THE DAY ISRAEL USED A BOY AGED 13 AS A HUMAN SHIELD

http://futurefastforward.com/component/content/article/906-misc/823-the-day-israel-used-a-boy-aged-13-as-a-human-shield?

This is what happened to a Palestinian child who joined teenagers throwing stones at Israeli border police.
Muhammad Badwan was grabbed by officers and tied by an arm to the grille covering the windscreen of their security vehicle (circled).
Last night the 13-year-old’s father said the police had illegally used his son as a human shield to try to stop demonstrators throwing stones at them.
‘When I saw him on the hood of the jeep, my whole mind went crazy, ‘ said Saeed Baswan, a 34-year-old labourer. ‘It’s a picture you can’t even imagine. He was shivering from fear.’
Muhammad said: ‘I was scared when they got me at first. I thought they would put me in prison. I was scared a stone would hit me.’
The incident happened in Muhammad’s home village of Biddo, north-west of Jurusalem, which has become a flashpoint for violence between Israeli forces and demonstrators protesting against the building of an Israeli security fence.
The picture was published by an Israeli human rights group trying to expose the behavior of some Israeli security personnel. Rabbi Arik Ascherman, director of Rabbis For Human Rights, heard about the boy and tried to intervene with the police, demanding he be released.
The rabbi claimed he was head-butted by one of the officers and arrested. He said he intended to press charges against the police.
‘The boy was sitting on the hood of a vehicle, unsuccessfully trying to hold back his tears, shivering with fright, and with one arm tied to the screen protecting the windshield,’ he said.
‘We tried to calm him down and reassure him. I asked if he was hurt. He said he had been beaten and was in pain.
‘It is very depressing that we have come to this position where this is what we do.’The Israeli police said they were investigating the incident.

The IDF has no mercy for the children in Gaza nursery schools

Published:

14:47 15/01/2009

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055574.html

_{By Gideon Levy, Haaretz Correspondent}

The fighting in Gaza is "war deluxe." Compared with previous wars, it is child's play - pilots bombing unimpeded as if on practice runs, tank and artillery soldiers shelling houses and civilians from their armored vehicles, combat engineering troops destroying entire streets in their ominous protected vehicles without facing serious opposition. A large, broad army is fighting against a helpless population and a weak, ragged organization that has fled the conflict zones and is barely putting up a fight. All this must be said openly, before we begin exulting in our heroism and victory.

This war is also child's play because of its victims. About a third of those killed in Gaza have been children - 311, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, 270 according to the B'Tselem human rights group - out of the 1,000 total killed as of Wednesday. Around 1,550 of the 4,500 wounded have also been children according to figures from the UN, which says the number of children killed has tripled since the ground operation began.

This is too large a proportion by any humanitarian or ethical standard.

It is enough to look at the pictures coming from Shifa Hospital to see how many burned, bleeding and dying children now lie there. History has seen innumerable brutal wars take countless lives.

But the horrifying proportion of this war, a third of the dead being children, has not been seen in recent memory.

God does not show mercy on the children at Gaza's nursery schools, and neither does the Israel Defense Forces. That's how it goes when war is waged in such a densely populated area with a population so blessed with children. About half of Gaza's residents are under 15.

No pilot or soldier went to war to kill children. Not one among them intended to kill children, but it also seems neither did they intend not to kill them. They went to war after the IDF had already killed 952 Palestinian children and adolescents since May 2000.

The public's shocking indifference to these figures is incomprehensible. A thousand propagandists and apologists cannot excuse this criminal killing. One can blame Hamas for the death of children, but no reasonable person in the world will buy these ludicrous, flawed propagandistic goods in light of the pictures and statistics coming from Gaza.

One can say Hamas hides among the civilian population, as if the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv is not located in the heart of a civilian population, as if there are places in Gaza that are not in the heart of a civilian population. One can also claim that Hamas uses children as human shields, as if in the past our own organizations fighting to establish a country did not recruit children.

A significant majority of the children killed in Gaza did not die because they were used as human shields or because they worked for Hamas. They were killed because the IDF bombed, shelled or fired at them, their families or their apartment buildings. That is why the blood of Gaza's children is on our hands, not on Hamas' hands, and we will never be able to escape that responsibility.

The children of Gaza who survive this war will remember it. It is enough to watch Nazareth-born Juliano Mer Khamis' wonderful movie "Arna's Children" to understand what thrives amid the blood and ruin we are leaving behind. The film shows the children of Jenin - who have seen less horror than those of Gaza - growing up to be fighters and suicide bombers.

A child who has seen his house destroyed, his brother killed and his father humiliated will not forgive.

The last time I was allowed to visit Gaza, in November 2006, I went to the Indira Gandhi nursery school in Beit Lahia. The schoolchildren drew what they had seen the previous day: an IDF missile striking their school bus, killing their teacher, Najwa Halif, in front of their eyes. They were in shock. It is possible some of them have now been killed or wounded themselves.

Bolivia to take Israel to The Hague

------------------------------------------------ http://www.presstv. ir/detail. aspx?id=82554&sectionid=351020202 Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:57:08 GMT

Israel ignores international calls to end Gaza invasion. Bolivia is seeking to take Tel Aviv to International Criminal Court over the brutal atrocities the Israeli forces have committed in Gaza. The Andean state says it is intended to make regional allies take a unified stance against "the Israeli political and military leaders responsible for the offensive on the Gaza Strip" and make it to stand trial at the international body in the Hague, said Sacha Llorenti, whose portfolio covers civil society. Moves to begin the legal process will begin "probably next week," Bolivia's deputy justice and human rights minister Wilfredo Chavez told journalists during the visit to Geneva, AFP reported on Friday. Bolivia followed in the steps of its ally Venezuela and severed diplomatic ties with Israel over its massacre of the Gazans and snubbing the international calls for an 'immediate' and 'durable' truce, said the Latin American governments. The Bolivian president Evo Morales told a group of diplomats in the administrative capital of La Paz that he will request the International Criminal Court (ICC) to file genocide charges against Israeli President Shimon Peres andPrime Minister Ehud Olmert. The ICC is competent to adjudicate war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed after 2002. Israel and its closest ally, the United States, are not among the 108 signatories of the Rome Statute creating the Hague-based court in 2000 to investigate and prosecute war crimes. After 21 days of non-stop bombardment and aggression, the Israeli invasion of Gaza has left 1,133 Palestinians killed and more than 5,200 wounded. ----------------------------------

Israeli Assault Injures 1.5 Million Gazans

By Jonathan Cook

16 January, 2009
Countercurrents.org

Nazareth: This week the death toll in Gaza passed the 1,000 mark, after nearly three weeks of Israeli air and ground attacks. But surprisingly, no one has reported an even more appalling statistic: that there are some 1.5 million injured Palestinians in Gaza. How is is possible that such an astounding figure could have passed the world’s media by?

The reason apparently is that they have been relying on the highly unreliable statistics provided by official Palestinian sources. It appears that the Palestinian health ministry only records as wounded those Gazans who need to stay in hospital because of the severity of their injuries.

That means they only count the more than 4,500 Gazans who have suffered injuries such as severe burns from exploding Israeli phosphorus shells; shrapnel wounds from artillery rounds; broken or lost limbs from aerial bombardment; bullet wounds; physical trauma from falling building debris; and so on.

But in fact there is another, far more reasonable standard for assessing those injured, one that provides the far higher total of 1.5 million Gazans – or every surviving Palestinian in Gaza. The measure I am referring to is the one employed by Israel.

Here is an example of its use. In September 2007, the international media reported that 69 Israeli soldiers had been wounded when Palestinian militants fired a rocket into the Zikim army base near the Gaza Strip. The rocket struck a tent where the soldiers were sleeping.

It is worth noting the details of the attack. Israeli officials related that, of the 69 wounded, 11 had moderate or severe injuries and one was critically injured. A few more had light wounds. The rest, probably 50 or more, were injured in the sense that they were suffering from shock.

So, if we apply the same standard to Gaza, that would mean 1.5 million Gazans have been wounded. Or is there still some doubt about whether the weeks of bombardment of Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, have left the entire civilian population in a deep, and possibly permanent, state of shock?

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Talking of Gaza’s civilians, where did they all go? Israel’s so-called “war” on Gaza must be the first example in human history of a conflict where there are apparently no civilians. Or, at least, that is the impression being created by the world’s leading international bodies, from the World Health Organisation to the United Nations. Instead they refer to a new category of “women and children”.

Thus, those 1,000-plus dead Gazans are broken down into percentages defined in terms of “women and children” and the rest. The earliest figures stated that about 25 per cent of Gaza’s dead were “women and children”, and that has steadily climbed close to the 50 per cent mark since Israel’s ground invasion got under way.

The implication – one with which Israel is presumably delighted – is that the rest are Palestinian fighters, or “terrorists” as Israel would prefer us to call them. It also suggests that every man in Gaza over the age of 16 is being defined as a non-civilian – as a combatant and, again by implication, as a terrorist. In short, all Gaza’s men are legitimate targets for Israeli attack.

This is not very far from the position recently attributed to Israeli policymakers by the daily Jerusalem Post. The newspaper reported that officials had come to the view that “it would be pointless for Israel to topple Hamas because the population [of Gaza] is Hamas”.

On this thinking, Israel is at war with every single man, woman and child in Gaza, which is very much how it looks. Maybe we should be glad that the category of “women and children” is still being recognised – at least, for now.

***********

The myths about the blockade of Gaza are so legion it is almost impossible to disentangle them. But let’s try tackling a few.

The first is that the blockade was a necessary response to the election of Hamas.

Tell that to John Wolfensohn, special envoy to the Quartet, comprising the US, UN, Europe and Russia, from May 2005. His job was to oversee the disengagement. Wolfensohn was succeeded by the far less principled Tony Blair, the former British prime minister.

In an interview with the Haaretz newspaper in 2007, Wolfensohn explained why he had resigned a year into his job, in April 2006. Shortly after the disengagement in summer 2005, he said, Israel and the US had violated the understandings made to ensure the border crossings into Gaza remained open after the Jewish settlers left. “Every aspect of that agreement was abrogated,” he said.

The economy collapsed as a result, as Gaza’s farmers saw their produce rot at the crossings, and unemployment and disillusionment among Gazans rocketed. “Instead of hope, the Palestinians saw that they were put back in prison. And with 50 per cent unemployment, you would have conflict.”

It was the closure of the crossings that Wolfensohn believes partly explains Hamas’ success in the subsequent elections, in early 2006. So, according to Wolfensohn, Israel’s blockade pre-existed Hamas’ rise to power and began when Fatah were still the rulers of Gaza.

The second myth is that the blockade was an attempt, if a futile one, to get Hamas to recognise Israel’s “right to exist”.

Tell that to Dov Weisglass, former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s fixer in Washington. It was he who suggested the true goal of the blockade, which Israel intensified immediately following Hamas’ electoral triumph. The policy would be “like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won’t die.”

In short, according to Weisglass, Israeli policy in Gaza was “collective punishment” inflicted on the civilian population for choosing Hamas – a policy that, should it need pointing out, is a grave violation of international law and a war crime.

The hope, it seems, was that Gazans would, as they sank into abject poverty, manage to summon up the energy to overthrow Hamas. It didn’t happen.

The third myth is that the blockade was designed to put pressure on Hamas to end the rocket fire into Israel.

Tell that to Ehud Barak, the defence minister, and Matan Vilnai, his deputy. This pair were plotting an invasion of Gaza throughout the six-month ceasefire with Hamas, and in fact much earlier.

In truth, they ignored every diplomatic overture from Hamas, including offers of indefinite truces, while they invested their energies in the coming ground invasion. In particular they worked on plans, noted in the Israeli media back in spring 2008, to “level” Gaza’s civilian neighbourhoods and create “combat zones” from which civilians could be expelled.

One aspect of the blockade that seems to have been overlooked is the way it has been used to “soften up” Gaza, and Hamas, before Israel’s attack. For three years Gaza’s population has been denied food, medicines and fuel.

Every general knows it is easier to fight an army – or militia – that is cold, tired and hungry. Could there be a better description of the Hamas fighters, as well as those “women and children”, currently facing Israel’s tanks and warplanes?

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest book is “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net

A version of this article appeared in Al-Ahram Weekly (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg), published in Cairo.

http://www.countercurrents.org/cook160109.htm

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Gaza survivors' four days without water

Friday, 9 January 2009

Gaza survivors' four days without water

The ICRC has accused the Israeli army of failing to evacuate and care for the wounded

By Rushdie Aboualaf BBC News, Gaza City

Sameh, aged three, and Ahmad, 18 months, cry all the time.

As she sits on the bed in al-Quds hospital in Gaza City, their mother Fatima al-Shamouny, 36, tries to comfort them.

But as she tells their - and her own - story, she sobs too.

The boys were found on Wednesday, with their dead father and unconscious mother nearby, four days after the emergency services said they began trying to reach the neighbourhood.

They were among 30 people Palestinian Red Crescent workers said they evacuated from Zeitoun, a south-eastern suburb of Gaza City, on Wednesday.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said the paramedics found "shocking" scenes of wounded people huddled together in houses among dead bodies, weak after having had no food or water for several days.

In one home, the agency said, four small children were found sitting close to their dead mothers, "too weak to stand on their own".

It is not clear if Sameh and Ahmad were in that particular house - it may be that the unconscious Fatima was initially thought to be dead - but she says she and her toddlers were among those who had a long wait for help.

Survivors' accounts

The ICRC has accused the Israeli military of failing to live up to its obligations under international law to facilitate the evacuation or to care for the wounded.

The agency said it had been requesting safe passage for its ambulances to access the neighbourhood since 3 January, but only received permission to do so from the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) four days later.

The details of exactly what happened at the Shamouny family compound are still sketchy.

Survivors have told the BBC that 26 of the extended family's 65 members died in Israeli military operations.

We spent days without food, without water - the wounded were bleeding for four days Wael Faris al-Shamouny

Their accounts of shelling, and then ground troops surrounding their homes, cannot be independently verified.

Fatima, who was wounded in the chest, says two of her sons, her husband, her aunt, her uncle and her brother-in-law were all killed.

"One of my sons crawled to our neighbour's house - he was injured - and he called some of the local radio stations to ask for help. But the help arrived late. Everybody had died," she said.

"On the third day, I passed out. I don't know what happened until I found myself here in the hospital," she said.

Wael Faris al-Shamouny, 39, another member of the extended family, smoked and sipped black coffee as he sat on the floor in the hospital corridor.

He says he lost five sons and his wife, and believes some of the dead may have survived if given medical treatment earlier.

"We tried to help them, but we didn't have first aid things in our house. We spent days without food, without water - the wounded were bleeding for four days," he said.

"The ambulances came and they saved who they saved. There are still pieces of my wife, my sons and my cousins' bodies in the house."

ICRC criticism

The ICRC said the wounded had to be transported about a kilometre on a hand-pulled donkey cart because large earth walls erected by the Israeli army had made it impossible to bring ambulances into the neighbourhood.

The minimum is to treat these [injured] people, to feed these people, give them water, and keep them in a safe place Katarina Ritz ICRC's head of mission in Jerusalem

Katarina Ritz, the ICRC's head of mission in Jerusalem, said experienced Palestinian emergency workers wept at the scenes they were confronted with.

She said Israeli troops were within about 100m of the houses in question, and that the ICRC believes the soldiers "must have been aware" of the presence of the wounded people, because of repeated requests from aid agencies for access.

Under international law, she said, even if there are security concerns meaning the injured cannot be evacuated, "the minimum is to treat these people, to feed these people, give them water, and keep them in a safe place".

The Israeli military said it was investigating the case. It said it is "engaged in a battle with the Hamas terrorist organisation that has deliberately used Palestinian civilians as human shields".

And it stressed it works in "close co-operation with international aid organisations during the fighting, so that civilians can be provided with assistance".

'Difficult' co-operation

Earlier in the week, an ICRC spokeswoman told the BBC attempts to co-ordinate safe passage for ambulances were so slow that people were dying as they waited.

Not all ambulance drivers in Gaza have been waiting for co-ordination with the Israeli military, and health officials in Gaza say 10 paramedics have been killed trying to rescue the wounded since the Israeli operation began.

Israeli Defence Ministry Spokesman Peter Lerner said that co-ordinating the movements of ambulances has been "extremely difficult because of heavy gunfire".

He said that even during the three-hour lull Israel declared to allow humanitarian operations, Hamas militants continued to shoot at Israeli forces.

Outside the hospital, as Fatima Shamouny told her story, dozens of people gathered as Thursday's ICRC-led convoy of ambulances prepared to leave.

They came with addresses where they believed injured people were trapped.

One man's hands shook so much with fear that he had to ask for help writing the directions down.

Finally, the convoy received clearance, and drove away.

It was headed back to Zeitoun, where the ICRC said there were reports of more injured people stranded, and another area in northern Gaza, which ICRC workers had not even reached yet.