Who are the Terrorists?
Once against bombs are pounding Gaza while the economic blockade remains in full force. Dropping bombs on one of the world’s most densely populated areas is what Israel calls self defense. Haaretz reports that planning for the current offensive began six months ago. What Israel is doing is premeditated, cold-blooded murder.
Ehud Barak said Israel was not fighting the people of Gaza but was in “a war to the bitter end” with Hamas. Olmert had “assured President Bush that Israel is taking appropriate steps to avoid civilian casualties” and said that Israel was “targeting only Hamas operatives and those affiliated with Hamas.“
Apparently Hamas affiliates include family members, neighbors and co-workers. An airstrike that killed a senior Hamas official also killed his family members and other bystanders, when it ” obliterated a house in the densely packed Jabalya refugee camp north of Gaza City.” According to Al Mezan Center for Human Rights:
At approximately 2:40pm yesterday, Thursday 1 January 2008, Israeli aircrafts fired heavy missiles at the house of Nizar Rayyan, a leader in the Hamas movement, in the Jabaliya refugee camp, causing massive destruction in the camp and killing 16 of its residents, 11 of whom were children. The victims were identified as:
- 49-year-old Nizar Abdul-Qadir Rayyan;
- 40-year-old Nawal Ismail Rayyan;
- 46-year-old Hyiam Abdul-Rahman Rayyan;
- 45-year-old Iman Khalil Rayyan;
- 25-year-old Shirin Said Rayyan;
- 2-year-old Asad Nizar Rayyan;
- 3-year-old Usama Nizar Rayyan;
- 3-year-old Aiysha Nizar Rayyan;
- 4-year-old Reem Nizar Rayyan;
- 5-year-old Halima Nizar Rayyan;
- 5-year-old Meryam Nizar Rayyan;
- 6-year-old Abdul-Rahman Nizar Rayyan;
- 12-year-old Abdul-Qadir Nizar Rayyan;
- 12-year-old Ayia Nizar Rayyan;
- 15-year-old Zainab Nizar Rayyan;
- 16-year-old Ghassan Nizar Rayyan
The victims are from the same family. The body of Ghassan was still under the rubble of the house at the time this release was drafted. Moreover, 12 people, including five children and one woman, were injured this raid. It also destroyed 10 houses completely and caused damage to another dozens of other houses.
This is what assassination or, “targeted killings” as Israelis call it, looks like. Missiles or bombs dropped on buildings in crowded areas killing or wounding everyone in the vicinity. Explain how these toddlers and teenagers were involved in shooting rockets. Were they Hamas fighters?
Amira Hass reports from Gaza on similar attacks:
Shortly afterwards, another missile was fired, this one hitting a building full of occupants, 300 meters from al-Attar’s home. The home, little more than concrete and asbestos, belongs to the Abbasi family. The father, Ziad, is a building contractor. Three of his children were killed in the strike and remained buried under the rubble: Sadki, age 3; Ahmed, age 12 and Mohammed, age 14. The parents and three other children were wounded.
On Monday at 5 P.M. a house was bombed in Beit Lahia, and according to initial reports seven family members were killed.
“Every parent understands the home isn’t safe, as the streets aren’t safe,” says Umm Basel.
“Maybe next door lives someone from Iz al-Din al-Qassam, I don’t know, or on your side they think he lives there, and that you’re allowed to fire a missile on us. He is not in his home, we are.”
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. 80 percent of the people in Gaza Strip are refugees. 750,000 of them are children. Robert Fisk explains who the Gazans are:
That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don’t come from Gaza.
The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.
The New York Times reports that Israel is so gracious as to warn civilians of impending attacks :
Tens of thousands of Gazans have received recorded phone calls from the Israeli Army warning them that their houses have been marked as targets because they harbored either militants or weapons facilities like rocket workshops. Noncombatants were urged to clear out. Hundreds of thousands of leaflets gave the same message.
The fact still remains that people’s houses are destroyed and they are driven out of their homes, which is a crime in itself. But what good is a warning if there is nowhere to go? Mustafa Barghouti asks,
Where should they go away? In which place? Where? Which place they can go to, when Israel is putting Gaza for two years under total blockade, by sea, by air, by land.
Assertions about trying to avoid civilian causalities are all lies. A Palestinian doctor in Gaza told the BBC nearly all the casualties he had seen overnight and on Monday had been civilians. Nir Rosen reminds us, “When you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some “collateral” civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate.”
As Jennifer Lowenstein points out, the initial air strikes against Gaza were timed to produce maximum casualties
They occurred at approximately 11:20am on a bustling Saturday morning, just as schools were changing shifts and many children were either leaving for home or coming to afternoon classes; when offices were filled with their employees, and streets busy with the late morning crowds out getting lunch or on quick errands of one sort or another.
In an interview with Democracy now, Dr. Moussa el-Haddad describes the situation on the ground :
No place is safe. All the buildings that were attacked, they are not military buildings. Even in the initial day, on Saturday, the first 150 people, they were civil servants. They were not striking attackers. They were civil servants, civilians.
Mustafa Barghouti speaking on the same program :
. . . what Israel is doing in Gaza is not an act of self-defense, as it is claiming. It’s not an attack on Hamas. It is an attack on the whole Palestinian population. What we see is a war crime, a bloodbath, unprecedented since 1967. What we have had so far is 318 people killed, including thirty children, and at least 1,400 people injured, including 150 children and forty women. I was shocked deeply today over the fact that yesterday the Israeli planes destroyed a house in Jabalya camp and killed five girls, five sisters from one family, and injured their mother seriously and critically. This is a bloodbath that should stop immediately.
Israel is claiming that it is attacking Hamas, but in fact it is attacking all the Palestinians. It is attacking the whole infrastructure. They have destroyed a university. They have destroyed five mosques. They have attacked the hospital. They are shooting and destroying everywhere. And it seems imminent that there will be even a land invasion which could destroy and kill and take away thousands of lives.
Ali Abunimah notes that Israel has simply changed the means by which it kills Palestinians:
In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food and necessary medicine by the two year-old Israeli blockade calculated and intended to cause suffering and deprivation to 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority refugees and children, caged into the Gaza Strip. In Gaza, Palestinians died silently, for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel.
Israel’s idea of a truce. It is very simple. Under an Israeli-style truce, Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonize their land. Israel has not only banned food and medicine to sustain Palestinian bodies in Gaza but it is also intent on starving minds: due to the blockade, there is not even ink, paper and glue to print textbooks for schoolchildren.
There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel’s attacks, killings, land theft, settler pogroms and kidnappings never ceased for one single day during the truce. The
It did not save, for instance, the al-Kurd family from seeing their home of 50 years in occupied East Jerusalem demolished on 9 November, so the land it sits on could be taken by settlers.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livny has the gall to claim , “There is no humanitarian crisis in the strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce,” because “Israel has been supplying comprehensive humanitarian aid to the strip.”
However, International aid agencies present a much different picture. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported Thursday that humanitarian needs in Gaza are growing, despite the aid shipments. The organization said electricity, cooking gas and water are all in extremely short supply. The U.N. also warned of a health and food crisis in Gaza, despite an increase in humanitarian shipments. Maxwell Gaylard, the UN’s chief aid coordinator for the region called the situation a “critical emergency,” while Oxfam warned the situation “is getting worse by the day” with critical shortages clean water, food and fuel. The charity also reports hospitals being “overwhelmed with casualties” and raw sewage “pouring into the streets.”
But Condoleezza Rice claims it’s Hamas and not Israel that’s holding Gazans hostage. “Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage ever since their illegal coup against the forces of President Mahmoud Abbas.” That would be the democratically elected Hamas government she’s talking about. And how exactly does Hamas hold Gaza hostage when Israel controls the borders, airspace, access from the sea?
Jennifer Lowenstein points out that Hamas has become Israel’s new boogeyman, filing the role once held by Arafat and the PLO. Any destruction or loss of life is justified on the grounds of a link (real or imagined) to Hamas.
“HAMAS”… the word that, in this case, renders any action taken by the other side, no matter how barbaric or sadistic, legitimate. Couple any noun with the preceding adjective “Hamas” and it will be immediately quarantined as if tainted by some infectious bacteria. This is how to dehumanize a million and a half people overnight; how to render them different from us and dangerous to us.
What we have is a clear case of blaming the victim. The PR machine is at full spin and suddently its seems that it is Israel with its 4 dead from rocket attacks that is under attack rather than the 400 dead and 2000 wounded Gazans. In the calculus of Zionist math, Israeli lives are worth much more than the lives of Palestinians. Israel talks about collateral damage as necessary for security, to bring “peace and quiet” to southern Israel, yet if the casualties were on the other side, there would be howls of rage every time even a single hair on a single Israeli head was harmed.
Mustafa Qadr urges us to place the situation into its proper context:
But the calls of self-defense must be understood within the broader context of the continued annexation of Palestine. It is the greatest of reverse-psychology ploys. Israel calls Hamas and other Palestinian resistance movements existential threats while, at the same time, it continues to ensure that a viable Palestinian state can never hope to exist by imprisoning Gaza and expropriating much of the West Bank.
One could not ask for a clearer example of war being politics by other means. It’s nearing election time in Israel. But that’s not the whole story – it is also about driving Hamas from power. Israel has refused to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government. The .U.S and Israel are working with the quisling “moderate leader” Abu Mazen “and his security forces in West Bank and would like to see something similar in Gaza. Israel cannot let stand any kind of persistant resistance as it may provide an example or inspiration. The aim is to terrorize Gazans into turning on Hamas. The bombing and starvation by blockade are in fact forms of collective punishment, aimed to achieve a political outcome by attacking the civilian population.
Ilan Pappe observes that
Israel presents itself to its own people as the righteous victim that defends itself against a great evil. The academic world is recruited to explain how demonic and monstrous is the Palestinian struggle, if it is led by Hamas.
. . . This righteous fury is a constant phenomenon in the Israeli, and before that Zionist, dispossession of Palestine. Every act whether it was ethnic cleansing, occupation, massacre or destruction was always portrayed as morally just and as a pure act of self-defense reluctantly perpetrated by Israel in its war against the worst kind of human beings.
. . . there is only one way forward: challenging head-on this righteousness as an evil ideology meant to cover human atrocities. Another name for this ideology is Zionism and an international rebuke for Zionism, not just for particular Israeli policies, is the only way of countering this self-righteousness. We have to try and explain not only to the world, but also to the Israelis themselves, that Zionism is an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now massive massacres. What is needed now is not just a condemnation of the present massacre but also delegitimization of the ideology that produced that policy and justifies it morally and politically. Let us hope that significant voices in the world will tell the Jewish state that this ideology and the overall conduct of the state are intolerable and unacceptable and as long as they persist, Israel will be boycotted and subject to sanctions.
Tags: Gaza
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