Watch this video for a sense of the terror of having houses around you bombed. The usual tactic is a first strike followed immediately, sometimes within a minute, by the massive bomb which obliterates the house. This is what Palestinians are enduring.
The UN has weakly expressed concern whether “the Israeli strikes have been in accordance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”…To borrow a friend’s expression, Tfooooo!!!, on you UN. Useless institution that only weakly utters condemnation on the Zionists and on the Takfiris in Syria and which enabled the Zionists to occupy Palestine, enabled NATO to bomb Libya to shreds and is in general complicit wherever a nation is being torn apart.
“…in a televised statement on Thursday, Netanyahu seemed to indicate that Israeli’s military action in Gaza – named Operation Protective Edge – was far from over.“So far the battle is progressing as planned, but we can expect further stages in future. Up to now, we have hit Hamas and the terror organisations hard and as the battle continues we will increase strikes at them,” he said.Israel has called up about 20,000 reserve troops, and while there is still no indication of whether it will launch a ground offensive, shelling and air strikes continued on Friday.”
Press TV gave up to date numbers: Death toll from Israeli attacks on Gaza hits 107
Medical sources reported several casualties from an Israeli missile attack on a house in southern Gaza on Friday while Israeli warplanes pounded Deir al-Balah, leaving a number of people dead in the central city.Earlier, three Palestinians, including a child, were killed in the northern towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya in the coastal enclave.Israeli warplanes and drones have reportedly pounded more than 600 targets across the blockaded sliver since Tuesday, with Palestinian sources saying one third of the casualties are women and children.Israel has also mobilized 20,000 soldiers for a possible ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Al Akhbar has updated the list of the names of the martyred, and their ages and venues when murdered.
The medical sector is in even more of a state of crisis than the normal siege-inflicted crisis. Al Akhbar reported:
“…hospitals in the Strip are going through a major crisis that began even before the war, when the Health Ministry had announced that it is running out of 25 percent of essential drugs. Now they are facing what could be called a disaster as the martyrs and the injured keep arriving at hospital reception rooms and ERs by the minute. The Israeli aggression, accompanied by an environmental crisis and high pollution rates in Gaza, in addition to increased power outages and the lack of alternatives, prompted medical personnel to declare a state of emergency from the very beginning of the current aggression.…the available drugs and medical supplies are barely enough for the coming two days. He cautioned that hospitals have depleted more than 55 percent of their supplies on all levels because of the serious injuries coming in. He called on Arab countries and international organizations to save Gaza from a major health disaster and to stop the Israeli assault.Inside hospitals, it is clear that injuries range between critical to moderate. Based on Al-Akhbar’s observations and pictures provided by news agencies, it appears that a large number of martyrs are arriving in pieces and loss of limbs are the dominant form of injury in addition to severe burns.Dr. Marwan Rashid told Al-Akhbar that 40 percent of the injuries are among children, adding: “most of the children’s injuries are serious given that their bodies cannot withstand the injury. In addition, shortages in children’s drugs exacerbate the effects of injuries because it is not possible to use adult drugs that might cause them serious complications.”…Because targeting Palestinians in their homes is not enough for Israel, it drops bombs near Palestinian hospitals, especially those located in close proximity to the border, which are the most vulnerable, including hospitals in northern Gaza in Beit Hanoun and in southern Gaza in Rafah and Khan Younis.The day before yesterday, Israeli planes bombed in the vicinity of the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis. According to a Health Ministry statement, one of the buildings of the hospital was targeted which caused cracks in the building and wounded a paramedic and a nurse…Another factor that makes the situation more complicated for these hospitals is that the shortage in supplies is worse than in hospitals in the center of the city. Medical supplies – no matter how limited – do not reach them fast enough due to the difficulty of the movement of ambulances in those areas. After all, Israel has a history of targeting ambulances and their medical staff as they did in the previous two wars on Gaza in 2008 and 2012.On the second day of this war, an Israeli plane targeted an ambulance belonging to the Palestinian Red Crescent which was transferring victims from the city of Gaza, injuring an ambulance worker in his shoulder and abdomen. Yesterday night, the Red Crescent headquarters in the town of Jabalia was bombed and three paramedics were injured. An ambulance worker, Maamoun Atallah, says the north area where he works is targeted the most. He told Al-Akhbar: “Most of the time, the planes do not fire warning rockets as they do with houses, that is why they target paramedics directly and deliberately injure them.”
On the note of medical services and supplies, MAP-UK does excellent work in Gaza and has a fund-raising campaign, one way to support Palestinians if you are looking to do so.
Another sad incident which might move people who don’t necessarily care about Palestinians but do about football: World Cup fans killed in Gaza as bomb hits cafe:
“Palestinian football fans gathered in a café in Gaza last night to watch the World Cup semi-final between Argentina and Holland, in a bid to seek respite from the barrage of airstrikes that have killed scores of people since Operation Protective Edge began early on Monday morning.There was to be no let-up in Israel’s bombing campaign, however, as horror struck and missiles rained down on the Fun Time Beach café killing nine people and wounding 15.The Israeli airstrike scattered the dead and wounded fans across the beach, making a hole so large seawater filled it after impact.“It was a normal social occasion,” Wael Soboh, a local policeman employed by the Palestinian Authority, told AFP.“The boys ate their Ramadan iftar meal there, and then began watching the match. It is not a military area,” he said.Eight people were immediately killed by the blast, medical sources said, all of them residents of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.Bulldozers were seen earlier on Thursday looking for a ninth man believed buried in the rubble, while locals looked on in the searing midday heat.”
Chatted with Amjad Shawa, who my own corporate CBC deigned to interview, an appallingly bad interview full of loaded questions implying Palestinians deserve to be murdered…Anyway, Amjad re-iterated things are worse than ever in Gaza.
- what’s the situation now?
worse than yesterday deterioration more target killing of civilians with threat of the ground operation
do you know how many have been martyred?- 103 killed 700 injuries
- which areas of Gaza are being most targeted (I know that everywhere is being targeted, but are some areas being hit more than others?)
- Zaiton, Shijaia and the sea port
- no safe place in Gaza
- what hospitals have been hit?
- el Wafa rehabiltation hospital, red crescent center in Jabalia, el Bureij Ministry of Health centerThe ISM in Gaza posted this notice re the al Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital:“Israeli forces have contacted El-wafa hospital in Gaza and told them to evacuate. Four ‘Warning’ rockets have been fired. Three ISM activists and six other internationals are heading to the hospital now to offer protective presence.”I’d like to point out that Wafa is a hospital with mostly invalid patients, unable to walk (let alone flee) of their own accord who are need the specialized care Wafa provides and which is not found elsewhere in Gaza. This is what the Zionists are targeting.This is what they did to Wafa in Jan 2009, when there were roughly 70 invalid patients in the hospital:I wrote the following on Jan 20, 2009:“The hospital, attacked on January 12th with a chemical bomb that may well be white phosphorus and which set fire to the roof, and whose 4 different buildings were shelled intensely on January 15th, is trying to re-build and re-open, as is the shelled, burned, seriously-damaged al Quds hospital in Tel el Hawa, Gaza city.Even today, after mentioning to the Canadian TV crew accompanying me that fire blobs had burned up to yesterday, we found still more blobs spread out, smoldering and willingly breaking into white smoking fires anew.”More photos from the attack in 2009:
READING/LINKS:
“Canada’s recent diplomatic, corporate and military oriented mission to Israel, one of the largest such foreign delegations in Canadian foreign affairs history, including over 200 people, certainly set in motion a deepening of Canadian complicity with Israeli apartheid, driven strongly from the halls of political power in Ottawa.
Specific examples of military equipment and devices produced in Canada, now being deployed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli Air Forces (IAF) are numerous and damming.
Engines for the Bell “cobra” helicopter, nicknamed the “viper” on the Israeli Airforce website, are produced in the Montréal region by Pratt & Whitney Canada. Also the the Israeli military uses helicopters produced in Mirabel, Quebec by Bell Helicopter Textron Canada, a company also represented on the recent Conservative governmental delegation to Israel.
Also CAE, a corporation in Montreal that specializes in flight simulator and “real-time operation systems”, has secured major contracts to develop technology for the Israeli army, aiming to train military personnel to operate “next-generation combat aircraft.”
As bombs fall from the skies over Gaza, let us think about the aircraft training technologies for Israeli military pilots manufactured here in Montreal by CAE.
Beyond military companies the Canadian government continues to deepen links with Israel, a process dating back to one of Canada’s first international “free trade” agreements, signed with Israel in 1997. Also seen in the more recent and wide-ranging “public security agreement”, under which Israel named a defence attaché to Ottawa for the first time, through which Israeli agencies aim to “enhance cooperation” between Israeli state institutions with the RCMP, CSIS and CBSA.
Certainly a major amount of Canadian produced military technologies are right now an important part of the military machinery, involved in the killing over 100 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip over recent days. On a diplomatic level, total Canadian support for Israel’s horrifying state violence equals more political operating room for Israel on the international stage, more political room for Israel to assert a violent, colonial narrative that dehumanizes and attempts to erase the legitimate struggle of the Palestinian people.”
“South Africa’s ruling party on Thursday denounced Israel’s ongoing onslaught on the Gaza Strip, urging South Africans to protest the Israeli attacks and show solidarity with the Palestinian people.
“The African National Congress (ANC) condemns in the strongest terms the barbaric attacks on the defenseless Palestinian people of Gaza,” ANC Deputy Secretary-General Jessie Duarte said in a statement.
“The state of Israel has turned the occupied territories of Palestine into permanent death camps,” said the ANC.
“As we move towards the month of August and are reminded of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, surely we must ask the people of Israel has the term ‘lest we forget’ lost it meaning?”
“We are unequivocal in our support for the Palestinian people in their struggle for self-determination and unapologetic in our view that the Palestinians are the victims and the oppressed in the conflict with Israel.”
“… I heard a loud explosion. I grabbed Kinan and went out into the street with him. It was full of smoke and dust. I walked on bits of glass. I left Kinan with people in the street and went back into the yard to check on the rest of the family. I found bodies lying on the ground covered in blood, with their clothes torn. Everything was full of shrapnel and blood. Some neighbors came with flashlights. When they lit up the yard, I was shocked – I saw the bodies of my three sons, ‘Abd al-Hafez, Mahdi and Ibrahim, my wife, my granddaughter Dina, and my daughter-in-law Suha. The two other little ones, Rakan and Nur, were lightly injured.
I went into shock. The neighbors held me because I couldn’t stand. I felt like I was going to faint from the horror of it. The missile fell on my family with no warning. I assume they wanted to hit ‘Abd al-Hafez, but what did the rest of the family do wrong? Why did they kill an entire family?”
“A simple search of Twitter for the string ARAVIM, which means “Arabs” in Hebrew, produces a long list of messages by young Jewish Israelis calling to ethnically cleanse the country.”
“Sderot cinema. Israelis bringing chairs 2 hilltop in sderot 2 watch latest from Gaza. Clapping when blasts are heard. ‘
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
Uprooted Palestinian 
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
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