1300 People Killed, 5400 Injured in Occupied Palestine

[niss]

No Comment video: Gaza

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64LsV16X ... re=channel


http://www.nocommenttv.com

http://www.euronews.net

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=noc ... iew=videos

Why is the UNRWA not complaining about palestinian factions hijacking food as it comes in?

[bob sacamano]

I haven't read about what you stated, feel free to support your claim, however I read lots about the israeli army shelling and bombing the whole UNRWA compound.

[trey kule]

guys..guys...its over.

Its time to put away the swords and get back to the buisness of building a pipeline to move Palestinian oil to Israel and reimplement the 300 calorie a day plan for all the Palestinians left living in the rubble.

Its also time to watch the whole pile of new holocaust related movies coming out to remind us of the suffering that one of the combatants has gone through in their history.

[2R]

Israel defends use of phosphorus

Some rights groups say images from the conflict prove the illegal use of phosphorus


Israel insists its use of white phosphorus shells during its three-week campaign in Gaza was not illegal.

Foreign ministry spokesman Ygal Palmor said an internal investigation so far had found no evidence to support claims it was illegally fired near civilians.

White phosphorus is legal for making smokescreens in open battleground. But rights groups and journalists say it was used in crowded civilian areas.

The weapon sticks to human skin and will burn through to the bone.

It can cause death or leave survivors with painful wounds which are slow to heal. Its ingestion or inhalation can also be fatal.

Army investigation

The UN said its headquarters were hit by three white phosphorus shells during the offensive, causing a fire destroying much of its aid supplies.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and foreign journalists who have gone into Gaza since the operation ended say they have found evidence of its use in crowded residential areas.

The Israeli army said on Wednesday it would investigate the allegations.

But Mr Palmor told the BBC that the probe had so far found no evidence to support the claims.

"Parts of the Gaza Strip are open battlefield and I'm not going to go into the specific circumstances of each and every incident because I haven't investigated and neither have you," he said.

"I will content myself with quoting the words of the ICRC, the International Red Cross.... that they have no evidence of illegal use of white phosphorus in Gaza and they will refrain from making any comments pending further investigation."


KEY STORIES
UN 'shocked' by Gaza destruction
Israel defends use of phosphorus

Gaza father finds out child survived
UN chief condemns Gaza raids

You know who is going to say this is just anti-semetic lies from the BBC,the UN and the Red Cross

[sky's the limit]

[niss]

I haven't read about what you stated, feel free to support your claim, however I read lots about the israeli army shelling and bombing the whole UNRWA compound.

http://www.petranews.gov.jo/nepras/2009 ... /19000.htm

19/ Armed men seize Jordanian aid in Gaza Strip

Amman, Jan. 20 (Petra) – A number of armed men have seized on Tuesday a Jordanian aid convoy after entering the Gaza Strip via Karem Abu Salem Crossing Point, Petra was informed

The aid convoy, which was sent by the Jordan Hashemite Charity Organization (JHCO), was unloaded to non-Jordanian trucks driven by non-Jordanian drivers after crossing King Hussein Bridge.

The UNRWA was expected to receive the convoy and unload it into its warehouses in Gaza to be distributed later on civilians in the strip.

The armed men opened fire at drivers after crossing Karem Abu Salem crossing point and forced them to head to their own warehouses.

UNRWA has asked the transport company not to send the aid convoys scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday until the issue of the seized convoy is solved.

//Petra// A.SH


20/01/2009 18:56:24

WRT the UNRWA school compound, isn't entirely possible there were militants there?

The United Nations agency that administers a school in Gaza where dozens of civilians were killed by Israeli mortar fire last week has admitted to employing terrorists to work at its Palestinian schools in the past, has no system in place to keep members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad off its payroll, and provides textbooks to children that contain hate speech and other incendiary information.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479940,00.html

The resolution cited specific examples of UNRWA ambulance and schools having been used to abet terrorism and mentioned a number of figures, including Awad al-Qiq, headmaster of an UNRWA school in Gaza, "who also led Islamic Jihad's engineering unit that built bombs and Qassam rockets."

http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2009/01/ ... osett.html

You know who is going to say this is just anti-semetic lies from the BBC,the UN and the Red Cross

Funny that even the Red Cross said there was no evidence that Israel was using WP illegally or maliciously. I wonder if the same can be said for the Palestinians who launched a WP mortar shell at an Israeli city?

Looks can be decieving.

Photo of completely destroyed Al Quds hospital in Gaza (which was fully repaired a week later)


Or is it a photo of the building down the street from the hospital as this early photograph clearly indicates?


http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_conte ... ticle=1599

[bob sacamano]

Israel promises troops legal backing over Gaza war

Sun Jan 25, 2009 8:28am EST

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - International calls to investigate Israel over alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip prompted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday to promise military personnel state protection from foreign prosecution.

"The commanders and soldiers sent to Gaza should know they are safe from various tribunals and Israel will assist them on this front and defend them, just as they protected us with their bodies during the Gaza operation," Olmert said.

Last week, the military censor ordered local and foreign media in Israel to blur the faces of army commanders in photos and video footage of the Gaza war for fear they could be identified and arrested while traveling abroad.

Israeli media reports said the military had been advising its top brass to think twice about visiting Europe.

Speaking at the weekly cabinet meeting, Olmert said Israel's justice minister would consult with the country's top legal experts and find "answers to possible questions relating to the Israeli military's activities" during the 22-day war.

Some 1,300 Palestinians, including at least 700 civilians, were killed, medical officials said, in the offensive Israel launched in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip with the declared aim of ending cross-border rocket attacks.

The civilian deaths sparked public outcry abroad and prompted senior U.N. officials to demand independent investigations into whether Israel committed war crimes.

Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians, hit by rocket salvoes, were killed in the conflict.

Israel said hundreds of militants were among the Palestinian dead and that it tried its best to avoid civilian casualties in densely populated areas where gunmen operated.

WHITE PHOSPHOROUS

Rights group Amnesty International has said that Israel's use of white phosphorus munitions -- which can cause extreme burns -- in built-up areas of the Gaza Strip was indiscriminate and therefore constituted a war crime.

Israel has said it used all weapons in Gaza within the limits of international law. Its military, however, has opened an investigation into white phosphorous use during the conflict.

Palestinians have long demanded international prosecution of Israel's military crackdowns. Yet legal frameworks are problematic.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has no jurisdiction to investigate in the Gaza Strip, as it is not a state. Though the Palestinian Authority has been functioning as an interim sovereign polity since 1993, it was forced out of Gaza last year by Hamas after the Islamists won an election.

And while Israel has not signed the Rome Statute that enshrined the ICC, it can still be investigated, but that would require a U.N. Security Council mandate. Any such proposal would probably be vetoed by Israel's ally, the United States.

Some European nations allow for war crimes lawsuits to be filed privately against members of Israel's security services.

In 2005, reserve Major-General Doron Almog, the former head of Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, was warned by Israeli diplomats not to leave an El Al aircraft that landed in London after a tip-off British police were about to arrest him on war crimes charges.

A British Muslim group had won an arrest warrant alleging he breached the Fourth Geneva Convention in the demolition of Palestinian homes in 2002 in the southern Gaza Strip. Israel said the dwellings provided gave cover to gunmen.

Almog stayed on the plane and flew back to Israel.

(Editing by Charles Dick)

[bob sacamano]

http://www.petranews.gov.jo/nepras/2009 ... /19000.htm

petra news? Howbout we try a better source next time? Find it for me on reuters, bbc, euronews, etc.

You're trying to shed light on a few trucks that were allegedly seized by gunmen in a land of lawlessness. You think you inventing the wheel here?

I wish you put the same effort to shed light on the white phosphorus weapons that were used by the israeli army against civilians in the gaza concentration camp.

However, you being an extremist, you don't have the ability to do that.

[crazy_aviator]

Asking the Israeli military whether they comitted any crime in using phosphoprous is like asking a little boy , with candies falling out of his pockets, to find out who stole the candies from the candy store. Do they really think the rest of the world is THAT stupid !

NISS, AWESOME-NISS I wish to ask you the same question AGAIN, Do you believe that all non-jews are Goyim or cattle or dogs ? And please answer honestly.

[niss]

Asking the Israeli military whether they comitted any crime in using phosphoprous is like asking a little boy , with candies falling out of his pockets, to find out who stole the candies from the candy store. Do they really think the rest of the world is THAT stupid !

NISS, AWESOME-NISS I wish to ask you the same question AGAIN, Do you believe that all non-jews are Goyim or cattle or dogs ? And please answer honestly.

If I did would I be engaged to one?

[crazy_aviator]

If you are engaged to a non-jew , then i would suspect that your answer may be NO

[niss]

If you are engaged to a non-jew , then i would suspect that your answer may be NO

That or I am not allowed near farms anymore.

[crazy_aviator]

okay, Now im REALLY confused

[TG]

There is a similar topic running on PPrune and I cam across one of the most lucid post (my personal opinion) on the subject.
http://www.pprune.org/jet-blast/359309- ... ost4671647
As I'm not sure anyone can access this link without logging into the website I'm quoting the post.

So from "Wiley", worth a reading:

My question is this: If the Saudis give a damn, about the Palestinians, why don't they take in all of them in and settle them in the KSA? The Saudis have the money, the land and the infrastructure to support such a bold incentive and would increase their standing in the world.

Back to the first post, a couple of uncomfortable facts:

1. A lot - quite a lot, in fact – of the land the Israelis (or to be more accurate, Zionist settlers) ‘stole’ from the Palestinians before 1948 they bought at commercial prices from the absentee (Palestinian) owners, most of whom lived in places like Beirut or Damascus, with agents collecting their rents from the peasant farmers who worked their land. The fact that there were Arab tenants occupying much of this land – and who would not be welcome by the new owners - didn’t seem to matter much to the vendors. Quite a lot of other land sold to the Zionist groups was swamp or barren waste land. At the time, the Arabs selling this land to the Jews were highly amused at the folly of the Jewish buyers – and took their money knowing the land to be utterly useless. However the Jews drained the swamps and irrigated the waste land and made the until then useless land into productive farms and orchards. (Not without some major failures themselves along the way.)

2. After the UN declared partition in May 1948, all surrounding (and some distant) Arab states declared war on Israel and, (quite understandably) believing that their military campaign would be a walkover, in many areas told the local Arabs to move out so their victorious armies could have a clear field to kill all the Jews. (This is not to say that there weren’t instances where the Israelis indulged in a bit of their own ethnic cleansing in terrorising and killing Palestinians in order to encourage them to leave their villages.)

3. When the Arab victory didn’t occur, the Arab states, in particular the Saudis, made a conscious (and in my humble opinion, unbelievably callous) decision not to accept the displaced Palestinians into their own countries, but instead to leave them to fester in the camps close to the Israeli border that exist to this day. (Gaza, until 1967, could have been described, not too inaccurately as a (huge) Egyptian-controlled ‘camp’ for Palestinians.) Their reasoning? The refugees would be an ongoing (and ever growing) sore that would ensure there was no hope of peace with (or more importantly, for) the ‘Zionist Entity’, particularly if the camps’ ever increasingly large number of inhabitants were taught to passionately hate the people who had kicked them out of their homes.

A parallel would have been if the West had insisted that all the displaced refugees from Eastern Europe in 1945 were left, with no right of citizenship, in the DP camps right up against the East German border until the present day to somehow embarrass the Soviets into giving them their homes back – their ‘traditional lands’ (to quote a post above) that I’m damn sure the Eastern Europeans didn’t want to leave either. But they did, and the vast majority, as citizens of their adopted countries, have made a decent life for themselves - and their children - in the countries that accepted them, and those countries have benefited enormously from the skills and the labour – and diversity - of those refugees just as the Arab countries would have done had they taken in the Palestinians (who, unlike the European refugees, shared a common language and culture with their adoptive countries). Oh, and a religion.

Have the Palestinians been incredibly hard done by? - Without a doubt. And are the Israelis without fault in this? - By no means. They’ve done more than their share in making the situation worse. However I can’t forgive the Arab leadership (and let’s not forget the Iranians, who have more lately bought into this sorry mess in their support for Hamas and Hezbollah) who since 1948 have used three generations of Palestinians now as pawns in their fight against Israel, condemning hundreds of thousands of these poor unfortunates to a truly horrible - and hopeless - life, (a life not shared in any way by the people who made the decision to leave them, stateless, in the camps) when those same people could have led lives as happy and productive as the tens of thousands of Eastern European refugees who fled their homes and were allowed to settle in and become citizens of half a dozen countries in the West.

Standing by for a major flaming for stating what is not the accepted line by today’s huggie fluffies in the West, most of whom have never picked up a history book in their lives - and closing by saying that if I had been born into one those camps, I’m pretty damn sure I’d be wearing a green head band and carrying an AK around looking for Israelis to kill. Which I suppose goes to prove how incredibly successful those 1948 Arab leaders were in their plan.

He's got a point.

[sky's the limit]

Here we go again...


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7853803.stm

[niss]

Interesting article title.

Israel launches attacks in Gaza.

Wouldn't a more apt title be "Hamas attacks Jeep, kills soldier, Israel retaliates"?

[sky's the limit]

Interesting article title.

Israel launches attacks in Gaza.

Wouldn't a more apt title be "Hamas attacks Jeep, kills soldier, Israel retaliates"?

Or perhaps "Israel Imprisons Gazans for Decades, Kill 1200 Last Month, Hamas Kills 5th Soldier, Israel Retaliates - Again/Still"

I like that better. But you are right, that headline - like most - is totally off.

stl

[trey kule]

Ah, STL, we have little to worry about.

The new US president has been installed and will no doubt turn over the middle east situation to his able secretary of state, Ms. Clinton....and her two able deputies, Jacob Lew and James Steinburg.
Despite the fact Mr. Lew has a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Israeli government bonds, I am sure they will treat the Palestinians with fairness and impartiality.

Sometimes you have to wonder who is really running the USA?

[sky's the limit]

Sometimes you have to wonder who is really running the USA?

I'm starting to think it's Pizza Hut... You can even get delivery at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan.....

stl

[BoostedNihilist]

I think colonel sanders has an honorary seat with the joint chiefs of staff.

[bob sacamano]

The americans were getting their KFC flown from Beirut to baghdad. They were chartering a Lebanese company, using a metro on that run.

[TG]

Hey Bob, KFC apart, did you took the time to read "Wiley's post" from PPrune I quoted above ?
It seems to give an impressive explanation to the problem.

Maybe you knew, maybe not but I'm really curious to know your own take about it.
(any truth to it or just garbage?)

[niss]

UN backtracks on claim that deadly IDF strike hit Gaza school
By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent
Tags: israel news, IDF, gaza, hamas

The United Nations has reversed its stance on one of the most contentious and bloody incidents of the recent Israel Defense Forces operation in Gaza, saying that an IDF mortar strike that killed 43 people on January 6 did not hit one of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency schools after all.

It seems that the UN has been under pressure to put the record straight after doubts arose that the school had actually been targeted. Maxwell Gaylord, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Jerusalem, said Monday that the IDF mortar shells fell in the street near the compound, and not on the compound itself.

Gaylord said that the UN "would like to clarify that the shelling and all of the fatalities took place outside and not inside the school."
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UNRWA, an agency whose sole purpose is to work with Palestinian refugees, said in response Tuesday that it had maintained from the day of attack that the wounded were outside of the school compound. UNRWA said that the source of the mistake in recent weeks had originated with a separate branch of the United Nations.

Senior IDF officials had previously expressed skepticism that the school had been struck, saying that two mortar shells could not kill 43 people and wound dozens more.

Questions about the veracity of the claims that the school had been hit by the IDF were also raised last week by the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. The newspaper said that a teacher in the UNRWA compound at the time of the strike "was adamant" that no people had been killed inside the compound.

The newspaper quoted the teacher as saying that, "I could see some of the people had been injured... But when I got outside, it was crazy hell. There were bodies everywhere, people dead, injured, flesh everywhere."

The newspaper said that the teacher had been told by the UN not to speak to the media. "Three of my students were killed," he said. "But they were all outside."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1061189.html

[JakeYYZ]

In related news, the UN has announced they will officially merge with Hamas later this week....

[Four1oh]

Thanks for posting that Niss, I was planning on doing it myself, but forgot.