Israel criticised for blockading Gaza Strip

Times Online
January 21, 2008

The international community rounded on Israel today demanding an end to its blockade of the Gaza Strip as Palestinians reported mounting fuel and food shortages and hospitals ran short of power and medical supplies.

The lights went out on the Strip last night when the only electricity plant in the seaside territory closed down after Israel cut off fuel deliveries.

Many inhabitants, including fishermen, were unable to work today due to fuel shortages. Essential supplies and United Nations’ aid were blocked from entering the territory, and the UN warned it would be forced to stop distributing emergency food by the end of the week.

British, European Union and UN officials said that they were pressing Israel to allow fuel and medicine immediately into Gaza, where 1.5 million people live.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and Douglas Alexander, the Secretary of State for International Development, have issued a joint statement condemning the blockade.

“We do not support Israel’s decision to close all crossings into Gaza, preventing the delivery of vital humanitarian supplies as well as fuel to the Gaza power station,” they said.

“Reports that electricity has been cut due to fuel shortages are particularly alarming and require urgent attention. Continued fuel shortages will have immediate humanitarian consequences, including on the supply of clean water.

“We appeal to all parties to work for the reopening of the crossings. . . Israeli security and justice for Palestinians will not be achieved by cutting off fuel or by firing rockets.”

The UN is struggling to maintain food aid provided to 860,000 Palestinian refugees by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Richard Miron, spokesman for Robert Serry, the UN Middle East envoy called for an immediate end to the sanctions.

“We hope and expect nothing less than a positive decision today to allow fuel shipments and medicines into Gaza. We want this to happen today,” said Mr Miron.

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Times Online Related:

The Lessons of Violence

By Chris Hedges
Jan 21, 2008

The Gaza Strip is rapidly becoming one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. Israel has cordoned off the entire area, home to some 1.4 million Palestinians, blocking commercial goods, food, fuel and even humanitarian aid. At least 36 people have been killed in Israeli strikes since Tuesday and many more wounded. Hamas, which took control of Gaza in June, has launched about 200 rockets into southern Israel in the same period in retaliation, injuring more than 10 people. Israel announced the draconian closure and collective punishment Thursday in order to halt the rocket attacks, begun on Tuesday, when 18 Palestinians, including the son of a Hamas leader, were killed by Israeli forces.

This is not another typical spat between Israelis and Palestinians. This is the final, collective strangulation of the Palestinians in Gaza. The decision to block shipments of food by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency means that two-thirds of the Palestinians who rely on relief aid will no longer be able to eat when U.N. stockpiles in Gaza run out. Reports from inside Gaza speak of gasoline stations out of fuel, hospitals that lack basic medicine and a shortage of clean water. Whole neighborhoods were plunged into darkness when Israel cut off its supply of fuel to Gaza’s only power plant. The level of malnutrition in Gaza is now equal to that in the poorest sub-Saharan nations.

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Pictures Showing The Slaughter In Gaza
So Many Tragedies in Such Little Time

By photojournalist Mohammed Omer

21/01/08 -- - Where to start…, what to talk about…? The crippling electricity shortages, affecting hospitals as well as civilians? The air strikes & on-going, daily bombings by the Israeli army, their indiscriminate targeting of civilians and police stations…? Israel’s non-accidental, enforced starvation of 1.5 million people by closing off ALL borders and not allowing in even UN aid, let alone basic medicinal, food, and construction needs…?

View the photos here

European Collusion in Israeli Genocide

Omar Barghouti, The Electronic Intifada, 21 January 2008

The European Union, Israel's largest trade partner in the world, is watching by as Israel tightens its barbaric siege on Gaza, collectively punishing 1.5 million Palestinian civilians, condemning them to devastation, and visiting imminent death upon hundreds of kidney dialysis and heart patients, prematurely born babies, and all others dependent on electric power for their very survival.

By freezing fuel and electric power supplies to Gaza, Israel, the occupying power, is essentially guaranteeing that "clean" water -- only by name, as Gaza's water is perhaps the most polluted in the whole region, after decades of Israeli theft and abuse -- will not be pumped out and properly distributed to homes and institutions; hospitals will not be able to function adequately, leading to the eventual death of many, particularly the most vulnerable; whatever factories that are still working despite the siege will now be forced to close, pushing the already extremely high unemployment rate even higher; sewage treatment will come to a halt, further polluting Gaza's precious little water supply; academic institutions and schools will not be able to provide their usual services; and the lives of all civilians will be severely disrupted, if not irreversibly damaged. And Europe is apathetically watching.

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Judeo-Christian peace processes for the killing of Muslim Palestinians

Agustin Velloso

In the early hours of Tuesday, January 15th 2008, the Israeli occupation army in Palestine killed sixteen Palestinians and injured about fifty others, some critically. Once again, it was just another incursion with fighters, helicopters, tanks, armoured bulldozers and snipers in the city of Gaza, which is under an international blockade.

This army did not confront another one in the battlefield, it did not face an army hiding in trenches, guarded by anti-aircraft batteries and equipped with state of the art weapons. It attacked, as it usually does, civilians living under occupation - people who should enjoy special protection according to Geneva Conventions. These people were in the streets of their hometown, Gaza, one of the most populated cities in the world, defenceless. Half Gaza's inhabitants are under the age of 15.

Beyond the area where the victims' families live, this crime against humanity is not an issue. Crimes like this have been committed so many times by Israel, and then pardoned and forgotten so fast by its allies in Europe and the United States, that each crime quickly covers the one preceding it : today's overwrites that of the 14th, which hid that of the 13th, which erased that of the 12th.

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Khater: Gaza massacre practical translation to Bush-Olmert understandings

The Palestinian Information Center

Senior Hamas political leader and member of the Movement's political bureau, Sami Khater, said on Wednesday that the IOF brutality in Gaza Strip was "practical translation" of the understandings between Israel and the USA.

In an exclusive statement to the PIC, Khater held the Israel, the USA, and the PA leadership fully responsible for the bloody IOF attacks against the Palestinian civilians in Gaza Strip.

He also underlined that all options are open before the Palestinian people to retaliate to those atrocities, adding that the visit of US president George W. Bush encouraged Israeli premier Ehud Olmert and provided him with the political cover to carryout those heinous crimes.

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