Crime and accountability in Gaza
Toufic Haddad, The Electronic Intifada
Now that the smoke has at least temporarily cleared from Gaza’s skies, credible human rights reports have filtered in describing the utter devastation that took place throughout the course of Israel’s 22 day assault “Operation Cast Lead.” The figures are truly shocking. According to statistics by the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, at least 1,285 Palestinians were killed, of which 895 were civilians, including 280 children and 111 wome n. Another 167 of the dead were civil police officers, most of whom were killed on the first day of the bombing when they were graduating from a training course. More than 2,400 houses were completely destroyed, as were 28 public civilian facilities, (including ministries, municipalities, governorates, fishing harbors and the Palestinian Legislative Council building), 29 educational institutions, 30 mosques, 10 charitable societies, 60 police stations and 121 industrial and commercial workshops…
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Al-Quds Evictions Infuriate Palestinians
IslamOnline.net
Israel’s plans to evict some 1,500 people and destroy more than 88 houses in Al-Quds (occupied east Jerusalem) have sent shockwaves among Palestinians and infuriated politicians and civil society. “We will be in the street. Our women and children will be homeless,” Fakhri Abu Diab, a member of the Committee for the Defense of the Territory of Silwan, told the Palestinian News Agency (PNN). “The demolitions will affect a whole generation and foster hatred from the re sidents as they see only this side of the Israeli government.”—
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‘I was victim of medieval torture,’ says freed Guantanamo detainee
By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
The seven-year ordeal of a British resident who claims he was brutally tortured before being sent to Guantanamo Bay was brought to an end last night during an emotional reunion with his family. Binyam Mohamed’s sister, Zuhra Mohamed, said she was “overcome with joy” as she watched her brother shuffle down the steps of the RAF transport plane which had carried him from the notorious US detention camp in Cuba to Northolt airfiel d, west London… Almost as soon as Mr Mohamed had taken his first steps on British soil, the former computer and engineering student made it clear that he had unfinished business with both the US and UK governments. In a carefully worded statement he said he intended to hold to account those he blamed for his alleged rendition, torture and unlawful imprisonment: “I am not asking for vengeance; only that the truth should be made known so that nobody in the future should have to endure what I have endured.”..
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Amnesty’s scandalous obliquity
By Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem
In an apparent effort to sound “balanced” and “unbiased,” the London-based human rights group, Amnesty International (AI) , has urged the international community to halt arms sales to the Israeli apartheid regime and the Palestinian Islamic liberation movement, Hamas. A report issued by the group on Sunday, 22 February, pointed out that arms supplied to “the two sides” were used in attacks on civilians and civilian objects” which constituted war crimes. Non the less, a careful examination of the report shows a clear propensity on the part of AI to create a false symmetry between Hamas, a small liberation movement resisting a decades-old Nazi-like foreign military occupation, and Israel, a manifestly criminal state armed to the teeth, which has been committing every conceivable crime under the sun for the purpose of maintaining its colonialist occupation and brutal domination over the Palestinian people. To be sure, no one claims that Hamas is completely blameless. Targeting innocent civilians is unacceptable. However, equating the resistance of a long-persecuted people languishing under an evil military occupation, even if wrongs are done, with an immensely superior state terror unjustifiably perpetrated by an occupying power is morally unconscionable, to say the very least…
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Gaddafi: Israel, not Sudan, to blame for crisis in Darfur
Reuters
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the current African Union president, on Tuesday accused “foreign forces” including Israel of being behind the Darfur conflict. Judges from the International Criminal Court are due to announce on March 4 whether they will issue a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir over allegations that he masterminded genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region. UN diplomats have told Reuters the warrant will be issued. Bu t Gaddafi, addressing a meeting on ways to expand cooperation between the United Nations and African Union, urged the Court to stop its proceedings against Bashir…
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EVIL are these means and avowed ends
Carolyn Bennett, thepeoplesvoice.org
…In its 23-day reign of rabid violence (on top of continuous aggression and occupation) that left 1,330 people (among them 400 children) massacred and 5,450 wounded, Israel has left two thirds of Gaza’s 1.5 million people homelessness. New refugees number 30,000 that the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and the UN refugee agency are scrambling to house in 700 tents. Do you know (Are you acquainted with) any human beings who live in “tents” or have lived in “camps” for 60 years —under critically worsening conditions?…
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The Only Palestinian Woman in Israel’s Parliament
Jonathan Cook
When Israel’s 18th parliament opened today, there was only one Arab woman among its intake of legislators. Haneen Zoubi has made history: although she is not the first Arab woman to enter the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, she is the first to be elected for an Arab party. Sitting in her home in Nazareth, the effective capital of Israel’s 1.2 million Palestinian citizens, she is dismissive of her predecessors, two women elected on behalf of Zionist parties. “They were worse than decorations,” she said. “Decorations don’t do any harm, but these women damaged our society. They were no role models at all.”…
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Study: Israel “retaliates” to Palestinian “provocation” in UK press
Shipra Dingare, The Electronic Intifada
A new study by Arab Media Watch demonstrates a strong tendency in the British press to represent Israel as “retaliating” in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The study, the first to investigate this aspect of British press coverage of the conflict, examined a period from January to June 2008. It found that when the British press represents a party as retaliating or responding in the conflict, that party is Israel 72 percent of the time. The tabloid press showed a particularly marked bias, representing Israel as retaliating in 100 percent of all representations of “retaliation.”…
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Israeli forces shoot Palestinian teenager in southern Gaza
Ma’an news
Seventeen-year-old Wafa An-Najjar was shot in the leg by Israeli forces on Tuesday near the borderline in the town of Khuza’a in the Southern Gaza Strip. Medical sources at Nasser Hospital in the nearby city of Khan Younis reported that the girl had a bullet in her leg. On Tuesday morning, international volunteers reported that Israeli forces opened fire on farmers near Khuza’a, about 300 meters from the Green Line. The volunteers, with the Internationa l Solidarity Movement (ISM), were accompanying farmers on their lands…
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“They killed me three times”
Eva Bartlett writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine
Amer al-Helo smiled wanly while saying he is broken inside. Twenty days after Israeli soldiers shot dead his 55-year-old father and his one-year-old daughter in front of him, also shooting his oldest daughter in the elbow and his brother in the shoulder, the pain of the 29-year-old had not diminished. Then again, he’d only just recovered the rotting corpse of his father six days earlier; his entire area of Gaza City’s Zeito un neighborhood had been cut off from ambulances and emergency teams until Israel unilaterally declared an end to the extensive bombing of Gaza and pulled ground troops out of occupied areas on 18 January. “It was a nightmare,” al-Helo said of the experience. From the afternoon of 3 January until 5am the next day there was “non-stop shelling in our area. We had F-16 firing missiles out front, tanks shelling all around.”…
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Palestinians Reconsider Two-state Strategy
By Khalid Amayreh, IOL Correspondent
While the west-backed Palestinian Authority is still clinging to the two-state solution as the only feasible strategy for ending the 40-year Israeli occupation, a growing number of Palestinian intellectuals and lay people are coming to the conclusion that the creation of a viable Palestinian state is no longer possible in light of the ubiquitous proliferation of Jewish settlements. “There is no doubt that the two-state solution is dead. In fac t it has been dead for quite a long time,” Laila el-Haddad, a Gaza-based writer, told IslamOnline.net. “The metastasizing of Jewish settlements, along with the overriding deliberate policies of ‘politicide’ have rendered the two-state solution impossible,” she believes…
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Report Contradicts Govt Claims of “Humane” Detention
By William Fisher
A leading human rights organisation charges that contrary to recent U.S. government reports that found prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba being treated humanely, they are in fact “deteriorating at a rapid rate” due to “harsh conditions that continue to this day, despite a few cosmetic changes to their routines.” The Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released a report on the current conditions in Camps 5, 6, and Echo following a press conference con vened late last week by Admiral Patrick M. Walsh, the vice chief of naval operations. In his own report on conditions at Guantanamo, delivered to the White House, Walsh determined that conditions at the base meet the standards of the Geneva Conventions…
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I Was Illegally Detained by the U.S. Government and Held in CIA-Run “Black Sites”
Mohamed Farag Bashmilah
From October 2003 until May 2005, I was illegally detained by the U.S. government and held in CIA-run “black sites” with no contact with the outside world. On May 5, 2005, without explanation, my American captors removed me from my cell and cuffed, hooded, and bundled me onto a plane that delivered me to Sana’a, Yemen. I was transferred into the custody of my own government, which held me — apparently at the behest o f the United States — until March 27, 2006, when I was finally released, never once having faced any terrorism-related charges. Since my release, the U.S. government has never explained why I was detained and has blocked all attempts to find out more about my detention…
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The End of the “Peace Process,” and Dissolution of the Historical Political Regimes in Israel and Palestine
Sergio Yahni, The Alternative Information Center (AIC)
Though there is continued talk about an ongoing, though perhaps stalled, Israeli-Palestinian “Peace Process,” for all intents and purposes, it ended more than eight years ago, on 29 September 2000, with the beginning of the Israeli offensive against the Palestinian people in the wake of the collapse of the Camp David negotiations. Since that time, all attempts b y the international community to revive the process, including the Arab initiative, have failed. ..
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