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ضيف
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رد: صور من حصار غزة
Gaza civilians die along with assassinated leader
Mohammed Omer, The Electronic Intifada
 Palestinians carry the body of five-year-old Ayoub al-Fayed who was killed the previous night in a missile strike on the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, 16 February 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)
GAZA CITY, 16 February (IPS) - Human remains mix with debris following the latest Israeli assault Friday on Bureij camp in Gaza Strip. Early reports listed nine dead and more than 50 injured.
A targeted leader was killed, but many others were killed too.
"It's very hard for us to rescue, or even locate bodies beneath the building," said a medical relief worker from the local Bureij hospital.
Israel has not confirmed responsibility for the missile attack by F-16 aircraft.
"This is a barbaric crime," said Dr. Hassan Khalaf, head of the local al-Shifa hospital. "They bombed residential areas where people were sleeping in their houses."
The attack apparently targeted the house of a top leader of the al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad party. The leader, Ayman al-Fayed, 42, was reported killed, along with two of his children and his wife. Other victims were from the Bureij camp.
Palestinian sources said seven houses were destroyed, and about 100 others damaged. According to hospital sources, many of the casualties were children under the age of 12, and included a baby only a few months old.
Fire and ambulance crews continued to fight several fires that erupted after the bombing.
In military language, the loss of civilian lives was "collateral damage." And not for the first time.
In the assassination of Hamas leader Dr. Nabil Abu Salmiya in July 2006, the Israeli air strike killed his wife and eight other family members, and injured many others, including neighbors.
"The Israeli occupation have lost their compasses," said Islamic Jihad spokesman Abu Ahmed. "Shelling a house in the middle of a residential district, inevitably killing and injuring children and women ... this is evidence of their failings."
Abu Ahmed said Israel will pay a high price for the attack.
"This is an Israeli-made earthquake," said a Gaza resident. "Palestinian resistance fighters should fire homemade rockets, so Israelis suffer and feel what we are suffering as a result of their rockets."
Anguished Bureij camp residents gathered outside the local hospital, calling for justice. "It is a war crime to bomb an entire neighborhood to kill just one person," said resident Abu Fuad.
The Israeli air strike came only hours after the visit to Gaza by John Holmes, UN Under-Secretary-General for humanitarian affairs. Holmes urged a re-opening of Gaza's borders to relieve the suffering of 1.5 million civilians.
Holmes is the highest UN official to visit Gaza since Hamas took control of the area on 14 June last year. Following that the Israeli blockade was further tightened.
Holmes told reporters in Gaza City that the long-imposed blockade "makes for a grim human and humanitarian situation here in Gaza, which means that people are not able to live with the basic dignity to which they are entitled. I have been shocked by the grim and miserable things I have seen and heard about during the day."
Just days before the attack, Israel's interior minister Meir Sheetrit told cabinet members that their forces could pick a neighborhood in Gaza, give the inhabitants 24 hours to leave, and "wipe it out," according to the BBC.
But in this attack there was no warning, as the Israeli military targeted the leader.
http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=41269&s2=19
Agha: The situation in Gaza portends real famine
Palestinian Information Center
February 18, 2008
GAZA, (PIC)-- Dr. Mohamed Al-Agha, the agriculture minister in the PA caretaker government, warned Sunday that the agricultural sector and food security in the Gaza Strip are facing a disaster after Israel decided to sever its economic ties with the Strip, adding that the situation in Gaza portends real famine.
In a press conference, Dr. Agha called on the UN organizations and the concerned sides to assume their responsibilities and to visit Gaza to see closely the tragic reality there.
The minister explained that as a result of the closure of crossings in the face of Gaza exports and imports, the daily losses of the agricultural sector are estimated at $200,000, adding that the area of agricultural lands deliberately destroyed by the Israeli occupation amounts to 200 square kilometers, where this number does not include the lands which were reclaimed and destroyed again.
The minister also stated that the Gaza Strip suffers a food deficit estimated at 80 percent in fisheries, 90 percent in red meat and 65 percent in dairy products.
The minister pointed out that the poverty rate rose to more than 90 percent, where the unemployment rates rose to more than 75 percent in the agricultural sector alone and 85 percent in the other sectors.
:: Article nr. 41269 sent on 18-feb-2008 21:50 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=41269
Link: www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2bcOd87MDI46m9rUxJEpMO%2bi 1s
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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/955766.html
German intellectuals: Israel's creation made Palestinians victims of Holocaust
By Cnaan Liphshiz
A group of visiting German intellectuals called on Berlin on Monday to
change what they termed its Holocaust-rooted blind support of Israel,
saying the creation of the State of Israel turned Palestinians into
victims of the Nazi Holocaust as well.
The four, Dr. Reiner Steinweg, Prof. Gert Krell, Prof. Georg Meggle, and
Jorg Becker, took part in a debate Monday evening at the Netanya
Academic College on the future of German-Israeli relations. They were
among 25 signatories to a petition on the issue that was circulated in
the German media following the Second Lebanon War.
According to the manifesto, German responsibility toward the
Palestinians is "one side of the consequences of the Holocaust which
receives far too little attention." The paper goes on to argue that it
was the Holocaust which Germany perpetrated that brought about "the
suffering that has persisted [in the Middle East] for the last six
decades and has at present become unbearable."
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This, according to the manifesto titled "Friendship and Criticism," is
because "without the Holocaust of the Jews, Israeli policy would not see
itself as entitled - or forced to ride over the human rights of the
Palestinians and the inhabitants of Lebanon."
Without the Holocaust, the document adds, Israel would not have enjoyed
the same material and political support from the U.S. The researchers
told Haaretz this also applies to support from Germany.
"So it is not only Israel which can lay claim to special consideration
on the part of Germany. As Germans we share not only a responsibility
toward Israel's existence, but also for the living conditions of the
Palestinian People," the scholars concluded.
The four cosignatories attended the debate at the invitation of former
deputy Knesset speaker, Dov Ben-Meir, who organized the event. In
December 2006, Ben-Meir wrote what he titled "a friendly response" to
the manifesto, which he in turn circulated in the media.
In his response, Ben-Meir said the original manifesto reflected a
"simplistic" approach. One of the main reasons for the conflict and the
current state of Arabs and Palestinians, Ben-Meir said, was
intransigence on their part and their reliance on violence instead of
dialogue.
Conceding that Germany's attitude to Israel is part of a Holocaust-based
"special relationship," Ben-Meir said at the debate that this
relationship - which included huge reparations payments that Germany
made to Israel in the 1950s - was primarily a German interest, more than
an Israeli one.
"By agreeing to put Germany's Nazi past aside, the Jewish nation has
granted Germany an entrance pass into the family of nations after
Germany was considered a pariah nation because of its Nazi past," he
said.
The debate, which drew a crowd of some 150 people, took place in the
framework of a panel discussion. Representing the German scholars were
Professor Meggle, who specializes in philosophical anthropology at the
University of Leipzig, and Dr. Steinweg, a researcher at the Linz branch
of the Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution.
Steinweg said the group came to clear up misunderstandings about the
manifesto, which according to him has been misconstrued as a call to end
Germany's longstanding friendship with Israel.
Local panelists included former Israeli ambassador to Germany Shimon
Stein, correspondent for Die Zeit, Gisela Dachs and Professor Moshe
Zimmermann, Director of the Koebner Minerva Center for German History at
the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Zimmermann said the issue of the Holocaust was currently subject to
political manipulation both by Israel and in Germany. "The Israelis try
to use this issue to paint people who criticize Israel as anti-Semites.
At the same time, this manifesto is an attempt to manipulate German
feelings of guilt vis-à-vis the Holocaust, by projecting them onto the
Palestinians," he argued.
"If the Germans want to feel guilt about the Holocaust, they better
stick to the Poles, the Dutch and the Jews. There is no need to go as
far as to feel guilty for what happened to the Palestinians," he added.
Commenting on the heated discussion that ensued, Herman Bunz from the
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung - the private non-profit German organization
which funded the visit by the German scholars - told the panelists,
"This is the perfect chance to misunderstand each other, but I would
advise you to do the opposite."
"They are a minority, but they educate young German minds and we cannot
afford to brush their criticism aside as anti-Semitic. We must confront
it," said Ben-Meir.
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