http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/SHES-7BETPP?OpenDocument&rc=3&emid=ACOS-635PFR

Source: United Nations Radio

Date: 01 Feb 2008

Weather adds to suffering caused by closures in Gaza

Listen to the news

The UN agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, says that unusually cold weather, heavy rains and winds are exacerbating the suffering of Palestinians caused by the Israeli closure of crossings into Gaza.

According to the agency, the Kerem Shalom crossing remains closed, forcing its trucks which arrived at the Israeli side of the crossing to return to Ashdod.

UNRWA spokesman Matthias Burchard says that the agency has more than 160 trucks loaded with food waiting in Ashdod to be allowed into Gaza to deliver crucial food supplies.

He says that no commercial food and other imports have been allowed into Gaza since January 18th.

"I do not want to sound cynical, but you must be allowed to wonder that fear of animal disease due to livestock brought in from Egypt prompted Israel to send in thousands of vaccines immediately, but not enough food to feed hungry people."

Mr. Buchard says that lack of fuel supplies in Gaza has resulted in garbage piling up along the streets.

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/CMAS-7BET4E?OpenDocument&rc=3&emid=ACOS-635PFR

Occupied Palestinian Territories: Settlements Established and Evacuated 1967 - 2008

• Date: 01 Feb 2008
• Source(s):
  Foundation for Middle East Peace
• Type: Complex Emergency
• Keyword(s): Access; Population and Demographics
• Format: PDF *, 385k
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Palestinian Dispossession and Israeli Apartheid are no Cause for Celebration- Beatles, don't let it be!

The Land and Love (painting by Palestinian Ismail Shammout)

http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=655_0_1_0_C

Beatles, don't let it be!
Palestinian Dispossession and Israeli Apartheid are no Cause for Celebration

PACBI | | February 2, 2008

Open Letter to the Beatles

Forty-three years ago, the government of Israel banned your performance in the country for fear you would corrupt the minds of Israeli youth. Now, Israel is extending an apology and an invitation to you, hoping you will forget the past and agree to help celebrate its 60th "birthday." The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) urges you to say no to Israel, particularly since the creation of this state 60 years ago dispossessed and uprooted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and lands, condemning them to a life of exile and destitution.

There is no reason to celebrate! Israel at 60 is a state that is still denying Palestinian refugees their UN-sanctioned rights, simply because they are "non-Jews." It is still illegally occupying Palestinian and other Arab lands, in violation of numerous UN resolutions. It is still persistently and grossly breaching international law and infringing fundamental human rights with impunity afforded to it through munificent US and European economic, diplomatic and political support. It is still treating its own Palestinian citizens with institutionalized discrimination.

Now, more than ever, Israel is committing horrific war crimes, especially in the occupied Gaza Strip, where its illegal and immoral policy of collective punishment -- through a hermetic military siege and an almost complete blockage of fuel, electric power, and even food and medicine -- is pushing 1.5 million Palestinian civilians to the brink of starvation. Without electricity, incubators are shutting down; hospitals are fast coming to a standstill; water is not being properly purified nor separated from raw sewage; whatever is left from the local economy is undergoing a meltdown; and the most vulnerable sectors of the population, the children, the elderly, and the acutely ill, are languishing under unspeakable hardships. Do you see any reason to celebrate?

Israel's military occupation -- the longest in modern history -- is not an abstract notion to us. It manifests itself in wilful killings of civilians, particularly children; wanton demolition of homes and property; uprooting of more than a million fruitful trees; incessant theft of land and water resources; denial of freedom of movement to millions; and cutting up the occupied Palestinian territory into Bantustans, some entirely caged by walls, fences and hundreds of roadblocks.

In light of the above, performing in Israel at this time is morally equivalent to performing in South Africa at the height of the apartheid era. Indeed, Israel has created a worse system of apartheid than anything that ever existed in South Africa, according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights Prof. John Dugard, and South African government minister Ronnie Kasrils, among others.

In 2005, inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Palestinian civil society called for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) [1] against Israel until it fully complies with international law and recognizes the fundamental human rights of the people of Palestine. A specific call for cultural boycott of Israel [2] was issued a year later, garnering wide support. Among the many groups and institutions that have heeded the Palestinian boycott calls and started to consider or apply diverse forms of effective pressure on Israel are the British University and College Union (UCU); the two largest trade unions in the UK; the Church of England; the Presbyterian Church (USA); prominent British architects; the British National Union of Journalists (NUJ); the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU); the South African Council of Churches; the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in Ontario; Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists; celebrated authors, artists and intellectuals led by John Berger; and Palme d'Or winner director Ken Loach.

We strongly urge you to uphold the values of freedom, equality and just peace for all by joining this growing boycott against Israeli apartheid. Nothing less would do justice to the legendary legacy of the Beatles.

PACBI

www.PACBI.org
---------------------------------------

[1] http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=66_0_1_10_M11

[2] http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=315_0_1_0_C

Posted on Feb 02, 08 | 2:54 pm

Israel's Gaza mess...& more from IMEU

The Institute for Middle East Understanding offers journalists and editors quick access to information about Palestine and the Palestinians, as well as expert sources — both in the U.S. and in the Middle East. Read our Background Briefings. Contact us for story assistance. Sign up for e-briefings.

The strangulation of Gaza
Saree Makdisi, The Nation, Feb 2, 2008

This article was originally published by The Nation and is republished with the author's permission.

Palestinians carry goods across the Rafah crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, after the border was breached last week. (Wissam Nassar, Maan Images)

The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days of freedom last week, after demolition charges brought down the iron wall separating the impoverished Palestinian territory from Egypt, allowing hundreds of thousands to burst out of the virtual prison into which Gaza has been transformed over the past few years - the terminal stage of four decades of Israeli occupation - and to shop for desperately needed supplies in Egyptian border towns.

Gaza's doors are slowly closing again, however. Under mounting pressure from the United States and Israel, Egypt has dispatched additional border guards armed with water cannons and electric cattle prods to try to regain control. It has already cut off the flow of supplies crossing the Suez Canal to its own border towns. For now, in effect, Suez is the new border: even if Palestinians could get out of Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have to cross the desolate expanses of the Sinai Desert and cross the canal, on the other side of which they would find the regular Egyptian army (barred from most of Sinai as a condition of the 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel) waiting for them.

Now that Gaza's fleeting taste of freedom is beginning to fade, the grim reality facing the territory's 1.5 million people is once again looming large. "After feeling imprisoned for so long, it has been a psychological relief for Gazans to know that there is a way out," said John Ging, the local director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). "But it does not resolve their crisis by any stretch of the imagination."

Indeed, all the frenzied shopping in Egyptian border towns brought into Gaza a mere fraction of the food that UN and other relief agencies have been blocked by Israel from delivering to the people who depend on them for their very survival. As long as the border with Egypt is even partially open, Israel refuses to open its own borders with Gaza to anything other than the bare minimum of industrial fuel to keep the territory's one power plant operating at a subsistence level, and a few trucks of other supplies a day.

Related stories People power in Gaza A fight for life in a power struggle Worse than a crime Short term gain for Hamas, long term gain for Israel Bush's delusions die in Gaza

UNRWA has almost depleted the stocks of emergency food aid it had previously built up in Gaza. Only thirty-two truckloads of goods have been allowed to enter Gaza since Israel imposed its total closure on January 18; 250 trucks were entering every day before last June, and even that was insufficient to meet the population's needs.

On January 30 UNRWA warned that unless something changes, the daily ration that it will distribute on the 31st to 860,000 destitute refugees in Gaza will lack a protein component: the canned meat that is the only source of protein in the food parcels - which even under the best of circumstances contributes less than two-thirds of minimum daily nourishment - is being held up by Israel, and the stock of those cans inside Gaza has been exhausted. The World Food Program, which feeds another 340,000 people in Gaza, has brought in nine trucks of food aid in the past two weeks; in the seven months before that, it had been bringing in fifteen trucks a day.

Gazans have been ground into poverty by years of methodical Israeli restrictions and closures; 80 percent of the population now depends on food aid for day-to-day subsistence. With the aid, they were receiving "enough to survive, not to live," as the International Red Cross put it. Without it, they will die.

All this is supposed to be in response to Palestinian militant groups' firing of crude homemade rockets into Israel, which rarely cause any actual damage. There can be no excuse for firing rockets at civilian targets, but Israel was squeezing Gaza long before the first of those primitive projectiles was cobbled together. The first fatal rocket attack took place four years ago; Israel has been occupying Gaza for four decades.

The current squeeze on Gaza began in 1991. It was tightened with the institutionalization of the Israeli occupation enabled by the Oslo Accords of 1993. It was tightened further with the intensification of the occupation in response to the second intifada in 2000. It was tightened further still when Israel redeployed its settlers and troops from inside Gaza in 2005 and transformed the territory into what John Dugard, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, referred to as a prison, the key to which, Dugard said, Israel had "thrown away." It was tightened to the point of strangulation following the Hamas electoral victory in 2006, when Israel began restricting supplies of food and other resources into Gaza. It was tightened beyond the point of strangulation following the deposition of the Hamas-led government in June 2007. And now this.

When Israel limited commercial shipments of food - but not humanitarian relief - into Gaza in 2006, a senior government adviser, Dov Weisglass, explained that "the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger."

Israel's "diet" was taking its toll even before last week. The World Food Program warned last November that less than half of Gaza's food-import needs were being met. Basics including wheat grain, vegetable oil, dairy products and baby milk were in short supply. Few families can afford meat. Anemia rates rocketed to almost 80 percent. UNRWA noted at about the same time that "we are seeing evidence of the stunting of children, their growth is slowing, because our ration is only 61 percent of what people should have and that has to be supplemented."

By further restricting the supply of food to an already malnourished population, Israel has clearly decided to take its "diet" a step further. If the people of Gaza remain cut off from the food aid on which their survival now depends, they will face starvation.

They are now essentially out of food; the water system is faltering (almost half the population now lacks access to safe water supplies); the sewage system has broken down and is discharging raw waste into streets and the sea; the power supply is intermittent at best; hospitals lack heat and spare parts for diagnostic machines, ventilators, incubators; dozens of lifesaving medicines are no longer available. Slowly but surely, Gaza is dying.

Patients are dying unnecessarily: cancer patients cut off from chemotherapy regimens, kidney patients cut off from dialysis treatments, premature babies cut off from blood-clotting medications. In the past few weeks, many more Palestinian parents have watched the lives of their sick children ebb slowly, quietly and (as far as the global media are concerned) invisibly away in Gaza's besieged hospitals than Israelis have been hurt - let alone actually killed - by the erratic firing of primitive homemade rockets from Gaza, about which we have heard so much. (According to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, these rockets have killed thirteen Israelis in the past four years, while Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied territories in the past two years alone, almost half of them civilians, including some 200 children.)

Israel's squeeze is expressly intended to punish the entire population for the firing of those rockets by militants, which ordinary civilians are powerless to stop. "We will not allow them to lead a pleasant life," said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when Israel cut off fuel supplies on January 18, thereby plunging Gaza into darkness. "As far as I am concerned, all of Gaza's residents can walk and have no fuel for their cars."

Olmert's views and, more important, his policies were reaffirmed and given the legal sanction of Israel's High Court. In what human rights organizations referred to as a "devastating" decision, on January 30 the court ruled in favor of the government's plan to further restrict supplies of fuel and electricity to Gaza. "The decision means that Israel may deliberately deprive civilians in Gaza of fuel and electricity supplies," pointed out Sari Bashi, of the Gisha human rights organization in Israel. "During wartime, the civilian population is the first and central victim of the fighting, even when efforts are made to minimize the damage," the court said. In other words, harm to the civilian population is an inevitable effect of war and therefore legally permissible.

That may be the view of Israel's highest legal authority, but it is not how the matter is viewed by international law, which strictly regulates the way civilian populations are to be treated in time of war. "The parties to a conflict must at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants in order to spare the civilian population and civilian property," the International Red Cross points out, invoking the Geneva Conventions and other founding documents of international humanitarian law. "Neither the civilian population as a whole nor individual civilians may be attacked."

Moreover, no matter what Israel's High Court says, what is happening in Gaza is not a war in the conventional sense: Gaza is not a state at war with the state of Israel. It is a territory militarily occupied by Israel. Even after its 2005 redeployment, Israel did not release its hold on Gaza; it continues to control all access to the territory, as well as its airspace, territorial waters and even its population registry. Over and above all the routine prohibitions on attacks on the civilian population and other forms of collective punishment that hold true in case of war, in other words, international law also holds Israel responsible for the welfare of the Gaza population. Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) specifically demands, for example, that, "to the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate."

Israel's methodical actions make it clear that it is systematically grinding down and now actually starving people for whose welfare it is legally accountable simply because it regards Gaza's 1.5 million men, women and children as a surplus population it would, quite simply, like to get rid of one way or the other: a sentiment made quite clear when Israel's chief Ashkenazi rabbi proposed, shortly after the current crisis began, that the entire Palestinian population of Gaza should just be removed and transferred to the Egyptian desert. "They will have a nice country, and we shall have our country and we shall live in peace," he said, without eliciting even a murmur of protest in Israel.

The overwhelming majority of Gazans are refugees or the descendants of refugees who were expelled from their homes when Palestine was destroyed and Israel was created in 1948. Like all Palestinian refugees, those of Gaza have a moral and legal right to return to the homeland from which they were expelled. Israel blocks their return for the same reason it expelled them in the first place, because their presence would undermine its already tenuous claim to Jewishness (this is the nature of the so-called "demographic problem" about which Israeli politicians openly complain). As long as the refugees live, what Israel regards as the mortal threat of their right of return lives on. But if they would somehow just go away...

"Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and - some would say - encouragement of the international community," the commissioner-general of UNRWA warned recently.

The question now is whether the world will simply sit and watch, now that this unprecedented threshold is actually being crossed.

Having taken matters into their hands and destroyed the wall cutting them off from the outside world, it is most unlikely that the people of Gaza will simply submit to that fate. A hermetic closure ultimately depends not merely on Israel's whims but on Egypt's willingness - or ability - to cut off the Palestinians of Gaza and watch them starve. For all the US and Israeli pressure on Egypt, and for all the steps Egypt is now taking, it seems most unlikely that it would let things go that far. Not intervening to save fellow Arabs from the Israeli occupation is one thing; actually participating in their repression is quite another. The Egyptian government would have to answer not only to the people of Palestine but to its own people, and indeed to all Arabs.

Working together, Hamas and the people of Gaza have forced Egypt's hand and made much more visible than ever before the role it had been playing all along in the Israeli occupation and strangulation of Gaza; now that its role in assisting Israel has been revealed, it will be difficult for Egypt to go back to the status quo. Gazans have thrown Israel's plans into disarray, because Israel's leaders could do little more than watch with pursed lips as the people of Gaza burst out of their prison. And they have placed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the government of Ramallah in a corner: they will have to choose between defending their people's rights and needs or confirming once and for all - as indeed they are doing - that the PA is there to serve Israel's interests, not those of the Palestinians. In which case they too will one day be called to account.

A long term gain for Israel Ghassan Khatib, Bitterlemons.org

Culture and hope in Gaza This Week in Palestine

The rough guide to Hebron The Independent

Palestinian divide allows despair to rule
Roula Khalaf, Financial Times (Feb 2, 2008)

Canadian probe blames Israeli army for UN observer deaths in Lebanon
The Associated Press (Feb 2, 2008)

The fallout from the Gaza earthquake
Patrick Seale, Dar Al-Hayat (Feb 2, 2008)

Israel's Gaza mess
Dina Ezzat, Al-Ahram Weekly (Feb 1, 2008)

Gaza blockade threatens education crisis: UNESCO
Agence France Presse (Feb 1, 2008)

Angry Arabs protest in Israel
Al Jazeera (Feb 1, 2008)

Yet another nothing
Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly (Feb 1, 2008)

Egypt tightens Gaza border gaps
BBC (Feb 1, 2008)

Gazans demanding passage out of Egypt continue sit-in for ninth day
Maan News (Feb 1, 2008)


Calling for open borders
IMEU, Feb 2, 2008

A Palestinian boy stands near the Rafah border fence, during a demonstration against attempts to reseal the crossing. (Wissam Nassar, Maan Images)

How can India be Israel’s friend? BY AIJAZ ZAKA SYED

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2008/February/opinion_February7.xml&section=opinion&col=
How can India be Israel’s friend?
BY AIJAZ ZAKA SYED

2 February 2008

IT'S hard not to admire Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi whose 60th death anniversary India commemorated earlier this week. Without Gandhi, the history of India's freedom struggle would be as incomplete as Shakespeare's Hamlet without Prince of Denmark.

But the lasting impact of the man derided by Churchill as a 'half-naked fakir' is hardly limited to the sub-continent. From Nelson Mandela to Martin Luther King, every aspiring leader has turned to him for inspiration and guidance. What really wins hearts and minds of ordinary people like me is Gandhi's utter humility and equally unshakable faith in his beliefs and ideals.

And the more you read about him, the more he impresses you as a leader who looked far ahead of his time. More importantly, he had the courage of conviction and spoke the truth as it is.

|Look at the following lines, written 70 years ago, in 1938. Commenting on the campaign by imperial powers and Zionist groups to found Israel on Palestinian land, Gandhi wrote in his paper Harijan on Nov 26, 1938: “My sympathies are all with the Jews. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close.

“But my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?

“Palestine belongs to Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It's wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. It would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred.”

Historic words or what? It's as if the Mahatma's far-sighted eyes saw the disastrous consequences the creation of Israel in the heart of the Arab world at the gunpoint by the Western powers would unleash.

Reading Gandhi's prophetic words today, I wonder how the Mahatma would react to the growing proximity between the country he fought hard to liberate and the state whose creation he warned would be a 'crime against humanity'.

Given his strong views on Palestine and the imperial attempts to impose their own Jewish population on the Arabs, I wonder what the visionary leader would have said on the Indian establishment's current wooing of Israel, the world's most racist and ruthless regime. It was Gandhi's unwavering support for Arab position that set the direction of independent India's foreign policy and consistent backing for the Palestinian cause.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister and a formidable leader in his own right, carried the Gandhian legacy forward with his passionate championing of the Palestinian cause and identification with the Arabs.

Nehru's successors including his daughter Indira and grandson Rajiv Gandhi followed in his footsteps. India led the developing world in vehemently speaking out against Israel's persecution of the Palestinians at every available opportunity and platform. No wonder India had a special place in the hearts of the Palestinians too. The inimitable Yasser Arafat used to be a frequent visitor to India and very close to the Gandhis, especially to Indira. She had been the sister Abu Ammar never had. This is exactly why this newfound love of the current Indian leaders for Israel and all that it stands for is most bewildering, to say the least. It's all the more disconcerting considering the present government is led by the Congress, the party of the Gandhis, the Nehrus, the Ali brothers, Azad and millions of other freedom loving people.

I wonder what Gandhi and Nehru would make of the recent launch of an Israeli spy satellite by India. Even though the Indian government has been rather coy about this whole spooky business, Israel itself has reassured its people that the satellite would help it spy on Iran, Syria and 'other enemies of Israel' in the Middle East.

You don't have to be a genius to know who Israel's enemies are. In other words, the whole of Arab and Muslim world has come under the hawk eyes of this satellite.

What was the Indian government thinking? Are we now going to spy on our friends for Israel?

India's ties with the Middle East go way back in time, even before Islam. These relations have developed and strengthened over the past thousand years or so, thanks to India's large Muslim community. With a population of over 200 million, the community is the world's biggest Muslim community.

No wonder the whole of Arab and Muslim world including Iran has always seen India as a great friend and ally; a friend who has always stood by them and spoken out against injustice everywhere. On the other hand, the only thing common between India and Israel is the letter 'I'.

This is why these growing ties between India and Israel are so profoundly disturbing.

This is what we had all feared when US president Bush inked that now infamous nuclear deal with PM Manmohan Singh.

As many courageous Indian leaders including Prakash Karat of CPM have warned, this deal with the US comes at a great price to India's ideals and interests.

The reigning superpower, already thinly spread in the Middle East and Central Asia, is desperately looking for a surrogate power to promote its own agenda and protect its geopolitical interests. And India is that surrogate power.

There are no free lunches in the world of international relations. Everything is quid pro quo. And India's growing 'cooperation' with Israel is part of this quid pro quo. You marry Uncle Sam and you end up with Israel as stepson.

But even if this new love of Indian leadership for Israel is driven by the national interest, it's overlooking some fundamental facts at a great cost to India's long-term geopolitical interests. In case the memory of the South Block mandarins has deserted them, here are some home truths to refresh it:

The Middle East is home to a large Indian population. In fact, it is the biggest Indian Diaspora, much bigger than our more pampered cousins in the US and Europe. While the people of Indian origin in the West are never likely to return home for good, Indians in the Gulf eventually go home. More important, the Indians in the Gulf are the biggest single source of vital foreign exchange for their country.

If India is one of the fastest growing economies today and has emerged as a key economic player on the world stage, this steady source of income from the Gulf has played a crucial role in it.

Does the Indian leadership want to jeopardize all this by dumping its traditional friends in the Muslim world for a murderous, apartheid state based on lies and deception?

Besides, isn't it strange that at a time when an energy-hungry world is increasingly reaching out to the Middle East -- home to the world's most known reserves of oil and gas -- India is snapping out of its historical ties with the Muslim world? Just look at China. Why do you think it's bending backwards to woo the Arabs and Iranians?

But even if we rise above this business of national interest, just look at what Israel, backed by the US, has been doing to the Palestinians? The whole of Palestine has been transformed into a large concentration camp and gulag with its people being deprived of daily basics like food, water and fuel? Hundreds of thousands of innocents have paid with their lives for the Holocaust the Zionists have inflicted on the Holy Land. And we want to be partners and friends with such people? Would Gandhi approve of it? Given his beliefs and ideals, I bet the Mahatma would be leading another long march against this betrayal of India's cherished ideals.

Aijaz Zaka Syed is a senior editor and columnist of Khaleej Times. Write to him at aijazsyed@khaleejtimes.com

letters

RE: Hamas won't go away- Palestine's Islamists can't be defeated or ignored, but embracing them won't be easy http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10608398

Dear Sir,

Rather than foolishly obsessing on and on about HAMAS, we need to be noticing ALL of Palestine- and the Palestinians' just cause for complaint: "Former Information Minister, Dr. Mustafa al-Barghouthi, the Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative stated on Thursday Zionist measures, especially the expansion of settlements and the building of the wall, expose the future of the whole region to danger.... The lawmaker also stated that the Zionist aggressions increased by 220% since the Annapolis conference at the end of last November." Zionist aggressions increased by 220% after Annapolis

220% !!!! Racist Israel's multiple violations of international law and the Palestinians' basic human rights continues unchecked- no one should make peace with that.

Sincerely,
Anne Selden Annab

***********************************************
RE: Grim reality in Gaza: The occupation is still the problem, EXCELLENT letter by Chris Doyle- Director, Council for Arab-British Understanding
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article3284766.ece

Dear Editor,

I am very grateful to see the excellent letter by Chris Doyle- Director, Council for Arab-British Understanding "Grim reality in Gaza: The occupation is still the problem".... although I think we need to take it all a step further to see that the occupation itself is mainly a symptom of something so much larger, and that is the ongoing Israeli made Nakba- the catastrophe created by sovereign Zionist bigotry armed and eager to impoverish, displace and destroy the native non-Jewish people of historic Palestine.

We need to know the full story, not Zionist spin & religious fantasies by deluded rabbis & priests but the truth about how all this began “... Jewish fighters stormed the house, screaming “Out! Out! Get out!” My mother and my sister’s children – including a small child we had to carry – ran out, as did other relatives and neighbours. We had no idea where to go, but the Jewish soldiers ordered us to get moving. So we walked. It was a hot day in Ramadan. Some people around us were saying it was the Day of Judgement, others that we were already in Hell. When we reached the outskirts of town, we found a Jewish checkpoint where those leaving were being searched. We had no weapons. But our neighbour’s son, Amin Hanhan, apparently had some money concealed on him and wouldn’t let them search him. A Zionist soldier shot him dead right in front of our eyes. His mother and sister rushed to him, wailing. His brother, Bishara, had been in elementary school with me and we were friends. We used to study and play together … You wonder why I have chosen this road, why I became an Arab nationalist. This is what Zionism is about. After all this, they talk about peace. This is the Zionism that I knew, that I saw with my own eyes.” George Habash http://www.haloscan.com/comments/lenin/8108367474201115799/ Habash interview in 1997, published in the Journal of Palestine Studies , (1998) vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 86-101
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0377-919X(199823)28%3A1%3C86%3ATSAIWG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M (

Habash died a Palestinian refugee- but his words will live on and on, his compelling eye witness account verified by three quarters of a million more such tales of early Zionist terror and violence, now joined by millions more as the children of Palestine continue to be tormented and seriously harmed by Zionist brutality.

Sincerely,
Anne Selden Annab

***********************************************
RE: The state of Gaza should shame us all By Barbara Stocking, Director of Oxfam
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=ZCGCTCPQAQI51QFIQMGCFF4AVCBQUIV0?xml=/opinion/2008/02/01/do0108.xml

Dear Sir,

It is a huge relief to see Barbara Stocking's boldly honest "The state of Gaza should shame us all"... for indeed it should shock and sicken us as the situation goes from bad to worse in every possible way: Israel's abject cruelty towards Palestinian men, women and children officially starts in 1948 with Israel's racist refusal to respect the native non-Jewish population of historic Palestine... Break the siege- believe in basic human rights including but not limited to the Palestinian refugees' very real right to return to original homes and lands.

Sincerely,
Anne Selden Annab

The Strangulation of Gaza by Saree Makdisi

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080218/makdisi

article | posted February 1, 2008 (web only)

The Strangulation of Gaza

Saree Makdisi

The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days of freedom last week, after demolition charges brought down the iron wall separating the impoverished Palestinian territory from Egypt, allowing hundreds of thousands to burst out of the virtual prison into which Gaza has been transformed over the past few years--the terminal stage of four decades of Israeli occupation--and to shop for desperately needed supplies in Egyptian border towns.

Gaza's doors are slowly closing again, however. Under mounting pressure from the United States and Israel, Egypt has dispatched additional border guards armed with water cannons and electric cattle prods to try to regain control. It has already cut off the flow of supplies crossing the Suez Canal to its own border towns. For now, in effect, Suez is the new border: even if Palestinians could get out of Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have to cross the desolate expanses of the Sinai Desert and cross the canal, on the other side of which they would find the regular Egyptian army (barred from most of Sinai as a condition of the 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel) waiting for them.

Now that Gaza's fleeting taste of freedom is beginning to fade, the grim reality facing the territory's 1.5 million people is once again looming large. "After feeling imprisoned for so long, it has been a psychological relief for Gazans to know that there is a way out," said John Ging, the local director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). "But it does not resolve their crisis by any stretch of the imagination."

Indeed, all the frenzied shopping in Egyptian border towns brought into Gaza a mere fraction of the food that UN and other relief agencies have been blocked by Israel from delivering to the people who depend on them for their very survival. As long as the border with Egypt is even partially open, Israel refuses to open its own borders with Gaza to anything other than the bare minimum of industrial fuel to keep the territory's one power plant operating at a subsistence level, and a few trucks of other supplies a day.

UNRWA has almost depleted the stocks of emergency food aid it had previously built up in Gaza. Only thirty-two truckloads of goods have been allowed to enter Gaza since Israel imposed its total closure on January 18; 250 trucks were entering every day before last June, and even that was insufficient to meet the population's needs.

On January 30 UNRWA warned that unless something changes, the daily ration that it will distribute on the 31st to 860,000 destitute refugees in Gaza will lack a protein component: the canned meat that is the only source of protein in the food parcels--which even under the best of circumstances contributes less than two-thirds of minimum daily nourishment--is being held up by Israel, and the stock of those cans inside Gaza has been exhausted. The World Food Program, which feeds another 340,000 people in Gaza, has brought in nine trucks of food aid in the past two weeks; in the seven months before that, it had been bringing in fifteen trucks a day.

Gazans have been ground into poverty by years of methodical Israeli restrictions and closures; 80 percent of the population now depends on food aid for day-to-day subsistence. With the aid, they were receiving "enough to survive, not to live," as the International Red Cross put it. Without it, they will die.

All this is supposed to be in response to Palestinian militant groups' firing of crude homemade rockets into Israel, which rarely cause any actual damage. There can be no excuse for firing rockets at civilian targets, but Israel was squeezing Gaza long before the first of those primitive projectiles was cobbled together. The first fatal rocket attack took place four years ago; Israel has been occupying Gaza for four decades. .....[more]

http://www.imemc.org/article/52556

Palestinian refugees in Iraq call for unity

Saturday February 02, 2008 01:13 by IMEMC Staff saed at imemc dot org

Palestinian refugee in Iraq, facing repeated attacks, abductions and killings, voiced an appeal to the Palestinian people in Palestine and to all factions in order to save them and place their issue as a high priority. The refugees called on all Palestinian factions to end the internal tension and to unite.

File- Palestinian Refugees in Iraq

In a letter that was written by the refugee in Iraq, they said that since the US occupation of Iraq in 2003, they have been subjected to murder, displacement and abductions carried by armed militias supported by the US forces.

The refugees added that they are also being attacked by the Iraqi police and military and other armed militias that came to Iraq.

“Every Palestinian refugee in Iraq is subjected to danger, either abduction or killing, we are surrounded and there are dozens of refugees who went missing long time ago and remained without a trace”, the refugees said in their statement, “We are being subjected to all of these violations, including torture and murder, and nobody is trying to help us”.

The statements also revealed that a large number of Palestinian refugees were abducted by the US army and are now in American and Iraqi run prisons, while others are missing.

Attacks against Palestinian neighborhoods in Iraq are still ongoing; some of these attacks are carried by armed militias while other attacks are carried by joint Iraqi and American forces.

Dozens of students stopped going to school or college in fear of abduction while most families had to sell their furniture in order to feed their children. Dozens of Palestinian employees were fired from their work as well.

Most of the refugees are now dependent on humanitarian aid as they lost their jobs, houses and shops, and dozens of families are now stranded on the Jordanian and Syrian border after their fled to save their families.

The refugees appealed in their letter all Palestinian factions to launch Arab and International campaigns to their relief, and to contact the Arab countries to open their borders for the refugees who had to flee from their homes and are living a new catastrophe.

They also appealed the UNRWA to intervene and provide them with the needed help and security.

Fri Feb 1, 5:45 PM ETPrev 1 of 400 NextPalestinian youths climb on a destroyed part of the Egypt-Gaza border metal wall, during a demonstration to support the open border with Egypt, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Friday, Feb. 1, 2008. Hamas blew open the border wall on Jan. 23, ending a seven-month blockade of the Gaza Strip that began after the Islamic group violently wrested control of the territory. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans have been moving in and out of Egyptian border towns since, and in the meantime, Hamas bulldozers have pried open new gaps and blocked Egyptian efforts to narrow existing ones. (AP Photo/Eyad Baba)

Fri Feb 1, 9:28 AM ETPrev 57 of 400 NextA Palestinian boy looks through a destroyed section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt February 1, 2008. Egypt called in police reinforcements and sealed gaps at the breached border with the Gaza Strip on Thursday. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem (GAZA)

Fri Feb 1, 9:20 AM ETPrev 58 of 400 NextPalestinians place flags at a destroyed section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt February 1, 2008. Egypt called in police reinforcements and sealed gaps at the breached border with the Gaza Strip on Thursday. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem (GAZA)

Fri Feb 1, 9:14 AM ETPrev 59 of 400 NextA Palestinian makes his way to Egypt through a destroyed section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt February 1, 2008. Egypt called in police reinforcements and sealed gaps at the breached border with the Gaza Strip on Thursday. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem (GAZA)

Fri Feb 1, 9:10 AM ETPrev 61 of 400 NextPalestinians buy cows from Egypt through a destroyed section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt February 1, 2008. Egypt called in police reinforcements and sealed gaps at the breached border with the Gaza Strip on Thursday. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem (GAZA)

Fri Feb 1, 8:44 AM ETPrev 65 of 400 NextPalestinians stand on top of a destroyed section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt February 1, 2008. Egypt called in police reinforcements and sealed gaps at the breached border with the Gaza Strip on Thursday.

REUTERS/Suhaib Salem (GAZA)

Thu Jan 31, 10:47 PM ETPrev 74 of 400 NextMembers of the Palestinian community in Chile light candles during a protest during a rally in Vina Del Mar city February 1, 2008, against what they said are Israel's military operations in Gaza. REUTERS/Eliseo Fernandez (CHILE)

Thu Jan 31, 10:38 PM ETPrev 75 of 400 NextMembers of the Palestinian community in Chile light candles during a protest during a rally in Vina Del Mar city February 1, 2008, against what they said are Israel's military operations in Gaza. REUTERS/Eliseo Fernandez (CHILE)

Thu Jan 31, 7:54 PM ETPrev 77 of 400 NextClimbing the fence : A Palestinian boy climbs over the destroyed fence in the divided border town of Rafah between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.

(AFP/Mahmud Hams)

Thu Jan 31, 7:53 PM ETPrev 78 of 400 NextBorder view : Palestinians walk along the breached border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. (AFP/Mohammed Abed)

Thu Jan 31, 7:51 PM ETrev 79 of 400 NextBorder sunset : Palestinian children play during sunset at the breached border between Egypt and the southern Gaza Strip in the divided town of Rafah. (AFP/Mohammed Abed)

Thu Jan 31, 4:49 PM ETPrev 81 of 400 NextA Palestinian man walks past a destroyed section of the border wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt January 31, 2008. (Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters)

Thu Jan 31, 7:10 AM ETPrev 171 of 400 NextPalestinians build a snowman as the snow line can be seen on the edge of the desert on Mount Scopus after a winter storm, near Jerusalem, Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008. Early Wednesday a rare snowfall hit Jerusalem and the surrounding areas closing schools and businesses. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer)

Thu Jan 31, 11:55 AM ETPrev 107 of 400 Next The Dome of the Rock in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City, is seen covered with snow Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008. A rare snowfall hit parts of Israel and the West Bank on Wednesday, closing schools and businesses. (AP Photo/Atta Awisat)

Thu Jan 31, 8:02 AM ETPrev 166 of 400 NextPalestinian children build a snowman next to the Dome of the Rock, background, in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City, Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008. A rare snowfall hit parts of Israel and the West Bank on Wednesday, closing schools and businesses. (AP Photo/Atta Awisat)

Thu Jan 31, 7:28 AM ETPrev 167 of 400 NextA Palestinian woman throws a snowball outside Jerusalem's Old City, Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008. Early Wednesday a rare snowfall hit Jerusalem and the surrounding areas closing schools and businesses. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer)

Thu Jan 31, 10:34 AM ETPrev 110 of 400 NextPalestinian children play in the snow after a winter storm, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008. A rare snowfall hit parts of Israel and the West Bank on Wednesday, closing schools and businesses. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)

Thu Jan 31, 11:48 AM ETPrev 108 of 400 NextIsraeli soldiers detain Palestinian youths who had a playful snow fight with Jewish settlers in the West Bank town of Hebron,Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008. The youths were released after less than an hour. A rare snowfall hit parts of Israel and the West Bank on Wednesday, closing schools and businesses. (AP Photo/Nasser Shiyoukhi)

Thu Jan 31, 11:20 AM ETPrev 109 of 400 NextA Palestinian sprays a snowman with the words 'Palestine' and 'Free Gaza' in the West Bank city of Hebron ,Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008. A rare snowfall hit parts of Israel and the West Bank on Wednesday, closing schools and businesses.

(AP Photo/Nasser Shiyoukhi)

Thu Jan 31, 8:50 AM ETPrev 145 of 400 NextBoys build a snowman in front of the Dome of the Rock Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem January 31, 2008. Jerusalem, some of northern Israel and hilly areas in the occupied West Bank were covered in a blanket of snow for the second day in a row on Thursday and many cars stayed off roads due to hazardous driving conditions. REUTERS/Ammar Awad (JERUSALEM)

Thu Jan 31, 9:54 AM ETPrev 125 of 400 NextPalestinian youths build a snowman nest to the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008. A rare snowfall hit parts of Israel and the West Bank on Wednesday, closing schools and businesses. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty)

Thu Jan 31, 8:47 AM ETPrev 147 of 400 NextPalestinians build a snowman near the controversial Israeli barrier after a snowstorm, near the Qalandiya checkpoint, just outside the West Bank city of Ramallah January 31, 2008. Jerusalem, some of northern Israel and hilly areas in the occupied West Bank were covered in a blanket of snow for the second day in a row on Thursday and many cars stayed off roads due to hazardous driving conditions. REUTERS/Ammar Awad (WEST BANK)

Thu Jan 31, 9:14 AM ETPrev 140 of 400 NextA Palestinian stands on the Egypt-Gaza border, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, during an Islamic Jihad demonstration demanding the continuous opening of the border, Thursday Jan. 31, 2008. Egyptian officials say they have worked hard to keep Palestinians bottled up near the border since hundreds of thousands poured across after last week's breach in parts of the border. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

NETUREI KARTA of THE ORTHODOX JEWRY

NETUREI KARTA of THE ORTHODOX JEWRY

JERUSALEM, PALESTINE

Jan 31.08

URGENT PRESS RELEASE

In the past week the so-called Chief Rabbi of the so-called State of "Israel", Yona Metzger, has made vicious and provocative statements asserting that the Palestinians living in Gaza should be moved from their homes into the Sinai.Desert.

Yona Metzger is not an authentic rabbi, despite the fact that he carries the title of “Chief Rabbi”. Chief rabbis of the Zionist State only carry legitimacy in the eyes of Zionist Jews. His status as a rabbi is not unlike the leadership of Theodor Herzl, who also wore a beard!

The State of “Israel” is an illegitimate rogue regime whose very existence is leading the world to World War III. Palestinians have an inherent right, guaranteed under international and moral law, to return to their land in historic Palestine and to establish their independent state in the entire Holy Land, which was forcefully taken from them by the Zionists. Indeed, many Gazans are refugees who were expelled from other areas of Palestine by the Zionists ever since 1948.

Chief rabbis of the Zionist state, whether Metzger or anyone else, are merely very well-paid stooges of the Zionists and serve their Zionist masters without regard for the welfare of the Jewish People, the Palestinians, or any other nation in the world.

The Chief Rabbinate of the Zionist State, just as all Zionist institutions, has importance only because of its coercive power over the religious, economic and everyday life of the Jewish residents of Zionistoccupied Palestine. Whoever recognizes and supports the Zionist State, even innocently, has been taken over by the heretical Zionist movement, no matter how large the halo that it is granted by Orthodox rabbis.

Chief rabbis, and other rabbis who support the existence of the Zionist state, are wicked emissaries of Evil. Such “rabbis” promote hatred and war, and use their coercive powers to demand subservience of Jews to the Zionist enterprise. This description of such people has been the long-standing position of authentic rabbis for the last centur