Israel targets children in Gaza

ISRAEL TARGETS CHILDREN

IN LATEST GAZA ASSAULT:

Israel's latest assault on the imprisoned people of Gaza this month provoked international outrage among people all over the globe except for the hypocritical US/EU/NATO Alliance whose leaders and spokespeople backed the Zionist state's murderous assault on the men, women and children of blockaded Gaza with mealy mouthed cliches of "Israel has the right to defend itself". Seems to have been overlooked by Hypocrite Hillary Clinton, EU's Hypocrite-in-Chief, "Baroness" Catherine Ashton and other apologists for Zionist terror, that so does everyone else.

The Israelis have a modern technological country supplied with vast quantities of money and arms from the USA, but the Palestinians are not allowed to import anything without Israeli permission, and are deliberately kept living in third world conditions. When they try to bring anything in from outside by sea—Gaza is on the Mediterranean coast—the Israelis pirate the merchant ships bringing in goods, illegally blockading international waters.

Israel has no legal territorial waters. It is a land-based de facto state with no internationally recognised borders, only ceasefire lines from the 1948 war when the Zionists declared unilateral independence on the territory they controlled of the Palestine Mandate. The Zionist state was not a lawful successor to the Palestine Mandate and has maintained itself since 1948 by military force backed by massive US military and financial aid procured by the powerful Zionist lobby in the USA.

Gaza is not an independent state at all—that is what the Palestinians want—but it is effectively an Arab ghetto of Israel. All complaints against Israel are suppressed by the USA. The UN Human Rights Council has adopted more resolutions condemning Israel than it has all other states combined. From 1967 to 1989 the UN Security Council adopted 131 resolutions directly addressing Israeli deprivation of the rights of the Palestinians.

So, Israel has all the power, the money, the modern weapons. The Western media make a lot of noise about the Gazans having crude Qassam rockets which they fire into Israel in retaliation for oppression by the Israelis, but these rockets are not guided and not accurate, not reliable and of limited range, being mostly home made. The Israelis, as in this case where they killed the Hamas official whom they were negotiating with about a captured IDF soldier, create provocations to break truce agreements, then blame the Arabs, who, having no professional army, no modern weapons, no airforce unlike Israel’s large sophisticated one, and no money, necessarily come off worse.

Even though a ceasefire was eventually agreed, the Gazan people know that Israel has scant respect for ceasefires and international law and only a free Palestinian state will provide protection for their basic rights as human beings.

(Israel lies about Gaza rockets: see 
http://blagaroon2.blogspot.ie/  )

The Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights has now assessed the destruction caused to Gaza and to it’s 1.6 million people living in an area of land twenty five miles long and between four and seven miles wide (forty one km and six to twelve km respectively.)

The destruction of near all necessary to maintain civil society is so surgical as to make it impossible not to believe that the stated aim of Israel’s Interior Minister Eli Yishai to “… send Gaza back to the Middle Ages”, Gilad Sharon’s to “Flatten all of Gaza”, or Knesset Member Michael Ben-Ari’s exhorting: “There are no innocents in Gaza, mow them all down”,were not aberrations but reflected Israeli government intentions.

In the first five days of the Gaza onslaught the Israeli military state that they carried out thirteen hundred and fifty air strikes on the tiny strip already blockaded since electing the Hamas government in 2006. The Al Mezan Centre’s initial findings on death and destruction are chilling and shaming  but were out of date just twenty four hours later. In an extensive list, damaged or destroyed schools now stand at fifty two, the deaths at one hundred and sixty eight.

The Maan News Agency recounts: ‘The Headmistress of the UN-sponsored Al-Bureji girls preparatory school, Hanan Abu Yousif was stunned when she found her school in pieces on Satuday morning. “The school that used to win competitions has been turned to rubble.”

Exactly what threat the clinics, the schools, the Headquarters of the Palestinian Paralympic Committee, now rubble, posed to Israel’s security is unknown. Just the remains of a wall with a sign proclaiming the latter’s name and its aim: “For The Disabled Sports” are all that is left. Three youth clubs were also destroyed.

It is also hard to know what threat the dead pose to the State of Israel.Three cemeteries were also bombed.

“Children shall be the object of special respect and shall be protected against any form of indecent assault.The Parties to the conflict shall provide them with the care and aid they require, whether because of their age or for any other reason”, states paragraph 1, Article 77 of the Geneva Convention (1977.) No impediment here for the Zionist bombers and drone operators.

On November 15^th, Nader Basioni (14) sleeping in the same room as his brother, saw nine year old Faris decapitated when metal from an air strike on “a near by field” tore through the family home. “His head was gone except for a piece of skin of his face”, said Nader. “I’m afraid to go to sleep because I see him in my dreams. It’s the same thing over and over – Faris is gone. He’s dead.”

The Hijazi family too have suffered the unimaginable. In 2008 Mohammed (17) was killed in an Israeli air strike. His parents were gifted with the arrival of another baby who they named Mohammed in his memory. Last week this small pre-school threat to the fourth most powerful military on earth, and his two year old brother Suhaib died in an attack – as did their father Fouad and mother Amna.Trauma continues to engulf a third generation of Gaza’s children, families.

And that famed “pinpoint accuracy” stuff has done well. “Pinpointed” seemingly, were two dead boys probably about nine years old,  one with his stomach near eviscerated, remnants of his leg placed on his body. The other, his leg made meat, exposed bone, blood drenching his jaunty blue and white, matelot-type  sweat shirt.

Four small children, lay together on a trolley in the morgue , blue jeans, brightly coloured, now bloodied tops were also part of military accuracy, the frozen faces of parents and relatives recording them to memory for the last time -.before they washed them, wrapped them and laid them under the earth. And did anyone in authority in the  “only democracy in the Middle East” note the image of the father kissing the face of a dead toddler, his arms collecting her to him for a last time, this lost little threat to a neighbouring State – and another peril: the blood soaked child, lying across his father’s lap, the young father’s head buried on his lifeless form.

A nine year old girl lost the fingers of her right hand, her mother is working to explain that her artistic passion can be achieved as well with her left. Pinpointing doesn’t get more  accurate than the fingers of a small right hand.

When eleven members of the Dallou family were annihilated with five children, their home reduced to a large crater, the Israeli army declared it a:

“mistake in identification of the right home” a blatant admission that targeting homes is a norm, in yet further defiance of a swathe of international law.

The direct targeting of civilians is a breach of the laws of armed conflict. “The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited,” states Additional Protocol I of 1977.

Israel, naturally, has not ratified Protocol I: but, this provision, prohibiting direct attacks on civilians, is generally recognized as customary law, universally applicable regardless of ratification. It has to be wondered how a country that also holds the world record for defying UN Resolutions continues to get away with “prohibited” attacks, massacres, thefts, displacements, and the spreading of terror or threat of it, on a near ongoing basis.

Further, forgotten it seems, amid the deafening silence of the United Nations and its seemingly now mute Secretary General (even his spineless predecessor Kofi Annan used to respond to illegal annihilations with: “regrettable” or “unfortunate”) are two UN Resolutions:

General Assembly Resolution 3236 of November 22^nd 1974 affirms: “the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine…to self-determination without external interference” and “to national independence and sovereignty.”

Reaffirmation of a Palestinian State is in Security Council Resolution 1397 of 12^th March 2002, which affirms: “a vision of a region where two states, Israel and Palestine, live side by side within secure and recognized borders.”

If, as seems near certain, Palestine moves from “Observer entity” to “Non-member observer State” at the UN on 29^th November, which: “implies recognition of statehood …” states Vera Jelinek, Dean of New York University’s Center for Global Affairs, regained nationhood of what remants remains of Palestine’s un- stolen land edges closer.*

Will Israel accept this with indifference, or will it return to Gaza to inflict a “final solution” on a people also enduring, as Iraq before it, a near Middle Age siege?

As Al Mezan points out in their Report:“The failure of international community to make timely, effective interventions to protect civilians and condemn violations of international law; including the failure of the Security Council to issue a statement (on the Gaza attack) illustrates that international community continues to apply (double) political standards on human rights and international law issues; an attitude that could allow for violations of international law to recur in the future.” Incidentally, it is an ironic coincidence that the onslaught on Gaza began on the anniversary of German forces murdering nine thousand Jewish people in Slonim, Belarus on 14^th November 1941, in “Operation Barbarosa.”

In India 14^th November was Universal Children’s Day, which is celebrated there on the birthday of Jawahalal Nehuru, the country’s first Prime Minister much influenced by his friend Mahatma Gandi, who said: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it – always.”

*Today, the UN General Assembly voted by large majority (Yes: 138, No:9, Abstain : 41) to recognise Palestine as an Observer State despite opposition of the usual pro-Israel gang of US/EU/NATO Alliance.

(See more here:

http://blagaroon2.blogspot.ie/2013/01/palestine-victory-at-un.html)