Last week, soon after the Red Cross and other humanitarian groups condemned Israel for blocking deliveries of vital aid for wounded civilians in Gaza, and with the Palestinian death toll at 700, the U.S. House and Senate passed resolutions that not only blamed Palestinians for the bloodbath, but praised Israel for its conduct of the assault.

The House resolution, co-sponsored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., commends Israel for bringing "humanitarian aid to Gaza with hundreds of trucks carrying humanitarian assistance and numerous ambulances entering the Gaza Strip since the current round of fighting began."

Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who co-sponsored the Senate resolution with Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., stated before the vote, "The Israelis ... are responding exactly the same way we would." Reid added: "When we pass this resolution, the United States Senate will strengthen our historic bond with the state of Israel … "

http://www.alternet.org/audits/120495/

in the real world …..

Gaza is an immense concentration camp - 1.5 million people squeezed into 140 square miles hemmed in on all sides by 25-foot-high walls separated by a vast expanse of bulldozed earth.

The 2005 "pull-out" left Gaza still controlled by Israel from air and sea, its entries and exits prisonlike mazes electronically controlled and under constant surveillance. Bombing it, assaulting it with tanks and Uzis, is like shooting animals in a pen.

The claptrap about "pinpoint" accuracy and "avoiding civilians" is a lie so flagrant, so transparent, that any child - certainly any Gaza child - could grasp it.

There have been eight military assaults on Gaza since 2004; blockades started in 2005, and then a siege of medieval proportions in 2006, punishment for Gazans' having elected the wrong party for Israel and its U.S. patron.

By December 2008, Richard Falk, special rapporteur on the Occupied Territories for the United Nations, reported an overall Gaza malnutrition rate of 75 percent, a childhood anemia rate of 46 percent and a devastated infrastructure.  (For more, see Richard Falk's "Understanding the Gaza Catastrophe.")

This latest war - called Operation Cast Lead - is the "holocaust" promised by Israel's Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai last spring when he said Israel would create a shoa if Qassem rockets kept dropping on Israeli towns like Sderot. Shoa, Hebrew for holocaust, is a serious word denoting the extermination of an entire people.

Vilnai embarrassed the Israeli government, and no official has used the term since.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/120197/gaza_is_a_concentration_camp__/

"We have achieved our objectives, and more," says Israeli prime minister Olmert. So 1300 dead, 400 of them children, is slaughter enough for now.

Injuring 6000 people, bombing hospitals and ambulances, killing medical staff -- that will also do for now. But, says Israel, we may start again any time we wish.

The cost to Israel in the past three weeks: three civilians killed and ten soldiers killed, four of them by their own troops, tells its own story against the mass murder suffered by Palestinians in Gaza.

Israel's ceasefire must be followed by the lifting of the blockade and the opening of all Gaza's borders. The accusation of war crimes against Israel by the United Nations, the Red Cross, Amnesty International and other human rights organisations must be investigated and Israel held to account.

http://globaldayofaction.org/stopwar/index.php