We have no words left

[subsuelo]

"I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing." Those chilling words were spoken on al-Jazeera on Saturday by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defence official in the Sderot area adjacent to the Gaza Strip. For days Israeli planes have bombed Gaza. Almost 300 Palestinians have been killed and a thousand injured, the majority civilians, including women and children. Israel claims most of the dead were Hamas "terrorists". In fact, the targets were police stations in dense residential areas, and the dead included many police officers and other civilians. Under international law, police officers are civilians, and targeting them is no less a war crime than aiming at other civilians.

Palestinians are at a loss to describe this new catastrophe. Is it our 9/11, or is it a taste of the "bigger shoah" Matan Vilnai, the deputy defence minister, threatened in February, after the last round of mass killings?

Israel says it is acting in "retaliation" for rockets fired with increasing intensity ever since a six-month truce expired on 19 December. But the bombs dropped on Gaza are only a variation in Israel's method of killing Palestinians. In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food, cancer treatments and other medicines by an Israeli blockade that targeted 1.5 million people - mostly refugees and children - caged into the Gaza Strip. The orders of Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, to hold back medicine were just as lethal and illegal as those to send in the warplanes.

...

With governments and international institutions failing to do their jobs, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee - representing hundreds of organisations - has renewed its call on international civil society to intensify its support for the sanctions campaign modelled on the successful anti-apartheid movement.

Now is the time to channel our raw emotions into a long-term effort to make sure we do not wake up to "another Gaza" ever again.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/29/israel-gaza-attack-palestinian-reaction">Ali Abunimah/The Guardian - read more

[Dennis Donovan]

1. Recommended if I could...

[THUNDER HANDS]

2. correct me if I'm wrong, but

is there anything preventing other arab nations from sending in food and medicine to Gaza?

[azurnoir]

3. Well other than the Israeli air and water blockade?

oh yeah I forgot Egypt, all of the shortages in Gaza are due to the Egyptian blockade that's right I forgot wow I even forgot that it was Egypt that signed international agreements that said it would provide such services and what is with all of this propaganda that states it was Israel thanks you should get a medal.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

5. No, but instead they have sent weapons

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

4. The only way they will stop the war

is for one side to completely kill everyone on the other. OR both sides realize that the ONLY way to survive is to come to the table and hammer out a peace agreement. But since the signers of the Camp David accords were both assassinated by their own countrymen, I don't give the latter option much hope.

[Vegasaurus]

6. As long as militant terrorists insist on killing Israelis and Jews

there isn't a chance for peace.

The Palestinians gave up the best hope for a state they ever had.

They won't ever get that good an option again, and Arafat blew it for them completely.

Now they live with the misery of a terrorist group masquerading as a government, one that would sacrifice all of its people in order to fulfill its mission of annihilating Israel and Jews.