Mohammed Suliman sends out a stream of tweets from Gaza that provide an insight into the kinds of surreal thoughts that flood your mind when you await what might well be your own death from a missile strike. It is poignant and tragic. It should be read in conjunction with this report (via Pharyngula) about the most recent massacre committed by Israel in which nearly ninety people died in one neighborhood.
Two small bodies lie on the metal table inside the morgue at Gaza’s Shifa hospital. Omama is 9 years old. Her right forearm is mangled and charred and the top half of her skull has been smashed in. Beside her lies her 7-year-old brother. His name is not certain. It might be Hamza or it might be Khalil. Relatives are having trouble identifying him because his head has been shorn off. Their parents will not mourn them—because they are dead too.
All of them were killed in Shejaiya, one of Gaza’s poorest and most crowded neighborhoods, which came under a brutal and sustained assault by the Israeli military today.
“They dropped shells on our heads,” says Lotfy al-Banna, a resident from the neighborhood who fled early Sunday morning. “Everything is burnt down.”
Sara Hussein describes what she saw when she entered the area with emergency responders.
Inside were scenes of absolute devastation: entire buildings collapsed on themselves or strewn into the streets.
Mangled trees were bent over, children’s shoes — a girl’s purple slipper, a boy’s blue flip-flop — mixed in with the rubble underfoot.
An entire apartment building of several floors was still ablaze, the fire burning on the ground floor and covering the facade with black soot.
And there were bodies lying in the streets.
Some were burnt almost beyond recognition, whole appendages missing.
One man in his houserobes was completely charred black except for his internal organs, which were starkly yellow against the coal colour of the rest of his body.
The dead were young and old, with more than one lifeless child carried out by frantic ambulance workers.
Via A Million Gods, I learn that the group Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) says that the bombing is indiscriminate and calls for Israel to stop bombing trapped civilian populations and that medical personnel are also being killed.
Since Israel launched its ground offensive the number of victims is increasing exponentially. “While official claims that the objective of the ground offensive is to destroy tunnels into Israel, what we see on the ground is that bombing is indiscriminate and that those who die are civilians,” said [MSF field coordinator in Gaza Nicolas] Palarus.
I wonder for how long Israel will continue to claim that its campaign is carefully targeted to avoid civilian casualties. Not only is Israel hemorrhaging former supporters in the US, even the mainstream US media are getting sick of the rationalizations for their periodic killing sprees. Soon only the Israel lobby and the US congress will be their allies.
We have all become masters in tuning it out. Take a look at Taslima Nasreen’s latest post on FTB. Warning: it is sickening and graphic. When will this madness stop?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/taslima/2014/07/22/a-piece-of-coal/
Good evening Mano,
Meanwhile, these two bits of news hit my inbox this afternoon from the Cleveland Jewish Federation of Cleveland.
First:
.
Second (also from the Federation):
Jeff
It’s not the first time. Israel deliberately blocks attempts to take medical supplies into Gaza. And many of the Palestinians subjected to mass arrest and years of imprisonment without trial are social leaders, not dangerous people -- they’re teachers, businesspeople, doctors. If they were dangerous, why would Israel keep releasing them and never try them?
The US deliberately targeted medical workers in Iraq, threatening and assaulting doctors, forcing doctors to turn over wounded people to them, taking away phones with cameras and other acts to cover up their crimes.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1213-09.htm
DsylexicHippo (#1) --
That’s just the one you’ve seen, there are plenty of others that are never talked about. The corporate media wants to pretend such events don’t exist until they can no longer keep up the façade (re: wikileaks, Snowden and the NSA)..
Soon only the Israel lobby and the US congress will be their allies.
Hmm? I doubt that -- Plenty of people who support Israel with -- if only Hamas was not dedicated to killing all Jews, if only Palestinians did not celebrate death of Israelis, If only Israel was not surrounded by fundamentalist Islamic nations .. then Israel would be the morally upstanding nation that it could be.
I have never understood why anyone took sides in this conflict -- both parties seem to be fucked up in the head.
I am so disgusted with Israel and its supporters. The military is targeting buildings and vehicles with a complete disregard for Palestinian lives. They are even attacking hospitals and ambulances! How can the supporters look at this massacre and find excuses for it? How do they mentally shift the blame for all these civilian deaths to Hamas? I don’t understand it.
The main argument seems to be that Hamas has human shields and that’s why Israel cant help but kill them. It’s a fucking ridiculous argument.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/21/hospital-hamas-isreal-hiding-among-civilians?CMP=twt_gu
@ ^ danzig :
That’s just not true.
Read the facts here :
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2014/07/gaza_civilian_casualties_while_hamas_targets_innocent_people_israel_tries.html
Mano Singham’s latest post on this issue acknowledges that Israel is NOT letting the Palestinians starve (okay, they experience discomfort and short rations but NOT starvation) and allows them humanitarian supplies despite the ongoing Hamas rocketfire and terrorism aimed at destroying the world’s only Jewish nation which is remarkably, exceptionally compassionate on Israel’s part although it seems to get no credit for it from the usual suspects. (Aside : Don’t you think Egypt has some responsibility here too?)
Do you understand why this war is happening? What the cause of it starting and continuing is? Clearly not.
FYI. Hamas started this latest round of carnage by kidnapping and murdering three Israeli teenagers and then continually indiscriminately firing rockets at Israeli civilians.
To use an analogy -- suppose some well-armed pyschopath took his wife and child hostage and then went up to a police station and started shooting wildly into it holding his wife and child in front of him as human shields. The police, coming under heavy fire and in threat of their lives then shoot back killing all three people -- the murderous pyschopath and his two hostages.
Who would you blame for that? Obviously any reasonable ethical person would fully blame the psychopath who was holding his family hostage and attacking the police.
Whatever cause the psychopath had -or thought he had -his own inexcusable behaviour gave the police no other choice. Nothing justifies that sort of behaviour.
Even if the psychopaths fire wasn’t very accurate and he hadn’t yet killed any officers, you wouldn’t expect the police to do nothing and just allow him to keep shooting would you?
Well, that’s in essence the situation here. Hamas is the pyschopath, the police are Israel and the innocent hostages -- the psychopaths own wife and child -- are the innocent Palestinian victims.
It is tragic, it is horrendous -and it is all Hamas fault. Without them and their actions this war would not be occurring and, consequently, the Hamas side bears full responsibility for all the casualties on all sides.
Now do you understand?
@ 6 StevoR
Well, if the police were rogue cops with no respect for law, they’d driven the “psychopath” off his land to build their police station and impounded his assets, they were behind bullet-proof glass at the time, and they were lobbing grenades at the “psychopath” and his family… then you might have an analogy.
@ ^ SilentBob :
The analogy works fine either way.
Whatever the past, right or wrong, Hamas cannot be allowed to get away with shooting deadly rockets at innocent people right now.
Also just seen this suggested solution to the current conflict :
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/07/how_to_save_gaza_demilitarization_and_abbas.html
which makes a pretty reasonable case.
@StevoR : Free West Papua, free Tibet, let the Chagossians return!
So, the resistance fighters in the Warsaw ghetto (1943 CE) occupied France (1940-44 CE), and Armenia (1915 CE)--or, for that matter, the First Peoples of the Americas (1492 CE to the present), the zealots at Masada (66-73 CE) or the Maccabees (166 BCE)-- were wrong for using armed opposition against their occupiers/oppressors?
I think not.
Jeff Hess
Have Coffee Will Write
StevoR,
…I’m pretty sure that if a gunman has hostages and is taking potshots at the police, they’re supposed to react with some combination of:
1) Retreat and find cover.
2) Negotiate for release of the hostages.
3) Stall for time until they can find a way of neutralizing him with minimal threat to the hostages, e.g. tear gas or a sniper.
Slaughtering both the gunman and his hostages in a massive hail of bullets would pretty much be the worst possible response, the sort of thing that gets cops suspended, fired and potentially prosecuted.
Still, I’m sure you can make the analogy lead to your desired conclusion if you massage it some more. Maybe add something about how the “hostages” are actually his disguised accomplices and the real hostages are imprisoned somewhere in the sewer system, in a room slowly filling with water. Also, a nuke goes off if the bus travels below fifiy miles an hour.