Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

There's many ways to inflict suffering and harassment... The past months war; "The Full On" version, did a whole lot of damage and continues to do so!

 

But there's also the 'smaller invisible' ones; The everyday harassment at the border to Israel, waiting for hours in the sun; your fate at the whim of a pimpled youth who hates and fears you. The continued annexation of land, housing the never ending influx of settlers, who find it justified to let the government steal some land and by force ouster the rightful owners. There's the ever expanding illegal "safety zone" leaving people homeless-  Giving them a day, sometimes only a few hours notice, before the bulldozers come and levels, what has been their farms/houses for several generations! - How can Israel keep on  justifying this?

Israel has during this last invasion, destroyed acres and acres of fertile farmland, to such a degree, that Gaza now is facing a severe food crisis.... This destruction cannot be justified as 'targeting Hamas rocket sites', no chicken, cow or olive orchard has yet fired a single shot against anyone in history! Taking away the means of feeding the population is bordering the Ethnic Cleansing, which has been some have been whispering about for some time....!

 This cynical treatment of the Palestinian peoples can only be explained as; The Israeli simply doesn't see the Arabs as fellow human beings, this view has been indoctrinated to all Israeli during school and the compulsory military service! After having treated Palestinians like 2.class citizens during their service, how will they change their mind later in life?

    -When I hear "normal and average" Israelis talk about their neighbours, it's so clouded with prejudice and racism - and the tales of child eating two headed dragons inside of every Palestinian, is hard to listen to! 

It simply do not make sense to me like; Why the Israeli sets up a brand new and shiny medical emergency clinic, outfitted with doctors, nurses, medicine etc - treats 5 (!) persons - this at a time, where the Gaza hospitals are literally wading in amputees, blood and the dying - and the closes the whole damn thing...???? What was the purpose of this exercise? 

The politics of Hamas has not helped their people much, but I get it - When the desperate have nothing to lose....!! - And when you see your sick Grandmother/child whoever, being treated like underlings by boy soldiers, begging for the right to go to hospital, not once in a while, but every single time! 

When you're constantly being robbed of a future; No jobs, no education, no homes, no food, no water, not even the right to harvest your own land! - Well, then you take desperate measures... 

And this desperation is what is (maybe) so hard for us to understand, sitting here with our bellies full and all comfy like in our "Lazeeboy" zapping the channels for something to entertain us! 

Email from Vittorio; The aftermath of war!

Home is where your heart is

I crossed the threshold of my house in Almina, facing Gaza City port, after several days of absence. Everything was exactly as I had left it – the gas cylinder still anorexic (feeding it is too expensive) and the electric current cut off by foreign shears. The once pleasant panorama outside my window has changed and no longer gladdens my spirits from the misery of living under siege. On the contrary, it now rubs salt in the wound, a trauma that won't heal with its reminder of a massacre. Twenty metres from my front door, where the fire station once stood, a huge crater now gapes wide enough for children to mess around in, as if to expel their parents' demon. 

The afternoon call to prayer no longer has the same comforting quality of the muezzin's chant that I had grown accustomed to. I wonder where he's gone, if he managed to survive at the top of one of the few minarets that were left intact. The last time I listened to him, this anonymous muezzin had to interrupt his solemnly chanted liturgy because of a chesty cough. It's an affliction I'm familiar with myself, as the gases of the bombs in Gaza have spared no one. I found a note at the foot of the French window looking onto a small balcony, as if it had been put there by a friendly hand. The street and garden were littered with these same leaflets. They had been dropped from Israeli airplanes warning the Palestinians to stay alert, and be aware that the walls had ears and eyes. 

"At the slightest threatening action against Israel we'll be back to invade the Gaza Strip. What you've seen these days is nothing compared to what awaits you." Some kids in the streets had picked up the leaflets and folded them into paper airplanes, seemingly sending the message back to its destination. 

Ahmed told me on the phone about a new kids' game – until a few days ago, they amused themselves by relighting the fires, simply by kicking the fragments of white phosphorous bombs found scattered all over the Strip. The debris left by these devices with high chemical potential has very long-lasting inflammable properties. Even when picked up several days after their detonation, it still catches fire if shaken about. The Al Quds hospital paramedics speak of how they gave up trying to put out the fires provoked by these illegal bombs – their flames seemed to feed off the water being thrown at them.

 "The consequences of all the shit that's been thrown at us in these last three weeks will surface in the near future, with new cancer cases and deformed babies", Munir, a doctor at Al Shifa hospital told me. Even Gaza's neighbours seem to be worried by this massive use of weapons forbidden by all international conventions. In Sderot, and likewise in Ashkelon, Israeli citizens have formally asked their government for clarifications regarding the weapons that have been used to torment us. It's obvious that impoverished uranium and white phosphorous scattered in such a criminal manner all over the tiny patch of land that is Gaza won't discriminate between Jews and Muslims when it comes to provoking generic illnesses.

The truce ought to have started by now, but today I was woken in my bed by the deafening rumble of cannon shots from the war ships, exactly like a few days ago. Some brave Palestinian fishermen had ventured from the port on their tiny boats equipped with fishing nets. The Israeli Navy pushed them back. Nowadays, the only edible fish found in Gaza are the Egyptian cans of tuna that came through the tunnels months ago. Yesterday, yet two more casualties of "collateral damage" were caused by Israeli bombs. East of Gaza City two children were blown up when playing with an unexploded device. The witnesses we heard spoke of active mines in front of the Tal el Hawa houses' ruins. Some bomb disposal experts sent over by Hamas defused them and, judging by the care with which they loaded them onto an off-road vehicle, I think the al qassam brigades will soon return that message of death directly to its lawful owner.

Looking from Naema's roof, the Israeli-Palestinian border has never seemed so easy to pick out. On one side lie the green hills which are constantly watered by the Israeli kibbutzim, on the other you see the parching thirst of a land robbed of its water springs and herds. Naema wished to tell me all about her last few days – a tactile, aural and olfactory account of the massacre, considering that Naema is blind. The soldiers threateningly ordered her fellow villagers to evacuate their homes only a few minutes before storming the place. The men loaded smaller children onto their shoulders and ran away, along with their women. Naema chose to stay so as not to slow down their escape. She took refuge in her own house, believing herself to be safe, and welcomed her neighbours, who had nowhere to go: three women, an elderly lady and a paralyzed old man. The tanks and bulldozers then trespassed and started spreading death and destruction, devouring acre by acre, until they stopped in front of Naema's house. Standing on a small hill, the building she inhabits is the tallest in the village, and the soldiers of Tsahal, who found it was strategically positioned, let themselves in and occupied it for two weeks. 

"They came in and pointed their weapons at us, pushing us into a small room, where they locked us up for eleven days." Naema continues her story: "During that entire time they brought us water to drink only twice, and food came in the form of the soldiers' rations' left-overs. They never let us go to the bathroom, so we had to go to the toilet in one corner of the room. 

They wouldn't let us talk amongst ourselves, and they would come in and beat us when at night, huddled in a circle, we tried to gather some strength in prayer. Sometimes they'd come over and, intimidating us by touching our bodies with the cold metal of their weapons, they threatened us with death to confess our support for Hamas. I gave them my cell phone, so they could check my phone book and the calls I'd made. Even this gesture didn't mellow their spite." 

At the end of the eleventh day of imprisonment, the international Red Cross finally arrived and released the six prisoners from their jailers. "They didn't allow us to pick up anything, not even my sunglasses", Naema brings her story to a close, adding that when they came back to her house, they found out about the thefts that had been carried out by the soldiers. They had taken all their gold trinkets and hidden savings, after having destroyed their few possessions, two TV sets, a radio, a fridge, and the solar panels on the roof. I saw tears in this woman's eyes, hidden behind her new dark glasses. They seemed the most vivid I had ever seen. In fact, what Naema "saw" is a lot more that any young woman her age will ever get a chance to see, if she had the bad luck of being born in this tormented land. 

Stay human

Vittorio Arrigoni

(Translated from italian by Daniela Filippin)

"We Will Not Go Down" Michael Heart Music Video- And then some !

You might find this video a bit..... eh, well .... eh ahem.... I find it hard, not to say something rather unkind about I think of the song it self and the way it's performed, it is a bit over the top, and sounds like thousands of other ballads of exactly same sort... The images are heartbreaking though and drives the message home.... It just might do the trick, where such tricks are necessary, where mere facts aren't enough... 

And by this; I mean the big wast majority of the worlds population! Who didn't pay too much attention, when it all this mess went down in Gaza and who most certainly will not do so now that it's supposedly "all over"! Our, for ever shortening, 'attention span' will quickly turn to something else. We'll forget that the aftermath of war is almost as horrendous as war itself  - The suffering is longer, so much longer! People are still dying from the wounds! People are grieving over entire families gone, People (by this term I mean children, women and men old and young) are suffering from "Post traumatic stress syndrome" with all that entails!!! People are now living in "tents"!  There's no water, no food, no sewage, no electricity  etc etc ... 3 out of 4 in Gaza is unemployed (!!) due to the 19 month long Israeli Blockade makes it absolutely impossible to maintain a steady job and the whole Palestinian population is totally dependent on foreign Aid... (Here's some links to random articles on the Blockade from Nov.2008; Counterpunch

and LA times) 

The Israeli border blockade is still in full vigor; This meaning no building materials, no fuel, no medicine, nothing whatsoever!!!

 The EuropeanUnion and some Humanitarian Aid Org.'s (like the UN) are for the very first time (!!) refusing to pay for all the damages done by IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) arguing, that Israel should pay for some of their destruction as well! The EU, UN, Red Cross/Half Crest and different NGO's has paid billions of $ for the rebuilding of Gaza and the West Bank, every time Israel has bombed and pulverized the infrastructure, houses, schools, hospitals, food storage etc in Gaza... But Israel refuses to pay a penny, they say, not surprisingly; It's all Hamas' fault (!!!)

Another Email from inside Gaza

Vittorio Arrigoni on the ground in Gaza, January 9, 2009

 

--------

My toothpaste, toothbrush, shavers and shaving foam. The clothes I'm wearing, the cough medicine I'm using to get rid of a persistent cough, the cigarettes I bought for Ahmed, and some tobacco for my arghile. My cell phone, the laptop onto which I compulsively type my eye-witness accounts from the hell surrounding me. All that's needed for a modest, yet dignified existence in Gaza comes from Egypt, and arrives on the shops' shelves through the tunnels. These are the very same tunnels that the Israeli F16s hasn't stopped heavily bombing in the last 12 hours, destroying along with them thousands of Rafah houses near the border.

A few months ago I had three teeth dodgy fixed, and at the end of the operation I asked my Palestinian dentist where he'd gotten all of his dental equipment from – the anesthetic, the syringes, ceramic inlays and all the other tools. With a sly look on his face, he'd made a certain gesture with his hands: from under ground. There's no doubt that through the tunnels underneath Rafah, explosives and weapons were also smuggled, the very same that the resistance is using today to try and contain the terrifying advance of the armour-plated Israeli death-machines. But it's next to nothing compared with the tons of consumer goods flowing into famished Gaza under this criminal siege.

It's easy enough on the internet to find photos documenting how even livestock comes in from Egypt through the tunnels. Sedated, strapped-up goats and cows are lowered into an Egyptian well, re-emerging on this side to provide milk, cheese and meat. Even the main hospitals in the Strip stocked up surreptitiously at the border. The tunnels were the only resource allowing the Palestinians to survive the siege, a siege which long before the current bombings, was the cause of a 60% unemployment rate and forced 80% of families to live off humanitarian handouts.

Our colleagues at the ISM in Rafah describe the umpteenth siege that they witnessed. Caravans of desperate refugees leaving their homes facing Egypt, on mule-drawn carts or hodgepodge vehicles. A déjà-vu scenario – in previous days, leaflets were raining down from the planes intimidating the Palestinians into evacuating. Since Israel always keeps its threatened promises, bombs are raining down from the planes now. Today's new homeless will spend the night with their relatives, friends and acquaintances in Gaza. No one dares crowd the United Nations schools anymore, after yesterday's massacre in Jabalia. But a considerable number haven't gone anywhere, as they have nowhere safe to go. They shall be spending the night praying to God that they'll be spared, since no one on earth seems to take any interest in their existence.

The death toll at present is at 768 Palestinians, with 3,129 wounded, and 219 children killed. The count of civilian victims on the Israeli side is thankfully still only at 4. At Zaytoun, an Eastern neighbourhood of Gaza City, the Red Cross ambulances could only rush to the scene of a massacre after several hours, under the coordination of the Israeli military summit. When they finally got there, they picked up 17 corpses and 10 injured, all belonging to the Al Samouni family. A perfect execution: in the tiny bodies of the children it was possible to notice bullet holes rather than wounds caused by shrapnel.

The last two nights in the Gaza City hospitals were quieter than usual, as we assisted a number of injured in the tens rather than the hundreds. Obviously after the massacre at the Al Fakhura school, the Israeli Army surpassed the daily budget of civilian casualties as an offering to its blood-thirsty government in view of the imminent elections. We have an inkling that tonight the morgues will once again be filled to bursting point.

With our sirens screaming, we continue to rush pregnant women into hospital as they give birth prematurely. It's as if nature and the conservation instinct were inducing these brave mothers to predate the arrival of these new lives to make up for the growing number of dead. These newborns' first cry, when they survive, can for a moment cover the rumbling of the bombs.

Leila, a colleague at the ISM, asked our neighbours' children to write some of their impressions on the atrocious tragedy we're enduring. Here are some extracts of their words, the horrors of war seen through the pure and innocent gaze of Gaza's children:

Suzanne, aged 15: "The life in Gaza is very difficult. Actually we can't describe everything. We can't sleep, we can't go to school and study. We feel a lot of feelings, sometimes we feel afraid and worry because the planes and the ships, they hit 24 hours. Sometimes we feel bored because there is no electricity during the day, and in the night, it is coming just four hours and when it comes we are watching the news on TV. And we see kids and women who are injured and dead. So we live in the siege and war."

From Fatma, 13: "It was the hardest week in our life. In the first day we were in school, having the final exam of the first term, then the explosions started, many students were killed and injured, and the others surely lost a relative or a neighbour. There is no electricity, no food, no bread. What can we do - it's the Israelis! All the people in the world celebrated the new year, we also celebrate but in a different way."

From Sara, 11: "Gaza is living in a siege, like a big jail: no water, no electric power. People feel afraid, don't sleep at night, and every day more people are killed. Until now, more than 400 are killed and more than 2000 injured. And students had their final first term exams, so Israel hit the Ministry of Education, and a lot of ministries. Every day people are asking when will it end, and they are waiting for more ships with activist like Vittorio and Leila."

Darween, 8: "I am a Palestinian kid,
I won't leave my country 
so I will have lots of advantages
 because I won't leave my country 
and I hear a sound of rockets
so I won't leave my country."

Meriam is four. Her siblings asked her, "what do you feel when you hear the rockets?" And she said, "I feel afraid!", before running to take cover behind her father's legs.

Gaza is sadly shrouded in obscurity in the last ten days. I can recharge my computer and phone only in the hospitals. We watch TV with the doctors and paramedics while waiting for an urgent call. We listen to the rumblings in the distance, and after a few minutes the Arab satellite networks refer exactly where the explosions take place. We often watch ourselves pull bodies out of the rubble, as if having seen it all in the flesh weren't enough already. Last night I switched over to an Israeli channel with the remote. They were showing a traditional music festival, complete with scantily-clad showgirls and firework displays in the end. We went back to our horror, not on screen but in the ambulances. Israel has every right to laugh and sing even while they're massacring their neighbours. Palestinians only ask to die a different kind of death – say, of old age.

Stay human

Vittorio Arrigoni

Link to original Blog in Italian - (Apt for Google -page translation)

Link to "The Free Gaza Movement"

Email from Gaza

Vittorio Arrigoni, Gaza, January 9, 2009

Take some kittens, some tender little moggies in a box", said Jamal, a surgeon at the Al Shifa, Gaza's main hospital, while a nurse actually placed a couple of blood-stained cardboard boxes in front of us. "Seal up the box, then jump on it with all your weight and might, until you feel their little bones crunching, and you hear the last muffled little mew." I stared at the boxes in astonishment, and the doctor continued: "Try to imagine what would happen after such images were circulated. The righteous outrage of public opinion, the complaints of the animal rights organisations…" The doctors went on in this vein, and I was unable to take my eyes off those boxes, sitting at our feet. "Israel trapped hundreds of civilians inside a school as if in a box, including many children, and then crushed them with all the might of its bombs. What were the world's reactions? Almost nothing. We would have been better off as animals rather than Palestinians, we would have been more protected."

At this point the doctor leans towards one of the boxes, and takes its lid off in front of me. Inside it are the amputated limbs, legs and arms, some from the knee down, others with the entire femur attached, amputated from the injured at the Al Fakhura United Nations school in Jabalia, which resulted in more than fifity casualties. Pretending to be taking an urgent call, I took my leave of Jamal, actually rushing to the bathroom to bend over and throw up.

A little earlier I'd been involved in a conversation with Dr. Abdel, an ophtalmologist, regarding the rumours that the Israeli Army had been showering us with non-conventional weapons, forbidden by the Geneva Convention, such as cluster bombs and white phosphorous. The very same that the Tsahal Army used in the last Lebanese war, as well as the US air force in Falluja, still violating international norms. In front of Al Auda hospital we witnessed and filmed white phosphorous bombs being used about five hundred metres from where we were, too far to be absolutely certain there were any civilians underneath the Israeli Apaches, but so terribly close to us all the same.

The Geneva Treaty of 1980 forbids white phosphorous being used directly as a war weapon in civilian areas, allowing it only as a smoke screen or for lighting. There's no doubt that using this weapon in Gaza, a strip of land concentrating the highest population rate in the world, is a crime all on its own. Doctor Abdel told me that at Al Shifa hospital they don't have the medical and military competence to say for sure whether the wounds they examined on certain corpses were indeed provoked by white phosphorous bullets.

But on his word, in twenty years on the job he had never seen casualties like those now being carried into the ward. He told me about the traumas to the skull, with the fractures to the vomer bone, the jaw, the cheekbones, tear duct, nasal and palatine bones showed signs of the collision of an immense force against the victim's face. What he finds inexplicable is the total lack of eyeballs, which ought to leave a trace somewhere within the skull even in case of such a violent impact. Instead, we see Palestinian corpses coming into the hospitals without eyes at all, as if someone had removed them surgically before handing them over to the coroner.

Israel has let us know that we've been granted a daily 3-hour truce, from 1:00 to 4:00 PM. These statements from the Israeli military summit are considered by the people of Gaza as having the same reliability as the Hamas leaders' declarations that they've just provoked a massacre of enemy soldiers. Just to be clear on this point, the soldiers of Tel Aviv's worse enemy are the very same who fight under the Star of David. Yesterday a war ship off the coast of Gaza's port picked out a large group of alleged guerrilla fighters from the Palestinian Resistance, moving as a united front around Jabalia. They shot their cannons at them. But as it turned out, they were their own fellow soldiers, with the shooting resulting in three being killed and about twenty injured. No one here believes in the truces that Israel declares, and as it happens, today at 2:00 PM Rafah was under attack by the Israeli helicopters. There was also yet another massacre of children in Jabalia: three little sisters aged 2, 4 and 6 from the Abed Rabbu family were slaughtered. Just half an hour earlier in Jabalia, once again the  Red Crescent hospital's ambulances were under attack. Eva and Alberto, my ISM colleagues were on board that ambulance and managed to film everything, passing those videos and photos on to all the major media.

Hassan was kneecapped, fresh from mourning the death of his friend Araf, a paramedic who was killed two days ago as he came in aid of the injured in Gaza City. They had stopped to pick up the body of a man languishing in agony in the middle of the road, when they were under fire by about ten shots from an Israeli sniper. One bullet hit Hassan in the knee and the ambulance was filled with holes. We're now at a death toll of 688, in addition to 3,070 injured, 158 dead children and countless missing. Only yesterday, we counted 83 dead, 80 of which were civilians. Thankfully, the death toll on the Israeli side is still only at 4.

Travelling towards Al Quds hospital, where I'll be working all night on the ambulances, as I raced along on board one of the very few fearless taxis left, zig-zagging to avoid the bombs, on the corner of one street I saw a group of dirty street urchins with tattered clothes, looking exactly like the "sciuscià" kids of the Italian afterwar period. They threw stones towards the sky with slingshots, at far away and unapproachable enemy who was toying with their lives. This is a crazy metaphor, which could serve as a snapshot of the absurdity of this time and place.

Stay human

Vittorio Arrigoni

"These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.."

White Phosphorus (Incendiary bombs)allegedly used by the IDF

It's time for Israel to let in the international reporters and journalists, instead of keeping them within a 5 km (some places more) buffer zone.. If Israel have nothing to hide, let them in as to have a more balanced views of whats going on inside the war...

The brave Palestinian journalists have to live there with their families, and therefore are understandably fearful of Hamas and the repercussions of statements made against the ruling party.

The UN and the Int. Red Cross have reported horrific tales of 110 people hurdled together in a building and then shelled, wounded children left to die of dehydration and hunger.

IDF bombing hospitals and Aid workers etc etc... This harrowing list just grows longer and longer....

 "The Lancet"; A stout medical weekly, have a report from the West bank (Where no Hamas rockets are fired!!) where 5 unbiased doctors went and had a real surprise, when they witnessed the daily harassment the Palestinian population has to endure; I.e. 33 weeks old triplets waiting for 5 hours in the heat, at the border crossing, when having to go to the hospital outside the West bank and finally let in, without either parent! 

In the same edition of "The Lancet" there's a diary from a Aid worker in Gaza....here 

(I just found the other 13 entries from his ongoing diary here on BBC)

(This is another diary from the BBC correspondent in the area; Jeremy Bowen)

This war is just the culmination of the long Israeli blockade, where no water, electricity or gas has been severely rationed for the last 6 months. This war with all the modern armoury is kicking a civilian population who's already laying down.

My wondering about the timing is apparently not that far off; The offensive had to be before the inauguration of Barrack Obama Jan. 20 and before the Israeli election Feb.10.

The war will hopefully ( and properly) be over before Obama and his foreign secretary; Hillary Clinton is sworn in... And the little Obama has said, makes promises for a change in old policies and calls for a more active role in Middle East - than just supplying arms and "All Access Pass" to Goliath.

And now even the more conservative voices in the US, calls for a tough treatment of Israel. Even a Carte Blanche (Given by most of the former US Adms. and redesigned - taken to a whole new level by G.W. Bush) can be maxed out!....  (" In the last 25 years, there have been no serious discussion with the Israelis about the damage, that settlement activity - incl. land confiscation, bypass roads and housing demolitions - does to the peace-making process..." Aaron David Miller; Newsweek)

PS. If you don't suffer from a heart condition, and you still haven't had enough of horrific pictures from inside Gaza - Here's a video shot, just after a bomb has fallen on Dec. 27. I could only stand for 3-4 minutes before my tears blinded me... (See the title of this post... from the T.S.Eliot; "Gerontion")

Oh, Mama - Can this really (really?) be the end ?

Seems like I have been slightly obsessed of late... But when such an obvious injustice is going down, right on the southern beaches of the Mediterranean, then I just can't keep still or shut my mouth/keep away from the keyboard !

The breaking news right now, this instance is that The UN security council is calling for a lasting truce, and no veto is expected. Earlier this evening UN withdrew their humanitarian aid workers from the strip, as at least one UN worker were killed by IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) while they moved about in the city . Ambulances were targeted while attempting to rescue the wounded victims left behind by IDF - And this during the 3 hour midday truce called by the Israeli themselves!

Red Cross int. also calls for a in depth investigations of the action or rather lack thereof, by the IDF; carelessly abandoning the wounded and the dead in shelled out buildings.. leaving wounded children by their dead mothers unattended for days... Without food nor water....

                                                          

The Israeli domestic news media won't show Palestinian victims and the results of 14 days of heavy shelling .. In Israel focus has been solely on the few Israeli victims and the families of the fallen soldiers. There's hardly any opposition within the Jewish community and the demonizing of Hamas and the people of Gaza is in full swing. The people of Israel has been spared all these soulnumming photos of children, dead or barely alive..

I ask my self, what this kind of war does to people, on both sides of the conflict...? These youngsters carrying the latest deadly gadgets on their shoulders, manipulated by fear and lack of information, they're tunnel visioned into believing in the victory of the righteous...They must be! Otherwise it's simply not possible to lead teen-agers to war against women and babies.

There's 30 years of generations of Palestinian kids, growing up with fear and hate as prime emotions. Being held down and robbed of land/jobs/education/future/life/safety - They grow up with nothing left to loose And the militants have their heyday... The more moderate voices will be drowned in the earsplitting yells for revenge, thereby digging their own graves, aided by someone like the Bush Adm. who, with their biased and shortsighted views and double standards only have their own economic interest at heart, Peace will be a long time coming - if ever... 

Maybe Israels only wishes for Hamas to keep fighting, thereby give them an alibi to keep pushing the Palestinian people further out to sea.. In the end Israel will be rid of it's nagging "neighbour" and Jerusalem become undivided, Al-Aqsa can be torn down, so Salomon's temple can rise on Temple mountain again. The whole of Israel can be filled by settlements of orthodox Jews with oranges and the good, old Arabic olive trees.... - Na--! This is too far out.. Ain't' it?

It's truly a sad, sad war..

 The amount of huaman suffering is beyond any imagination.

  And there's absolutely no winners! 

Only a planet full of losers, some  a lot more sore than others....

The rest is silence....

International Red Cross discovered today several wounded children left behind unattended by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF)!!!

 Alone without food or water for several days - At one instance 4 small children had  been sitting by their dead mother for 3-4 days, so weak by dehydration, that one of them (a boy of 7) now are dying. Another had to have an arm amputated due to lack of immediate medical attention.

Israeli officials has not yet responded to the Red Cross allegations.....! 

"There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce." - Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister. Read more on Window into Palestine  and see the related pictures (warning they are disturbing)