The president of the United Nations General Assembly has accused Israel of violating international law with its war on Gaza in which almost 1,100 Palestinians have been killed, nearly half of them civilians. “Gaza is ablaze. It has been turned into a burning hell,” Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann told an emergency session of the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday. He said Israel’s offensive was “a war against a helpless, defenceless and imprisoned people” and accused Israel of carrying out attacks on civilian targets. “The violations of international law inherent in the Gaza assault have been well documented: collective punishment, disproportionate military force [and] attacks on civilian targets, including homes, mosques, universities, schools,” he said. He also rebuked UN member-states for their lack of action over the crisis, saying: “The [UN Security Council] may have found itself unable or unwilling to take the necessary steps to impose an immediate ceasefire, but outsourcing that effort to one or two governments, or through the quartet, does not relieve the council of its own responsibilities under the UN charter. “The council cannot disavow its collective responsibility. It cannot continue to fiddle while Gaza burns.” Ryad Mansour, the Palestinian observer at the UN, called for an independent investigation of Israel’s “grave breaches and systematic violations of international law”. “Since this crisis began, it is without a doubt that a multitude of war crimes have been perpetrated by the occupying power [Israel],” he said while also calling for “measures for the protection of the defenceless Palestinian civilian population.” Gabriela Shalev, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, dismissed the session as a “cynical, hateful and politicised [attempt] to de-legitimize Israel’s fundamental right to defend its citizens”. Gaza war ‘genocide’
The emergency meeting had been requested by the 118-member UN member states making up the non-aligned movement.An Israeli delegate had sought to block the session on procedural grounds by arguing that under the UN charter the 192-member assembly could not rule on a matter already being tackled by the Security Council, but the move was dismissed. D’Escoto noted that the Security Council last week had called for a Gaza ceasefire leading to the withdrawal of Israeli forces. “Prime Minister Olmert’s recent statement disavowing the authority of Resolution 1860 [the Security Council resolution] clearly places Israel as a state in contempt of international law and the United Nations,” d’Escoto added. He urged the assembly to agree its own non-binding assembly resolution reflecting “the urgency of our commitment to end this slaughter” in Gaza. Israel has continued its offensive regardless of the resolution which was also rejected by Hamas. D’Escoto, a former Nicaraguan foreign minister, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that Israel’s killings of Palestinians in Gaza amounted to “genocide”. Almost 1,100 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s Gaza offensive, which Israel says is to stop Palestinian rocketfire coming from Gaza. |
Archive for the ‘War Criminals’ Category
Israel ‘breaking law’ with Gaza war
January 16, 2009
PM Ismail Haniyeh: My message to the West – Israel must stop the slaughter
January 15, 2009By Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian Prime Minister
The Independent, Thursday, 15 January 2009
I write this article to Western readers across the social and political spectrum as the Israeli war machine continues to massacre my people in Gaza. To date, almost 1,000 have been killed, nearly half of whom are women and children. Last week’s bombing of the UNRWA (UN Relief Works Agency) school in the Jabalya refugee camp was one of the most despicable crimes imaginable, as hundreds of civilians had abandoned their homes and sought refuge with the international agency only to be mercilessly shelled and bombed by Israel. Forty-six children and women were killed in that heinous attack while scores were injured.
Evidently, Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 did not end its occupation nor, as a result, its international obligations as an occupying power. It continued to control and dominate our borders by land, sea and air. Indeed the UN has confirmed that between 2005 and 2008, the Israeli army killed nearly 1,250 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children. For most of that period the border crossings have remained effectively closed, with only limited quantities of food, industrial fuel, animal feed and a few other essential items, allowed in.
Despite its frantic efforts to conceal it, the root cause of Israel’s criminal war on Gaza is the elections of January 2006, which saw Hamas win by a substantial majority. What occurred next was that Israel alongside the United States and the European Union joined forces in an attempt to quash the democratic will of the Palestinian people. They set about reversing the decision first by obstructing the formation of a national unity government and then by making a living hell for the Palestinian people through economic strangulation. The abject failure of all these machinations finally led to this vicious war. Israel’s objective is to silence all voices that express the will of the Palestinian; thereafter it would impose its own terms for a final settlement depriving us of our land, our right to Jerusalem as the rightful capital of our future state and the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes.
Ultimately, the comprehensive siege on Gaza, which manifestly violated the Fourth Geneva Convention, prohibited the most basic medical supplies to our hospitals. It disallowed the delivery of fuel and supply of electricity to our population. And on top of all of this inhumanity, it denied them food and the freedom of movement, even to seek treatment. This led to the avoidable death of hundreds of patients and the spiralling rise of malnutrition among our children.
Palestinians are appalled that the members of the European Union do not view this obscene siege as a form of aggression. Despite the overwhelming evidence, they shamelessly assert that Hamas brought this catastrophe upon the Palestinian people because it did not renew the truce. Yet we ask, did Israel honour the terms of the ceasefire mediated by Egypt in June? It did not. The agreement stipulated a lifting of the siege and an end to attacks in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Despite our full compliance, the Israelis persisted in murdering Palestinians in Gaza as well as the West Bank during what became known as the year of the Annapolis peace.
None of the atrocities committed against our schools, universities, mosques, ministries and civil infra-structure would deter us in the pursuit of our national rights. Undoubtedly, Israel could demolish every building in the Gaza Strip but it would never shatter our determination or steadfastness to live in dignity on our land. Surely, if the gathering of civilians in a building only to then bomb it or the use of phosphorous bombs and missiles are not war crimes, then what is? How many more international treaties and conventions must Zionist Israel breach before it is held accountable? There is not a capital in the world today where free and decent people are not outraged by this brutal oppression. Neither Palestine nor the world would be the same after these crimes.
There is only one way forward and no other. Our condition for a new ceasefire is clear and simple. Israel must end its criminal war and slaughter of our people, lift completely and unconditionally its illegal siege of the Gaza Strip, open all our border crossings and completely withdraw from Gaza. After this we would consider future options. Ultimately, the Palestinians are a people struggling for freedom from occupation and the establishment of an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital and the return of refugees to their villages from which they were expelled. Whatever the cost, the continuation of Israel’s massacres will neither break our will nor our aspiration for freedom and independence.
The writer is the Prime Minister of Gaza Palestinians
Growing calls for investigations and accountability in Gaza conflict
January 15, 2009Philip Luther of Amnesty International explains the human rights issues in the Israel/Gaza conflict
© Amnesty International
Smoke rises during Israeli airstrike, Gaza City, 13 January 2009
© APGraphicsBank
Amnesty International has urged all parties to the Gaza conflict, as well as the international community, to ensure that a thorough, independent and impartial investigation is established without delay into abuses of international human rights and humanitarian law, and to ensure full accountability.
These include Israeli attacks that have been directed at civilians or civilian buildings in the Gaza Strip, or which are disproportionate, and Palestinian armed groups’ indiscriminate rocket attacks into civilian population centres in southern Israel.
Where appropriate, states must be ready to initiate criminal investigations and carry out prosecutions before their own courts if the evidence warrants it.
The Israeli army’s attacks are often disproportionate and have killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. Attacks are also directed at civilians and civilian buildings.
Most of the civilian population in Gaza has no access to the humanitarian aid on which they depend. They have nowhere to go for safety, while hospitals are overstretched and lacking basic necessities.
Meanwhile, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups persist in firing indiscriminate rockets into Israel.
Amnesty International has called on Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups to immediately cease all attacks on civilians and disproportionate attacks which harm civilians.
According to Amnesty International:
- All parties should abide by a humanitarian truce – the current lull in fighting of three hours a day is grossly insufficient and anyway has not been fully respected in practice – so as to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza and to be distributed to the civilian population.
- Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups must also respect the role of medical personnel and ambulances in assisting the wounded. The Israeli authorities should allow the free movement of ambulances to collect the wounded and the dead at all times. Israel must also permit immediate and unfettered access for humanitarian workers, human rights workers and journalists.
Gaza: The endless cycle of trauma
January 15, 2009| Al Jazeera, January 15, 2009 |
|||||||||||||
| By Sandy Tolan, Middle East analyst |
|||||||||||||
The Israeli bombs and rockets streaking through the skies of Gaza trace not only a path of death and terror for Palestinians in 2009, they also outline the smoke trails of traumas past, from the Nakba, or ‘catastrophe,’ in 1948 to the 1967 war; from the Lebanon invasions, to the 2002 assault on Jenin. All are echoes of today’s calamity of US-made missiles and mortars raining down on Gazans. Watching history repeat itself is, of course, most horrifying for the people through whose roofs the missiles are falling, whose children are dying. For the outsider, peering in from a safe perch, it is merely surreal. We look on as Israel replays the tape-loop of its brutal and tragic follies. Israel has shown again and again that, rather than vanquishing its enemies, it makes new ones while strengthening old ones. Many commentators have invoked 2006 and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, when, in trying to destroy Hezbollah, it made it stronger. But this is only a relatively recent example. ‘My enemy’s enemy’
Consider early 1988, near the beginning of the First Intifada, when Israel, trying to weaken Yasser Arafat, the late PLO leader, invoked the ill-fated strategy known as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”In trying to marginalise the exiled Arafat and his Tunis cadre, Israel helped seed the growth of a fledgling Hamas in Gaza. Or recall March 1968, when Israeli infantry, tanks, paratroopers, and armoured brigades – 15,000 soldiers in all – moved east across the Jordan River to attack the village of Karama. Though, technically, the Israelis won a military victory, they encountered far stiffer resistance than expected, losing 28 soldiers. At the centre of the heroic Palestinian battle of Karama was the man who would emerge strongest from the fight: Yasser Arafat. The biggest loser was the pro-Western “moderate,” King Hussein of Jordan, who in the wake of the battle was forced to declare, no doubt to the alarm of Israel, “we are all fedayeen now.” Or, we can revisit the pre-dawn of November 13, 1966, when Israeli planes, tanks and troops attacked the West Bank village of Samu, blowing up dozens of houses and killing 21 Jordanian soldiers. The attack deepened anger on the ‘Arab Street’ against Israel and its Western benefactors, and badly weakened King Hussein, who imposed martial law. “The monarchy itself is in jeopardy,” American officials in Amman cabled Washington. Largely as a result of the attack, the Jordanian king was forced into a pan-Arab alliance with his arch-rival, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president. The 11th-hour pact helped seal the fate of the 1967 war, and the 41-year occupation whose echoes can be heard in the exploding shells of Gaza. US response
Yet it is worth considering the American response to Israel’s Samu raid for the lessons it contains for US policymakers today. For although the US sided with Israel, many American officials were working hard behind the scenes to prevent war, and US officials, unlike those of the outgoing and incoming American administrations today, were furious at Israel.The “3000-man raid with tanks and planes was all out of proportion to the provocation,” wrote Walt Rostow, the national security adviser, in a memo to Lyndon Johnson, the then-US president. “They’ve undercut Hussein… It makes even the moderate Arabs feel fatalistically that there is nothing they can do to get along with the Israelis no matter how hard they try.” When Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime minister, wrote to Johnson for American support “in this difficult hour for us,” the president ignored him, instead writing a note of sympathy to King Hussein, expressing his “sense of sorrow and concern … words of sympathy are small comfort when lives have been needlessly destroyed”. Then, in words scarcely imaginable for a US president today, he added: “My disapproval of this action has been made known to the government of Israel in the strongest terms.” In the end, of course, the US, distracted by Vietnam and in a Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union, backed Israel in the Six Day War, giving it a tacit green light for the surprise attack on Egypt in June 1967. (When Meir Amit, the then-head of the Israeli intelligency agency Mossad, visited Robert McNamara in the Pentagon, he told the inquiring defence secretary that the war would take “seven days”.) Lessons for Obama
Yet US officials, before acquiescing to Israel in the final days before war, actually fought to prevent it, and it is there, in that lost moment, that the lessons lie for Barack Obama, the incoming US president.Similar to (but far worse than) the Samu raid of 1966, Israel now wages a war whose destruction is “all out of proportion to the provocation.” Like the days leading up to the Six Day War, hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets, with mass protests in Cairo, Beirut, Amman, Doha, Paris, Athens, Istanbul, Sydney and other international capitals. These genuine expressions of fury, combined with wide-ranging condemnations from international leaders, and increasing outrage from a vocal minority of Israelis, do not bode well for the US or Israeli governments. Unlike 42 years ago, however, no US president, incoming or outgoing, is willing to criticise Israel. Obama’s tepid comment – “the loss of civilian life in Gaza and Israel is a source of deep concern” – does not qualify. Worse, his statement in Sderot last July – “If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that” – has been used as another green light by Israeli military politicians whose prime ministerial ambitions are a key factor underlying the assault on Gaza. Hillary Clinton’s declaration, during her senate confirmation hearings on Tuesday, January 13, 2008, that “the president-elect and I understand and are deeply sympathetic to Israel’s desire to defend itself under the current conditions,” hardly points to a visionary change in US policy. Yet if Obama wishes to preserve the truest hopes inherent in his election – that his presidency would stand for real change; that his internationalist view of the world would translate into wisdom and compassion for people other than the most powerful – he must be willing to transform US dealings in a region where the phrase “honest broker” has become a parlour joke. For the US to restore its credibility, Obama must send clear signals that Israeli impunity cannot continue. He needs to speak hard truths to an old friend, pointing out the Jewish state’s history of making its enemies stronger. Strengthening Hamas
And this, beyond the needless deaths, may be the ultimate result of the current war on Gaza. Israel, despite its stated goal of stopping Hamas’ rocket attacks, has simply not done so. Despite the latest wave of assassination by bombing, Israel’s attempts to destroy Hamas seem to be going the route of Lebanon, 2006.”What is the strategic purpose behind the present fighting?” asks the normally staid Anthony Cordesman in a commentary for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. “Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal or at least one it can credibly achieve? … It is also far from clear that the tactical gains are worth the political and strategic cost to Israel. At least to date, the reporting from within Gaza indicates that each new Israeli air strike or advance on the ground has increased popular support for Hamas and anger against Israel in Gaza. The same is true in the West Bank and the Islamic world.” Or, as Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas leader, declared to Israel last weekend, “you have created resistance in every household.” Thus the horrible chapter called “Gaza 2009” fits snugly into Israel’s book of outsized assaults on Palestinian civilians. It seems it will ever be so, until a US president steps forward with the guts and vision to change the game. Sandy Tolan is associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, and author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East. The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of Al Jazeera. |
Bush cronies rewarded for warmongering
January 15, 2009US PRESIDENT George W Bush conferred the country’s highest civilian honour on former British prime minister Tony Blair, former Australian prime minister John Howard and Colombian leader Alvaro Uribe on Tuesday, describing them as “true friends of the US.”
The three rightwingers were given the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a ceremony at the White House.
Mr Bush said that each of the men had “met historic challenges with great tenacity, providing a lasting example of statesmanship at home and abroad.”
The outgoing US president described Mr Blair as a “man of faith, ideal and integrity” who would “stand tall in history.”
Mr Bush said that his “staunch friend” had carried the “might and morality of the British people and applied it to the war on terror.”
Mr Blair and Mr Howard were Mr Bush’s closest allies in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. The outgoing president paid lengthy tribute to each of them and their “firm adherence to the principles of freedom and democratic values.”
“They’re the sort of guys who look you in the eye and tell you the truth and keep their word,” he said.
President Harry Truman established the Medal of Freedom in 1945 to reward service during World War II.
It recognises “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States or to world peace or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavours.”
Medical staff recovers bodies of 22 Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza city
January 14, 2009| [ 13/01/2009 – 04:50 PM ] |
|
|
|
GAZA, (PIC)– Palestinian medical staff was able this morning to recover bodies of 22 Palestinian citizens killed during the IOF troops’ attempts to advance last night and early Tuesday into the Tel Al-Islam neighborhood, southeast Gaza city. The medical staff have not been able to have access to all bodies which are caught in crossfire in the area, according to Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, the director of emergency services in the health ministry. The Tel Al-Islam area witnessed fierce fighting between Palestinian resistance fighters and IOF troops who failed to break into the area after they took positions in nearby agricultural lands. According to Palestinian eyewitnesses, the Palestinian resistance fighters showed heroic death-defiance and managed to destroy more than 10 tanks and armored vehicles in the area. The eyewitnesses added that the ferocity of the resistance made the IOF troops shell and fire at the area randomly, where dozens of houses and buildings were completely destroyed, noting that the IOF troops used white phosphorous and incendiary shells during their attack. Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, managed during a successful ambush to kill and wound at dawn Tuesday a number of IOF troops who tried to infiltrate into east of Khan Younis city, south Gaza. In a communiqué received by the PIC, Al-Qassam Brigades said that its fighters detonated four anti-personnel explosive devices, and fired 15 mortar shells and one RPG at different Israeli special forces who tried to advance into Khuzaa, east of Khan Younis. The Hebrew radio reported that one of its soldiers was seriously wounded and three others sustained slight and moderate injuries after an Israeli brigade of paratroopers was attacked by Palestinian resistance fighters in the north of Gaza, alleging that the paratroopers were mistakenly shot by other Israeli troops. |
Israeli Troops Ordered to ‘Shoot Rather Than Ask Questions’
January 14, 2009Gaza-deployed Soldiers Appalled by Destruction as Reports of Civilian Deaths Grow
Posted January 13, 2009
“We are treating everything as hostile right now. We were told not to take chances – to shoot rather than ask questions.” That is the policy of the invading Israeli soldiers as described by one of their lieutenants. And indeed, they’re doing plenty of shooting. As for who they’re shooting, that’s one of those questions that not only are they not supposed to ask, they’d just as soon not answer.
Even among the invading army there is no small amount of shock at the destruction of residential neighborhoods. To quote the same soldier “it looks destroyed, demolished, like we were bombing it for years. You can’t imagine what damage we have done.” Nor can we rely on the international press to cover that damage, because they are still being kept from entering the strip by the Israeli military.
But we do get plenty of eyewitness accounts from the ground. The death toll has reportedly exceeded 975 now, with untold thousands wounded, and the promised “phase three” of the attacks haven’t even started in earnest yet. Israeli rights group B’Tselem reported that Israeli soldiers opened fire on a group of civilians trying to flee their homes, even though they had been ordered out by the Israeli military and were waving white flags at the time. The toll seems bound to rise as the troops move into the most densely populated parts of Gaza City.
Related Stories
compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]
The Humiliation of America
January 14, 2009
Paul Craig Roberts | Information Clearing House, January 14, 2009
“Early Friday morning the secretary of state was considering bringing the cease-fire resolution to a UNSC vote and we didn’t want her to vote for it.” Olmert said. “I said ‘get President Bush on the phone.’ They tried and told me he was in the middle of a lecture in Philadelphia. I said ‘I’m not interested, I need to speak to him now.’ He got down from the podium, went out and took the phone call.”
“Let me see if I understand this,” wrote a friend in response to news reports that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert ordered President Bush from the podium where he was giving a speech to receive Israel’s instructions about how the United States had to vote on the UN resolution. “On September 11th, President Bush is interrupted while reading a story to school children and told the World Trade Center had been hit–and he went on reading. Now, Olmert calls about a UN resolution when Bush is giving a speech and Bush leaves the stage to take the call. There exists no greater example of a master-servant relationship.”
Olmert gloated as he told Israelis how he had shamed US Secretary of State Condi Rice by preventing the American Secretary of State from supporting a resolution that she had helped to craft. Olmert proudly related how he had interrupted President Bush’s speech in order to give Bush his marching orders on the UN vote.
Israeli politicians have been bragging for decades about the control they exercise over the US government. In his final press conference, President Bush, deluded to the very end, said that the whole world respects America. In fact, when the world looks at America, what it sees is an Israeli colony.
Responding to mounting reports from the Red Cross and human rights organizations of Israel’s massive war crimes in Gaza, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted 33-1 on January 12 to condemn Israel for grave offenses against human rights.
On January 13, the London Times reported that Israelis have gathered on a hillside overlooking Gaza to enjoy the slaughter of Palestinians in what the Times calls “the ultimate spectator sport.”
It is American supplied F-16 fighter jets, helicopter gunships, missiles, and bombs that are destroying the civilian infrastructure of Gaza and murdering the Palestinians who have been packed into the tiny strip of land. What is happening to the Palestinians herded into the Gaza Ghetto is happening because of American money and weapons. It is just as much an attack by the United States as an attack by Israel. The US government is complicit in the war crimes.
Yet in his farewell press conference on January 12, Bush said that the world respects America for its compassion.
The compassion of bombing a UN school for girls?
The compassion of herding 100 Palestinians into one house and then shelling it?
The compassion of bombing hospitals and mosques?
The compassion of depriving 1.5 million Palestinians of food, medicine, and energy?
The compassion of violently overthrowing the democratically elected Hamas government?
The compassion of blowing up the infrastructure of one of the poorest and most deprived people on earth?
The compassion of abstaining from a Security Council vote condemning these actions?
And this is a repeat of what the Israelis and Americans did to Lebanon in 2006, what the Americans did to Iraqis for six years and are continuing to do to Afghans after seven years. And still hope to do to the Iranians and Syrians.
In 2002 I designated George W. Bush “the White House Moron.” If there ever was any doubt about this designation, Bush’s final press conference dispelled it.
Bush talked about connecting the dots, but Bush has failed to connect any dots for eight solid years. “Our” president was a puppet for a cabal led by Dick Cheney and a handful of Jewish neoconservatives, who took control of the Pentagon, the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, and “Homeland Security.” From these power positions, the neocon cabal used lies and deception to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, pointless wars that have cost Americans $3 trillion, while millions of Americans lose their jobs, their pensions, and their access to health care.
“These obviously very difficult economic times,” Bush said in his press conference, “started before my presidency.”
Bush has plenty of liberal company in failing to connect a $3 trillion dollar war with hard times. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities blames Bush’s tax cut, not the wars, for “the fiscal deterioration.”
Bush told the White House Press Corps, a useless collection of non-journalists, that the two mistakes of his invasion of Iraq were: (1) Putting up the “mission accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier, which, he said, “sent the wrong message,” and (2) the absence of the alleged weapons of mass destruction that he used to justify the invasion.
Although Bush now admits that there were not any such weapons in Iraq, Bush said that the invasion was still the right thing to do.
The deaths of 1.25 million Iraqis, the displacement of 4 million Iraqis, and the destruction of a country’s infrastructure and economy are merely the collateral damage associated with “bringing freedom and democracy” to the Middle East.
Unless George W. Bush is the best actor in human history, he truly believes what he told the White House Press Corps.
What Bush did not explain is how America is respected when its people put a moron in charge for eight years.
Peace and Justice Post 
Israelis bombard Gaza Strip UN HQ
January 16, 2009The Morning Star
OBLITERATION: Israeli air strikes destroying a building in the Gaza Strip.
ISRAELI forces bombarded the United Nations headquarters in the Gaza Strip with phosphorus shells on Thursday, as hundreds of refugees cowered inside.
UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon, who is in Tel Aviv on a mission to end Israel’s devastating offensive, expressed “outrage” over the bombing, which set buildings ablaze and injured at least three people.
Only that morning, the UN compound in Gaza was put to use as a makeshift shelter for hundreds of Gaza City residents seeking sanctuary from the relentless shelling.
Two of the shells hit a UN warehouse housing humanitarian supplies, setting off intense fires.
UN relief operations director John Ging said: “They are phosphorus fires so they are extremely difficult to put out because if you put water on it, it will just generate toxic fumes and do nothing to stop the burning.
“This is going to burn down the entire warehouse. Thousands and thousands of tons of food, medical supplies and other emergency assistance are there,” he warned.
UN spokesman Adnan Abu Hasna said that the UN had given Israel the co-ordinates of the building and that the compound was also clearly marked with UN flags and logos.
Israeli soldiers, backed by tanks and warplanes, pushed into a crowded Gaza City neighbourhood for the first time, sending terrified residents fleeing for cover.
Shells struck the al-Quds Hospital, causing fires that trapped about 400 patients and staff inside the main building.
There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Five high-rise apartment buildings and a building housing media outlets in Gaza City were also hit, injuring several journalists.
Bullets entered another building housing Associated Press offices and they lodged into the wall of a room where two staffers were working, but no-one was wounded.
The Foreign Press Association, which represents journalists covering Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, demanded a halt to attacks on press buildings.
Over 1,066 Palestinians, including at least 311 children, have been killed and 4,700 have been injured since Tel Aviv kicked off Operation Cast Lead on December 27.
Addressing soldiers at a southern base on Thursday, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak declared that the offensive would continue, but that Israel’s eyes were “also open to the possibility of winding up this operation and consummating Israel’s exceptional accomplishments through diplomacy.”
Share this:
Tags:DM Ehud Barak, Gaza Strip, Israeli forces, John Ging, Palestinians killed and injured, phosphorus shells, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, UN warehouse, United Nations headquarters
Posted in Commentary, Human rights, imperialism, Palestine, Uncategorized, War Criminals, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »