Child injured in Israeli attacks. Hospital officials say she suffered white phosphorus burns. 1-19-09
Deutsche Welle: In Gaza City, residents continued sifting through the rubble left behind by Israeli air raids and heavy shelling, and rescue teams found at least 10 more bodies. At least 100 bodies were uncovered on Sunday, Gaza emergency chief Mo'aweya Hassanein told reporters.
A boy in Jebaliya. 1-19-09
They brought the Palestinian death toll in the Israeli offensive to at least 1,310, 514 of them women and minors. The actual civilian toll was likely higher, as health officials were unable to say how many of the adult men were fighters.
Ayat cries for her uncle, who was found dead in the rubble. 1-19-09
More than 5,500 people were injured, 2,650 of them women and children. Some 100,000 Gazans are said to have fled their homes.
Boy asleep on a donkey cart, 1-19-09
Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were also killed and dozens injured in the ground fighting and in rocket attacks.
More photos, information, analysis, and a place to give below, in this 'final' Gaza invasion diary.
Families passing by destroyed American International School. 1-19-09
Families carrying their belongings away from the rubble. 1-19-09
A child.
Children in the rubble.
Orange groves destroyed by the Israeli military. 1-19-09.
A boy in front of ruins. 1-19-09.
A man in ruins. 1-19-09.
Three young children.
A girl in the rubble. 1-19-09.
Guernica, Pablo Picasso.
Father and child.
A man in rubble. 1-19-09.
A mother and her children.
A sign at a demonstration in San Francisco. 1-2-09.
Prayers in the ruins of his home.
Rafah, houses destroyed. 1-19-09.
Ruins and a man. 1-19-09.
Rubble. 1-19-09.
A woman and ruins. 1-19-09.
For What, Fred Varley, 1918.
A woman and a baby in the ruins. 1-19-09.
Daily Mail: But there was hope - and stories of remarkable survival, and remarkable reunions - as families visited hospitals to see whether their loved ones had survived or could now be taken from the hospital mortuarys for burial.
In one hospital, 15-year-old Arira al-Girim was being treated after she was found bleeding in a house, some four days after her father was killed by shell fire infront of her. Her brother and sister died, she believes, as they ran for help.
Her remaining family thought she too was dead and buried the scraps of flesh they thought were her remains.
'I looked outside, I found my father's car crushed, and his legs cut off," she told the BBC. "The floor was covered in blood from my leg.'
She says she wanted to leave, but her father was lying across the door. 'I didn't want to step on him incase I hurt him,' she said weeping yesterday, her leg in traction.
Arira had slept in the street for two days before struggling with a broken, bleeding leg in search of the safety of a shelter when she was found by a TV crew and taken to hospital.
Yesterday in hospital, she was reunited with her mother, who had thought her entire family had been wiped out. . . .
Deutsche Welle: While bulldozers began clearing the streets, Palestinians continued assessing the damage. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said the repair bill would total at least $1.9 billion (1.4 billion euros).
A source in the Hamas administration in Gaza told Reuters that 5,000 houses, 16 government buildings and 20 mosques were destroyed. The source said some 20,000 houses had been damaged.
Saudi Arabia has promised to donate $1 billion for reconstruction in the Gaza Strip. Israel has opened three border crossing to allow basic goods into the territory. A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said "enormous amounts" of aid could be allowed in if the quiet holds.
But western diplomats on Monday said Israel intends to exert control over reconstruction projects in Gaza and will seek guarantees that none of them benefit Hamas.
An EU official backed up Israel on the above, stating that aid to Gaza will not flow until its elected government is replaced with quisling/collaborator administrators.
Free Speech Zone is an interesting site, as maybe maybe not demonstrated by the following exchange:
to the conservative idea that both sides are the same and facts don't matter?
to argue a side is to be an ideologue regardless of the facts? to suggest one side is innocent as the facts say is to be an ideologue? . . .
by: DavidByron @ Fri Jan 16, 2009 at 16:20:58 PM CST
No, but some
Israelis are victims in the long-running conflict. Palestinians are a hundred times more the victims, but Americans are deliberately shielded from the imbalance, and we can't make up the imbalance with blog posts. The point is, when what you are arguing is demonstrably and spectacularly false, you lose. Every couple years a Hamas or other radical Palestinian terrorist action is successful, and the Israelis maimed and killed are heavily and aggressively splashed all over the mainstream media. These people are victims, denying that is idiotic and loses the pro-Palestinian argument or the anti-U.S.-involvement argument.
You may feel optimistic about winning the victim game right now, with so many Palestinian victims in Gaza and because of that the news (which won't deny us video of the reality inside Gaza) now oriented slightly toward sympathy for the Palestinians and looking with (maybe? I haven't seen it) a trace of skepticism at Israel. But we know how forgetful, in love with ignorance, and (therefore) easy to manipulate good ol' Americans are. And the Palestinian resistance will continue, and use terrorist means, and there will be Israeli civilian blood soon enough, to wipe away American sympathy for Palestinians, there's no question about that.
The argument with the best chance in the above context of moving U.S. policy in a way that benefits Palestine is against the U.S. taking sides, (or at least) against the U.S.'s emphatic and expensive support for an 'anything goes' neocon Israel in a mess where both sides engage in terrorism soaked in the blood of children. This 'meme' is reinforced when Israeli civilians next die or are maimed, whereas the "Israel is more to blame than Hamas" meme is killed off by how such dying or maiming will with certainty be handled in the U.S. media. . . .
'And all this to feed the avidity of a few millionary merchants and to keep up one thousand ships of war for the protection of their commercial speculations.' - TJeff by: fairleft @ Mon Jan 19, 2009 at 13:11:59 PM CST
I disagree with the following strategy (I prefer an approach that condemns U.S. diplomatic and financial support for Israel), but it certainly is a valid approach that deserves to be heard and considered:
The anti-war movement should apply pressure on Obama to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. And, just as important, particularly amid the horror that has been visited on the people of Gaza; a broader peace movement must also build real economic and political pressure against Israel's immoral and criminal acts against the Palestinians. This King Day should mark the beginning of an organized push for American divestment from Israel.
When you think about it, US foreign policy toward Palestine has been a segregationist or apartheid policy. In his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, former President Jimmy Carter likened Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and its repression of Palestinian people, both within Israel and in the occupied territories, to the state of apartheid, which existed in South Africa prior to the early 1990s. Apartheid means 'separateness.' And there is little debate that Zionism, the official ideology of Israel, is predicated on religious and ethnic separation or segregation. A self-described Jewish state -- that is, a state that operates of, by and on behalf of a single group of people -- cannot also be a secular, democratic state where persons of all religious and ethnic backgrounds are treated equally. A Jewish state that has never declared its borders, that has annexed and occupied territories, flouting international law and subjecting the indigenous population to poverty, indignity, theft, torture and death, is not only a colonialist outlaw state; it is also racist. As one Palestinian gentleman remarked to me, "While blacks in America were once considered subhuman, Palestinians are not considered humans at all."
And Israel could not have pursued any of these policies without the steadfast financial and political support of the United States. It is no secret that Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world. It receives more than $15 million every day from the United States, or $30 billion a year by most estimates. The F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters that have dropped hundreds of tons of bombs and missiles on Gaza are made in the United States and provided to the Israeli government. Every American taxpayer underwrites Israeli-style apartheid.
Divestment may be at odds with the position of many elected black leaders (the Congressional Black Caucus included), but it's not at odds with what King spoke of and died for. It is not at odds with those he championed. He championed the locked out and oppressed. . . .
Again, I haven't heard anyone defend Israel's ruling parties against the notion that the war and devastation wrought on Gaza was conducted primarily in order to boost their re-election chances in February. Certainly the ostensible goal of the invasion hasn't been achieved, Hamas rockets will continue to fire into Israel, as Israeli military leaders surely knew. So what was the purpose other than to look attractively brutal?
On 27 December 2008, Israel initiated yet another heinous carnage of the Palestinian people because of its democratically elected Hamas government. It did so with the silent encouragement of the US, the European Union and their Arab subcontractors, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. I have spent the past few weeks talking on Skype with friends in Ashdod, an Israeli town about 30 kilometers north of the Gaza Strip. Several times, they have had to seek safety from the rockets by fleeing to Jerusalem. The background noise to our conversations has been the sophisticated newspeak oozing from the Israeli TV.
How cynical are Israeli politicians that they have chosen to sacrifice the lives of innocent Gazan families to seek political advantage in the elections that will happen on 10 February. Not only has the Israeli regime sent its military machine to commit genocide in Gaza, it has also endangered the lives of its own citizens and soldiers. This, without even once trying to negotiate in good faith with the elected government of the Palestinian people. . . .
The [Israeli] left-wing pretends to accept the concept of a land-for-peace settlement but, in practice, perpetually stalls it by launching regional atrocities. The right-wing is more honest. It openly rejects the notion of relinquishing any land. . . .
Israel's "peace camp" is composed of Ashkenazim who can afford to portray themselves in the West as enlightened and progressive because they know they can rely on the Mizrahi demographic majority to protect them from the consequences of their own rhetoric. The hypocrisy of this rhetoric can be seen by noting that it is the leaders of the "peace camp" who started the present Gaza carnage and, before that, the 2006 Lebanon war. Do not forget that the perpetrator of the current atrocity is Ehud Barak, the leader of the Labor Party, while the defense minister in 2006 was Amir Peretz, his predecessor in that post.
Their political ancestor was David Ben-Gurion, the orchestrator of the Nakba, the 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what became the State of Israel. . . .
Smadar Lavie is the Hubert H. Humphrey Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Islamic World and the Middle East at Macalester College [in Minnesota].
GENEVA, Jan 19 (Reuters) - Israel's offensive in Gaza has left Palestinians vulnerable to disease outbreaks, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday, warning that severe health risks will persist beyond any ceasefire.
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said in a speech she was "deeply concerned" about an interruption of immunisations and other life-saving care in the densely populated territory.
There are now only 2,000 hospital beds for 1.5 million people in Gaza, and many hospitals and primary care clinics serving civilians are badly damaged or destroyed, she said.
Some 1,300 Palestinians have died in the assault, which began on Dec. 27 when Israel launched air strikes on Gaza to stop Hamas rocket attacks. Israel and Hamas separately declared ceasefires on Sunday, ending 22 days of fighting.
Israel put its dead at 10 soldiers and three civilians. "Right now, we very sadly see ideal conditions for outbreaks of disease," Chan told the WHO's executive board, citing health and sanitary risks from broken sewerage pipes, scarce drinking water, and garbage piling up in the streets.
Al Jazeera Television: West Bank divide grows: The war on Gaza has led to several demonstrations across the Palestinian West Bank. But empathy for Hamas's resistance against Israel has also put the Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank, on the defensive. From Ramallah in the West Bank Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna reports on the growing political divide.
The photos above were found at the Daily Mail site already cited or here and then heavily modified.
If you are moved and want to help out, perhaps Palestine Red Crescent Society might be the place to go. Worth a try, and let's hope Israel, the EU, and the U.S. allow whatever your donation buys to get through the siege.
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