GAZA CITY — As Israel withdrew its forces from the northern Gaza Strip after a two-day assault on Hamas militants on Monday and Palestinians emerged from their houses to inspect the damage, Hamas leaders seemed to be following the playbook of their Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, in its 2006 war with Israel.

Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, said that Hamas has “gone from the stone to the rocket.”

“What we learned from Hezbollah,” he said, “is that resistance is a choice that can work.”

The clearest example of echoing Hezbollah came on Monday when thousands attended a so-called victory rally , and Mahmoud Zahar, an influential Hamas leader, briefly came out of hiding to tell the celebrants that his organization would rebuild any house that had been damaged by the Israeli strikes.

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Gus: someone pointed out that the translation of "Holocaust" from Yedish was innacurate.

This letter in the SMH today:

Israel's Deputy Defence Minister, Matan Vilnai, did not say that there was going to be a holocaust (Letters, March 3). Reuters mistranslated Vilnai's use of the word "shoah", which means "disaster". The word "HaShoah" means "holocaust". This mistranslation means many people now believe the Israelis are hell-bent on killing all Palestinians, even though the opposite is more accurate. Hamas has vowed to destroy Israel, as evidenced by its continuous rocket attacks from Gaza and its indoctrination of Palestinian children to martyr themselves as suicide bombers.

Gus: by now it is difficult to know who started this war (actually, the creation of Israel did with the blessing of most western nations who wanted the Jews out of their countries) but dear Mr Philip Ioannou  — who wrote this letter in the SMH — at the rate of 2 or three Jews killed for 60 Palestinians, including women and children, the ratio is not good even if one has "good intentions". Hitler used the same tactics as the Jews, except he was honest about it but the Jews did not "retaliate".

It was America in the 1960s, and his parents were civil rights activists who encouraged their children to speak their minds. Until, aged 14, Mike Marqusee criticised Israel. In this extract from his new book, he recalls his father's fury

... 

Anti-Zionist Jews are not and do not claim to be any more authentic or representative than any other Jews, nor is their protest against Israel any more valid than a non-Jew's. But "If I am not for myself", then the Zionists will claim to be for me, will usurp my voice and my Jewishness. Since each Israeli atrocity is justified by the exigencies of Jewish survival, each calls forth a particular witness from anti-Zionist Jews, whose very existence contradicts the Zionist claim to speak for all Jews everywhere.

With the Palestinians split between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank, and the recent fighting in Gaza, gloom has again enveloped the area. But Bush was undeterred in his optimism.

"Ten months is a long time. There's plenty of time to get a deal done," Bush said after White House talks with Jordan's King Abdullah. Bush also said the goal of US diplomacy was to bring the two sides back to the negotiating table.

Even as Bush spoke, renewed fighting broke out. Israeli ground forces and Hamas militants clashed inside Gaza in the first raid of its kind since a five-day Israeli incursion ended on Monday.

Palestinian witnesses and Hamas officials said a column of Israeli armoured vehicles crossed through the border in central Gaza and came under mortar and machine gun fire.

Israeli helicopters circled overhead as the soldiers surrounded the home of a militant, described by Islamic Jihad, allies of Hamas, as a leader of its armed wing. An Israeli army spokeswoman confirmed that a military operation was under way in Gaza but gave no details.

The latest bout of fighting came as the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who is visiting the Middle East, urged Fatah to resume peace talks after it suspended them over Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip.

After talks with Rice, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, called on Israel to stop its "aggression" and create the right climate for negotiations as the US sought to salvage a stalled peace effort.

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Gus: yes, ten months is a long time... so is five minutes... so 5 million years... It's alll relative to the density of the events that fill in the space and the intent of those who decide on the thickness of the walls... The Palestinians and the Israelis have been at it for sixty years, an extra ten months represent 1.4 per cent of all that time... The switch to peace could be made in five minutes or never...

Libya blocked condemnation of Jerusalem attack: US

The US had drafted a statement condemning the attack on the religious school.

The United States has accused Libya of preventing the United Nations Security Council from condemning as a "terrorist attack", the deadly assault on a Jewish school in Jerusalem.

The United States had drafted a statement that was discussed at an emergency UN Security Council session called to debate an attack by a Palestinian gunman who killed at least eight people and wounded at least 10 more at an Israeli religious school.

"The members of the Security Council condemn in the strongest terms the terrorist attack that took place in Jerusalem ... which resulted in the death and injury of dozens of Israeli civilians," said the draft statement.

The US delegation had hoped the 15-nation council would unanimously support the text but Libya, backed by several other council members, prevented its adoption.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad said "We were not able to come to an agreement because the Libyan delegation with the support of one or two others did not want to condemn this act by itself but wanted to link it to other issues".

The Libyans wanted to include in the statement language condemning the recent Israeli incursions into Gaza, which have killed over 120 Palestinians, many of them civilians.

Mr Khalilzad rejected the Libyans' request.

He said killing students in a school was different from the unintentional killing of civilians.

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Gus: I know I'am sick but let me say this... the US are expert at knowing all about killing students in a school or college... 

Five sisters killed in Gaza while they slept

Israel's target was the mosque next door. But the rocket attack claimed the lives of innocent children

By Donald Macintyre and Said Ghazali
Tuesday, 30 December 2008

The five Palestinian sisters were fast asleep when a night-time Israeli airstrike hit the next-door mosque in Gaza. One of the walls collapsed on to their small asbestos-roofed home and they were all killed in their beds. The eldest sister, Tahrir, was 17 years old, the youngest, Jawaher, just four.

The Israeli military insists that it is doing its utmost to prevent civilian casualties but repeatedly points out that Hamas regularly and "cynically and specifically" uses locations in heavily built-up areas.

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And Israel regularly and "cynically and specifically" uses methods beyond the pale to punish, humiliate and kill innocent people amongst their far weaker "enemy" with the aim to encourage revenge, giving the Israeli more reasons to kill until their "enemies" all are wiped out or dishevelled. The way Israel goes about its business betrays the spirit of the Jewish people who survive the horrors of concentration camps. And America is complicit in this massacre. Obama should do something positive as soon as he gets into the White House. If he does not take Israel to the cleaners, then there was no point for him to be elected.

Actually I believe this offensive is designed by Israel to be hit Hamas mortally before Obama gets in... thus using the last days of president Bonsai to do their deeds of genocide, under the cover of the USA...

see toon at to...

Israel has rejected any truce with Hamas in the Gaza Strip before the threat of rocket fire from the coastal territory has been removed, and said it was ready to fight the Islamists for "weeks."

"There is no room for a ceasefire," Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit told Israel Radio as Israel's aerial offensive on Gaza entered a fourth day, with 345 Palestinians killed and four Israelis killed by rockets fired from Gaza.

"The government is determined to remove the threat of (rocket) fire on the south," he said. "Therefore the Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of Palestinians, of Hams, to continue to fire at Israel."

"That's the goal and it must be achieved," he added.

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Of all people Jews should know that war will not achieve their "goals"... Killing can only create more revenge from Hamas and disgust from the international community.

WASHINGTON — The United States is pressing Israel to call a cease-fire in its assault on Hamas militants in Gaza, officials said Tuesday, while enlisting Arab countries to press Hamas to do the same.

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read more fluffy guff by the US government at the NYT and ponder about toon at top....

Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas official, said: "We are not begging for calm and there is no room to talk about calm amid the continued aggression and siege."

Rockets fired from the Gaza Strip struck outside the Israeli towns of Kiryat Malachi and Rahat, a bedouin community near the southern city of Beersheba, areas some 18 miles from the territory and which had not been attacked before.

There were no reports of casualties after the salvoes, a day after three Israelis were killed by rockets.

Medical officials put Palestinian casualties since Saturday at 383 dead and more than 800 wounded. A United Nations agency said at least 62 of the dead were civilians. In all, four Israelis have been killed since the operation began.

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Although legitimately elected, the Hamas government has been rejected by the world community... It has been isolated, besieged, provoked and prodded by the Israelis like cattle at an abattoir. Hamas has denounced Israel on its core existence and feebly provoked it many times since Israel took over Palestine for its own establishment, under the blessing of the world community.  It's time for proper negotiations without violence.

From Robert Fisk, The Independent

How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.

That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.

But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.

 see toon at top...

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".

see toon at top... note the date...

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has cancelled interviews with the BBC over its decision not to broadcast a charity appeal for Gaza.

Mohamed ElBaradei believed that the BBC's decision broke "the rules of basic human decency", his spokeswoman said.

BBC director general Mark Thompson had said airing the appeal would compromise the BBC's impartiality.

In a statement, the BBC said that it regretted Mr ElBaradei's move.

see toon at top

The IAEA chief had been due to take part in interviews with the BBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

But Mr ElBaradei cancelled them over the corporation's decision not to broadcast a three-minute appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) - an umbrella group for major UK charities - for humanitarian aid funding for Gaza.

"He believes this decision violates the rules of basic human decency which are there to help vulnerable people irrespective of who is right or wrong," his spokeswoman said.

Israel was last night confronting a major challenge over the conduct of its 22-day military offensive in Gaza after testimonies by its own soldiers revealed that troops were allowed and, in some cases, even ordered to shoot unarmed Palestinian civilians.

The testimonies – the first of their kind to emerge from inside the military – are at marked variance with official claims that the military made strenuous efforts to avoid civilian casualties and tend to corroborate Palestinian accusations that troops used indiscriminate and disproportionate firepower in civilian areas during the operation. In one of the testimonies shedding harsh new light on what the soldiers say were the permissive rules of engagement for Operation Cast Lead, one soldier describes how an officer ordered the shooting of an elderly woman 100 metres from a house commandeered by troops.

Another soldier, describing how a mother and her children were shot dead by a sniper after they turned the wrong way out of a house, says the "atmosphere" among troops was that the lives of Palestinians were "very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers".

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see toon at top.

When asked why that elderly woman was killed, a squad commander was quoted as saying: “What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.”

see sad toon at top...

From the Guardian

The Israeli military attacked civilians and medics and delayed - sometimes for hours - the evacuation of the injured during the January war in Gaza, according to an independent fact-finding mission commissioned by Israeli and Palestinian medical human rights groups.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society yesterday said their findings showed Israel's military committed serious violations of international humanitarian law. In their 92-page report, compiled by five senior health experts from across the world, they documented several specific attacks, with interviews from 44 separate witnesses.

Human rights groups have accused Israel's military, as well as Palestinian militants in Gaza, of war crimes. "The underlying meaning of the attack on the Gaza Strip, or at least its final consequence, appears to be one of creating terror without mercy to anyone," the report said.

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see toon at top.

From the ABC

Little has changed in Gaza since the war in January, with thousands of families still living in tents and homes and schools still just rubble and ruins.

But life for many children has never been the same since Israel launched its offensive three months ago.

In January, Israeli bombs flattened the main building of this school in northern Gaza, destroying eight of the school's 20 classrooms.

The students had already evacuated but the three-storey block was crushed; the top floor still dangles dangerously over the schoolground and giant slabs of jagged concrete hang precariously in mid-air.

And the 22-month blockade imposed on Gaza means few if any materials are getting in to rebuild shattered areas.

English teacher Ghada Abu Ward still sees the daily impact on her students.

"They are hesitant, frustrated, depressed, thinking and dreaming all the time - daydreams - then after that we lose concentration, and [have] the bad achievements," she said.

"At the bravest times they've thought, 'I want to die. My father was dead in the Israeli attack - I want to be with them. So I want to die. There's nothing good about this life. At least when I die, I will be with my parents, and it will be heaven and paradise'."

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Gus: the saddest part of your misery, dear kids, is that there is no paradise beyond, but a terminal end. There is far more life in the hell you're living in now... So, forgive your zionists nemesis but do not forget. Make their hearts bleed from their own shame. Make their eyes cry tears of shame. It will do far more than gun or rocket. Be the Davids to their Goliath, not with a stone but with peace. Their own shame will bring them to heel... Sure, the zionists will try to lie still, but eventually the whole world will be on your side.

The zionists will have no friend but they own shame.

And you will cry tears of pride.

Exclusive: Israeli commander: 'We rewrote the rules of war for Gaza'

Civilians 'put at greater risk to save military lives' in winter attack - revelations that will pile pressure on Netanyahu to set up full inquiry

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem [The Independent]

A high-ranking officer has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives in order to minimise military casualties during last year's Gaza war, The Independent can reveal.

The officer, who served as a commander during Operation Cast Lead, made it clear that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as "means and intentions" – whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon – as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter. A more junior officer who served at a brigade headquarters during the operation described the new policy – devised in part to avoid the heavy military casualties of the 2006 Lebanon war – as one of "literally zero risk to the soldiers".

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The Americans did carpet bomb Germany, bombed japan "civilian" populations of two major cities with nukes and used napalm to do the same in Vietnam... Now, the Americans are trying to win hearts and minds with "targeted" raids, but despite GPS guided bombs, the results are: for one death, ten new "enemy combatants" are created amongst the civilians...

If Mark Regev is an Australian I think there are grounds for his arrest for encouraging terrorism.

In an interview with Al Jazeera last night, he said Palestinian journalists were not journalists, they were ‘targets’, and because they worked for a Hamas journal they had no right to expect to be immune from assassination like ‘foreign journalists’ are. He said their paper was like Pravda and they were using real journalists as ‘human shields’, which he then called a ‘war crime’.

This war crime was turning up for work at their office after it was bombed, mistakenly, a day ago.

His interrogator said it seemed he believed in ‘killing the messenger’.

Regev, as I understand it, hails from Melbourne.

If he is indeed an Australian he should I think be extradited and charged under our terrorist laws with encouraging murder.

Or does he have no case to answer?

Check the transcript and and decide for yourself.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/business/media-2/aussie-mark-regev-and-the-israeli-war-on-journalists/

Just as an aside compare my cartoon at top (3/3/08) and this one (21/11/12) by a fine cartoonist called Danziger (New York Times)... Plus ca change, plus c'est same shit...