Bowen diary: Stranded with dead

BBC Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen's diary of the conflict between Hamas and Israel.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7852218.stm

Ahmed, a 16-year-old boy, only became animated when he talked about his dead pets. Even then the mask that his face has become shifted only slightly.

"I don't know why they [Israeli soldiers] kill animals. I don't believe birds can harm them".
Ahmed

He pointed towards a pile of rubble: "That was my house. We were living there and we were very happy. The Israelis destroyed my house and the other houses before they pulled out."

'I had two goats and a donkey and they killed them. And they killed 10 pigeons, and our chickens and a cockerel and two ducks. The pigeons and the goats were mine. The rest belonged to the family.

"I loved seeing my pets grow. I wanted to see their babies. It makes me very sad that they killed the animals, the donkey, the goats, the pigeons and the ducks.

"Why? I don't know why they kill animals. I don't believe birds can harm them. My white pigeons were shot. I know that because I found their bodies."

'High-tech' rocket
Ahmed talks with some expression about the death of his pets because he is trying to clear his mind of everything else he witnessed in Gaza City.

"Three of my brothers died next to me. I had been lying next to my brother Ismail" said Ahmed.

Ahmed says that after the Israeli soldiers came to his street he was confined with 90 members of his extended family in a house just opposite his own. Other witnesses confirm his story.

After more than 24 hours, the house was hit by some sort of projectile and there was a big explosion. Local people say that 29 people were killed.

When representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reached the site more than 48 hours later they found part of what they say looked like a high-tech rocket in the building.

They also found children who had been stranded there with the bodies. One of them was Ahmed.
When he talks about it his face is a mask again. When the explosion happened he thought at first that he was dead.

"But I opened my eyes and moved my arms and legs and I realised I was alive. But I couldn't speak or get up," Ahmed says.

I asked him what happened to his family.

"Three of my brothers died next to me. I had been lying next to my brother Ismail. My head was a half-a-metre from his. My brother Yacoub was hurt. There was a hole in his stomach that you could have put a coffee cup into."

And his mother was killed. Ahmed says he thinks of her every day.

Trauma sessions
The survivors were allowed to leave by the soldiers who had told them to stay in the house. Ahmed could not walk, so the others promised to go for help.

He says the time they were there in the house was terrifying. They found a small amount of water. He would drag himself to the door to watch the Israelis. He saw them bulldozing the mosque flat.

The ICRC says Israel refused to let them get to the wounded for more than two days.

That is why they broke their usual silence to issue an angry statement saying it looked as though the Israeli army had not fulfilled its obligations under the laws of war to treat the wounded or arrange for their evacuation.

The house the soldiers commandeered is 10 paces away from the place where Ahmed and the others waited for help for more than two days with the bodies.

His father survived, as did four younger brothers and two older sisters. He has not gone back to school yet, because he says his clothes and his books were destroyed when his house was bulldozed. So was the bicycle he used to get to school. Maths was his favourite subject.

Ahmed has had some sessions with experts in the trauma that children suffer when they experience violence.

In Gaza, they have developed considerable expertise. They say he needs a lot of time and treatment, and even then the experience he has had will scar him for life.

The doctors were encouraged that, when he spoke about his mother, his expressionless mask slipped slightly, and he looked as if he was struggling not to cry.

The psychologist and psychiatrist who were with him said that he was going to have to go through a great deal of emotional pain, the pain that he was trying with all his might to suppress, if he was to have any hope of getting better.

No wonder Ahmed finds it easier to talk about his dead pets.

No one should be above the law

Tariq Al-Maeena talmaeena@aol.com in Arab News

From 1945 to 1949, a series of trials were held in Nuremberg, Germany, before the International Military Tribunal. In the dock were 24 major political and military leaders of Nazi Germany, indicted for aggressive war, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges included the wanton killing and total disregard for the lives of Poles, Russians, Jews and others.

Now that there is a lull in the Holocaust in Gaza, several international organizations including appointees by the United Nations have taken it a step further to charge Israeli leaders for their complicity in the more than three weeks of murderous assault on the people of Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have all been named as conspirators in this murderous assault on a primarily defenseless people. A formal complaint was submitted by Lebanese lawyers to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, against Ehud Barak and others in the Israeli Cabinet on the charge that they had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by ordering and maintaining a siege on Gaza.

This was not a war as some may have been led to believe but a systematic destruction of human lives carried out with unmatched firepower. Since June 2007, the 1.5 million residents of Gaza have been under a blockade imposed by the Israeli government, helped in great part by former US President George Bush and his administration. According to international law, the siege, which is still in force, is collective punishment of innocent people.

The-year-and-a-half-long siege had caused severe food and fuel shortages, intermittent drinking water and electricity supply problems, disruption to sewage treatment plants and shortages of medicine and essential medical equipment, affecting the people — a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Rome Statute. The despair and depression of such a people cannot be described in simple words.

While Americans were going to the polls back in November, the Israelis were violating the fragile cease-fire agreement killing 15 Palestinian civilians and wounding 50 others including seven women and 15 children. This was preceded by the blocking of UN humanitarian supplies and holding shipments of EU-funded fuel to the territory’s sole power plant.

Then on Dec. 27, 2008, the Israelis began the aerial bombardment of civilian population centers in Gaza. The attacks involved scores of aircraft sorties, dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gaza neighborhoods. Schools and hospitals were initially targeted, bringing the death toll of children to a disproportionate number.

More than 1,300 people — men, women and children lost their lives and 5,300 people were injured. The bombs damaged thousands of homes and turned hundreds of thousands of people into refugees. White phosphorus explosives were used indiscriminately against a defenseless people.

White phosphorus is an incendiary agent used to inflict serious burn wounds. UN officials and human rights groups have alleged Israel used it in the 22-day Gaza campaign. Amnesty International has called Israel’s firing of white phosphorus shells in densely populated residential areas of Gaza a war crime.

In their charge, Amnesty International stated that its researchers had found phosphorus wedges, sometimes still burning, in residential areas of Gaza. The group said that the wedges had been packed into steel artillery shells and fired from the air, a tactic that can scatter them over an area larger than a soccer field.

Medics interviewed in Gaza last week confirmed that so many patients had sustained burns consistent with white phosphorus and that it was obvious beyond a degree of doubt that Israeli forces used the chemical in highly populated areas.

At Shifa, the main hospital in Gaza City, doctors said that scores of patients had arrived with unusual burns, dark, foul-smelling splotches that grew deeper and blacker despite being washed with water and saline solution. The burns were so toxic in some patients that even those with relatively minor wounds, which ought to have been treatable, grew ill and died, the doctors said.

“We have never seen this type of injury or the number of such injuries,” said Dr. Nafez Abu Sha’ban, the head of the burns unit at Shifa. “These were not usual burns.”

The victims reported that they’d come into contact with smoking chunks of phosphorus, and in some cases had reached hospitals with wounds on their bodies still smoking. White phosphorus burns as long as it’s exposed to oxygen, and can reach temperatures well over 1,000 degrees.

To protect themselves, the Israelis first went into a total denial and spin mode. Then taking it a step further, they retrained their own media from revealing any details on those parties involved in this heinous crime.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the Israeli government made it forbidden for the press to make known the full names of military commanders of the units that participated in the war on Gaza. This action was taken to “prevent the possibility of prosecution for war crimes by Israeli left-wing activists and international organizations.” But can the Israeli government escape these charges so simply? Only if the rest of the world remains muted, and permits such atrocities to happen again and again without demanding punishment to the perpetrators.


Arif N. Khanhttp://www.netvert.biz/wordpowerhttp://profiles.yahoo.com/ank2000pkPS. Please endorse a copy of your comments on my post to ank2000pk@yahoo.com

Israeli white phosphorous bombs

Hi All

To get a visual feeling of what it means for a school -- sheltering civilians -- to be subjected by Israeli white phosphorous bombs ..... rain of inextinguishable fire balls falling from the sky in all directions, deliberately designed to cause maximum death and destruction.

No wonder it is illegal to use white phosphorous as a weapon of war, particularly in civilian settings, let alone a UN shelter!

In this criminal attack children were killed, one mother lost her legs, and dozens of children and women were injured --(some from inhaling the phosphorous smoke -- the effects of which will only be revealed with time )

Forward these photos for all those who call for JUSTICE(UNRWA SCHOOL IN BEIT LAHIA, GAZA, PALESTINE)

God in not only for JEW's but for all

These two websites are great resources and will definitely help anyone who takes part in a conversation with a zionist. Even if you're not planning on having tea and cake with a zionist any time soon, the info is still good to know.

Zionists may talk about their 'God given' rights and 'Palestinian acts of terror' but let us talk about facts and statistics....which are verified by international aid agencies and human rights groups.

1) www.whatreallyhappened.com

2) www.ifamericansknew.org

3) jewsagainstzionism.com

4) jewsnotzionists.org

The first site has links to excellent videos (which can be graphic at times) and photo galleries which are harrowing to say the least.The second is a wonderful site full of charts, graphs and analyses (so good for the techy/maths people among us!)

The last two sites are very coherent (if not so user friendly) at making the distinction betwen Judaism and zionism. It's really important to shake off this 'anti-semitic' tag which is thrown at us when we criticise the state of Israel and in my experience, these sites help us stand on our own when confronted with that slander.

I really hope that Muslim organisations forge links with groups such as Neturei Karta because seeing Jews protest against the attacks in Gaza has really made some previously anti-palestine people in this country question their preconceptions about what's going on and who's to blame.

Obama orders Guantanamo closure

Guantanamo Bay has been widely condemnedby international rights groups [GALLO/GETTY]

Barack Obama, the US president, has ordered the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp within one year and a review of the military tribunals set up by the Bush administration to try them.

Obama also signed an order ending the harsh interrogation of prisoners held by the US and the closure of any secret prisons run by the CIA.

On his second full day in office, Obama signed the three orders surrounded by retired military officers in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington.

Obama said the signing of the order showed "we are willing to observe core standards, not just when its easy but when its hard".

"The message that we are sending around the world is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism," Obama said.
"We are going to do so vigilantly; we are going to do so effectively; and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals."

Obama had promised to close the detention centre during his election campaign.

Prisoners future
Guantanamo was set up by the Bush administration in 2002 to hold prisoners it detained as part of its so-called war on terror.

Guantanamo prisoners will be treated in amanner consistent with international law [AFP]More than 240 prisoners remain held there, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is suspected of planning the September 11 attacks on the US.

The White House said the order closing Guantanamo also sets up a series of reviews to determine whether it is possible to transfer prisoners to their home countries, if US national security is not threatened.

If that is not possible, the review will then look at options for prosecuting them, the White House said in a statement.

The order also orders that all prisoners held at Guantanamo be held in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions until the facility is closed.

Al Jazeera's Anand Naidoo in Washington DC said it was likely that the five men facing charges over the September 11 attacks would face some kind of prosecution on US soil.

The US president also said he was setting up a task force that would have 30 days to recommend policies on handling "terror" suspects who are detained in future.

The force would look at where those detainees should be held instead of Guantanamo.

On Thursday, Obama had ordered a halt to military tribunals of al-Qaeda suspects held at the camp, including those suspected of involvement in the September 11 attacks.

Shane Kadidal, a senior lawyer at the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative that works on behalf of detainees, told Al Jazeera the move was a step in the right direction.

"We've always said that these military commissions were insupportable. The system was designed to launder evidence gained through torture and all those cases should be transferred to ordinary federal courts."

Legal advice
The order ending harsh interrogations also requires that all interrogations follow the US Army's Field Manual interrogation guidelines, which ban the use of techniques such as "waterboarding," which simulates the sensation of drowning.

The order bans the CIA from operating secret prisons, and forbids them from opening any new such facilities.

It also ends US government reliance on a series of controversial legal advice notes on the treatment of prisoners drawn up by Bush administration advisers.

The order, however, does not ban the controversial practice of rendition, which involves the secret detention and transfer of "terror" suspects from one country to another.

It does, however, order a review of the practice.

Obama also issued a memorandum ordering a review of the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari citizen and the only "enemy combatant" held on US soil at a Navy prison in South Carolina.

Obama orders missile Strikes in Pakistan

President orders air strikes on villages in tribal area.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/24/pakistan-barack-obama-air-strike

Barack Obama gave the go-ahead for his first military action yesterday, missile strikes against suspected militants in Pakistan which killed at least 18 people.

Four days after assuming the presidency, he was consulted by US commanders before they launched the two attacks. Although Obama has abandoned many of the "war on terror" policies of George Bush while he was president, he is not retreating from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders.

The US believes they are hiding in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, and made 30 strikes last year in which more than 200 people were killed. In the election, Obama hinted at increased operations in Pakistan, saying he thought Bush had made a mistake in switching to Iraq before completing the job against al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The US marine corp commander said yesterday that his 22,000 troops should be redeployed from Iraq to Afghanistan. Gen James Conway said "the time is right" to leave Iraq now the war had become largely nation-building rather than the pitched fighting in which the corps excelled; he wanted the marines in Afghanistan, especially in the south where insurgents, and the Taliban and al-Qaida, benefit from both a nearby safe haven in Pakistan and a booming trade in narcotics.

Obama has warned that he is prepared to bomb inside Pakistan if he gets relevant intelligence about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. He had also said he would act against militants along the border if the Pakistan government failed to.

The US missiles were fired by unmanned Predator drones, which hang in the sky gathering intelligence through surveillance and, when commanded and directed by remote control, to launch attacks.

The strikes will help Obama portray himself as a leader who, though ready to shift the balance of American power towards diplomacy, is not afraid of military action.

The first attack yesterday was on the village of Zharki, in Waziristan; three missiles destroyed two houses and killed 10 people. One villager told Reuters of phonethat of nine bodies pulled from the rubble of one house, six were its owner and his relatives; Reuters added that intelligence officials said some foreign militants were also killed. A second attack hours later also in Warizistan killed eight people.

The Pakistan government publicly expressed hope that the arrival of Obama would see a halt to such strikes, which stir up hostility from Pakistanis towards the government; in private, the government may be more relaxed about such attacks.

There is a lot of nervousness in the new administration about the fragility of Pakistan, particularly as it has nuclear weapons, but it also sees Afghanistan and Pakistan as being linked. In the face of a Taliban resurgence, there is despair in Washington over the leadership of the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, and there will not be much disappointment if he is replaced in elections later this year.

But Washington insists on seeing as one of its biggest problems the ability of the Taliban and al-Qaida to maintain havens in Pakistan. Obama on Thursday announced he was making veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke a special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, spoke by phone to the Pakistan president, Asif Ali Zardari.

Make the World a Better Place - Jews speak out against Israel

Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Join American Jews in Condemning Gaza War

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2009/01/15/join-american-jews-in-condemning-gaza-war/


Jan 15th, 2009 by Richard Silverstein


Jerry Haber and I, along with Verso Books, the publishers of A Time to Speak Out, have prepared the following statement from American Jews condemning the Gaza assault and Israeli policy toward the Palestinians.


We hope that you will sign it and encourage others you know to do so as well. Roane Carey of The Nation has expressed some interest in publishing it there, if we succeed in getting a significant number of signatories. We hope you will help start a viral campaign by promoting this statement as widely as you can via e mail, websites and general word of mouth.

To sign, please send your full name, title (if you wish), & affiliation (if you wish) to statement.signatories@gmail.com

It is only for signatures and not for regular correspondence. For that, please e mail me or this site directly.


“We Shall Not Be a Party to Their Counsel!”


As human beings, we are shocked and appalled at the mass destruction unleashed by the State of Israel against the people of Gaza in its current military operation, following years of Israeli occupation, siege, and deprivation.

As Americans, we protest the carte blanche given Israel by the US government to pursue a war of “national honor,” “restoring deterrence,” “destroying Hamas,” and “searing Israel’s military might into the consciousness of the Gazans.”

As progressives, we reject the same justifications for the carnage that we heard ad nauseam from the supporters of the Second Iraq War: the so-called “war on terror,” the “clash of civilizations,” the “need to re-establish deterrence” – all of which served to justify a misguided and unnecessary war, with disastrous consequences for America and Iraq.

But as Jews of different religious persuasions, from Orthodox to secular atheist, we are especially horrified that a state that purports to speak in our name wages a military campaign that has killed over 1,000 people, a large percentage of them civilians, children, and non-combatants, with little or no consideration for human rights or the laws of war.

While the moral and legal issue concerning Israel’s right to respond militarily in these circumstance can be debated, there is near-universal agreement that its conduct of the military operation has been unjust and even criminal – with only the usual apologists for the Jewish state disagreeing.

As Jews, we stand united with another Israel, the patriarch Jacob, who cursed his sons Simeon and Levi for massacring the people of Shechem in revenge for the rape of their sister Dinah. Like Jacob, “we shall not be a party to the counsel of zealots. We shall not be counted in their assembly. (See Genesis 34. 49: 5-7).

As Jews, we stand united with the Jewish sages who rejected the zealotry of the Jewish “terrorists” at Masada, those who masked ethnic tribalism in the cloak of “self-defense” and “national honor.”

As Jews, we listen not only when the sage Hillel says, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” but also when he says, “If I am only for myself, what am I?” Hillel’s closing words also ring true in this hour of decision when a ceasefire is demanded of both sides: “If not now, when?”

Finally, as American Jewish progressives, and as human beings, we condemn Hamas and Israel for violating the human rights of civilians on both sides, although we do not necessarily declare these violations to be morally or legally equivalent. We affirm the rights of both Israeli and the Palestinian peoples to self-determination and self-defense, as we affirm the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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