Israeli military fire hit a United Nations-run school in Gaza today, killing at least 20 people
and injuring an estimated 90 people. The school under attack, called
the Abu Hussein girls’ elementary school, is located in the
densely-populated Jabaliya refugee camp.

The United Nations Relief Works and Agency (UNRWA), the group that serves Palestinian refugees, issued a stern statement placing the blame for the attack on the Israeli army.

“Last night, children were killed as
they slept next to their parents on the floor of a classroom in a UN
designated shelter in Gaza. Children killed in their sleep; this is an
affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today the world
stands disgraced,” said UNRWA Secretary General Pierre Krähenbühl.
“We have visited the site and gathered evidence. We have analysed
fragments, examined craters and other damage. Our initial assessment is
that it was Israeli artillery that hit our school, in which 3,300 people
had sought refuge.”

Read more on MondoWeiss

The
horrific Israeli assault on Gaza has
exposed the extent to which Israeli pressure has infiltrated and corrupted American
institutions. Eventually America will pay an enormous price for this. The
presidency, the congress, our commitment to international law, even simple
regulatory agencies have all been corrupted. It is an orgy of lies unmatched
since the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.

Obama
repeats Netanyahu’s stock phrase that, “Israel has a right to defend itself”—support
that ensures continued Israeli aggression and war crimes. The US Senate approves S.Res. 498 –blaming
Palestinians for the violence and demanding the dissolution of
the Palestinian national-unity government—even though the lack of a unity
government had previously been used by Israel and the US as an excuse NOT to
negotiate with Palestinians. The killing goes on.

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Magic Johnson and other past and present NBA stars will not attend inauguration of Jerusalem’s new multi-purpose sports arena in September.

Magic Johnson and other past and present NBA stars, who were slated to attend the inauguration ceremony of Jerusalem’s new multi-purpose sports arena in September, have called off their visit to Israel.

The Jerusalem Municipality and the event’s production company, Ariel, were surprised to receive a phone call from the stars’ representatives on Sunday, informing them that they were cancelling their participation in the festive event.
 
Ariel and the municipality have been working on the Jerusalem Arena inauguration ceremony, which will take place on September 4, for several months now.
 
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat had invested many efforts to complete the construction and increase the number of seats in the arena after many delays over the years.
 
The municipality had planned a major opening, which would create a media buzz around the new sports complex. The highlight of the event was supposed to be a festive exhibition game between 10 retired and present NBA players and the Hapoel Jerusalem basketball club.
 
The guest of honor would have been Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Jr., one of the greatest basketball players of all times.
 
The Ariel company had also planned to bring a leading international musician to the ceremony. Talks held with Beyoncé and Kanye West have been unsuccessful so far.
 
Ariel CEO Zion Turgeman confirmed that the NBA players had canceled their visit to Jerusalem. “This is a serious blow to the arena’s inauguration. We have been working on the opening event for a long time, and now we will have to readjust.”
 
Turgeman added there was no plan to postpone the inauguration event. “We intend to invite 5,000 soldiers to the opening in order to thank the IDF for its contribution to the state,” he said.

[Senator Wyden’s response below has only some relationship to the truth and to the sequences of events culminating in Operation Protective Edge.  Read Omar Baddar’s article Debunking the myths about Gaza: The truth behind Israeli and Palestinian talking points for providing a proper context rooted in actual events]

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The International Community Must End Israel’s Collective Punishment of the Civilian Population in the Gaza Strip

As international and criminal law
scholars, human rights defenders, legal experts and individuals who
firmly believe in the rule of law and in the necessity for its respect
in times of peace and more so in times of war, we feel the intellectual
and moral duty to denounce the grave violations, mystification and
disrespect of the most basic principles of the laws of armed conflict
and of the fundamental human rights of the entire Palestinian population
committed during the ongoing Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip. We
also condemn the launch of rockets from the Gaza Strip, as every
indiscriminate attack against civilians, regardless of the identity of
the perpetrators, is not only illegal under international law but also
morally intolerable. However, as also implicitly noted by the UN Human
Rights Council in its Resolution of the 23th July 2014, the two parties
to the conflict cannot be considered equal, and their actions – once
again – appear to be of incomparable magnitude.

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There seems to be near-universal agreement in the United States with President Barack Obama’s observation that Israel, like every other country, has the right and obligation to defend its citizens from threats directed at them from beyond its borders.

But this anodyne statement does not begin to address the political and moral issues raised by Israel’s bombings and land invasion of Gaza: who violated the cease-fire agreement that was in place since November 2012 and whether Israel’s civilian population could have been protected by nonviolent means that would not have placed Gaza’s civilian population at risk. As of this writing, the number killed by the Israel Defense Forces has surpassed 600, the overwhelming majority of whom are noncombatants.

Israel’s assault on Gaza, as pointed out by analyst Nathan Thrall in the New York Times, was not triggered by Hamas’ rockets directed at Israel but by Israel’s determination to bring down the Palestinian unity government that was formed in early June, even though that government was committed to honoring all of the conditions imposed by the international community for recognition of its legitimacy.

The notion that it was Israel, not Hamas, that violated a cease-fire agreement will undoubtedly offend a wide swath of Israel supporters. To point out that it is not the first time Israel has done so will offend them even more deeply. But it was Shmuel Zakai, a retired brigadier general and former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division, and not “leftist” critics, who said about the Israel Gaza war of 2009 that during the six-month period of a truce then in place, Israel made a central error “by failing to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians in the [Gaza] Strip. … You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they are in and expect Hamas just to sit around and do nothing.”

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PEPPER SPRAYED & PURSUED IN NORTH TEL AVIV

July 26, 2014
http://thelefternwall.com/2014/07/26/pepper-sprayed-pursued-in-north-tel-aviv/
It happened after the demonstration -the biggest in Tel Aviv against the war yet, estimates of over 6,000 demonstrators- had mostly dispersed. The now-familiar group of right-wing demonstrators had worked themselves up into a frenzy throughout the speeches by left-wing Knesset Members and bereaved parents and chants to end the war, end the siege, end the occupation, end the violence.  They were screaming: “Traitors!” “Death to Arabs and Leftists!” “You all get fucked in the ass!” The usual. The two demonstrations had been tightly cordoned off by the police, though. And then, after.

A large number of us were walking away, in a cluster, for safety’s sake, and then suddenly, there’s yelling, screaming, pushing. I don’t know how it started, but I do know that I looked over to see the rightists begin hitting people on the heads with their flag poles, blue and white flags crashing down. I rush over to try to calm things, speaking in an easy tone, making eye contact, and it seems to work with a few of the guys, who hesitate as they look at me. And then:

Ffffsssst.

And my eyes are burning.

I blink rapidly. Could this be tear gas? No. My throat feels clear. But my eyes are stinging and fuzzy. I ask a bearded man next to me, also blinking and tearing up, what happened, and he says: “Pepper spray.” I don’t know if it was the right-wingers or undercover police. Next thing I do know is that I look up to see another demonstrator hit over the head with a aluminum crutch– and then blood starts pouring out, and everything seems more serious and scary.

Some activists -a few who I recognized as anarchists experienced at dealing with violence- ask everyone to stay together, and we walk away quickly, as a group. After a block or two, Kobi asks me to take a few others off to the left, so five of us branch off, and the rest of the group begins to disperse in different directions. We walk, alternating between shocked laughter and silence, my eyes still fuzzy but the pain dulling. A group of about six guys- a few wearing kippahs, all seeming to be Mizrahi/Jews of Middle Eastern descent (a devastating element of these clashes is the race breakdown, with many of the leftists being Ashkenazi/white, and many of the rightists being Mizrahi. My friend, Daria, who is leftist and Mizrahi said that at another demo, she wore a shirt with some phrase about being Moroccan, and folks on both sides of the barrier seemed terribly confused) saw us, recognized something or someone, and started yelling “You all get fucked in the ass!” “Fuck you all!” “We should kill you, traitors.” We kept our eyes down, did not respond, and they walked onwards.

Then we got a drink -because we needed to process and because most of Tel Aviv seemed to be bopping along as usual, drinking, chatting, flags flupping, et cetera- and then went home.

And the demonstration?

The demonstration was good, considering. It was big, it was somber, it took itself seriously. The crowd was by far the biggest since the beginning of this recent violence, and it looked like people were trickling in all night. Here were a few of my tweet-observations:

And that is all for tonight. Facebook and twitter report of more demonstrators injured, which is horrible but also really not the story, just the subplot. Gaza. All of the people there. I can’t imagine. I am wired and alert with sadness; it is 1:00 in the morning. Please, enough.

Survivors of massacre in Khuza’a say Israeli forces used Palestinians as human shields

Yousef Alhelou on July 26, 2014

Khuza’a is a village in the very eastern part
of Khan Younis adjacent to the border fence in the southern Gaza strip.
 Its farmers have faced death almost on a daily basis in the past 7
years as Israeli gunfire has become the norm along the buffer zone
between Gaza and Israel.

Following the Shuja’iyeh massacre,
Israeli forces invaded Khuza’a with aerial strikes targeting any moving
object. Survivors recall with horror that seemingly heavy random tank
fire led to the killing of dozens, injuring dozens others.

Over 150 of its residents were arrested by
Israeli forces. Most of them were released, others are still in
detention. Rescue calls were made live on the local radio stations, as
many residents were besieged in their homes, unable to leave. Those who
managed to leave came under fire as they were fleeing.

Ayman Abu Toaimah, 32, a resident of
Khuza’a recalls, “As Israeli invading troops advanced to the village
they besieged it and used residents as human shields. When the Israeli
army arrested people and then released some of them, they were told they
are free to go back to the village, but as they were fleeing they came
under fire and some of them shot dead. These people were used as human
shields.”

Abu Saleem, 56, a resident of
Khuza’a echoed Abu Toaimah, “Israelis claim that Hamas is using us as
human shields– how? This is a lie, we do not see fighters in the
streets. It’s them, the Israelis who used us as human shields in Khuza’a
and Shuja’iyeh. They turned our
houses into military posts, terrified residents in the houses. They
attacked innocent civilians with their bombs, and missiles, they
attacked chicken farms, they burned our crops, they have no mercy.”

What happened in Khuza’a was a massacre.
Civilians were killed in their homes and while they were fleeing. Even
ambulances were not immune. Paramedics report that Israeli forces
stopped ambulances that were trying to reach casualties and tried to
arrest a number of wounded. Ambulances came under fire despite the
coordination by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Scenes of dead bodies scattered in the streets reminiscent of the Sabra
and Shatila massacre that took place in two Palestinian refugee camps in
1982 have begun to leak out of the village.

Abu Ali Qudail a resident of Khuza’a said:
“When the ICRC told us that ambulances are waiting us at the entrance of
the village from the western side, about 1,000 people rushed to leave
their homes, some of which were used as a hideout for Israeli forces. As
people were leaving they were surprised that the ambulances were not
there, and as we were waiting tank shells rained down on our heads.”

Many people were killed, many others injured.
Survivors say they could not help the wounded, many were still under
the rubble, homes were destroyed and the smell of smoke and bombs was
everywhere.

Abu Ali Qudail continued: “I was watching
members of my family dying in front of me, some of them were torn to
pieces. Rami, Ibrahim, Alia, Haj Abed died..we had to leave them behind,
as soon as we reached one of the Khan Younis schools we entered it to
seek shelter but it was very crowded with people who fled their homes.
It’s hard to see people dying and you do not know what to do. One of my
relatives’ homes were struck while they were inside.”

As the all-out Israeli assault on Gaza
entered its 19th day, John Kerry announced from Cairo that he proposed a
one week ceasefire, but Israel’s PM Netanyahu refused the offer and
only agreed to a 12-hour lull.

Ma’an News reports
on one family that fled Khuza’a and was then killed by an Israeli
missile strike in Khan Younis as the ceasefire went into effect:

Minutes before a 12-hour humanitarian ceasefire went into
effect in Gaza on Saturday morning, an Israeli airstrike left at least
20 members of a Palestinian family dead in Khan Younis refugee camp.

The al-Najjar family had fled their homes in Khuzaa, just east of
Khan Younis, earlier in the day after Israeli artillery shelling there
killed dozens, and they were hoping to find shelter somewhere further
from the border.

Their refuge in Khan Younis, however, turned out to be anything but,
as missiles fired from Israeli warplanes just before 8 a.m. completely
leveled the four-story building they were sleeping in.

The airstrike killed eleven children, four women, and five men from the family, according to Palestinian medical sources.

The killing of the al-Najjar family brought the death toll in Gaza since the beginning of hostilities 18 days ago to 940.

Following the attack on the UN school in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza
in which 17 people were killed and over 200 injured, 29 of the UN Human
Rights Council’s 47 members voted in favor of creating a commission of
inquiry to look at possible war crimes committed by Israel. Only the
United States voted against the resolution, while 17 states abstained,
10 of them European.

The vote was taken after Navi Pillay, the UN’s human rights
commissioner, said “there seems to be a strong possibility that
international law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to
war crimes.”