A week into the bombings by Israel into Palestinian inhabited Gaza, the mayhem and bloodshed of hundreds of innocent civilians – children and women continues relentlessly. On day one, 100 tons of bombs were dropped on densely populated Gaza, killing over 200 the first day. Death toll is upwards of 450 now, with about 6 Israelis dead.
This offensive apparently has been in the planning for several months, along with a full scale prepared PR set up by Israel’s newly assembled “Information Directorate” to manage, influence and provide media outlets, bloggers and world leaders with ‘just cause’ action for their offensive – using the ‘us vs. them’ all too familiar paradigm in the fight against terror. An illuminating article on this and the reason for this action is very well reported here, at the Guardian UK: Why Israel went to war in Gaza
Quelling Hamas’ rocket launches, has been the reason why Israel has made this offensive move against the group – but it has wrongfully targeted innocent civilians who have already been under severe economic blockade, where they have been facing food, fuel and resource shortages for months, due to the shutdown of Gaza by Israel.
With the current mayhem and rising death toll as a result of the bombings of Gaza, the limited resources are running out, and all borders have been either destroyed by bombing or sealed. This is causing great difficulty for relief and humanitarian aid to enter where it is now critically needed, as many more continue to die needlessly. Read this wrenching account from the ground of a father, professional psychiatrist and Palestinian…
From The Washington Post : Sunday, January 4, 2009
As the Troops Enter, We Fear the Worst
By Eyad El-Sarraj
Sunday, January 4, 2009; Page B01
GAZA CITY
How much worse can it get? After a horrifying week, the Israelis have arrived once again at our doorstep. What now? Already we have experienced so much terror and want.
When the Israeli strikes first began, my wife and I were worrying about lentils. She said we could not have lentil soup for lunch because there were no lentils in the shops. Nor any rice or flour. Suddenly there was a deafening noise, followed by a succession of blasts the likes of which I had never experienced. Our house was rocking, the windows rattling in their panes.
Panicked, we ran into the small hallway. My sister-in-law, who lives upstairs, joined us, frantic because her young daughter was not yet home from school. Sari, a boy from the neighborhood, banged on our door asking for shelter. He trembled as he told us that he’d been on his way home from school in a taxi when there was a thundering blast. The driver stopped the car and ran for cover. The passengers scattered in all directions. Sari found himself running aimlessly. The explosions seemed to be chasing him, he said. Suddenly, he came upon people lying bleeding in the street. He went up to a man, wanting to help him, and touched his hand. It was nothing but a piece of burnt flesh. Somebody shouted at him to get away, so he ran off.
The news came over the telephone and the television. More than 200 people had been killed and even more wounded in less than 10 minutes. The numbers were climbing and the funeral scenes filled the TV screen. Apparently F16s had dropped more than 100 tons of bombs on crowded Gaza and had hit more than 300 targets in one mission. The pilots must have reported back to their commanders that their mission had been accomplished. But they never reported the pain and suffering of the innocent people and the fear their fighters had spread in the hearts of our children.
Noor, my stepdaughter, was silent throughout the day. Then she suddenly burst out alternately crying and laughing hysterically. She is a bright girl with artistic talents. She wants to write poetry.
On Monday, the phone rang. It was my friend Salam, asking for advice. His four children, ages 11, 9, 7 and 5, had wet their beds the night before. They’d mostly outgrown that a long time ago.
Three days after the attacks began, Fawaz Abu Sitta, a professor of political science at Al-Azhar University here, was declared dead on the radio. The announcer said that the rubble of a bombed ministry building had completely smothered his small villa. A friend who happened to hear the broadcast alerted civil defense officials to search Fawaz’s basement. They did, and Fawaz was rescued along with his wife, his children and his elderly mother.
This carnage goes on, as does another humanitarian crisis brought about by the Israeli siege of Gaza: a lack of medicines, bread, flour, gas, electricity, fuel and almost everything else. The Israeli siege has literally turned Gaza into a massive prison. All our borders are sealed, so there is no way out.
By Tuesday night, Gaza was like a ghost town. Its streets were deserted and people didn’t dare to come out of their houses.
The children suffer the most, I think. They see the fear in their mothers’ eyes. The image of their fathers as a source of security is shattered. Their fathers could not provide them with food, and now they are unable to protect them. The rockets will eventually stop flying, I am certain, but it may be too late for these children. To me, the chances seem great that they will join Hamas as they search for a replacement for the father figure, someone to provide and protect. In this way, Israeli actions will only strengthen Hamas.
Wisdom tells us that violence can only breed violence. Israel’s brutality guarantees that its people will not be secure. Israel may destroy much and kill many in Hamas, but that is not the solution. Hamas was born because of the occupation and won the democratic elections in 2006 because of false promises of peace and people’s disillusionment with the Palestinian Authority. Israel and its allies should address Palestinian grievances instead of aggravating them by denying justice and security and by violating basic human rights. Most of the Palestinians in Gaza are here because they were expelled in 1948 when Israel was created. Since then, we have not had a day of freedom or of equal rights with Israelis. We can barely feed our children or provide them with medicine, because Israel controls everything that goes in and out. From where I sit, in the middle of this barrage of bombing, Israel looks to be increasingly living outside the norms of the world community and outside international law.
I am not alone in thinking this. U.N. Human Rights envoy Richard Falk declared that what Israel is doing is a crime against humanity. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson, former head of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, have expressed similar views in the past. Israel must be stopped.
It looks increasingly likely, though, that before the missiles stop exploding, we will have more days like last Thursday, when a family that lives across the street came to our house. They had gotten a phone call telling them to evacuate because their home would soon be bombed. Israelis sometimes make these calls, but you can’t always be sure what will happen. Some houses are actually bombed after such messages. But some are hoaxes.
Our neighbors stayed with us for a couple of hours before they found out that the threat was just a joke — a very dark kind of humor.
Then on Friday we got word that my stepdaughter’s friend — a Christian — had died from wounds she had sustained earlier in the week. Noor spent the day crying.
So many people have left their homes. The people who live near Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader, have fled. The entire neighborhood is empty.
I’m scared, but I’m staying put, though I am fearful of what’s next. I’m worried about what will happen next, the serious bloodshed that will surely follow as the Israeli forces come through on land.
Hamas fighters will be battling from homes, in the streets, in the neighborhoods where we remain.
Eyad El-Sarraj, a psychiatrist, is the founder and president of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program and a commissioner of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights.
Another similar account from the ground in Gaza by Journalist, Mohammed Dawwas in the UK Independent newspaper.
An excerpt from the above piece on the reactions from world leaders on the invasion and bombing of Gaza:
Reaction: How world leaders responded to a week of aggression…
Gordon Brown, Prime Minister
‘It is vital that moderation must now prevail’
Tony Blair, Middle East envoy
‘We need to devise a new strategy for Gaza’
George Bush, US President
‘Hamas has… no intention of serving the Palestinian people’
Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State
‘We need a ceasefire that is durable and sustainable’
Barack Obama, US president-elect
‘Closely monitoring events’
Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state in waiting
‘No comment’
Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary-General
‘Strongly urge… an immediate stop to all acts of violence’
HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO:
Write to Secretary of State, Condolezza Rice, through the Amnesty International USA “Take Action Center”
If you are in the US, you can call your Congresspersons (Reps and Senators) and demand that they take action against the violation of Human Rights and International Law. Action speaks in numbers. Here’s the Congress.org site to send letters to your leaders: http://www.congress.org/congressorg/mailapp/
In Peace…
Frank Schaeffer: 
By:David Coleman
Posted April 14, 2008 | 11:54 AM (EST) [From The Huffington Post]
Last Sunday evening I attended the San Francisco fundraiser that has been the center of recent political jousting. The next day, when asked about the talk Obama delivered, I too commented about his answer to a question he was asked about Pennsylvania. Over the past week, though, I have had a Rashomon-like experience concerning those remarks.
Clinton, McCain, and media pundits have parsed a blogger’s audio tape of Obama’s remarks and criticized a sentence or two characterizing some parts of Pennsylvania and the attitudes of some Pennsylvanians. In context and in person, Senator Obama’s remarks about Pennsylvania voters left an impression diametrically opposed to that being trumpeted by his competitor’s campaigns.
At the end of Obama’s remarks standing between two rooms of guests — the fourth appearance in California after traveling earlier in the day from Montana — a questioner asked, “some of us are going to Pennsylvania to campaign for you. What should we be telling the voters we encounter?”
Obama’s response to the questioner was that there are many, many different sections in Pennsylvania comprised of a range of racial, geographic, class, and economic groupings from Appalachia to Philadelphia. So there was not one thing to say to such diverse constituencies in Pennsylvania. But having said that, Obama went on say that his campaign staff in Pennsylvania could provide the questioner (an imminent Pennsylvania volunteer) with all the talking points he needed. But Obama cautioned that such talking points were really not what should be stressed with Pennsylvania voters.
Instead he urged the volunteer to tell Pennsylvania voters he encountered that Obama’s campaign is about something more than programs and talking points. It was at this point that Obama began to talk about addressing the bitter feelings that many in some rural communities in Pennsylvania have about being brushed aside in the wake of the global economy. Senator Obama appeared to theorize, perhaps improvidently given the coverage this week, that some of the people in those communities take refuge in political concerns about guns, religion and immigration. But what has not so far been reported is that those statements preceded and were joined with additional observations that black youth in urban areas are told they are no longer “relevant” in the global economy and, feeling marginalized, they engage in destructive behavior. Unlike the week’s commentators who have seized upon the remarks about “bitter feelings” in some depressed communities in Pennsylvania, I gleaned a different meaning from the entire answer.
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