Israeli forces move into Gaza

By Steven Erlanger
Published: December 12, 2007


JERUSALEM: Israeli troops accompanied by about a dozen tanks moved into southern Gaza on Tuesday, a day before Israelis and Palestinians were due to hold their first talks on a comprehensive peace following the American-led conference in Annapolis, Maryland. The Israelis went as far as two miles into Hamas-run Gaza, near the towns of Khan Yunis and Rafah, and engaged Palestinian gunmen along the border, according to Palestinian residents and spokesmen for the Israeli Army.
At least six Palestinians were killed. Three of them, from Islamic Jihad, died when a tank shell struck the house they were using for cover; three more, from the Popular Resistance Committees, died from missiles fired by Israeli planes and helicopters.
Twelve Palestinians were wounded, local medics said, three of them critically and five seriously. Four Israeli soldiers were "very lightly injured," an Israeli Army spokesman said, when their Merkava tank was hit by an antitank missile. The soldiers were evacuated and the tank was set on fire, but the Israeli Army said it would continue to operate.
Other antitank missiles were fired but they missed, the army said. A squad of gunmen approaching the Israelis was hit from the air, the spokesman said.
The Israeli Army said the operation was a routine effort to disrupt rocket and mortar assaults on army bases and the Israeli-controlled Sufa crossing into Gaza, similar to regular raids into Gaza over the past six months. Some 10 tanks and armored vehicles were taking part, the army said. Palestinians said the number of tanks and armored vehicles was closer to 30.
Israeli soldiers detained scores of residents for initial questioning, Palestinians said. Normally, those detained are released, but a few are brought to Israel for further questioning about Hamas, Islamic Jihad and militant activity.

Earlier on Tuesday, two more Palestinian fighters were killed in separate Israeli airstrikes in northern Gaza, operations aimed at those trying to fire rockets or mortar rounds toward Israel. And another Palestinian died in Nablus, in the West Bank, while handling a bomb; three others were wounded as Israeli forces there arrested as many as a dozen Palestinians.
On Wednesday, in Jerusalem, the so-called "steering committee" for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks will meet for the first time since the Annapolis conference, where the two sides agreed to try to reach a final peace treaty by the end of 2008 while working in parallel to put into effect the first stage of the dormant 2003 "road map" peace plan.
The meeting on Wednesday will be organizational, each sides said, to set up a framework and discuss agendas and subcommittees for the major issues involved in any peace settlement — issues ranging from the status of Jerusalem and the rights of refugees to the nature of a new Palestinian state, including air rights and military capacity.
While Hamas runs Gaza, which Israel and the West are trying to isolate, the talks will be held with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, and his appointees, who are based in Ramallah.
A Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Fawzi Barhoum, said of Tuesday's incursions, "They believe that such operations will harm the resistance and weaken it, but they are mistaken."
Abbas and the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, will continue to hold roughly biweekly meetings to guide the negotiating teams, which are led by Ahmed Qurei, a former Palestinian prime minister, and the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni. The Israelis say little work has been done on either side to organize the negotiations.
Work on the first stage of the "road map" plan has also been minimal, and will take time. Under the plan, a staged peace plan written by the United States and supported by the West but never put into practice, the Palestinians are obligated to begin to crack down on gunmen and terrorism and stop incitement against Israel, while Israel is obligated to dismantle illegal outposts in the occupied West Bank, stop settlement activity and pull back from parts of the West Bank.
Next week, in Paris, countries will discuss aid to Abbas and his allies to help them build functioning state institutions in the West Bank. The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, an economist appointed by Abbas, will ask donors at the Paris conference, scheduled for Dec. 17, to provide about $5.5 billion in aid over three years, at least 70 percent of it in budget support to help allow for needed financial reforms.
Olmert has said that any final agreement with Abbas will not be put into effect until the first stage of the peace plan has been completed, as judged by the United States, and Gaza has returned to the control of Abbas.

__________________

Israeli tanks push deep into Gaza


Israeli tanks severed the main north-south route through Gaza

Israeli tanks and bulldozers have moved deep into the southern Gaza Strip in the biggest incursion into the territory in months.
Three Palestinian militants were killed early in the fighting, local medical officials said.
Israeli military officials say two soldiers were wounded. Reports speak of 30 or more tanks being involved.
Gaza is run by the Hamas militant group which took over the territory in June after a violent struggle with Fatah.
The BBC's Aleem Maqbool in Ramallah says it is the largest military incursion of Gaza for months, coming exactly two weeks after the Annapolis meeting that heralded a new round of peace negotiations.
We do believe that [with] these sort of surgical incursions where we go in, we deal with the infrastructure of the extremists, of the terrorists, we keep them on the run


Mark Regev
Israeli government spokesman


On Wednesday, Israel and a Fatah-led Palestinian delegation are to hold a first round of talks aimed at relaunching the peace process.
Since that meeting nearly 40 Palestinians, mainly militants, have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces.
The incursion was launched not far from the Sufa crossing point into Gaza, an area regularly used by militants to launch rocket and mortar attacks at Israel.
'Routine operation'
The Israeli force cut traffic on the main road between Khan Younis and Rafah, and encountered fierce resistance from Palestinian fighters, witnesses said.
A petrol station was reportedly demolished, and three Islamic Jihad militants were killed when an Israeli missile struck a house.

"During the latest period, with all the mortar shelling and rocket launching coming from the area... it's not something out of the ordinary," an Israeli spokeswoman said.
But correspondents on the scene said it looked anything but routine, with bodies lying amid the rubble of a destroyed building and Israeli tanks pushing deep into Palestinian territory.
Schoolchildren ran through the streets of Khan Younis, the largest town in southern Gaza, after schools closed so they could take refuge at home.
Dozens of people were detained in house-to-house raids by the Israeli troops, residents said.
The Israeli troops were injured when their tank was hit by a grenade. The vehicle was left smouldering, witnesses said.
Hours before the operations an Islamic Jihad militant was killed in an Israeli air strike, local medical officials said.
Rocket attacks
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev told the BBC the operation was designed to protect Israel's civilian population.
"We've had over the last few months some 4,000 rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli territory, trying to kill Israeli civilians.
"We do believe that [with] these sort of surgical incursions where we go in, we deal with the infrastructure of the extremists, of the terrorists - we keep them on the run, we keep them playing defence," he said.
Palestinian officials have accused Israel of trying to derail peace talks before they start, with the announcement of tenders to expand a settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. Israel denies this saying past obligations to cease settlement activity did not apply in that area. Hamas, which won parliamentary elections January 2006, has been excluded from the Annapolis talks and from the negotiations that are about to be launched. It does not recognise Israel.

__________________

Don't ya just love those painlessly minimalistic euphemisms,"surgical incursions"indeed......I'll wager we cut off their billion dollar subsidy they'll think twice about their terrorist activities and scream Oy Gevalt!

While I appreciate and admire the Jewish people and their humor,work ethic and resilience I do not like Israel,which is a clean different thing.

I just can't get around to wonder with distaste 'why is the rest of the world subjected to adhere and witness this debacle since about half a century now'.

__________________

Agreed and not all Jewish people are supporting Israel.

__________________
99 Gurkha with OM616 IDI turbo

2015 Gurkha with OM616 DI turbo

2014 Rexton W with OM612 VGT

www.ilanpappe.org

Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain's Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.
Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.
"Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack]..." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children".
Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] by using a competing religious alternative", in the words of a former CIA official.
Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas's rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis' aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this.
With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today..."
On 19 May, the Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: "Land, water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show," he wrote. "In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and the [Israeli] army behaves as a director... The Gaza strip needs to be shown as what it is... an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation."
The remarkable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza's more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the "thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment... The shadows of human beings roam the ruins... They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions".
Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water's edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who "clashed" with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.
More than 40 per cent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper's wound". A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust". Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.
I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children's community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group's homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed."
He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".
Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive role in "stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises". Just as the invasion of Iraq was a "war by media", so the same can be said of the grotesquely one-sided "conflict" in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the term "occupied territories" is seldom explained. Only 9 per cent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance. Words such as "terrorism", "murder" and "savage, cold-blooded killing" describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians.
There are honourable exceptions. The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply.
A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to Israel's destruction" and one that "refuses to recognise Israel and wants to fight not talk". This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine's destruction. Moreover, Hamas's long-standing proposals for a ten-year ceasefire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel. "The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran," said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. "Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions... If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don't think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution]."
When I last saw Gaza, driving towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there are foreigners around and they believe they can tell the world.

__________________

Well if they can't bomb Iran, they can't get their way with Hamas in Lebanon, the least they can do is bomb the poor souls in Palestine. After all their life is worth less than cattle, its the decree.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/140289-The+Truth+About+AIPAC+Slips+Into+Daily+Kos


This was a real wake-up call to me, because it sounded so insidious and seemed to reinforce a sterotype. We talked about reaching out to other interest groups for votes: African-Americans, Hispanics, gays and lesbians. But we never talked about getting "African-American money " or "gay and lesbian money."

Anyway, we were quickly told that the way to tap into the Jewish vote and money was to demonstrate unfettered support for Israel. So, some of our folks wrote up a few quick talking points, put out a one-pager, and voila! -- we support Israel. That should do it.

__________________
99 Gurkha with OM616 IDI turbo

2015 Gurkha with OM616 DI turbo

2014 Rexton W with OM612 VGT

Wake up calls come, inevitably.

__________________