The latest from Gaza under genocidal Zionist attacks

[from: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2c2fdm/new_photo_from_gaza_today_looks_like_actual_hell/]

 

Israeli shelling kills 20 Palestinians at UNRWA school in Gaza:

“Israeli bombings on Wednesday killed more than 77 Palestinians in Gaza, including at least 20 at a UN school, medics said, on day 23 of Israel’s assault against the besieged strip.

The deaths brought the Palestinian toll to more than 1,306, emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said. Qudra added that 180 Palestinians were injured on Wednesday, raising the total number of wounded to 7,200.

Shelling shortly after 5:30 am killed 20 people at the UN school being used as a shelter for those displaced by the war.

An AFP correspondent said the occupation forces had been pounding the area with tank fire for an hour before striking the school.

Blood was splattered across floors and mattresses inside classrooms as survivors picked through shattered glass and debris for flesh and body parts to bury.

Displaced Palestinians who had already had to leave their homes quickly gathered belongings and fled the building.

… some 3,000 Palestinians were taking refuge in the school, in Jabalia refugee camp, when it came under fire around dawn.

“There were five shells — Israeli tank shells — which struck the people and killed many of them as they slept. Those people came to the school because it is a designated UN shelter,” he said.

Five of the wounded were in critical condition, Halabi said. It was the second time in a week that a UN school sheltering hundreds of homeless Palestinians had been hit.

…the school’s location had been communicated to the Israeli army 17 times.

“This is the sixth time that one of our schools has been struck,” he said, calling the attack a “breaking point.”

The more than 240 Palestinian children who have died represent at least 29 percent of civilian casualties, the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, said in a statement.

“We see children killed, injured, mutilated and burnt, in addition to being terrified to their core. The consequences run much deeper than previous flare-ups” in Gaza, UNICEF’s Gaza field office chief Pernille Ironside said.

An estimated 240,000 Palestinians having taken shelter in 85 of UNRWA’s schools and buildings following calls by Israel for civilians to evacuate whole neighborhoods before military operations.”

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Israeli strikes kill over 100 in Gaza since Monday:

Bloodshed in war-torn Gaza surged on Tuesday with over 100 bodies of Palestinians, mostly civilians, arriving at hospitals across the besieged strip as the US-backed assault raged into a fourth week, medics said.

The latest bodies to arrive at a Gaza morgue were those of brothers Rafif and Mohammed al-Najjar, aged two and three, respectively, health ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra wrote on Twitter, bring the overall death toll in Gaza to 1,161.

Following two nights without airstrikes, the violence returned to Gaza’s skies overnight, with Israeli warplanes bombed 60 targets, among them the strip’s main power station and the house of a top Hamas official.

UN statistics published Monday showed 215,000 Palestinians had already fled their homes, with 170,461 staying in 82 of the agency’s schools.

Also Tuesday, Israel confirmed another five soldiers had been killed in an ambush by Hamas forces on Monday evening after they sneaked into southern an Israeli-occupied town by a tunnel.

Their deaths raised to 53 the total number of occupation soldiers killed since the war began on July 8. Another three civilians have been killed by rocket fire — two Israelis and a Thai national

…Monday after Israel shelled the Shifa hospital compound in Gaza City, followed by an attack at a children’s playground in the city’s Shati refugee camp, that killed 10, eight of them children.

…an NBC reporter who witnessed the attack on the hospital said a missile was fired by an Israeli drone.”

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The victims of Gaza: A list of Palestinians killed in Israel’s ongoing assault:

“The Gaza health ministry has confirmed the deaths of at least 1,314 Palestinians in the besieged strip since Israel began its relentless assault on July 8. Among those killed, at least 260 were aged 18 or younger.

At least 12 children were killed by Israeli forces on Monday, on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Eight of these children were among the ten killed by a missile in a public park.

During a 12-hour truce observed by both sides on Saturday, medics pulled out at least 147 bodies from the rubble across the Gaza Strip.

More than 53 families have been “massacred” in Gaza in the past 20 days, according to health ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra.

On Sunday July 20, more than 74 people were killed in Shujayeh, a neighborhood east of Gaza City.

According to sources in Gaza’s health ministry, 80 percent of the people killed by Israeli forces in Gaza were civilians.

The youngest victim so far has been five-month-old Fares Jomaa al-Mahmoum, killed by Israeli tank shelling in Rafah”

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Last updated: 07:00 GMT, 30 July 2014, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights

Wounded			Killed
Percentage		Category	Percentage		Category
100%	5924	Total	100%	1324	Total
	Mostly Civilians	Civilians	85.3%	1130	Civilians
27.5%	1634	Children	24.7%  of the total number of victims29 % of the total number of civilian victims	328	Children
19.7%	1169	Women	13.3% of the total number of victims13.3 % of the total number of civilian victims	177	Women

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These are the images from Gaza that are too graphic for many US news outlets to publish (DAY 22)  [many photos]

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Gaza: Catholic Church told to evacuate ahead of Israeli bombing:

“The Holy Family Latin Church in Gaza has just received an evacuation order warning them that Israei is planning to bomb their neighbourhood tonight.  In a message,  a priest writes: ” The church of Gaza has received an order to evacuate.. they will bomb the Zeitun area and the people are already fleeing. The problem is that the priest Fr George and the three nuns of Mother Teresa have 29 handicapped children and nine old ladies who can’t move.

“How will they manage to leave?? If anyone can intercede with someone in power, and pray, please do it. We are trying.. may our impotence be taken up by his Omnipotence!!”

The House of Christ in Gaza, is a care home dedicated to looking after disabled children. The disabled children were removed from the care home into the Holy Family Church recently because Israel was targeting the area.”

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Gaza’s only power plant “finished” in Israeli shelling:

“Israeli tank fire hit the fuel depot of the Gaza Strip’s only power plant on Tuesday, witnesses said, cutting electricity to Gaza City and many other parts of the Palestinian enclave of 1.8 million people.

The plant had already been hit last week and was working at a reduced capacity of about 20 percent, allowing only a few hours of electricity a day for Gaza’s residents.

Besides the power plant, Gaza also purchases electricity from Israel, but many of the supply lines have been badly damaged by the recent Israeli attacks fighting, deputy director of the energy authority Fathi al-Sheikh Khalil told AFP.

“Five out of 10 of the Israeli electricity lines into the Gaza Strip were also damaged because of Israeli shelling, and maintenance still cannot reach the areas and fix them,” he explained.”

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Israel attacks on Gaza destroy almost 5,000 Palestinian homes:

“…as many as 4,987 Palestinian homes had been destroyed due to the Israeli onslaught on the impoverished territory as of Monday. …a total number of 26,270 houses had been partially damaged, of which 4,136 are no longer habitable.

 

On Tuesday, the United Nations (UN) reported that 215,000 Gazans have fled their homes. As the aria is blockaded, most of the Palestinians take shelter in the places designated by the UN.

 

The Israeli regime, nevertheless, has been targeting UN-designated shelters as well. In less than one week, the Israel regime has targeted two UN-run schools sheltering Palestinian families against the Israeli offensive.”

 

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IMEMC: Mohammad Omer: Foreign journalists leaving Gaza: [AUDIO]

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Pepe Escobar: ” Killing civilians in hospitals, playgrounds and on the beach was just a gruesome appetizer. Yesterday the IDF unloaded a torrent of SMS – and phone calls – to people in ALL cities in northern Gaza, as well as parts of Gaza City. They were ordered to flee their homes “IMMEDIATELY”. Translation: Israel, in one stroke, is creating OVER 400,000 REFUGEES. But refugees INSIDE the same cage/concentration camp/gulag – a major CRIME under international law. This huge area is now off-limits. All civilians staying behind will be deemed as “combatants”. Needless to say, you WON’T learn this on Western corporate media. UNRWA had stated early last week that no less than 43% of Gaza had been deemed off-limits to civilians. Now it’s fast approaching 100%. Final Solution indeed. Faster! More sanctions! On Russia, of course.”

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Denis Rancourt on Gaza [VIDEO PART 1]  [VIDEO PART 2]

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Israeli Soldier Leaks Accounts of Revenge Attacks Against Civilians by Troops in Gaza:

“A member of the Israeli group ‘Breaking the Silence’ has published accounts of Israeli soldiers being authorized by their commanders to carry out revenge attacks against civilians in the Gaza Strip “to enable the soldiers to take out their frustrations and pain at losing their fellow soldiers”.

Eran Efrati reports, “Soldiers in two different units inside Gaza leaked information about the murdering of Palestinians by sniper fire in Shuja’eyya neighborhood as punishment for the death of soldiers in their units. After the shooting on the Israeli armored personnel carriers, which killed seven soldiers of the Golani Brigade, the Israeli army carried out a massacre in Shuja’eyya neighborhood.

“A day after the massacre, many Palestinians came to search for their relatives and their families in the rubble. In one of the videos uploaded to YouTube, a young Palestinian man Salem Shammaly calls the names of his family and looking for them between the ruins when he is suddenly shot at in his chest and falls down. A few seconds after that, there are two additional shots from snipers into his body, killing him instantly.

“Since the video was released, there was no official response from the IDF spokesperson. Today I can report that the official command that was handed down to the soldiers in Shuja’eyya was to capture Palestinian homes as outposts. From these posts, the soldiers drew an imaginary red line, and amongst themselves decided to shoot to death anyone who crosses it. Anyone crossing the line was defined as a threat to their outposts, and was thus deemed a legitimate target. This was the official reasoning inside the units.

“I was told that the unofficial reason was to enable the soldiers to take out their frustrations and pain at losing their fellow soldiers (something that for years the IDF has not faced during its operations in Gaza and the West Bank), out on the Palestinian refugees in the neighborhood. Under the pretext of the so-called “security threat” soldiers were directed to carry out a pre-planned attack of revenge on Palestinian civilians.”

Richard Silverstein, who works with the publication Tikkun Olam, wrote in response to Efrati’s account, “What Efrati is revealing is an semi-officially sanctioned My Lai-type massacre. The man in green murdered in cold blood in the YouTube video wasn’t killed by a lone gunman operating on his own. His murder was approved as an act of vengeance on all of Gaza. Let’s remember that 120 Palestinians died that night in Shejaia. This was no accident. They weren’t collateral damage. They were the targets.”

The reports of authorized revenge attacks come in the midst of a massive bombing attack by the Israeli airforce Tuesday morning, an admission by the Israeli military that their missile hit a UN school in Beit Hanoun, and another school was hit by an Israeli strike on Monday.

In an article in the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth on July 18th, as the ground invasion began, the paper reported, “The tanks, which serve as the heart of the assault force, received an order to open fire at anything that moved. The area and the targets are due to be seized by the morning hours. From here on, [the army] will start to clear the ground, in what could last for several days, depending on political developments.””

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Israel Violates Ceasefire, Shoots Palestinian, Extends ‘Ceasefire’ Until Sunday:

“Naim Abdul Aziz Abu Zaher, 36, was shot to death by Israeli forces east of Deir al-Balah around 9 pm Saturday, two hours before the ‘temporary ceasefire’ was scheduled to end. Two other Palestinians died of their wounds early Sunday morning.”

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Denis Rancourt: Israel’s attempted genocide must fail — Lessons from Canada’s genocide:

“The Zionist Project is to eradicate all Palestinians who make claim to a home in Palestine. The Zionist Project is exactly what Israel has been doing since its artificial creation.

The Zionist Project is planned incremental dispossession and an on-going attempted genocide, and this has been repeatedly and explicitly expressed by its architects and executioners. The Zionist Project as attempted genocide is also expressly cheered-on by many Israeli citizens and by members of the Zionist diaspora of all religions.

The attempted Israeli genocide, in its on-going mid-phase, is not unlike the now-accomplished Canadian genocide against First Peoples. First there were population displacements, then exterminations, then land treaties, then reservations, then forced cultural assimilation for any survivors, then cultural normalization of the crimes, and never any possibility of return or reparations.

A main difference is that Canada’s genocide is virtually complete, whereas Israel’s attempted genocide is in full swing and unfolding militarily before the world, in a time of instant and distributed electronic publishing, and in a time when other genocides have been named, exposed, condemned, and studied and understood.

…Canadian citizens are racist in condoning their state’s violence (both domestic and international) but they practice language-cleansing to hide their true racism from themselves.

If Israel’s attempted genocide is allowed to ripen to completion, then Israeli’s will cleanse their history and their language and thoughts, in the post-genocide period. We must not get there. The overt racism-of-expression of Israeli society and of the Zionist diaspora is an unmistakable indicator that the attempted genocide is in mid-project, as was the case in Canada during the overtly racist campaigns to take the territory.

The Zionist Project must now be stopped. This genocide must be stopped in its tracks, if it’s the last significant geopolitical accomplishment of the global civil society. The tide is turning. We see real political movement in the UK itself. Western World civil society must not be irrelevant and ineffective. We owe that to ourselves.

The only effective barrier against the Zionist Project at the moment is the remarkable Palestinian resistance itself. And Israel is doing everything it can to isolate, divide, erode, and destroy that resistance. The Palestinian resistance is phenomenal. Against all odds, Palestine has repeatedly found ways to assert itself, despite the tremendous pressures to make it abandon.

If Israel cannot be discouraged, and since it cannot be disarmed, then Palestine must be armed sufficiently to effectively discourage the on-going Israeli genocide. Can Israel be discouraged from pursuing its vicious plan? It’s time to test that question, while supporting that Palestine be enabled to defend itself.

In Canada, Stephen Harper is the “Prime Minister of Canada for Israel”. Israel’s regional violence keeps the price of oil high and the tar sands exploitable and profitable to the US masters of the Canadian economy.

The Canadian Israel lobby is an arm of US imperialism and has taken over as arguably the most influential superstructure acting on Canadian politics. Trudeau and Mulcair are vying to be more Zionist than Harper. It’s disgusting and humiliating for Canadians.

Virtually no Canadian members of parliament have condemned Israel for it grotesque massacre. Those who speak out condone and normalize the genocide. The Canadian mainstream media is largely poisoned by the same Zionism.

In Canada’s capital Ottawa, the university presidents of the two largest universities in the city are both staunch Zionists that make artificial academic ties with Israel and suppress student movements for justice for Palestinians.

This has all gone too far. It’s time to roll back Zionism in Canada and everywhere. Palestinians are doing the remarkable. The least we can do for ourselves is to cut back Zionists in our own countries.”

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Daring and lethal Palestinian raids from Gaza sap Israeli morale: [VIDEO]

“the most dramatic incident was a commando raid in which seven Qassam fighters emerged from a tunnel, raided a fortified Israeli army outpost at Nahal Oz inside Israel, killed five soldiers according to the Israeli count, and returned safely to Gaza through the tunnel.

Qassam said its fighters killed 10 Israeli combatants in the attack.

Qassam’s commander Muhammad Deif released an audio recording saying that his group would not accept a ceasefire which did not end the siege of Gaza. Deif said that his fighters were prepared for a long battle and were working according to a plan rather than “reacting” to events like Israel.

Deif said that the “enemy” had been “defeated” in its ground war and would continue to pay a heavy price as long as its army was in Gaza.

With more than 50 soldiers dead, a price no one in Israel expected to pay for attacking Gaza, even the country’s top leaders appear weary.

Yet the sheer unpreparedness of the Israeli army for military resistance may be causing it to take its rage out in even more vengeful attacks on Palestinian civilians.

In a revealing account of Israel’s 20 July attack on the Shujaiya neighborhood east of Gaza, The Jerusalem Post revealed that the army’s elite Golani Brigade suffered a thrashing at the hands of well-prepared resistance fighters who launched a “massive attack.”

“The Golani Brigade in [Shujaiya] sustained heavy casualties,” the newspaper reported citing an army source, “after Hamas intelligence units mapped out its location.”

Fearing they “would be getting 600 body bags back” containing dead Israeli soldiers, commanders withdrew the Israeli infantry and simply shelled Shujaiya, causing mass destruction and the deaths of dozens of civilians.”

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In case you missed them earlier:

—No ceasefire without justice for Gaza:

“…we call for a ceasefire only when negotiated conditions result in the following:

• Freedom of movement of Palestinians in and out of the Gaza Strip.
• Unlimited import and export of supplies and goods, including by land, sea and air.
• Unrestricted use of the Gaza seaport.
• Monitoring and enforcement of these agreements by a body appointed by the United Nations, with appropriate security measures.

Each of these expectations is taken for granted by most countries, and it is time for the Palestinians of Gaza to be accorded the human rights they deserve.”

—FAQ: Misperceptions about the Conflict in Gaza:

“As soon as the Palestinian Authority national unity government was announced in April, Israel set its sights on destroying it.  It did so by first pressing for the government’s isolation and, when that failed, it used the deaths of three Israelis (kidnapped in an area of the West Bank that is entirely under Israel’s control) to demonize Hamas in the Gaza Strip.  Within 18 days of the Israelis going missing, Israel arrested hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank including 11 Parliamentarians and 59 former prisoners who were released in a prisoner exchange three years ago.  These people were arrested without any proof that these individuals were in any way involved in the deaths of the three Israelis.  In addition, Israel killed 10 Palestinians, including three children in the West Bank and demolished three houses.  Israel launched air raids on the Gaza Strip, as documented by the UN, killing two, including a 10-year-old child.  This happened before a single Hamas rocket was fired from Gaza.  When Israel failed to break up the unity government diplomatically, it turned to a brutal military attack.”