WHAT THE ISRAELI ARMY FEAR MOST

The IDF know that Hamas forces, the Qassam Brigades and allied fighters are in the borders and in the tunnels. The IDF and even their most elite forces fear fighting in close combat and they loath going into the tunnels. They rather engage in long distant battles where they have superior and devastating firepower. But it is almost useless against determined Palestinian forces and every time they try to go in they suffer morale damaging casualties. 

Instead, they unleash indiscriminate shelling sea, air and land – ships, jet bombers, artillery and tanks onto Palestinian civilians, schools, hospitals, mosque and thousands of homes, resulting in thousands of deaths and maiming, mayhem and limitless destruction. They even kill and murder whole families. If they cannot get to the fighters, they intend to severely inflict hurt and savage their families, friends and the people of Gaza until the Palestinian resistance capitulates, insisting on a demilitarized zone free from Hamas fighters but still besieged at Israel’s mercy. But Gaza will not go down without a fight.

Do not let them.

FREE HANA SHALABI

 

Israeli authorities should immediately release a Palestinian detainee or charge her with a recognizable criminal offence and promptly try her, Amnesty International said amid fears that the woman could die in detention after 37 days on hunger strike.

Hana Shalabi, 30, from the village of Burqin in the northern West Bank, held under administrative detention has never been charged with a criminal offence.

She was transferred to Meir Hospital in the central Israeli town of Kfar Saba on Tuesday night, but remains under Israeli custody and constant armed guard.

“When her lawyers and independent physicians met her, Hana Shalabi reported to them that Israel Prison Service officers handled her violently while transferring her to hospital or the military court, and have consistently pressured her to end her hunger strike,” said Ann Harrison, Amnesty International’s interim deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

(Amnesty International)

President Carter said the same thing about Israel and Apartheid

Sigmar Gabriel, the head of the German Social Democratic Party and a possible candidate for the Chancellorship of Germany, described on Wednesday Israel as an “Apartheid-Regime” on his Facebook site.

 “I was just in Hebron. That is a lawless territory there for Palestinians. This is an apartheid regime, for which there is no justification,” wrote Gabriel.   (Jerusalem Post)

 

YOUR TIME IS GONNA COME

"It will not go on for ever, it will not go on for ever. Israel will lose support and then they will reap what they have sown." Member of the UK's House of Lords, Baroness Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat peer, was filmed making the remarks during a student panel last week.

She also went on to say, "One day, the United States of America will get sick of giving £70 billion [$112 billion] a year to Israel to support what I call America's aircraft carrier in the Middle East – that is Israel. One day, the American people are going to say to the Israel lobby in the USA: enough is enough."  (The Guardian UK)

Khader Adnan: My honour is more precious than food

Khader Adnan's two-month hunger strike has made him a hero among Palestinians outraged by Israel's policy of arbitrary detention. 

His hunger strike has focused growing attention on the malicious practice of Israeli administrative detention, in which Palestinians can be held without trial and on the basis of secret intelligence dossiers which are not shown to the defendant or his lawyers. He was from Jenin and was arrested on 17 December.

A Red Cross delegation had gone to his home to warn her wife that her husband's heart could fail "at any minute".

Khader Adnan says, "I reject administrative detention and I will continue the hunger strike until I am released". Mrs Adnan said that he is determined to continue his fast.

His resolve has been hardened, she said, not only by his summary arrest and its circumstances but by his treatment during interrogation. Her husband had been held for seven-hour periods – on a short chair with his hands tied behind its back, causing him intense discomfort, and that parts of his beard had been torn out by Israeli interrogators. He had also been subject to psychological pressure, including his Israeli interrogators saying cruel things against his wife.

Mrs Adnan said that her husband had repeatedly declared that "my honour is more precious than food".

He had done quite enough to transmit his message to the world protesting about the use of administrative detention without trial or charge.

According to his sister, Mr Adnan was a model father who "loves life", she added: "I am not sure that he wants just to deliver a message. He also wants to end the administrative detention. We have so much faith in Allah to get him out of this situation. We believe that God will not let him down."

Khader Adnan told one of his lawyers: "I do not want to go to oblivion or death. But I am a man who defends his freedom. If I die it will be my fate."

(adapted from The Independent UK)

Shame and Woe to the UN for producing an Immoral, Dubious and Unscrupulous Report

As expected of the UN, it appoints severely biased panellists, in turn vindicates and exonerates the bigger issue of criminality on the high seas and tries to justify the inhumane and barbaric blockade of 1.5 million people of deprived and stricken Gaza. This two man panel Palmer and Uribe (oh! so few choices amongst honourable men, none a Goldstone among them) themselves should be indicted for supporting crime against humanity as well as the UN secretary general for the idiosyncrasy or malicious expediency to appoint them.

   

The 105 page report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Inquiry on the 31 May 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla Incident is a non event, based on fallacies, a whitewash, a shame on the UN and if it is left standing is an indictment of the apathy of all of its pliant members, Arab, Muslim and democratic countries alike and are all to be held accountable.

Everyone knows that Palmer, the head of this panel, is very close to Israel, while Uribe was a prime buyer of Israeli-made weapons during his time in office as Colombian president and was awarded the “Light unto the Nations” prize by the American Jewish Committee and the “Presidential Gold Medallion for Humanitarianism” from B’nai Brith.  Uribe undertakes his role of impartial investigator weighed down by his Zionist partiality and connections.

The appointments despite such a great conflict of interest, is of course a sign of either ineptitude or bad intentions on the part of the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon.

The panel exerted great efforts to justify Israel’s brutal Gaza blockade, which the UN Human Rights Council and the International Red Crescent Committee found illegal and illegitimate. The two men panel shamelessly declared the Israel’s Gaza blockade to be legitimate, thereby contradicting its own propositions. In this legally and morally problematic report, the Palmer panel devoted its energy and efforts to justifying the naval blockade Israel is illegally imposing on another country, instead of reporting the act of banditry and massacre Israel had committed in international waters 72 miles off its coast.

The passengers were unarmed. But still the Israeli soldiers chose to shoot them “multiple times, including in the back or at close range”. This act of aggression resulting in the loss of innocent lives on the Mavi Marmara had not, according to the report, been “adequately accounted for” by Israel.

It is not a report intended to investigate the Israeli army’s piracy and the Mavi Marmara bloodbath, but a piece of immoral, unscrupulous and extremely biased material for propagandizing the legitimacy of the Gaza blockade. For this reason, as accurately noted by Turkish President Abdullah Gül, this report is legally void and invalid for Turkey. Turkey’s UN envoy rejected the report’s claim that the blockade was justified, pointing out that freedom of navigation on the high seas was part of international law, and a blockade required a broader convergence of views.

In the final analysis, this report prepared by a panel set up by the UN, an international organization which was originally established to support international peace and stability and protect the validity of international legal norms, fails to improve bilateral relations between Turkey and Israel or reinforce regional peace and stability, but has triggered a serious process of crisis and tension. Turkey has made its clearest stand and action on the principle of justice and humanity. Will Egypt which also recently suffered deaths inside its own borders from the hands of the Israeli killing machine follow suit to uphold it dignity?

 

All I want is to be treated as a human being with dignity

After 4 years of pain and hardship, Egypt reopens its border with Gaza

All they ever wanted was to be set free. It took the downfall of Mubarak and his dictatorship in Egypt before Gaza could get closer to be free once again. Gaza had to go through 4 years of siege and blockade. If that was not enough Israel bombarded its dense population and showered them with white phosphorus rain. As recorded in a song, Israel went manic and cast their mission in molten lead to be poured mercilessly onto helpless Palestinians as they have done often and ever again. Israel destroyed mosques, universities, schools and homes but to no avail. Palestinians are forever defiant.

It has been reported Egypt lifted a 4-year-old blockade of the Gaza Strip on Saturday, greatly easing travel restrictions on the 1.5 million residents of the Palestinian territory . There maybe many various reasons for this but when the UN's Ban Ki Moon went on record to discourage and speak against international aid flotillas intended to break the Gaza siege, it shows that the powers that be are feeling the pressure of conspiring and colluding in the most inhumane act in the history of he modern world. May they be condemned forever for their crimes against humanity!

"I was so happy to hear that the Egyptian border is opening so I can finally travel for treatment," said Mohammad Zoarob, a 66-year-old suffering from chronic kidney disease.

The blockade, which has fueled a prolonged economic crisis in Gaza, is deeply unpopular among Arabs and the free world, and Egypt's caretaker leaders had promised to end it since the ouster of longtime President Hosni Mubarak in February.

Israel and Egypt imposed the blockade after the Islamic militant Hamas seized control of Gaza in June 2007.

"All we need is to travel like humans, be treated with dignity and feel like any other citizens of the world who can travel in and out freely," said Rami Arafat, 52, who hoped to catch a flight out of Cairo on Sunday to attend his daughter's wedding in Algeria.

Nearby, 28-year-old Khaled Halaweh said he was headed to Egypt to study for a master's degree in engineering at Alexandria University.

"The closure did not affect only the travel of passengers or the flowing of goods. Our brains and our thoughts were under blockade," said Halaweh, who said he hadn't been out of Gaza for seven years.

(partly sourced from AP)