Abu Yazan – The 27th of December, a day I will never forget

I feel like sharing my story with my friends to show how much terror Israel has brought to us….

That day I was walking in the street with a friend of mine in the middle of Gaza City…we were laughing at some jokes he was saying…and all of the sudden we heard the roaring of the Israeli F16s…It is normal in Gaza to hear such things, so we did not pay much attention to that, we kept moving with our jokes….Then with a glance, an explosion happened in a police station that was around 150 meters away from us.. We went running to the place when another explosion took place followed by a third, then a fourth, a fifth, we didn’t know what was happening but we didn’t hesitate to keep on going to the first place bombed…We had our hands over our ears because the explosions never ended, it was very loud to the limit you think that you are the one being hit with those rockets.

When we arrived at the police station, this is exactly what we saw.. On the door there were two officers lying on the ground injured, when I told the man, “I am going to save you just hang on,” he said, “leave me and get inside”.. I didn’t know what was happening inside, so I went with my friend and with 15 other people following us…We found over 40 bodies lying on the ground dead and about 250 others were injured, most of them had bad injuries…

We left the dead and started to take the survivors out of the place fearing that the Israeli F16s would bomb the place for another time… Most of the survivors were in bad shape, while I was carrying the people, I reached to a person who was badly injured but he looked like he was dead to me, his body was all burned.. he was saying, “ashhad an la elah ela allah, ashhad an mohammed rasool allah”…and that’s what made me notice that he was alive…I just moved towards him and in a hurry tried to take him out of the place, I grabbed him by the hand but the problem was that his hand was not part of his body anymore…I tried from his leg and the same thing happened, his leg just slipped out of his body, so I was there looking at him and knowing that he has no hope. “What shall I do?!” I was saying in a loud voice, I didn’t know how to carry him because each part of his body was a piece and I had to take him out of that place…I had three other people coming towards me and shouting very loud, “lets get him out of here quick,” and that’s what we did…

After like fifteen minutes we took all the survivors and the bodies out of the place, we all left, and after 5 minutes…the Israeli airplanes just hit the place again…we all were praying that we don’t get hit while we were inside… I moved to the hospital with the last ambulance to see what was happening and believe me what I saw was really disgusting and awful… Bodies all lying on the ground… the white suit of all the doctors turned out to red as if they are working in a grocery… This is the day where I decided to work and tell the world about Palestine and about the crimes Israel commits against Palestinians…

And every Palestinian has his own story, because no one stayed at home that day…everyone wanted to take a role in rescuing the injured. Source

Two Years After Gaza War, Gaza Remains Sealed-Off, Suffering Continues

Two years after Operation Cast Lead: Gaza Remains Sealed-Off from outside World, Impunity for War Crimes Prevails
Ahmed Zourob receives dialysis treatment at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Because of the siege, his level of treatment is inadequate and he can no longer obtain the medication he needs (PCHR)

PCHR Report on Gaza War, Monday, 27 December 2010 11:30

December 27, 2010, marks the two-year anniversary of the beginning of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s 23 day offensive on the Gaza Strip. This offensive – the single most brutal event in the history of the occupation – was characterised by systematic violations of international law. Its aftermath has been characterised by pervasive impunity.

In total, 1,419 Palestinians were killed. 83% of the dead – the overwhelming majority – were civilians, the so-called ‘protected persons’ of international humanitarian law. A further 5,300 were injured, and public and private property throughout the Gaza Strip was extensively targeted and destroyed.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) notes that in the two years since the offensive there have been no concrete steps taken towards the fulfilment of victims’ legitimate rights to the equal protection of the law and an effective judicial remedy. Customary international law and the treaty-based obligations which all States have entered into are unequivocal: if a war crime has been committed, those responsible must be investigated and prosecuted in accordance with international standards. They must be held to account.

Numerous reports of international and national human rights organisations – including those of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (the ‘Goldstone Report’), the Independent Fact-Finding Mission mandated by the Arab League, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – concluded that war crimes were committed in the Gaza Strip, and noted that criminal accountability must be the legal consequence.

The Goldstone Report detailed explicit mechanisms to ensure such criminal accountability. As required by customary international law, genuine domestic investigations must be initiated. After six months, if these investigations failed to comply with international standards, the Security Council – acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter – must refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.

It is now two years since the offensive, and no effective domestic investigations or prosecutions have been initiated.

As PCHR has documented, Israel has systematically failed to ensure accountability. In the two years since Operation Cast Lead, the actions of the Israeli authorities have been characterised by a desire to shield those responsible from justice. Only three soldiers have been convicted of committing offensive-related crimes. One soldier was sentenced to seven-months in jail for the theft of a credit card. Two other soldiers were convicted of using a 9 year old boy as a human shield. They were given a 3 month suspended sentence.

This is an insult to victims and to the universal rule of law.

The international community’s response has been silence; through inaction they have implicitly endorsed Israel’s actions during Operation Cast Lead and the impunity that has followed. They have implicitly endorsed the systematic and widespread commission of international crimes.

The rule of law, and victims’ rights, have been sacrificed in the name of politics.

This situation must not be allowed to prevail.

The consequences of impunity are evident in the continuing and escalating violations of international law committed in the occupied Palestinian territory.

The consequences of impunity are evident in the fact that the entire Gaza Strip continues to be subject to an illegal closure. For over 3.5 years, 1.7 million people have been collectively punished and cut off from the outside world. Impunity, and the international community’s failure to prevent this ongoing crime, has resulted in the distinct possibility that the closure will become institutionalised, and effectively endorsed by the United Nations and the international community.

The consequences of impunity are evident in the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank; in the continued construction of the Wall; and in the house demolitions and evictions carried out in occupied East Jerusalem.

Equally, the consequences of sacrificing the rule of international law in the name of ‘political progress’ are evident in the abject failure of the Oslo process.

It is imperative that the international community fulfil its legal obligations, and ensure respect for international law. Those suspected of committing international crimes must be investigated and prosecuted. Israel must be held responsible for its internationally wrongful acts.

Impunity serves only to encourage continued violations of international law. Without accountability, how can the civilians of the Gaza Strip feel safe again?

British secret file confirms israeli nukes

A newly released British document confirms that Israel has possessed nuclear weapons for more than three decades.

Secret files released by Britain's National Archives said on Wednesday that British officials feared Tel Aviv would use its nuclear weapons in case of another war with Arab countries in the region.

Israel, which is considered as the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, has never confirmed or denied that it has produced nuclear warheads. It has also refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has also adamantly rejected international inspection of its nuclear facilities.

Former US President Jimmy Carter acknowledged for the first time in May 2008 that Tel Aviv has 150 nuclear warheads in its arsenals.

In 1986, Israeli nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, leaked the news that Israel had between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons.

Vanunu was a former worker at the country's Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert.

In May 2010, the UK's Guardian newspaper said secret South African documents reveal that in 1975, Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the then-apartheid regime in South Africa.

According to documents obtained by the newspaper, a secret meeting between the then-Israeli defense minister, Shimon Peres, and his South African counterpart, P.W. Botha, ended with an offer for the sale of warheads “in three sizes.”

The Guardian claimed that those “sizes” referred to conventional, chemical and nuclear weapons.

Israel has initiated several wars in the region in its 60-year-old history of occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and East al-Quds (Jerusalem).

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israel's genocidal aggression on Gaza revisited

By Khalid Amayreh

The Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip two years ago, which lasted for three weeks, was pornographically criminal and graphically genocidal. Israel knowingly and deliberately targeted innocent civilians, including children, using state-of-the-art machines of death.

Entire families were simply exterminated at the pretext that a member was involved with the resistance. Homes, hospitals, mosques and other public buildings were obliterated. Even terrified and thoroughly terrorized people raising white banners were mercilessly riddled with bullets.

The sheer criminality of the Israeli army gave the impression that Israeli soldiers were probably trying to mimic Old Testament savagery by murdering men, women, and children, and by destroying and annihilating all that breathe!!

The genocidal onslaught on Gaza is sufficient to render Israel an illegitimate state. No state under the sun, Jewish or otherwise, should behave in such a nefarious manner and remain legitimate.

Don't mention the holocaust. In the final analysis, since when did Israel have the right to utilize one holocaust in order to commit another? Or use it as red herring to divert attention from its genocidal atrocities against its victims?

To cover her crimes against humanity, Israel used her effective lying machine to the fullest. It claimed that Israel was coming under attack from Gaza and that it was merely exercising self-defense.

Such a claim, coming from a country that is based on mass murder, ethnic cleansing and land theft, is very much analogous to an imagined claim by the Third Reich that it was forced to deal stringently with Jews because SS soldiers had been coming under attack from Jewish resistance fighters at Ghetto Warsaw.

I am making this comparison because as soon as Israel ostensibly left Gaza in 2005, it imposed a hermetically tight blockade on the coastal enclave, turning it into the largest open- air prison in the world. Gazans were tormented and savaged and starved in manners unseen since Ghetto Warsaw, or probably the great Ukrainian starvation under Stalin.

Israel simply wanted Gazans to die unwept and as quietly as possible. However, when Gazans found out that they had nothing to lose; they decided to die standing on their feet, rather than walking meekly to the Israeli slaughterhouse.

Israel rained death on Gaza for 21 consecutive days, hoping to get the people of Gaza to crawl on their hands and feet, begging for mercy from an army that combined all the elements of barbarianism and brutality of the Wehrmacht, Gestapo and SS combined.

However, much of the so-called international community kept up looking on as Gaza was being killed and raped as if these abominations were occurring on a distant planet.

There is no doubt the pornographic apathy with which the so-called civilized world related to the shameful Israeli aggression in Gaza two years ago represented an all-time low in the world's morality.

What else can be said of powerful states, some of which are considered cornerstones of the international system, which related to the attempted lynching of nearly 2 million Gazans by merely saying that "Israel has the right to defend itself."!! What kind of fornication with language is this, coming from the President of the most powerful nation on earth?

To be sure, moral depravity was by means the lot of an evil empire that allowed itself to be transformed into a big whore by Israel and her supporters. Many other countries betrayed and continued to betray Gaza, including countries that shamelessly claim to be Arab and Islamic.

Unfortunately, the passage of two years since the clouds of death were hovering over Gaza has not brought any solace. The brutal ugliness of a manifestly fascist Israel is as conspicuous as ever. And Israel continues to gang up on Gaza, barring the victims of the 2008-2009 aggression from rebuilding their homes by preventing building materials from getting through into Gaza.

It is true that the overall humanitarian situation in Gaza is slightly better in comparison to what it was two years ago. However, it is also true that whatever improvement there has been is not a result of Israeli magnanimity but rather a cynical attempt to enhance her tarnished image.

This is why the free-minded people of the world must stay focused on Gaza lest Israel decides to reactivate her genocidal instincts and gang up on Gaza's children again.

We must not allow ourselves to forget the cardinal fact that the murder of Palestinian children has always been a well-guarded Zionist tradition. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatsoever suggesting that the Zionist entity is about to forgo this evil but intrinsic tradition which for most Zionists constitutes a way of life.

Youth groups paint murals in to mark Gaza war

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Two youth groups in Gaza marked the second anniversary of Israel's war on the Strip by painting murals on the walls of the destroyed government compound in Gaza City.

The Cultural Club and Free Spectrum organized the activity, commemorating the 22-day offensive which left more than 1,400 dead and injured over 5,000.

Israeli airstrikes targeted the compound of ministerial buildings several times during the war.

Free Spectrum coordinator Mohammad Al-Herbawi said the painting expressed Palestinians' demand "to live in dignity and freedom like other nations around the globe. We are asking all the free people around the world to stand by our people until they gain their freedom."

Al-Herbawi called on Palestinian leaders to unify, and to end the national division, which he said encouraged Israel to commit more crimes against unarmed Palestinians.

Many murals were painted, depicting scenes of Palestinian suffering, and condemning the war and Israel's siege of the coastal enclave.

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israeli secret report on inhumane conditions of detainees disclosed

GAZA, (PIC)-- Haaretz newspaper published a confidential report prepared by the Israeli association of jurists revealing the tragic and inhumane incarceration conditions which the Palestinian prisoners imprisoned in solitary cells are living in.

The report pointed out that hundreds of Palestinian detainees were locked up over the past years in solitary confinement and most of them were leaders of prisoners.

The Israeli activists who made the report worked as official inspectors sent by the association of jurists to visit Israeli prisons and meet with Palestinian detainees.

According to the report the isolation cells in all Israeli prisons, especially in Ayalon and Shikma jails, are like the cells of dungeons, small, infested with insects, smelly, cold, without windows and totally unsuitable for humans.

The report pointed out that the isolation of detainees from other prisoners in solitary for a long period of time has psychological effects on them and many of them develop mental problems inside these cells.

In another incident, the same newspaper said that about 90 percent of Palestinian prisoners being interrogated by the Shin Bet security apparatus are prevented from consulting with an attorney, according to a report published by the public committee against torture in Israel and the Palestinian prisoners' society.

The Shin Bet refused in the past to provide data on the numbers of prisoners who are prevented from meeting with a lawyer, but Haaretz quoted the Shin Bet as saying that it has legal clearance to keep certain detainees from lawyers.

According to this report, during prolonged periods when prisoners are kept from meeting with lawyers, the Shin Bet utilizes interrogation methods that run contrary to international law, Israeli laws and Israeli commitments to avoid such methods.

Among these interrogation methods are tying prisoners for a long time to a chair with their hands behind the back, sleep deprivation, threats usually of harming family members, humiliation and being kept for long periods in unsanitary cells.

The report said that the numbers of those whose right to an attorney was blocked between 2000 and 2007 ranged between 8, 379 to 10, 773 detainees.