While Hanaa al-Shalabi continues her 28 day long hunger strike against Israel’s vile administrative detention without trial or charge locked in an Israeli dungeon, Palestinians released from Israeli prisons become ongoing targets for Israel’s illegal extrajudicial executions. According to Haaretz, Israel has executed by remote control 26 people.
Out of these 22 were militants and 4 were civilians who were in the area of IAF strikes, but were not involved in the rocket fire.
Turkey’s PM Erdogan is adamant, correctly referring to the Israeli strikes as
“state terror,” saying that the Turkish people must “remember that Gazans are our brothers, and will always remain so.”
The use of the word “militants” by the media grates – Palestinians who resist their criminal Occupier term themselves “resistance fighters”. Far more courtesy is extended by the media to the fighters who challenge the Syrian dictatorship than Palestinian people who are entitled under international law to resist their occupier, including with the use of violence within the terms of the Geneva Conventions. The vast majority of Palestinian protest is non-violent – and this protest too is suppressed brutally by Israel. Perhaps the terminology differs not primarily because of any stranglehold the Israel lobby has on media perceptions, but because of western guilt, white supremacism, and the fact that Palestinians are seeking self-determination from settler colonial invaders who identify and are identified with the West. If the fake democracy of ethnosupremacist Israel was not associated with the West, no doubt Palestinians would be termed freedom fighters by the white supremacist western media too.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says 70 people have been maimed by Israel’s attacks, putting further strain on Gaza’s hospitals which are frequently without power due to Israel’s vicious siege.
Kamal Abu Obada, the Deputy Director of the Intensive Care Unit at al-Shifa hospital, is constantly aware of the risks that the patients he cares for are facing. “For me as a doctor this is all very depressing. All the time I’m working to keep the patients alive and when the electricity is cut they are all at risk. If something happens to them my efforts were all in vain.”
The latest Israeli bombardment of the people of Gaza was opportunistic, switching media and the Israeli public’s attention from Netanyahu’s failure to obtain support from Obama for an immediate Iran strike, and as a routine pressure valve through spectacle – the regular maintenance of Israel’s fascist sociopolitical cycle, and possibly to escalate pressure for war against Iran [Netanyahu is now conflating Gaza into his Iranian nuke fantasy]. Israel’s military gameplayers would have known that their initial assassination of two Popular Resistance Committee leaders, Zuhair Al-Qaisi and Mahmoud Al-Hannani, would be met with rocket retaliation from an infuriated resistance who have lived under Israel’s gruelling closure – collective punishment of a civilian population – for 1736 days. For Israel’s Channel 10, the latest sadism is regarded lightheartedly as a football game.
Like flies to wanton boys are Palestinians to Israel. It kills them for its sport.
A JPost article ratchets up the awful dehumanisation of Palestinians, terming Israel’s strike as “mowing the lawn”.
Israel’s population has a plethora of secure concrete bunkers and Iron Domes to fend off the primitive rockets fired from Gaza in response to the Israeli government’s crimes. In 2009, the Israeli General Gadi Eisenko said the Iron Dome system is not to protect the Israeli citizenry.
“The systems are designed to protect military bases, even if this means that citizens suffer discomfort during the days of battle.”
Under siege, the people of Gaza have nowhere to hide, and nowhere to escape to, making Israel’s deliberate criminal attacks all the more terrible and malevolent. Death can arrive in an instant from an invisible point in the skies. The Gaza rockets are regarded as illegal as they have no modern targeting systems and thus whether intended or not, target civilians. Yet many of Israel’s military installations are located close to population centres. The people of Gaza do protest their incarceration by Israel non-violently, but who is there to witness their demonstrations? The people of Israel whose regime determines the lives and deaths of the people of Gaza, are remote. Approaching the apartheid fence means one is shot at by Israel’s armed-to-the teeth Occupation troopers. For most Israelis, and for the rest of the world who applauds Israel’s crimes, the Palestinians of Gaza are inconvenient lesser humans of the wrong ‘colour’, viewed abstractly and depersonalised on television.
Last week, I had intense feelings of foreboding for several days prior to the attack, and put them down to a possible scientific explanation – the intense solar storm due to irradiate the upper atmosphere. Now, I’m not so sure. Several times in my life, I’ve had similar sensations associated with premonitions of deaths of people with whom I have an emotional connection – a feyness inherited from my Scottish grandmother. I have been so discomforted I’ve been unable to blog till now about Israel’s latest war crimes, confining myself to social media. As I write I feel miserable, disappointed in the sum of the world’s humanity that Israel’s vile crimes are applauded openly. Hillary Clinton’s noxious hypocritical cheerleading is particularly appalling. Indigenous Palestinian people, like so many other Indigenous folks before them and still, have suffered many years of gross indignities, humiliations and lack of basic human rights courtesy of predominantly northern European invaders and their descendants. Israel’s colonialism and apartheid are crimes against humanity. Does a criminal regime really have a “right to defend itself”, its existing crimes, by committing more crimes? Are not Palestinians (and Bahrainis who also resist a tyrannical western darling regime), like Syrians, Libyans, Tunisians, or Egyptians, entitled to defend themselves from a criminal regime?
Initially the IOF attempted to sell its latest war crimes against the people it occupies as a strike back against perpetrators of the last year’s killings at Eilat. This calumny was swiftly exposed as propaganda by Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunimah and others.
On Tuesday Egypt cobbled together a truce, and today, Israel broke it, claiming that this was in response to rockets.
Home Front Defence Minister Matan Vilnai confirmed Israel had reached an unwritten “understanding” with militant groups in Gaza.
“Apparently things are calming down and this round of confrontations appears to be behind us,” he told public radio.
Defence Minister Ehud Barak echoed him. “This morning the situation is relatively quiet,” he told reporters.
In Gaza, an Islamic Jihad spokesman said the radical group was willing to respect the deal, but Israel must end its targeted killings of militants.
“We accept a ceasefire if Israel agrees to apply it by ending its aggressions and assassinations,” Daud Shihab told AFP.
Both parties warned the agreement would be shortlived if the other side stepped out of line.
“Our message is clear,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a conference of senior civil servants in Jerusalem. “Calm will bring calm. Anyone who disturbs it, or even tries to disturb it, will be in our gun sights.”
“Any Israeli violation requires a strong response by all factions,” said Fawzi Barhum, a spokesman for Gaza’s Hamas rulers, who have been seeking Cairo’s help to restore calm.
The truce, he said, “was not meant to tie the hands of the resistance and its right to respond forcefully to the killings and attacks”.
News of the agreement emerged early on Tuesday after Cairo brokered what an Egyptian intelligence official described as a “comprehensive and mutual” truce.
“An agreement on ending the current operations between the two sides, including a halt to assassinations, came into force at 1am,” he told AFP, saying the deal resulted from “intensive contacts” with both sides.
But Vilnai denied Israel had agreed to halt the assassinations.
“Anyone involved in terrorism against Israel needs to know that they are in our sights,” he warned.
Senior Israeli defence ministry official Amos Gilad said the deal had been concluded with Egypt, without direct contact with Gaza’s Hamas rulers.
“We have agreed to quietness on condition there will be quietness.”
However, Israel broke the truce first, firing on funeral goers in Gaza City.
Related Links
Palestine, They Come From There :
No spokesperson from Gaza has been on any news bulletin I’ve heard. No name has been given to any of the dead in Gaza. No age, gender, occupation, personhood has been ascribed to any of those murdered. They are deemed non-persons, their deaths are not worthy of condemnation. Rockets are worthy of condemnation but not bombs. Potential injuries are worthy of condemnation but not actual deaths of actual people. Some politicians are ‘concerned’ by the violence, never calling for Israel to stop it.
Gaza Under Attack – Who Cares?
25 killed due to Israeli attacks on Gaza, Hana Shalabi, Poem
Nutanyahoo gibbers that Gaza is a forward position for Iran, associates Gaza with the nuclear threat he prevaricates about re Iran. Meant for domestic consumption?
Israel kills another surplus lesser being
My story with Israeli propaganda
Erdogan: Israel must stop ‘massacre’ of Palestinians in Gaza
Israel’s vicious stranglehold on Gaza means vulnerable sick people in Gazan hospitals without power are in danger and fear
Palestine / Israel Links
MUSIC VIDEO: Palestinians are “The New Black”
Grand larceny – Palestine Study: Israeli ‘state land’ illegally taken from West Bank
Israel’s Atom Bomb Factory in 3D
Israeli Apartheid and the Means of Resistance- SYDNEY UNIVERSITY
“The road to dismantling this apartheid and achieving true and just peace is long, and hard, but as I see it, actions taken by the Israeli army only push it further away. Over this past decade, the Palestinian people have been increasingly choosing the path of nonviolent resistance, and I choose to join this path and to turn to a popular, nonviolent struggle in Palestine, rather than to serve in the Israeli army and continue the violence.” Follow the courageous @GNoam on twitter
If there’s any doubt left in your mind whether Israel is a wicked, vile regime, this should make it clear for you. Any accoutrement no matter how essential, which makes life bearable for Palestinians under Israel’s filthy Occupation in the West Bank, are targets for demolition by the apartheid zionist entity.
Latest Hasbara handbook “The Playbook”. See how many shilleries you’ve encountered already. The hasbaroid manual describes BDS as a ‘flagrant foul’. Palestinian rights are just a game to Israeli racists.
Reports from hasbaroids on campus using the techniques gloated over here
According to the study released by Save the Children Sweden and YMCA-East Jerusalem on Monday, 90.6 percent of detained children suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after release.
Blue Planet publishes a LifeSource report calling for BDS