A hungry child in Gaza
You know it’s getting bad in Gaza when Mr Murdoch’s London Times announces Gaza families eat grass as Israel locks border.
The Times is one of News Corps many media assets around the world whose constant pro-Israeli bias helped create the context for the tragedy now unfolding in Palestine.
Today we learn the cruelty is working well. There’s mass starvation on Europe’s edge, deliberately induced by the occupying power. Marie Colvin reports:
As a convoy of blue-and-white United Nations trucks loaded with food waited last night for Israeli permission to enter Gaza, Jindiya Abu Amra and her 12-year-old daughter went scrounging for the wild grass their family now lives on.
“We had one meal today - khobbeizeh,” said Abu Amra, 43, showing the leaves of a plant that grows along the streets of Gaza. “Every day, I wake up and start looking for wood and plastic to burn for fuel and I beg. When I find nothing, we eat this grass…”
Israel controls the borders and allows in humanitarian supplies only sporadically. Families had electricity for six hours a day last week. Cooking gas was available only through the illegal tunnels that run into Egypt, and by last week had jumped in price from 80 shekels per canister (£14) to 380 shekels (£66).
The UN, which has responsibility for 1m refugees in Gaza, is in despair. “The economy has been crushed and there are no imports or exports,” said John Ging, director of its relief and works agency. “Two weeks ago, for the first time in 60 years, we ran out of food,” he said. “We used to get 70 to 80 trucks per day, now we are getting 15 trucks a day, and only when the border opens. We’re living hand to mouth.”
He has four days of food in stock for distribution to the most desperate - and no idea whether Israel will reopen the border. The Abu Amra family may have to eat wild grass for the foreseeable future.
Writing in TruthDig, Chris Hedges reports on Israel’s ‘Crime Against Humanity in Gaza.
Gaza now spends 12 hours a day without power, which can be a death sentence to the severely ill in hospitals. There are few drugs and little medicine, including no cancer or cystic fibrosis medication.
Hospitals have generators but often lack fuel. Medical equipment, including one of Gaza’s three CT scanners, has been destroyed by power surges and fluctuations. Medical staff cannot control the temperature of incubators for newborns. And Israel has revoked most exit visas, meaning some of those who need specialized care, including cancer patients and those in need of kidney dialysis, have died.
Palestinian Courage & Suffering
“It is macabre,” (UN special rapporteur Richard) Falk said. “I don’t know of anything that exactly fits this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog in modern times.
”“There is no structure of an occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances,” the rapporteur added.
“The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law, the impact on the health, lives and survival and the overall conditions warrant the characterization of a crime against humanity. This occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli military and civilian authorities. They are responsible and should be held accountable.”
Another Sad Christmas for Palestine
The point of this Israeli siege, ostensibly, is to break Hamas, the radical Islamic group that was elected to power in 2007. But Hamas has repeatedly proposed long-term truces with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent truce. During the last cease-fire, established through Egyptian intermediaries in July, Hamas upheld the truce although Israel refused to ease the blockade.
It was Israel that, on Nov. 4, initiated an armed attack that violated the truce and killed six Palestinians. It was only then that Hamas resumed firing rockets at Israel. Palestinians have launched more than 200 rockets on Israel since the latest round of violence began. There have been no Israeli casualties.
It appears these remarks - and others in similar vein - by the Jewish American Professor Falk were too much for the Israelis to bear.
Professor Richard Falk
To say such things about the Jewish Apartheid State in Palestine is most certainly ‘Hate Speech’ - whether or not one happens to be the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories representing humanity as a whole.
It’s the kind of speech they hate.
In a move that epitomizes just how low the Zionist State has sunk, it expelled Falk as he entered Israel in transit to occupied Ramallah, dispatching him on a plane back to the USA.
Have the rulers of apartheid Israel gone completely bonkers? It seems possible. Which planet do they think they’re on?
Of course, it’s one thing to complain about this from the relative immunity of another continent. It’s another to live in the same neighbourdood as this violent rogue State. The Palestinians deserve admiration and respect for their dogged resistance.
Mel Frykberg points out the Gaza truce is set to expire. He considers a few possible scenarios, all of them rather depressing. The occupiers are having some success in separating Gazans from West Bank Palestinians, not only by enforcing geographical isolation but by working to widen the political gulf.
There’s clearly a debate within Israel about just how much to torture the Palestinians.
Israeli PR boasts it’s the “only democracy in the middle east”.
The truth is, Israeli democracy is an oxymoron.
The world didn’t consider apartheid South Africa ‘democratic’ in any meansingful sense. Apartheid Israel is no different.
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