were destroyed in the 22-day Israeli operation. Some of them were police stations, mosques and government premises attacked in targeted airstrikes, in many cases with surrounding buildings left in tact.

Reduced to rubble

There were also whole neighbourhoods reduced to rubble in areas where the Israeli ground forces were present.

Ms Rovera said Amnesty International was concerned about "large scale destruction of homes and other civilian properties" during the conflict.

"The destruction was, in our view, and according to our findings, wanton destruction - it could not be justified on military grounds," she said.

Ms Rovera said her team found fragments of anti-tank mines in and around destroyed properties.

Their use was also consistent with remains of houses, collapsed in on themselves as if blown up from below, rather than destroyed from above as in an airstrike, she said.

Troops would have had to leave their armoured vehicles to plant them and rig up the detonators, she said.

"Unless those operating on the ground felt not just 100% but 200% secure - that the places were not booby trapped, that they wouldn't come under fire - they could not have got out of the vehicles," she said. "They would not have used that method."

"The use of the method tells us even more that there wasn't the kind of danger that might have made it lawful to destroy some of those properties," Ms Rovera said.

"Wanton destruction on a large scale would qualify as a war crime," she said, adding that the practice was among several used in the conflict by both sides that Amnesty is concerned may constitute war crimes.

In one case visited by the BBC, six homes belonging to the extended family of Raed al-Atamna in the Izbit Abed Rabbo area, near the border with Israel, were destroyed. Mr Atamna said a UN ordnance clearance team had found several mines in and around the remains of one of the homes.

He said he and his family had fled the area during the Israeli military operation, and returned to find their homes demolished.

'Substantial operational needs'

The IDF said buildings in the Gaza Strip were destroyed during Operation Cast Lead due to "substantial operational needs".

In a written statement, it said: "For example, buildings were either booby-trapped, located over tunnels, or fire was opened from within them in the direction of IDF soldiers.

"The terrorist organisations operated from within the civilian population, using them as a cover and made cynical use of the IDF's strict rules of engagement, opening fire from within civilian population centres, mosques, schools, hospitals and even private residences of citizens in the Gaza Strip.

"The troops were briefed and trained to avoid harming uninvolved civilians and did all they could to give warning in advance so that civilians could distance themselves from combat zones.

"The IDF emphasises that the terrorist organisation, Hamas, and its infrastructure were the target of Operation Cast Lead, and not the civilian population in Gaza."

A military source said the mines used do not detonate automatically and therefore do not represent a danger when left unexploded in the field. 

Outnumbered

Palestinian Women are Israel’s Demographic Nightmare 

Iqbal Tamimi

Apartheid Israel has killed 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza because its fears are of a demographic nature. Its army never cared what age or gender it killed. Israel’s war machine was harvesting Palestinians of all ages and sizes, young and old, disabled and healthy, pregnant women and young girls, the ones resisting the occupation and the ones who are still too young to understand such things.

Israel’s nightmare is on a demographic scale. It is frightened at the prospect of being outnumbered, so their answer is to starve people to death, stop them from receiving medication so that they would die of ‘natural causes’ then bar the media from investigating that, and then knit a freshly made lie to suit its new tailored fib. Israel’s actions translate into the concept of a terrorist in every Palestinian cradle...

During the time, since last December, that Israel was feeling victorious and happy counting 1,300 massacred Palestinians, Palestinian women retaliated by giving birth to 3,570 babies.

The Zionists consider the Palestinian woman a demographic bomb, a highly fertile creature, as fertile as the soil of Palestine. The more Israel sends a Palestinian on a one way trip to the womb of the land, the more Palestinian women’s wombs show generosity, giving birth to more heroes.

 

At a time when the average fertility in Israel is 2.6 births per woman, Gaza is considered one of the most natal-fertile places in the world, with an average of 6 births per woman. Israel sustains a high percentage of senior citizens while Gaza has an abundance of youngsters. According to UNICEF’s report on the 3rd of March 2009, the total number of children in Gaza is approximately 793,520, or 56 per cent of the population! This was one of the main reasons that forced Israel to stop its military incursions, for there are 4,170 humans per every square Kilometre in Gaza.

This brings us back to Israel’s devious methods of trying to kill women who are considered as factories for making resistance activists, without incurring responsibility directly -- with its blockades and checkpoints where sick women or women about to give birth suffer by not being able to reach hospitals, denying them the right to travel or import foods and medicines, bombing their infrastructure -- leaving them with no water to drink or use for hygiene, the near total shut-down of the sewage-system, spraying them with chemicals from above and burning them with white phosphorus below...

To Whom it May Concern

THUGS - Terrorists Holding Unilaterally Gilad Shalit

Raja Chemayel 

Head Quarters-office,

Under the rubbles of Gaza-City,

3rd Street left to the 2nd Avenue,

Behind all the burned school,

Gaza the liberated...

Announcement of Delay

We regret to announce an unforeseen delay in releasing

that mini-War-Criminal-Israeli-soldier

Mr. Gilad Shalit,

in exchange for

hundreds of innocent-Palestinian-hostages.

The circumstances of this delay

are beyond our control

and yet we ask for apologies.

It came to our attention that Mr. Gilad Shalit

has been hit by some Phosphoric bombs

thrown at us by some barbaric-army, lately...

Gilad has been treated now to cure his

constant-and-permanent-burning-wounds

but the delay is actually to be blamed on

the Regime of Mubarak which is not allowing

the medication to enter at the borders,

so we are using the tunnels, which takes longer

and of course, costs us more.

As soon as those medications will reach us

and as soon as Olmert will be ready to talk

to smaller Terrorists, than he actually is,

we shall, naturally and immediately release Gilad Shalit.

Signed :

THUGS

The rightful Terrorists

defending their own country

from the bigger-unrightful-Terrorists

Ongoing Suffering

The starving of Gaza; why Israel's offensive against Gaza will continue to claim lives  for years to come

Eric Ruder 

ISRAEL'S WAR on Gaza took a terrible toll in human casualties. Bodies are still being exhumed from the rubble, and Israel's refusal to open Gaza's border crossings to allow in humanitarian supplies has made treating the injured a tortuously slow endeavor.

But one less-noticed effect of Israel's brutal assault on the civilian and economic infrastructure of Gaza--combined with the suffocating effects of the 18-month siege that came before--is the further destruction of Gaza's long-term ability to provide food for its population.

The United Nations Children's Fund said that economic losses as a result of the war total $1.9 billion, which is significantly larger than Gaza's annual economic output. "According to the World Food Program, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and Palestinian officials, between 35 percent and 60 percent of the agriculture industry has been wrecked by the three-week Israeli attack," reported Britain's Guardian newspaper.

This could make a huge portion of Gaza's population entirely dependent on food aid from the outside. "When we have given a food ration in Gaza, it was never a full ration, but to complement the diet," said Christine van Nieuwenhuyse, the World Food Program's country director. "Now it is going to be almost impossible for Gaza to produce the food it needs for the next six to eight months, assuming that the agriculture can be rehabilitated."

The effects are hitting home for Samir Sawafiri, a poultry farmer. Surveying the carcasses of some 65,000 chickens strewn across his farm in Zeitoun, while several dozen live chickens--the only ones that survived the war--scrounged for food, Sawafiri told a reporter, "They are all that is left, and I have nowhere to put them."

The poultry farms around Zeitoun, which is on the eastern edge of Gaza City, once provided the bulk of Gaza's fresh eggs. But almost nothing remains standing now.

"I evacuated on January 9," said Sawafiri. "Three days later, on January 12, tanks came with bulldozers and leveled the fields. They wanted to spoil the economy--that's the only answer. There's no justification for what they did."

Rebuilding the farms will require investment running into the tens of millions of dollars, according to Fuad El-Jamassi, director of Gaza's Environmental and Health Ministry. Further complicating the rebuilding process is the fact that Israel does not allow live animals to cross into Gaza. So the only hope of restocking Gaza's poultry farms depends on whether Israel will restrict the import of fertilized eggs, which can then be taken to a hatchery.

The most pressing challenge for many of Gaza's farmers is planting crops in the next week or two, or they will miss the growing season. But their fields have been destroyed by Israel's repeated bombardments, and are strewn with debris, unexploded ordnance and hazardous chemical dust.

Aid organizations such as Oxfam and Save the Children have been waiting for Israel's permission to deliver humanitarian supplies massed at the border. But for more than two weeks, Israel has refused to allow them through Gaza's border crossings. "We've had every reason under the sun given to us for not going in...Security, not the right day, that is was closed for holiday, that the right people were not available, that we would hear tomorrow," says Mike Baily of Oxfam.

Oxfam is seeking to deliver basic items such as food and medicine, but it also plans to do what it can to help Gaza's farmers prepare their fields for the critical planting deadline. "If we don't plant crops now, we won't harvest in three or four month's time, and the one and a half million people of Gaza will be completely dependent on food aid," says Baily.

Evonne Frederickson, an aid worker with Sweden's Palestinian Solidarity Association, tells the same story. Her efforts to get mental health experts and doctors into Gaza have been repeatedly stymied. But she says that Israeli policy toward aid agencies has been capricious for a long time. "Sometimes you get in, sometimes you don't, so they're playing with those who are working with the aid to Gaza," she says.

On February 5, Israel announced it would allow 100 trucks a day through Gaza's border crossings with humanitarian relief supplies. But that's still less than the 130 trucks a day that crossed on average during the second half of 2008, and far less than the 600 trucks a day estimated to be needed to sustain Gaza's population and provide the critical goods necessary for rebuilding its shattered economy.

Another pressing threat to Gaza's agricultural viability is the raw sewage and toxic chemicals that threaten to contaminate the fields and leech into Gaza's groundwater system.

"This is a top priority," said Jens Toyberg-Frandzen, a special representative of the UN Development Program. "The rubble is mixed with poisonous harmful materials, and may include unexploded ordnances. It needs to be urgently removed to protect the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and to facilitate immediate access to basic humanitarian and social services."

El-Jamassi worries about the need for experts familiar with the chemicals used by Israel to assess the situation. "There were many chemicals used here by the Israelis--there has been chemical dust in the air," he said. "We need experts to come tell us what to do, if this is safe. There are no experts here."

Contamination of Gaza's water supply from failed sewage systems also poses a significant risk. According to Rachel Bergstein, who reports regularly on environmental issues in the Middle East:

Gaza's ecological conditions are already conducive to groundwater pollution. The sandy desert soil tends to absorb water--or pollutants like sewage--easily. Also, the groundwater is fairly close to the surface, so access wells are fairly shallow and easily contaminated...

Due to both a lack of investment and an inability to access materials and equipment for repairs, Gaza's sewage treatment infrastructure was in a pretty bad state of disrepair before the war began at the end of December. Israel's military actions caused even more damage to many of the pipes. As a result, top water engineers in Gaza report that the entire system is on the verge of collapse, posing a severe threat to Gaza's groundwater resources.