A powerful film with exclusive footage from the day of the Israeli assault on the densely populated Shujayea district.
Filmmakers: Amjad Almalki and Ahmad Ashour
Amid a renewed cycle of escalating tensions and violence, Israel launched a military offensive on the Gaza Strip on July 8, 2014.
On the 13th day of the assault on Gaza, Israel intensified its campaign with a ground offensive. The densely populated district of Shujayea in Gaza City came under intense bombardment.
Go RUSSELL BRAND! Love this guy, STRAIGHT, NO CHASER.
ISRAEL IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION, HANNITY! ASSCLOWN
Another U.N. School Hit In Gaza War, Killing At Least 19 Palestinians
by Hayes Brown Posted on July 30, 2014 at 9:02 am
For the second time in as many weeks, a United Nations-run school in the Gaza Strip was hit with with artillery fire, with reports that as many 90 Palestinians were wounded in the attack that killed an estimated 19 people.
The shelling that struck in Jabaliya landed around 5 a.m. early Wednesday morning, reportedly falling in rapid succession. Around 3,300 Palestinians had been using the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) school for shelter from the Israeli campaign to root out Hamas and other militant groups in the strip when the explosions began. “One hit the street in front of the entrance, according to several witnesses,” the New York Times reported. “Two others hit classrooms where people were sleeping.”
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/07/30/3465633/gaza-school-again/
Netanyahu is an arrogant sadist racist who is committing genocide on a defenseless people.
These photos are gut-wrenching.
Palestinian Mazen Keferna cries upon his return during a 12-hour cease-fire to the family house destroyed by Israeli strikes in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip, Saturday, July 26, 2014. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Israel has discovered that it’s no longer so easy to get away with murder in the age of social media
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/israel-has-discovered-that-its-no-longer-so-easy-to-get-away-with-murder-in-the-age-of-social-media-9621379.html
It used to be said that a lie goes twice around the world before the truth has put its shoes on. Not any more. I arrived in Israel on Christmas Eve 2008, the date chosen by Israel to launch Operation Cast Lead, an attack to end all attacks on Gaza.
The tanks rolled in, killing over 1,300 people, many of them women and children, and reducing their homes, schools and hospitals to rubble. But all I heard from the media was that some Israelis were very, very scared because a few primitive rockets were being sent from Gaza into southern Israel.
Reporters were not allowed into Gaza and Israeli soldiers were banned from taking on mobile phones for security reasons. So the 2008/9 massacre, which included use of the banned White Phosphorus, went un-witnessed and almost unreported. It also failed dismally in achieving its objective, as Hamas survived and the local population’s hatred of their arrogant oppressors burned as bright as the fires which consumed their homes. But for the “international community” it was “out of sight, out of mind”. Business as usual.
What a difference a few years of developing technology can make. The Gaza atrocities are now being reported on a constant basis by eyewitnesses, be they professional correspondents representing major media organisations, or amateur locals under fire. Because all you need is a mobile phone and a Twitter account.
It is those devices which brought us heart-rending images – some too horrific to be shown on television – of children with their limbs or half a head blown off. Children covered in shrapnel wounds screaming for dead parents; surviving parents carrying tiny bodies. Sights which caused the battle-hardened BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet to sob during a live broadcast.
They are all on Twitter now, should you care to look. This is the shape of wars to come. Anything less than total nuclear annihilation will, from now on, be recorded for posterity by the victims, as well as the victors, in their own versions. Imagine if this was the case in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, not to mention earlier massacres. Historians will finally have both sides’ stories to work from, and the evidence with which to back up their words.
Ron Cordry @Ronc99 12m
WOW!!! #Israel NOT America’s ally. PM @netanyahu released the transcript of his private convo with President Obama: http://www.timesofisrael.com/d… …
They Drift Apart
by BooMan
Tue Jul 29th, 2014 at 11:36:17 AM EST
I encourage (especially) our Jewish members to opine about this observation by Josh Marshall:
…Netanyahu has made the de facto alliance between the Likud or what remains of the faction he owns (that part gets very complicated) and the US Republican party increasingly explicit. And that’s dangerous. Dangerous for all concerned but particularly for Israel. I wish Netanyahu and his government had a better sense of the toxic repercussions of mobilizing GOP proxies as cut-outs in this way. It should go without saying that the Israel-US alliance becomes more brittle as it becomes more clearly identified with a single US political party. And perhaps more than that, as it becomes more clearly identified with the ties between Netanyahu and US Republicans.
Eric Cantor, who was recently defeated in a party primary, is the only elected Jewish member of the Republican Party in the federal government. To say that it is dangerous for Israel to align itself with the Republican Party is the understatement of the year.
American Jews could not be more alienated from the Israeli government by any other conceivable decision.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2014/7/29/113617/139
Dangerous Game
ByJosh Marshall
PublishedJuly 28, 2014, 3:19 PM EDT
US officials are “fuming” in the AP’s words at the barrage of Israeli criticism of Secretary of States John Kerry. But as Chemi Shalev notes in Haaretz, there’s a deeper backstory. Nothing gets the Obama administration’s ire up like the perception (very often grounded in reality) that Netanyahu and his government ministers are trying to scuttle his initiatives by inveigling themselves into domestic partisan conflict in the US. Specifically, using GOP proxies as cut-outs to push back against the President’s initiatives.
This is not entirely new. There was an episode during the first Bush administration when the shoe was on the other partisan foot. But Netanyahu, who speaks perfect English and lived a number of years in the United States, is better able to do it than many of his predecessors. And the US partisan alignment creates more tools to do it with.
In one very notable example, Israel’s current Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, is a former GOP political operative who once worked for Frank Luntz, and only made aliyah (immigrated to Israel) in 2005. He even reportedly played some role (though I suspect a small one since he was just out of college at the time) in creating the 1994 Contract with America. It’s usually good for both countries when a country’s ambassador has a deep relationship with the country’s head of government. It makes more seamless and reliable communication possible. And all seem to agree that Dermer’s relationship with Netanyahu is very, very deep – this article refers to him as “Bibi’s Brain.”
So Dermer is tight with Netanyahu and he, by definition, has a ready grasp of the the minute intricacies of US politics, particularly Washington politics. But his background makes Democrats and especially this White House suspicious.
I don’t know what role Dermer himself plays in the working the general ties with US Republicans, though I suspect it’s substantial. But Netanyahu has made the de facto alliance between the Likud or what remains of the faction he owns (that part gets very complicated) and the US Republican party increasingly explicit. And that’s dangerous. Dangerous for all concerned but particularly for Israel. I wish Netanyahu and his government had a better sense of the toxic repercussions of mobilizing GOP proxies as cut-outs in this way. It should go without saying that the Israel-US alliance becomes more brittle as it becomes more clearly identified with a single US political party. And perhaps more than that, as it becomes more clearly identified with the ties between Netanyahu and US Republicans.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dangerous-game–2
The Fire Next Time
By Liberal Librarian
Something feels different about this Israeli war. Previous incursions have gone without much import, the IDF killing hundreds of Palestinians, Palestinians making the diplomatic rounds excoriating Israel, and then everything settling back down into a dull stalemate. Even with US media bias, it’s gotten through the media filter that Israel’s war against Gaza is both disproportionate and horrific. When you trap a population in a Mediterranean gulag, and then pummel it, even the most jaundiced see that it’s morally reprehensible. No, Hamas shouldn’t launch rockets at Israel. But Israel has a rather effective missile defense system. Gaza has AK-47s. It is not an equal contest.
Perhaps it’s the prevalence of social media. During Israel’s previous incursion into Gaza, Twitter was in its infancy. Now with over a billion users, real time pictures from the killing zone are scrolling across millions of Twitter feeds. News organizations won’t show photographs of the dead and maimed; Twitter users will. Smoke plumes, flattened buildings, and screaming children are just a few of the images completely and effectively circumventing the media filter.
Israel’s spokespeople have also been closely questioned by Western media outlets, as in this interaction between Mark Regev and the BBC’s Emily Maitlis:
The usually smooth Israeli PR machine is unable to cope with thousands of reports coming out of Gaza. Israel is no longer the plucky little state facing overwhelming odds; it’s the dominant military power in the Middle East, now oppressing a nearly defenseless population in the name of “security”.
As militarily the conflict is not an equal one, neither is it equal morally. With every dead child, Israel loses more of its moral position. Hamas, a “terrorist organization”, is seen as the victim in the conflict. Perhaps that’s a bit too far; Hamas certainly has enough black marks against it. But every dead child, every destroyed hospital costs Israel valuable standing, standing which is passed on to the Palestinians, leaving the international community less willing to listen to Israel’s prerequisites for an end to the conflict. As Amira Hass writes in Haaretz:
http://theobamadiary.com/2014/07/28/the-fire-next-time/
*************************
Translation: My family and I still hiding under the stairs (staircase) after renewed artillery fire on our own in the Falluja-North of I can hear the sound of missiles in our
Young Americans take a dim view of Israel’s actions
By Aaron Blake July 29 at 6:30 AM
The United States is a politically polarized country. But when it comes to views of what’s happening in Israel, partisanship has nothing on age.
A new Pew Research Center poll is the second in the past week to show a huge generational split on the current conflict in Gaza. While all age groups north of 30 years old clearly blame Hamas more than Israel for the current violence, young adults buck the trend in a big way. Among 18 to 29-year olds, 29 percent blame Israel more for the current wave of violence, while 21 percent blame Hamas.
Young people are more likely to blame Israel than are Democrats, who blame Hamas more by a 29-26 margin. Even liberal Democrats are split 30-30. The only other major demographic groups who blame Israel more than Hamas are African Americans and Hispanics.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/07/29/young-americans-take-a-dim-view-of-israels-actions/?tid=pm_politics_pop
deeper into the poll
Question: Israel’s actions justified?
WHITES:
50 JUSTIFIED
34 NOT-JUSTIFIED
NON-WHITES
25 JUSTIFIED
49 NOT JUSTIFIED
Not surprising. Young folks get their news from social media and POC are the ones who are currently and have ALWAYS been under attack, whether here or around the world.
Gaza: Catholic Church told to evacuate ahead of Israeli bombing
http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=25263
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.
The parish appeal for prayers.
What in the holy HELL? Bombing a church? Where is HAMAS in all this?
Nothing is sacred with the Israeli forces. They bomb hospitals, schools, playgrounds & ambulances carrying the sick & wounded to finish them off. They are ruthless and Netanyahu has vowed to continue his assault on a defenseless people. All the Palestinians have are rocks. Rocks vs state of the art weapons.
The Holy Family Church houses disabled kids.
If Israel can make Gaza uninhabitable by destroying all infrastructure and then keeping up the blockade (with the blessings of the US), then the genocide won’t take as long.
Israel Strikes Fuel Tanks at Gaza’s Only Power Plant
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/middle-east-unrest/israel-strikes-fuel-tanks-gazas-only-power-plant-n167291
The fuel tanks at Gaza’s only power plant came under attack early Tuesday, threatening to deepen an already dire humanitarian situation.
The attack came hours after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned in a televised speech of a “prolonged” campaign in Gaza against Hamas. Israel carried out more than 70 strikes overnight – one of the biggest bombardments in the nearly month-long campaign. A Palestinian health official told The Associated Press that at least 100 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes and tank shelling on Tuesday.
TELL.THE.TRUTH.PRESIDENT ROUSSEFF.
And SHAME those DEVILS.
The United States Lowers Israel’s Diplomatic Shield at the United Nations
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/07/28/president_obama_removes_israelis_diplomatic_shield_at_the_united_nations_gaza
Despite a history of rocky relations between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Obama administration could largely be counted on to watch Israel’s back in the U.N. Security Council, where it succeeded for more than five years in blocking successive efforts by the Palestinians to gain more of the trappings of an independent state and to get the world body to formally censure Israeli settlement policies.
That changed after the stroke of midnight Sunday when, in the early minutes of Monday, July 28, the U.N. Security Council, with the backing of the United States, issued a formal “presidential statement” demanding that Israel and Hamas implement an “immediate and unconditional” cease-fire to end fighting that has left more than 1,000 Palestinians and 43 Israelis dead. The Palestinians say they will continue to seek Security Council support for a legally enforceable resolution demanding that Israel halt its military offensive in Gaza.
The latest U.N. diplomacy comes during a period of deepening tensions between the United States and Israel over the course of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, which Obama maintains needs to stop now, but which Netanyahu insists must be allowed to continue in order to destroy Hamas’s network of subterranean tunnels used for raids on Israel. “I understand that Israel can’t have a cease-fire in which they are not able to — that somehow the tunnels are never going to be dealt with. The tunnels have to be dealt with. We understand that; we’re working at that,” Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters in Paris on Saturday in a press conference with the foreign ministers of Turkey and Qatar. “By the same token, the Palestinians can’t have a cease-fire in which they think the status quo is going to stay and they’re not going to have the ability to be able to begin to live and breathe more freely and move within the crossings and begin to have goods and services that come in from outside.”
So now news sources are saying Kerry’s efforts are a failure?
UM… HELL NO!
Nut-&-YAZOO’s efforts to stop slaughtering innocent civilians is a
FAILURE!
Israel is peddling that bullshit. They’re arrogant and ungrateful.
THIS:
— Fail- Inside the Kerry-Israel Meltdown
Hours after the Secretary of State announced Israel and Hamas were negotiating a ceasefire extension, a new round of violence broke out. Eli Lake and Josh Rogin report that John Kerry’s whirlwind diplomatic efforts have completely disconnected from the two sides he’s trying—and failing—to pacify.
http://elink.thedailybeast.com/4e555ee3e018bee76c3458201pjkt.3rnd/U9eSy-YQhlCijikVC5241
WHAT THE FUCK?!!!
Harry Reid: Israel May Need More Aid
Source: Politico
By BURGESS EVERETT | 7/28/14 3:04 PM EDT
The Obama administration’s $225 million request to aid Israel during its war with Hamas may not be enough, warned Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Monday afternoon.
At the request of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Senate Democrats folded $225 million for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system into a larger bill that offers $2.7 billion in emergency funding to deal with the influx of Central American migrants to the southern border. But Reid said Israel will need even more help from the United States if the war in Gaza continues, demonstrating the need to pass the funding package this week ahead of a five-week congressional recess.
Reid predicted that Hagel’s aid request for Israel may turn out to be “only temporary” given the steep costs associated with operating Iron Dome, which picks off Hamas’s rockets at a price-tag of $62,000 per missile, according to Reid.
“We should not give the Israeli people the minimum amount of aid and then cross our fingers and hope it all works out in the future,” Reid said. “We can do better and need to go further in protecting Israel.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/israel-us-aid-hamas-harry-reid-109452.html#ixzz38ofGdJZU
Detroit citizens are BEGGING for water & Harry Reid want to give aid to Israel so they can continue their assault on the defenseless? No one cares about Detroit. Got dammit!
This gives me a headache. More money for Israel’s genocide?
World class sociopath Bibi Netan-yahoo wants to keep doing what he’s doing, says it’s all about the tunnels. He must think everyone in the world watches Fox News all day.
Netanyahu: Israel Is Prepared For ‘Long Operation’ In Gaza
by Alan Greenblatt
July 28, 2014
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday dismissed international calls for an immediate cease-fire in the country’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza.
“We need to be prepared for a long operation until our mission is accomplished,” Netanyahu said in televised remarks.
He defined that mission the same way Israeli officials have since launching a ground offensive in Gaza: taking out the tunnels Hamas uses to infiltrate Israel.
“Israeli citizens cannot live with the threat from rockets and from death tunnels — death from above and from below,” Netanyahu said, adding that Israelis would not “end this operation without neutralizing the tunnels, whose sole purpose is killing our citizens.”
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/07/28/336136841/netanyahu-israel-prepared-for-long-operation-in-gaza
The only PEOPLE who are dying are the PALESTINIANS!
From a few days ago but interesting points about Palestinians’ right to self-defense
The Palestinians’ Right to Self-Defense
Posted on Jul 23, 2014
By Chris Hedges
If Israel insists, as the Bosnian Serbs did in Sarajevo, on using the weapons of industrial warfare against a helpless civilian population then that population has an inherent right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The international community will have to either act to immediately halt Israeli attacks and lift the blockade of Gaza or acknowledge the right of the Palestinians to use weapons to defend themselves.
No nation, including any in the Muslim world, appears willing to intervene to protect the Palestinians. No world body, including the United Nations, appears willing or able to pressure Israel through sanctions to conform to the norms of international law. And the longer we in the world community fail to act, the worse the spiral of violence will become.
Israel does not have the right to drop 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on Gaza. It does not have the right to pound Gaza with heavy artillery and with shells lobbed from gunboats. It does not have the right to send in mechanized ground units or to target hospitals, schools and mosques, along with Gaza’s water and electrical systems. It does not have the right to displace over 100,000 people from their homes. The entire occupation, under which Israel has nearly complete control of the sea, the air and the borders of Gaza, is illegal.
Violence, even when employed in self-defense, is a curse. It empowers the ruthless and punishes the innocent. It leaves in its aftermath horrific emotional and physical scars. But, as I learned in Sarajevo during the 1990s Bosnian War, when forces bent on your annihilation attack you relentlessly, and when no one comes to your aid, you must aid yourself. When Sarajevo was being hit with 2,000 shells a day and under heavy sniper fire in the summer of 1995 no one among the suffering Bosnians spoke to me about wanting to mount nonviolent resistance. No one among them saw the U.N.-imposed arms embargo against the Bosnian government as rational, given the rain of sniper fire and the 90-millimeter tank rounds and 155-millimeter howitzer shells that were exploding day and night in the city. The Bosnians were reduced, like the Palestinians in Gaza, to smuggling in light weapons through clandestine tunnels. Their enemies, the Serbs—like the Israelis in the current conflict—were constantly trying to blow up tunnels. The Bosnian forces in Sarajevo, with their meager weapons, desperately attempted to hold the trench lines that circled the city. And it is much the same in Gaza. It was only repeated NATO airstrikes in the fall of 1995 that prevented the Bosnian-held areas from being overrun by advancing Serbian forces. The Palestinians cannot count on a similar intervention.
The number of dead in Gaza resulting from the Israeli assault has topped 650, and about 80 percent have been civilians. The number of wounded Palestinians is over 4,000 and a substantial fraction of these victims are children. At what point do the numbers of dead and wounded justify self-defense? 5,000? 10,000? 20,000? At what point do Palestinians have the elemental right to protect their families and their homes?
Article 51 does not answer these specific questions, but the International Court of Justice does in the case of Nicaragua v. United States. The court ruled in that case that a state must endure an armed attack before it can resort to self-defense. The definition of an armed attack, in addition to being “action by regular armed forces across an international border,” includes sending or sponsoring armed bands, mercenaries or irregulars that commit acts of force against another state. The court held that any state under attack must first request outside assistance before undertaking armed self-defense. According to U.N. Charter Article 51, a state’s right to self-defense ends when the Security Council meets the terms of the article by “tak[ing] the measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”
The failure of the international community to respond has left the Palestinians with no choice. The United States, since Israel’s establishment in 1948, has vetoed in the U.N. Security Council more than 40 resolutions that sought to curb Israel’s lust for occupation and violence against the Palestinians. And it has ignored the few successful resolutions aimed at safeguarding Palestinian rights, such as Security Council Resolution 465, passed in 1980.
Resolution 465 stated that the “Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949 is applicable to the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem.” The resolution went on to warn Israel that “all measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War and also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”
Israel, as an occupying power, is in direct violation of Article III of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. This convention lays out the minimum standards for the protection of civilians in a conflict that is not international in scope. Article 3(1) states that those who take no active role in hostilities must be treated humanely, without discrimination, regardless of racial, social, religious or economic distinctions. The article prohibits certain acts commonly carried out against noncombatants in regions of armed conflict, including murder, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture. It prohibits the taking of hostages as well as sentences given without adequate due process of law. Article 3(2) mandates care for the sick and wounded.
Israel has not only violated the tenets of Article III but has amply fulfilled the conditions of an aggressor state as defined by Article 51. But for Israel, as for the United States, international law holds little importance. The U.S. ignored the verdict of the international court in Nicaragua v. United States and, along with Israel, does not accept the jurisdiction of the tribunal. It does not matter how many Palestinians are killed or wounded, how many Palestinian homes are demolished, how dire the poverty becomes in Gaza or the West Bank, how many years Gaza is under a blockade or how many settlements go up on Palestinian territory. Israel, with our protection, can act with impunity.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_palestinians_right_to_self-defense_20140723/
Israel hates journalists, real journalists that is. Truth tellers, the ones who write the first draft of history. And what an ugly history that little country has.
AIPAC
American Israel Public Affairs Committee
Indeed.
*tears*
Where is Hamas in this heavily POPULATED CITY?
GENOCIDE!
*cries*
Yes, genocide.