""Israel’s quick embrace of an Egyptian-proposed cease-fire early
Tuesday was a sign of its reticence to launch a ground invasion of Gaza
and turn this into a full-scale war..."
'8 things you need to know about the Gaza-Israel conflict'
http://www.jta.org/2014/07/15/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/8-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-gaza-israel-conflict
"Hamas or its military wing is designated as a terrorist organization by
Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the European
Union, Egypt, Australia, Japan, and is banned in Jordan."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas
>
On 8/21/2014 1:38 AM, eustace10679 wrote:
Facts you should know about the fighting in Gaza
By Joyce Chediac on August 19, 2014
Since Israel began a military offensive in Gaza on July 8, some 2,000
Palestinians and 68 Israelis have been killed. What is going on? Why
is it important to you?
Fiction: Israel was exercising its “legitimate right of self-defense”
in bombing Gaza.
Fact: Israel has no such “right” under international law. But the
Palestinians do have a legal right to resist occupation.
Israel claims self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations
Charter, which says that states have a right to self-defense if
attacked by another state. But Gaza isn’t a foreign state. It has been
occupied by Israel since 1967, and 80 percent of its residents are
refugees that were forced out of Israeli invaded land in 1948. Israel
controls the land, sea and air borders of Gaza, the civil population
registry, and the tax and revenue system.
So Israel is bound by other laws. The 1960 Declaration on the Granting
of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, as well as the
Fourth Geneva Convention and its protocols, call Israel’s occupation
forced upon the West Bank and Gaza a “belligerency,” or state of war.
According to these laws, the people of Gaza have the legal right to
“fight against colonial domination and alien occupation in the
exercise of their right to self-determination.”
Fiction: Hamas is a terrorist organization and international outlaw.
Fact: Israel disregarded Hamas, the Palestinian peoples’ elected
choice, and then used state terrorism to try to get them out of office.
Hamas is one of many political, social, military, professional and
charitable organizations in Palestinian society. It had enough popular
support to win a parliamentary election in 2006 — an election which
was called “free and fair” by U.S. former President Jimmy Carter and
other election observers.
The U.S. and Israeli governments did not like the Palestinian people’s
choice, so they declared economic and military war on Hamas and Gaza.
Borders were sealed, and Gaza and its people were blockaded for eight
years. Since that 2006 election, Israel has waged three wars on Gaza:
in 2008, 2012 and now in 2014. Military measures taken by Hamas and
other organizations in Gaza have been to defend the people against
this constant Israeli aggression.
Fiction: Hamas started the current war by firing rockets into Israel.
Fact: For 17 months Hamas fired no rockets, while Israel repeatedly
violated ceasefires and then attacked full force.
After a November 2012 ceasefire agreement ended eight days of Israeli
attacks, not one rocket was fired into Israel from Gaza until Israel
broke the ceasefire in February 2013.
Since then, according to the Jerusalem Fund, a nonprofit group based
in Washington, D.C., “Palestinian launches have been rare and sporadic
and occurred almost always after successive instances of Israeli
cease-fire violations.” (blog.thejerusalemfund.org, Feb. 5) The
Centre for Research on Globalization reports that of the rockets fired
from Gaza in 2013, “none … came from the Hamas government themselves,
despite the widespread violations from Israeli forces.” (July 28)
Hamas did not fire any rockets from November 2012 until June 30, 2014,
after an Israeli plane struck Gaza.
Israel could easily end the rocket strikes by stopping its attacks,
lifting the blockade and letting the Palestinian people have their
rights.
Fiction: Gaza rockets purposely target civilians.
Fact: Israel claims “pinpoint precision” for its weapons, yet its
bombs hit schools, mosques, hospitals and ambulances and demolished
whole neighborhoods. These are war crimes.
Gaza rockets have killed two Israelis. Rather than purposely targeting
civilians, their low-tech, mostly homemade rockets are hard to aim.
Most military analysts regard these rockets as harassment rather than
a serious threat to Israel. The fighters in Gaza would gladly trade
their homemade rockets for the laser-guided Cruise and Tomahawk
missiles that the U.S. gives to Israel.
Israel claims that its high-tech weaponry can target with pinpoint
precision. Yet according to the U.N., Israeli planes, ships, tanks and
bombs have killed 1,948 Palestinians — 1,402 of them civilians,
including 456 children. Some 9,806 Gazans have been wounded. Israel
has destroyed Gaza’s industrial sector along with whole neighborhoods,
mosques, hospitals and 11,000 homes, devastating the infrastructure
and creating a dire economic, humanitarian and public health crisis.
Israel took out Gaza’s only power plant. This has drastically reduced
the pumping of water to homes and the treatment of sewage, both of
which require electricity. The lack of refrigeration has also severely
affected food production. Bakeries can barely bake bread.
Fiction: Israel struck because Hamas kidnapped and then killed three
Israeli teens on the West Bank.
Fact: Israel used the deaths as a pretext for an assault on the West
Bank well beyond the scope of finding the three Israelis. Hamas has
denied involvement in the killings.
For 18 days, thousands of Israeli soldiers, security agents, police
and special forces scoured through Palestinian towns, refugee camps
and villages. They invaded thousands of Palestinian homes at gunpoint,
arrested and detained hundreds of West Bank residents without charge,
blew up Palestinian homes, rearrested prisoners that had been released
in a prisoner exchange and killed at least six civilians who had
nothing to do with the abduction of the Israelis.
Hamas denied any responsibility for the deaths of the three Israeli
youth.
Fiction: The Israelis killed were just hitchhiking teenagers.
Fact: The youth were part of an aggressive, illegal settlement movement.
Circumstances surrounding the deaths of the three Israelis remain
murky, as no autopsy results have been released. They were from Kfar
Etzion, one of many illegal settlements whose populations serve as the
flying wedge of the Israeli state’s West Bank land confiscation.
These settlers, often armed by Tel Aviv, assault Palestinians of all
ages, slap Palestinian children in their faces in the street and fire
on Palestinians trying to harvest olive crops. They desecrate and set
fire to mosques, or declare mosques to be Jewish religious sites and
off-limits to Palestinians.
For decades, the bodies of West Bank youth have been discovered,
believed to have been killed by settlers roaming the countryside.
Settler violence against Palestinians quadrupled between 2006 and
2014, according to the U.N. Secretariat’s Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affairs.
Fiction: Hamas uses civilians as human shields, fires rockets from
hospitals and homes, and hides weapons under bomb shelters and schoolshe.
Fact: Israel fires on a trapped civilian population, then vilifies
Gazans for defending their communities, homes and hospitals.
Using civilians as human shields certainly violates international law.
However, even the New York Times states that “there is no evidence
that Hamas and other militants force civilians to stay in areas that
are under attack — the legal definition of a human shield under
international law.” (July 23)
Meanwhile, by closing the borders, Israel and Egypt have forced Gazan
civilians to stay in areas being attacked. The population of 1.7
million people is trapped in a 25-mile-long strip, surrounded by
concrete walls and fences, with nowhere to go as it is bombed and shot
at by the fourth-most-powerful military in the world.
“Gaza is unique in the annals of modern warfare in being a conflict
zone with a fence around it, so civilians have no place to flee,” said
Chris Gunness, spokesperson for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for
Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). (Los Angeles Times, July 22)
Blogger Jim Kavanagh notes that “Israel is using the ‘human shield’
argument … to hinder careful thought and justify the unjustifiable.
Israel finds ‘human shields’ everywhere there are civilians in the way
the U.S. government now finds ‘weapons of mass destruction.’”
(opednews.com, Aug. 3)
Israel struck six U.N. schools serving as bomb shelters and sheltering
thousands of people. UNRWA said it had informed the Israeli military
of the locations of the schools repeatedly, in one case 33 times. (The
Guardian (Britain), Aug. 8).
Israel repeatedly bombed and finally destroyed the al-Wafa Hospital
rehab center in Gaza city, claiming its grounds and vicinity were used
by fighters. Basman Alashi, the hospital’s director, said the hospital
had not been used by Hamas or other fighters: “Israel has targeted our
hospital based on false and misleading claims. They are targeting
medical facilities, the wounded, the sick and our children, all over
the Gaza Strip. They want us to know that nowhere is safe.” (The
Guardian (Britain), July 24)
Fiction: Israel hits only military targets.
Fact: Israel has invented a scenario for declaring Palestinian
civilians “military targets.”
Law professor Ryan Goodman notes the international law definition of
military targets: “lawful targets include members of the armed forces
of an opposing side and individuals who ‘directly participate in
hostilities’ such as helping to load and fire a weapon. The definition
excludes purely political leaders, religious figures, financial
contributors and others without a fighting function.”
(justsecurity.org, Aug. 6)
But the Israeli military has invented a whole scenario for declaring
Palestinian civilians to be “legitimate military targets.” “Israel’s
warfare is … about the transformation of human beings into collateral
damage, subjects who can be killed without violating international
law,” explained Nicola Perugini in his article, “On ‘human shielding’
in Gaza.” (Al Jazeera, July 18)
Fiction: Hamas tunnels into Israel to kill and terrorize Israeli
civilians.
Fact: Israel has blockaded and carpet-bombed Gaza. Tunnels are a
supply lifeline and a defensive military response to the world’s
fourth-most-powerful military.
Gaza’s tunnels are a low-tech way to bypass Israel’s siege on Gaza,
get vital supplies and wage a defensive war. During the Nazi siege of
the Warsaw Ghetto during World War ll, Jewish people dug tunnels to
bring in food and supplies. In the same way, the Palestinians of Gaza
brought in food and medicine, cement and arms through tunnels dug into
Egypt. The Sisi government in Egypt closed these vital supply tunnels
in 2013 and 2014, and had some of them flooded with excrement.
Hamas and other groups have tunneled under their cities and camps to
store weapons for self-defense where they can’t be spotted by
satellites. They have built bomb shelters for their leaders in these
tunnels so their government would be able to function beneath Israeli
radar. In this 47-year war called “occupation” against them, the
Palestinian people have tunneled behind enemy lines into Israel for
surprise attacks.
Fiction: The Israeli war on Gaza has strained U.S.-Israeli relations.
Fact: The U.S. government rearmed Israel so it could continue
attacking Gaza.
The same week that Israel shelled a U.N. school, killing 16 people,
the Pentagon opened up to Israel a secret cache of weapons that it
keeps in Israel for its own emergency use, resupplying Israel with 120
mm mortar launchers, 40 mm bomb launchers, and detonators, grenades
and ammunition so it could continue attacking Gaza.
(middleeastmonitor.com, July 31).
There are no fundamental disagreements between the Israeli and U.S.
governments. Israel is Wall Street’s most reliable ally in the Middle
East region. Israel’s murderous attempt to crush the Palestinian
people makes the Middle East safer for U.S. oil companies, who fear
that people in the region will rise up and take back their resources.
But the Palestinian people will not be crushed. When the New York
Times asked 28-year-old Adel al-Ghoula why he was sitting in front of
the rubble of his demolished home, he said, “To tell the world: We are
rooted in our land until death.” (Aug 18)
Washington gives Israel $3 billion a year, $8.5 million a day, in
weapons that Israel used to bomb Gaza’s only power plant and cut off
the water there. Here, the city of Detroit has cut water off to
thousands of people, claiming there is no money.
U.S. tax dollars pay for the bombing of homes, factories, schools and
service centers in Gaza, while funds for affordable housing, jobs,
schools and social services are cut. Let’s demand that Washington stop
all aid to Israel and use that money to meet human needs right here.
http://www.workers.org/articles/2014/08/19/facts-know-fighting-gaza/
