Category: News

{mosimage}

[Photo: Sanaa Athamna lies dead with the bodies of her relatives Maysa and Maram. Eighteen members of the same family died in an Israeli artillery attack. Photograph: Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images]

Sanaa Athamna lay as if she slept, dead on a steel tray in the morgue of Beit Hanoun hospital. Across her forehead was a single, hairline fracture and beneath her eye a smudge of blood, the only visible marks of the destruction brought by the wave of Israeli artillery shells that struck her street in Beit Hanoun before dawn yesterday.

In her arms, hospital staff laid the bodies of her relatives: two sisters, Maysa, one, and Maram, three. Their mother Manal was also killed in yesterday's attack, but lay in a morgue at another hospital awaiting burial.

In all, 18 members of the extended Athamna family died when Israeli artillery struck their houses on Hamad Street. At least 14 of the dead were women and children. It was the biggest single Israeli strike in the Palestinian territories for four years and came only a day after the military had ended a six-day incursion in Beit Hanoun, a heavy battle which claimed more than 50 lives.

(more…)

I am not inviting America to sacrifice a traditional friend: Israel. I am offering America an additional one: Palestine.
(more…)

Yesterday at dawn, the Israeli air force bombed and destroyed my home.

I was the target, but instead the attack killed my sister-in-law, Nahla, a widow with eight children in her care. In the same raid
Israel’s artillery shelled a residential district in the town of Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip, leaving 19 dead and 40 injured, many killed
in their beds. One family, the Athamnas, lost 16 members in the massacre: the oldest who died, Fatima, was 70; the youngest, Dima, was one; seven were children. The death toll in Beit Hanoun has passed 90 in one week.
(more…)

US policy toward Israel is not expected to shift dramatically if Democrats take control of Congress. While Republican leaders have made efforts to overtly back Israel in recent years, analysts point to historic support for Israel among Democrats. In recent weeks, Democrats have been working to counter concerns they would balance support for Israel and the Palestinians or that Democrats would name committee chairmen who are seen as traditionally unsupportive of the Jewish state.

"There will be some Democratic chairmen who may not share all my views or have as clear a perspective on Israel as I do," Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California), a Jewish lawmaker, said in a recent on-line chat with Jewish voters, sponsored by the House Democratic caucus. "But they will not be chairing committees dealing with Israel and the Middle East."
(more…)

We reject with disgust the lame apologies offered by government speakers. Even if there had been no explicit intention to perpetrate a massacre and kill civilians and children sleeping quietly in their beds, this massacre was the inevitable result of the army’s uncontrolled rampage in the Gaza Strip, fully authorized by the government.

In supposed “retaliation” for the shooting of missiles which killed nobody in Israel during the entire past year, the army killed nearly a hundred Palestinians in just the past week. We call upon the government to end the carnage and enter immediate talks with the elected Palestinian government in order to achieve a complete cease- fire and prisoner release, on the way to full negotiations for peace and an end to the occupation.

We further call upon all who care for peace and human decency everywhere – including, and especially, those who consider themselves friends of Israel – to raise their voice in protest at the war madness which seized those who hold power in Israel, and to hold protest vigils outside all Israeli embassies and consulates.
(more…)

This street in Beit Hanoun is very, very quiet indeed.

It's just a matter of hours since a number of Israeli shells fell on houses in this area, killing 18 people, including six children and two women.

We counted about eight impacts. The shells appear to have landed roughly in a straight line, starting in the fields at the end of the street and hitting houses on either side of it.

A pen for livestock was struck by one of the explosions and the animals are lying dead on the ground.

There are pools of bloodstained water outside one of the houses, which has had a hole blown through the roof and there are shrapnel marks everywhere from the explosion.
(more…)

Beit Hanoun residents pick their way past a puddle of blood-stained water Water stained with blood filled the street where the shells landed At least 18 Palestinians have been killed and 40 wounded by Israeli tank fire in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, Palestinian sources have said.

Palestinian officials said a barrage of tank shells hit civilian homes, and women and children were among the dead.
(more…)

Hours after the Israeli military pulled out of the town of Beit Hanoun yesterday morning, Talal Nasr was at the cemetery to search for a spot to bury the body of his 13-year-old daughter.

It was the first time for six days that any of the town's residents had been allowed out of their homes, the duration of Israel's biggest military operation in the Gaza Strip for months. The streets quickly filled and many headed out to mourn and bury their dead.
(more…)

A third of unarmed Palestinians killed during IDF operations in the Gaza
Strip since the abduction of Gilad Shalit have been minors, according to a new report prepared by Physicians for Human Rights, to be published Wednesday.

Between June 27 and October 28, 247 Palestinians, including 155 civilians (63 percent) were killed by the IDF. Among the civilians killed, 57 were minors. This figure does not include minors who were armed.

The report also claims that of the 996 Palestinians injured during the past four months, about a third, 337, are children.
(more…)

An Israeli Cabinet minister called for the Jewish state and West Bank to be partitioned according to ethnicity.

Avigdor Lieberman of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu Party said in an interview Sunday that rather than evacuating Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Israel should keep them while ceding Israeli Arab communities to a future Palestinian state.

“I think separation between two nations is the best solution,” Lieberman told Britain’s Sunday Times.

“I want to provide an Israel that is a Jewish, Zionist country.”
(more…)