International Herald Tribune
UN warns of refugee crisis in Gaza Strip
By Taghreed El-Khodary and Sabrina Tavernise
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
GAZA CITY: Growing numbers of Palestinians are fleeing their homes for
makeshift shelters in schools, office buildings and a park as the Israeli Army
continues to press its military campaign deeper into Gaza City.
On the 18th day of the conflict, the Israeli military said Tuesday that its
forces rained down fire in Gaza overnight, launching 60 air strikes against
targets including a hotel where Hamas operatives were gathering, tunnels in the
border area with Egypt, weapons caches and 15 squads of armed gunmen.
According to the United Nations, about 30,000 people are living in schools it
sponsors and an estimated 60,000 have fled to the houses of relatives. The
figures still represent a small part of Gaza's 1.5 million population but have
doubled in the past four days, United Nations officials said, raising concerns
about the humanitarian impact of a broader war.
"What began as very small, isolated numbers is now turning into a torrent,"
said Aidan O'Leary, deputy director for the United Nations agency that deals
with Palestinian refugees.
Major Jacob Dallal, an Israeli military spokesman, said units used leaflets to
warn families to leave areas where they planned to operate. Aid officials say
that with Gaza's borders closed, choices for shelters in the 140-square-mile
strip are slim and the shelters are not completely safe. Last week, as many as
43 people were killed near a United Nations school by an Israeli mortar strike
that the military said was in response to a Hamas attack. The Israeli military
disputes the death toll.
Egypt continued to press for a cease-fire on Monday. MENA, Egypt's state-owned
news agency, quoted an unidentified Egyptian official as saying that talks
between the nation's intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, and Hamas envoys were
"positive."
Tony Blair, a special international envoy for the Middle East, speaking from
Cairo, said the "elements of an agreement for an immediate cease-fire are
there," The Associated Press reported, though a senior Israeli military
official, Amos Gilad, postponed his trip to Egypt to discuss a possible truce.
An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the
negotiations were not yet public, said the delay was a matter of timing and not
a breakdown in talks.
In a televised speech on Monday night, a senior Hamas official, Ismail Haniya,
expressed an openness to a diplomatic solution but reiterated previous demands
that any deal include the opening of Gaza's border crossings, which Israel and
Egypt have kept mostly closed since Hamas violently pushed out its rival Fatah
in 2007.
"We are not closed to this path," he said of diplomacy, speaking from hiding in
Gaza.
He praised Hamas fighters as heroes who would be victorious.
Aid groups, meantime, spotlighted what they said was a growing number of
refugees. When Israeli soldiers moved deeper into the Zeitoun neighborhood of
Gaza on Sunday night, Olfat Jaawanah decided she had had enough. Shrapnel flew
through a window, injuring her son, Ali, she said, and on Monday morning, she
gathered a few blankets and moved her nine children out of their large house.
The nearby United Nations school was full its bare classrooms packed with
families and its toilets smelling foul so she took her family instead to her
husband's office, in a building belonging to an international organization in
the center of Gaza City.
According to O'Leary, about a third of the agency's 91 schools are now full.
Movement is complicated by the confusion over when it is safe to leave. When
the Abu Hajaj family received a leaflet last weekend, they took it as a sign of
safe passage. But Majad Abdel Karim Abu Hajaj, a teacher at a United Nations
school, said his mother and sister were killed as they walked holding a white
flag. Their bodies remain where they fell, he said, because ambulances cannot
get to the area.
Sarit Michaeli of B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said she had had six
reports of families stuck in areas now occupied by Israeli troops.
At times, the city took on a cinematic quality. A woman came with a pan and
dough to Al Nasir hospital, asking for the use of its electricity so she could
bake. A corpse was wheeled in a donkey cart where an ambulance was afraid to go.
Humanitarian shipments were moving on Monday, and Egypt, under pressure to do
more for Palestinian victims of the conflict, agreed to allow in 38 Arab
doctors and a group of European legislators.
Palestinians interviewed in Gaza on Monday cited another reason for their
flight: Israel soldiers, they said, are firing rounds of a noxious substance
that burns skin and makes it hard to breathe.
A resident of southwest Gaza City on Monday showed a reporter a piece of metal
casing with the identifying number M825A1, which Marc Garlasco, a military
analyst with Human Rights Watch, identified as white phosphorus, typically used
for signaling, smoke screens and destroying enemy equipment.
In recent years, experts and rights advocates have argued over whether its use
to intentionally harm people violates international conventions.
Dallal would not say whether Israel was using white phosphorus, but said, "The
munitions we use are consistent with international law."
Still, white phosphorus can cause injury, and a growing number of Gazans report
being hurt by it, including in Beit Lahiya, Khan Yunis, and in eastern and
southwestern Gaza City. When exposed to air, it ignites, experts say, and if
packed into an artillery shell, it can rain down flaming chemicals that cling
to anything they touch.
Luay Suboh, 10, from Beit Lahiya, lost his eyesight and some skin on his face
Saturday when, his mother said, a fiery substance clung to him as he darted
home from a shelter where his family was staying to pick up clothes.
The substance smelled like burned trash, said Jaawanah, the mother who fled her
home in Zeitoun, who had experienced it too. She had no affection for Hamas,
but her sufferings were changing that. "Do you think I'm against them firing
rockets now?" she asked, referring to Hamas. "No. I was against it before. Not
anymore."
Correction:
Notes:
International Herald Tribune Copyright © 2009 The International Herald Tribune
| www.iht.com
---------------
Jusfiq Hadjar gelar Sutan Maradjo Lelo
Allah yang disembah orang Islam tipikal dan yang digambarkan oleh al-Mushaf itu
dungu, buas, kejam, keji, ganas, zalim lagi biadab hanyalah Allah fiktif.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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