The Gaza crisis compels us to interrogate when, if ever, we consider armed resistance acceptable The Guardian, Monday 12 January 2009
Four years ago, during a visit to Gaza to interview the boys throwing blast bombs at the Israeli troops then protecting the settlements in the coastal enclave, the question came up repeatedly over why parents permitted it. It was a moot point. For not only was the activity largely pointless - few of the bombs came close to their targets, and were more dangerous to those who threw them - but the inevitable return of Israeli fire hurt far more of the children. The approximation of an answer that I gleaned was complex, but nearly five years later it has a resonance for one of the most compelling questions of the continuing Gaza crisis: why is it that the militant factions have persisted with rocket fire that has almost no military value?
It is not to be found in the bravado that says it welcomes the Israeli ground invasion as an opportunity to kill Israeli troops. Instead, it is to be found in a more subtle conjunction of motivations revolving around the idea of resistance. It served - said my interview subjects - multiple functions: as a form of psychological release; as a focus for social cohesion and national identity, generating "martyrs" to celebrate; and, finally, as a constant reminder to the "other" - the enemy - that the Palestinians had not been defeated.
It was intimately interwoven for me then with another issue: the rejection of non-violent resistance by large sections of Palestinian society. While that issue retains its urgency, these days it is interwoven with a second, equally compelling, point of interest - when do we regard armed resistance as being acceptable?
In recent years, it has been seen as unremarkable to support the rights of groups to turn to violence in order to pursue ambitions of statehood, seceding from regimes that they complain suppress both their human rights and desire for self-determination. In both Kosovo and Darfur the west has sided with the secessionists.
In the context of Gaza and Israel - as Michael Walzer, author of Just and Unjust Wars, argued in a 2002 essay on the region - one of the problems is the oversimplification of the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. The reality, he argued, was that there were "four wars" being fought at different times, each of them requiring a different moral response: a Palestinian war to destroy the state of Israel; a Palestinian war to create a state alongside Israel and end the occupation; an Israeli war for security within the 1967 •borders; and an Israeli war for a Greater Israel, for settlements and the occupied territories.
The difficulty is that the wars in Israel/Palestine that people believe they are fighting overlap - and in the moral realm are often contradictory. So Walzer categorises the war to destroy Israel as "unjust", while arguing that the war to create a Palestinian state - while in pursuit of a legitimate "goal" - could have been pursued without violence. "Winning the second war," he argues, "depends on losing the first."
Walzer also famously propounded the notion of the "supreme emergency" - his framework of permission for state terror, founded on the fire-bombing of German cities in the second world war when the allies were faced with the prospect of defeat by the Nazis. It saw the targeting of civilians, against his general view that civilians should never be targeted.
Although Walzer would perhaps deny its applicability, the consequences of Israel's economic blockade of Gaza come close to the idea of a supreme emergency (much in the same way that Israel has justified its attack on the Gaza Strip in similar terms). Under the blockade, Gazan society has been brought close to disintegration: Gaza's economy has suffered irreparable damage; one in two residents live in poverty; and its always fragile social, kinship and political relationships have violently broken down.
What has made the issue even more murky - as Conor Gearty, professor of human rights law at the LSE has noted - is the way in which terrorism is less and less regarded as a "technique", albeit a horrible one, in pursuit of a political agenda. Instead, it has been deliberately redefined, largely by states, to mean a "category of person" - making it easy to ignore the underlying causes while concentrating on the acts.
None of the above should be read as a defence of terror, or even as an argument for armed resistance. The tragedy of Gaza is the acceptance on both sides that killing and oppression have more value than negotiation. And while many in the international community - and in Israel - remain stuck on the idea that the Jewish state has a monopoly on the deployment of the language of "supreme emergency", more violence is inevitable.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Children of Gaza: stories of those who died and the trauma for those who survived
Rory McCarthy reports from Gaza City on the individual stories of some victims and the physical and psychological toll on an estimated 350,000 youngsters
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 January 2009
Amal Abed Rabbo, two: one of the children killed during Israeli raids on Gaza
Amal Abed Rabbo, two, photographed by her family after she died in an Israeli attack outside her house in the village of Izbit Abed Rabbo, Gaza, on 7 January 2009
Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed today with her right leg in plaster, and held together by a line of steel pins dug deep into her skin. For several days after her operation Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even now talks only in a low whisper.
In her past are bitter memories: watching her father die in the street outside their home, then hearing another shell land and kill her brother Ala'a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16, and then the three days that she spent alone, injured and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a neighbour's abandoned house before she could be rescued last Sunday.
Ahead of her, she has a long recovery. First there is an imminent flight to France for the best possible medical treatment, many more operations and then months of rehabilitation and psychiatric care.
Only now, after most of the dead have been buried, is the first properly researched reckoning of the toll emerging. What already stands out is the striking cost borne by the children of Gaza, who make up more than half of the 1.5 million people living in this overcrowded strip of land.
The Palestinian death toll after three weeks of Israel's war was 1,285, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, or 1,268, according to the al-Mezan Human Rights Centre. Among those dead were at least 280 children.
The impact will be felt by many more for years to come. Among the more than 4,000 people injured more than a quarter were children, some left with severe disabilities. The Gaza Community Health Programme estimates that half Gaza's children – around 350,000 – will develop some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Amira Qirm, who lived in Tel al-Hawa, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in Gaza City, is among the few in line to receive medical treatment abroad.
Already she has a dream to fulfil once she returns to Gaza. "I want to be a lawyer," she said today , "and to stand in court facing the Israelis for what they have done."
Most of the other children will have to make do with treatment in Gaza. Last week some psychologists were walking through the ruins of a house in Atatra, talking to a boy from the Abu Halima family who had lost his father, three brothers and an infant sister in a horrific fire after an Israeli phosphorus shell hit the house.
"The problem is they are not feeling safe even in their own homes, on the streets, in the mosques," said Ehassan Afifi, the psychologist. "This boy is seeing what happened as if it is an endless movie. The physically affected can be operated on, sometimes cured. But these mental problems may lead to problems for the rest of their lives."
Israel has consistently rejected international criticism that its forces used excessive and indiscriminate firepower.
Asked about the criticisms, the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in an interview yesterday in the Israeli paper Ma'ariv that the mental health of the children of southern Israel had suffered in recent years. He added: "So now there is talk about Israel's cruelty. When you win, you automatically hurt more than you've been hurt. And we didn't want to lose this campaign. What did you want, for hundreds of our soldiers to die? That, after all, was the alternative."
On the Israeli side 13 died in this conflict, three of them civilians. In total in the past eight years, 20 people in Israel have died from rocket and mortar attacks launched by militants in Gaza.
Halting this rocket fire was Israel's primary goal and for the last few days, at least, it has achieved its aim.
But Eyad al-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist who leads the Gaza community health programme, said that years of violence in Gaza had only fostered radicalism among its young people, who have seen their fathers humiliated and now left defenceless.
His organisation is training 1,000 people to spread out across Gaza to offer help with grief and mourning and to pass serious cases on to professional therapists.
Already there were reports, he said, of children bed-wetting, stuttering, falling mute, having trouble sleeping, becoming violent or restless and losing their appetites.
The difference between this war and the uprisings, like the first intifada of the late 1980s, was that whereas there was once a frontline, with tanks near the border, now the bombing and artillery reached deep inside Gaza's urban areas and into the homes of ordinary families. "Yes, we have developed a coping strategy but we are still frightened of the Israelis doing this again and again," said al-Sarraj.
"The devastation is a reminder of what the Israelis will do. You need to give children a protective environment and give a chance to the fathers to regain their status as protectors and providers by giving them jobs and homes to live in … This is a massive, man-made disaster and we have to tackle the results."
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 January 2009
Amal Abed Rabbo, two: one of the children killed during Israeli raids on Gaza
Amal Abed Rabbo, two, photographed by her family after she died in an Israeli attack outside her house in the village of Izbit Abed Rabbo, Gaza, on 7 January 2009
Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed today with her right leg in plaster, and held together by a line of steel pins dug deep into her skin. For several days after her operation Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even now talks only in a low whisper.
In her past are bitter memories: watching her father die in the street outside their home, then hearing another shell land and kill her brother Ala'a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16, and then the three days that she spent alone, injured and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a neighbour's abandoned house before she could be rescued last Sunday.
Ahead of her, she has a long recovery. First there is an imminent flight to France for the best possible medical treatment, many more operations and then months of rehabilitation and psychiatric care.
Only now, after most of the dead have been buried, is the first properly researched reckoning of the toll emerging. What already stands out is the striking cost borne by the children of Gaza, who make up more than half of the 1.5 million people living in this overcrowded strip of land.
The Palestinian death toll after three weeks of Israel's war was 1,285, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, or 1,268, according to the al-Mezan Human Rights Centre. Among those dead were at least 280 children.
The impact will be felt by many more for years to come. Among the more than 4,000 people injured more than a quarter were children, some left with severe disabilities. The Gaza Community Health Programme estimates that half Gaza's children – around 350,000 – will develop some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Amira Qirm, who lived in Tel al-Hawa, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in Gaza City, is among the few in line to receive medical treatment abroad.
Already she has a dream to fulfil once she returns to Gaza. "I want to be a lawyer," she said today , "and to stand in court facing the Israelis for what they have done."
Most of the other children will have to make do with treatment in Gaza. Last week some psychologists were walking through the ruins of a house in Atatra, talking to a boy from the Abu Halima family who had lost his father, three brothers and an infant sister in a horrific fire after an Israeli phosphorus shell hit the house.
"The problem is they are not feeling safe even in their own homes, on the streets, in the mosques," said Ehassan Afifi, the psychologist. "This boy is seeing what happened as if it is an endless movie. The physically affected can be operated on, sometimes cured. But these mental problems may lead to problems for the rest of their lives."
Israel has consistently rejected international criticism that its forces used excessive and indiscriminate firepower.
Asked about the criticisms, the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in an interview yesterday in the Israeli paper Ma'ariv that the mental health of the children of southern Israel had suffered in recent years. He added: "So now there is talk about Israel's cruelty. When you win, you automatically hurt more than you've been hurt. And we didn't want to lose this campaign. What did you want, for hundreds of our soldiers to die? That, after all, was the alternative."
On the Israeli side 13 died in this conflict, three of them civilians. In total in the past eight years, 20 people in Israel have died from rocket and mortar attacks launched by militants in Gaza.
Halting this rocket fire was Israel's primary goal and for the last few days, at least, it has achieved its aim.
But Eyad al-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist who leads the Gaza community health programme, said that years of violence in Gaza had only fostered radicalism among its young people, who have seen their fathers humiliated and now left defenceless.
His organisation is training 1,000 people to spread out across Gaza to offer help with grief and mourning and to pass serious cases on to professional therapists.
Already there were reports, he said, of children bed-wetting, stuttering, falling mute, having trouble sleeping, becoming violent or restless and losing their appetites.
The difference between this war and the uprisings, like the first intifada of the late 1980s, was that whereas there was once a frontline, with tanks near the border, now the bombing and artillery reached deep inside Gaza's urban areas and into the homes of ordinary families. "Yes, we have developed a coping strategy but we are still frightened of the Israelis doing this again and again," said al-Sarraj.
"The devastation is a reminder of what the Israelis will do. You need to give children a protective environment and give a chance to the fathers to regain their status as protectors and providers by giving them jobs and homes to live in … This is a massive, man-made disaster and we have to tackle the results."
Amid dust and death, a family's story speaks for the terror of war
48 members of the Samouni family were killed in one day when Israel's battle with Hamas suddenly centred on their homes
* Rory McCarthy in Zeitoun guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 January 2009 21.26
Helmi Samouni knelt yesterday on the floor of the bedroom he once shared with his wife and their five-month old son, scraping his fingers through a thick layer of ash and broken glass looking for mementoes of their life together. "I found a ring. I might find more," he said.
His wife Maha and their child Muhammad were killed in the second week of Israel's 22-day war in Gaza when they were shelled by Israeli forces as they took shelter nearby along with dozens of relatives. In total 48 people from one family are now known to have died that Monday morning, 5 January, in Zeitoun, on the southern outskirts of Gaza City.
Of all the horrors visited on the civilians of Gaza in this war the fate of the Samounis, a family of farmers who lived close together in simple breeze-block homes, was perhaps the gravest.
Around a dozen homes in this small area were destroyed, no more than piles of rubble in the sand yesterday. Helmi Samouni's two-storey house was one of the few left standing, despite the gaping hole from a large tank shell that pierced his blackened bedroom wall. During the invasion it had been taken over by Israeli soldiers, who wrecked the furniture and set up sand-bagged shooting positions throughout.
They left behind their own unique detritus: bullet casings, roasted peanuts in tins with Hebrew script, a plastic bag containing a "High Quality Body Warmer", dozens of olive-green waste disposal bags, some empty, some stinking full - the troops' portable toilets.
But most disturbing of all was the graffiti they daubed on the walls of the ground floor. Some was in Hebrew, but much was naively written in English: "Arabs need 2 die", "Die you all", "Make war not peace", "1 is down, 999,999 to go", and scrawled on an image of a gravestone the words: "Arabs 1948-2009".
There were several sketches of the Star of David flag. "Gaza here we are," it said in English next to one.
Helmi's brother Salah, 30, had an apartment in the same house. He too was pulling out what he could, including an Israeli work permit once issued to his father. "They gave him a permit and then they came from Israel and they killed him," said Salah. In the attack he lost both his parents, Talal and Rahma, and his two-year-old daughter Aza.
During the war, Israel banned journalists from entering Gaza. But the accounts of Salah and his neighbours outside the rubble of their homes yesterday corroborate the accounts from witnesses given in the days after the attack, accounts which led the UN to describe the killings at Zeitoun as one of the gravest episodes of the war and the Red Cross to call it, in a rare public rebuke, "a shocking incident".
More than a dozen bodies were pulled from the rubble on Sunday, and one more yesterday, bringing the Samouni death toll to 48, according to Dr Mouawia Hassanein, head of Gaza's Emergency Medical Services. With more bodies being recovered each day, the death toll from Israel's three-week war now stands at 1,360. On the Israeli side, 13 were killed.
On the second Saturday of the war, after a week of Israeli air strikes, there came a wave of heavy artillery shelling which preceded the ground invasion of Gaza. That night, Salah Samouni took shelter on the ground floor with 16 others from his family. By the next morning, Sunday 4 January, more neighbours had come looking for shelter and the number now there was approaching 50.
"They fired a shell into the upstairs floor and it started a fire," said Salah. "We called the ambulance and the fire service, but no one was able to reach us." Soon a group of Israeli soldiers approached. "They came and banged on the door and told everyone to leave the house," he said. They walked a few metres down the dirt road and entered the large, single-storey home of Wa'el Samouni.
There they stayed for the rest of the day, now a group of around 100 men, women and children, with no food and little water. Though there may have been Palestinian fighters operating in the open fields around the houses, all the witnesses are adamant that those gathered in Wa'el Samouni's house were all civilians and all from the same extended family.
On the Monday morning, four of the men - Salah among them - decided to go out to bring back firewood for cooking. "They fired a shell straight at us," Salah said. Two of the four were killed instantly, the other two were injured. Salah was hit by shrapnel on his forehead, his back and his legs. Moments later, he said, two more shells struck the house, killing dozens of them.
Salah and a group of around 70 fled the house, shouting to the soldiers that there were women and children with them. They ran to the main road and on for a kilometre until ambulances could reach them. Others stayed behind.
Wa'el Samouni's father, Faris, 59, lived next door to the house where the crowd had taken shelter. He had a single-storey house with only a corrugated iron roof and so his family had moved next door to shelter, but he had stayed behind. He was unable to leave his building for fear of being shot, but on the Tuesday the survivors called to him to bring water. He ran quickly the short distance and joined them.
"Dead bodies were lying on the ground. Some people were injured, they were just trying to help each other," he said. There among the dead Faris found his wife Rizka, 50; his daughter-in-law Anan; and his granddaughter Huda, 16.
Only on the afternoon of the following day, the Wednesday, were the survivors rescued when the Red Cross arrived to carry them out to hospital.
The Israeli military has said it is investigating what happened at Zeitoun. It has repeatedly denied that its troops ordered the residents to gather in one house and said its troops do not intentionally target civilians.
Others in the family saw a different but equally grim fate. Faraj Samouni, 22, lived with his family next door to Helmi and Salah. Again on the Saturday evening the family had sought shelter from the heavy shelling, a group of 18 of them gathering in one room for the night. On the Sunday morning the Israeli soldiers approached. "They shouted for the owner of the house to come out. My father opened the door and went out and they shot him right there," said Faraj.
With the body of his father Atiya, 45, slumped on the ground outside, the soldiers fired more shots into the room, he said, this time killing Faraj's younger half-brother Ahmad, who was four years old, and the child's mother.
Yesterday there was blood on the wall of the small room where the child had been sitting.
Then the troops ordered them to lie on the floor. But when a fire started burning in the room next door, sending in acrid smoke, they began shouting to be allowed out. "We were shouting 'babies, children'," Faraj said.
Eventually the soldiers let them out and they ran along the street, passing the others who had gathered in Wa'el Samouni's house and making their way out on to the main road and to safety.
When Faraj returned, he found his home completely destroyed, a pile of twisted iron bars and concrete. On a small outdoor grill were the charred remains of the eight aubergines that the family had been cooking that Sunday morning for their breakfast.
Only on Sunday was he able to bury his father's body and even then there was a final injustice: Gaza's graves are now so crowded and concrete so scarce because of Israel's long blockade that he had to break open an older family grave and put his father in with the other corpse.
"How can we have peace when they are killing civilians, even children?" said Faraj. "I support the ceasefire now. We have no power. If there wasn't a ceasefire we couldn't even bury our dead."
Some Gazans speak privately of their anger at Hamas, blaming the Islamist movement that rules the small territory for dragging them into this conflict. But by far the larger majority are speaking now of their bitter anger at Israel and their deep resentment at the apathy of the Arab world and the rest of the international community, which failed to halt the destruction and the killing.
"We blame everyone," said Ibrahim Samouni, 45, who lost his wife and four of his sons in the killings at Zeitoun. "We need everyone to look at us and see what has happened here. We are not resistance fighters. We are ordinary people."
* Rory McCarthy in Zeitoun guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 January 2009 21.26
Helmi Samouni knelt yesterday on the floor of the bedroom he once shared with his wife and their five-month old son, scraping his fingers through a thick layer of ash and broken glass looking for mementoes of their life together. "I found a ring. I might find more," he said.
His wife Maha and their child Muhammad were killed in the second week of Israel's 22-day war in Gaza when they were shelled by Israeli forces as they took shelter nearby along with dozens of relatives. In total 48 people from one family are now known to have died that Monday morning, 5 January, in Zeitoun, on the southern outskirts of Gaza City.
Of all the horrors visited on the civilians of Gaza in this war the fate of the Samounis, a family of farmers who lived close together in simple breeze-block homes, was perhaps the gravest.
Around a dozen homes in this small area were destroyed, no more than piles of rubble in the sand yesterday. Helmi Samouni's two-storey house was one of the few left standing, despite the gaping hole from a large tank shell that pierced his blackened bedroom wall. During the invasion it had been taken over by Israeli soldiers, who wrecked the furniture and set up sand-bagged shooting positions throughout.
They left behind their own unique detritus: bullet casings, roasted peanuts in tins with Hebrew script, a plastic bag containing a "High Quality Body Warmer", dozens of olive-green waste disposal bags, some empty, some stinking full - the troops' portable toilets.
But most disturbing of all was the graffiti they daubed on the walls of the ground floor. Some was in Hebrew, but much was naively written in English: "Arabs need 2 die", "Die you all", "Make war not peace", "1 is down, 999,999 to go", and scrawled on an image of a gravestone the words: "Arabs 1948-2009".
There were several sketches of the Star of David flag. "Gaza here we are," it said in English next to one.
Helmi's brother Salah, 30, had an apartment in the same house. He too was pulling out what he could, including an Israeli work permit once issued to his father. "They gave him a permit and then they came from Israel and they killed him," said Salah. In the attack he lost both his parents, Talal and Rahma, and his two-year-old daughter Aza.
During the war, Israel banned journalists from entering Gaza. But the accounts of Salah and his neighbours outside the rubble of their homes yesterday corroborate the accounts from witnesses given in the days after the attack, accounts which led the UN to describe the killings at Zeitoun as one of the gravest episodes of the war and the Red Cross to call it, in a rare public rebuke, "a shocking incident".
More than a dozen bodies were pulled from the rubble on Sunday, and one more yesterday, bringing the Samouni death toll to 48, according to Dr Mouawia Hassanein, head of Gaza's Emergency Medical Services. With more bodies being recovered each day, the death toll from Israel's three-week war now stands at 1,360. On the Israeli side, 13 were killed.
On the second Saturday of the war, after a week of Israeli air strikes, there came a wave of heavy artillery shelling which preceded the ground invasion of Gaza. That night, Salah Samouni took shelter on the ground floor with 16 others from his family. By the next morning, Sunday 4 January, more neighbours had come looking for shelter and the number now there was approaching 50.
"They fired a shell into the upstairs floor and it started a fire," said Salah. "We called the ambulance and the fire service, but no one was able to reach us." Soon a group of Israeli soldiers approached. "They came and banged on the door and told everyone to leave the house," he said. They walked a few metres down the dirt road and entered the large, single-storey home of Wa'el Samouni.
There they stayed for the rest of the day, now a group of around 100 men, women and children, with no food and little water. Though there may have been Palestinian fighters operating in the open fields around the houses, all the witnesses are adamant that those gathered in Wa'el Samouni's house were all civilians and all from the same extended family.
On the Monday morning, four of the men - Salah among them - decided to go out to bring back firewood for cooking. "They fired a shell straight at us," Salah said. Two of the four were killed instantly, the other two were injured. Salah was hit by shrapnel on his forehead, his back and his legs. Moments later, he said, two more shells struck the house, killing dozens of them.
Salah and a group of around 70 fled the house, shouting to the soldiers that there were women and children with them. They ran to the main road and on for a kilometre until ambulances could reach them. Others stayed behind.
Wa'el Samouni's father, Faris, 59, lived next door to the house where the crowd had taken shelter. He had a single-storey house with only a corrugated iron roof and so his family had moved next door to shelter, but he had stayed behind. He was unable to leave his building for fear of being shot, but on the Tuesday the survivors called to him to bring water. He ran quickly the short distance and joined them.
"Dead bodies were lying on the ground. Some people were injured, they were just trying to help each other," he said. There among the dead Faris found his wife Rizka, 50; his daughter-in-law Anan; and his granddaughter Huda, 16.
Only on the afternoon of the following day, the Wednesday, were the survivors rescued when the Red Cross arrived to carry them out to hospital.
The Israeli military has said it is investigating what happened at Zeitoun. It has repeatedly denied that its troops ordered the residents to gather in one house and said its troops do not intentionally target civilians.
Others in the family saw a different but equally grim fate. Faraj Samouni, 22, lived with his family next door to Helmi and Salah. Again on the Saturday evening the family had sought shelter from the heavy shelling, a group of 18 of them gathering in one room for the night. On the Sunday morning the Israeli soldiers approached. "They shouted for the owner of the house to come out. My father opened the door and went out and they shot him right there," said Faraj.
With the body of his father Atiya, 45, slumped on the ground outside, the soldiers fired more shots into the room, he said, this time killing Faraj's younger half-brother Ahmad, who was four years old, and the child's mother.
Yesterday there was blood on the wall of the small room where the child had been sitting.
Then the troops ordered them to lie on the floor. But when a fire started burning in the room next door, sending in acrid smoke, they began shouting to be allowed out. "We were shouting 'babies, children'," Faraj said.
Eventually the soldiers let them out and they ran along the street, passing the others who had gathered in Wa'el Samouni's house and making their way out on to the main road and to safety.
When Faraj returned, he found his home completely destroyed, a pile of twisted iron bars and concrete. On a small outdoor grill were the charred remains of the eight aubergines that the family had been cooking that Sunday morning for their breakfast.
Only on Sunday was he able to bury his father's body and even then there was a final injustice: Gaza's graves are now so crowded and concrete so scarce because of Israel's long blockade that he had to break open an older family grave and put his father in with the other corpse.
"How can we have peace when they are killing civilians, even children?" said Faraj. "I support the ceasefire now. We have no power. If there wasn't a ceasefire we couldn't even bury our dead."
Some Gazans speak privately of their anger at Hamas, blaming the Islamist movement that rules the small territory for dragging them into this conflict. But by far the larger majority are speaking now of their bitter anger at Israel and their deep resentment at the apathy of the Arab world and the rest of the international community, which failed to halt the destruction and the killing.
"We blame everyone," said Ibrahim Samouni, 45, who lost his wife and four of his sons in the killings at Zeitoun. "We need everyone to look at us and see what has happened here. We are not resistance fighters. We are ordinary people."
Monday, 26 January 2009
Ultimate aim remains unclear as government prepares for next move
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem The Guardian, Monday 12 January 2009 Article history
The problem is to define victory. At first, Israel said that the goal of its onslaught against Gaza was to stop the Hamas rockets. But after more than two weeks and nearly 900 Palestinians killed, almost a third of them children and young people, the rockets are still flying into Israel by the dozen each day.
So then Israel said the end game was deterrence - to make Hamas recognise that the price of breaching the next ceasefire was so high it would no longer fire the rockets even if it has them.
But there are many among Israel's political and military elite who doubt that deterrence works with the Islamist group. Every rocket fired into Israel is a victory for Hamas and it is unlikely to stop unless a ceasefire comes with major Israeli concessions, such as lifting the economic blockade of Gaza. And then Hamas would claim its own victory.
So the army has been preparing militarily and politically for phase three - an escalation of the assault that is thought likely to include a major offensive into urban areas such as Gaza City, with all the risks that street fighting brings.
Hamas has said that if Israel attacked the city it would fall into its trap and that the Israeli military would lose so many soldiers battling through the warren of narrow streets, facing roadside bombs and hit-and-run attacks, that the Israeli public would never stand for it.
The army claims Hamas's armed wing has taken a severe beating and that the relatively low number of Israeli casualties so far - with nine soldiers killed, four of them by an Israeli shell - is evidence that resistance is failing.
"The experience so far shows that Gaza is not turning in to a death trap for the Israeli forces," said Shlomo Brom, a former chief of strategic planning in the Israeli military. "I don't think fear of casualties is the concern here. The concern is to decide what this operation is for. The political cost will be dependent on what is in phase three."
The military and the politicians are divided not only over whether to go to phase three, but what it is intended to achieve.
Brom said one goal would be to ensure that Hamas could no longer smuggle weapons into Gaza through tunnels under the border with Egypt.
"If there is breakdown in the next ceasefire the rockets will be launched not only against Be'er Sheva but Tel Aviv," he said. "We want to prevent it, and that was not achieved yet. That is not simple to achieve because we don't expect Hamas to deliver it.
"We expect the Egyptians to deliver it, so one of the purposes of the continuation of the fighting is to put pressure on Egypt or the international community to put pressure on Egypt."
If that is the goal, then the focus of the next phase of the assault will be along the border with Egypt where Israel may reoccupy the frontier and bring the Gazan town of Rafah under its control. Israel has tried occupying Rafah before and been forced out by the high number of Israeli casualties.
However, there are those in the military who see phase three as serving another purpose entirely.
The Israeli press reported yesterday that the officer in command of military operations in Gaza had urged the cabinet to allow the army to make the most of a "once in a generation" opportunity.
"If we don't do that we'll be missing a historic opportunity," Major General Yoav Galant is reported to have said.
Brom said Galant's history opportunity was a desire to topple Gaza's Islamist government.
"I think the main risk in this campaign is that through a series of incremental decisions to go a step further we may find ourselves in a situation in which eventually we change the objective of the war, and instead of the objective being to create this new balance of deterrence, the objective will be to topple Hamas, to destroy Hamas," he said.
Such a move would be fraught with danger, not least the risk of becoming trapped in Gaza in order to maintain control if the Hamas administration is toppled, he continued. "I think we are capable of taking the city of Gaza with a relatively small number of casualties.
"The problem is whether we are not changing our political aims and creating a situation in which we are bogged down in Gaza, in the sense that we reoccupy the Gaza Strip and now we have to decide what we are going to do with this poisonous beast."
Military stages
Phase One On the first day of the week-long air bombardment of Gaza about 250 Gazans were killed, many of them policemen at a graduation ceremony. In the following days, much of the public infrastructure was bombed.
Phase Two During the ground invasion a week later, Israeli tanks and troops seized large parts of northern Gaza, principally areas from where Hamas fired rockets into Israel. They also laid siege to towns and refugee camps.
Phase Three This is the planned ground operation into urban areas such as Gaza City. Hamas has said the city streets will be the soldiers' graveyard. But some in the army believe Hamas has been considerably weakened and such an operation would topple it from power.
Phase Four Plans for the complete reoccupation of Gaza have been drawn up, but the Israeli government says this is not on the cards.
The problem is to define victory. At first, Israel said that the goal of its onslaught against Gaza was to stop the Hamas rockets. But after more than two weeks and nearly 900 Palestinians killed, almost a third of them children and young people, the rockets are still flying into Israel by the dozen each day.
So then Israel said the end game was deterrence - to make Hamas recognise that the price of breaching the next ceasefire was so high it would no longer fire the rockets even if it has them.
But there are many among Israel's political and military elite who doubt that deterrence works with the Islamist group. Every rocket fired into Israel is a victory for Hamas and it is unlikely to stop unless a ceasefire comes with major Israeli concessions, such as lifting the economic blockade of Gaza. And then Hamas would claim its own victory.
So the army has been preparing militarily and politically for phase three - an escalation of the assault that is thought likely to include a major offensive into urban areas such as Gaza City, with all the risks that street fighting brings.
Hamas has said that if Israel attacked the city it would fall into its trap and that the Israeli military would lose so many soldiers battling through the warren of narrow streets, facing roadside bombs and hit-and-run attacks, that the Israeli public would never stand for it.
The army claims Hamas's armed wing has taken a severe beating and that the relatively low number of Israeli casualties so far - with nine soldiers killed, four of them by an Israeli shell - is evidence that resistance is failing.
"The experience so far shows that Gaza is not turning in to a death trap for the Israeli forces," said Shlomo Brom, a former chief of strategic planning in the Israeli military. "I don't think fear of casualties is the concern here. The concern is to decide what this operation is for. The political cost will be dependent on what is in phase three."
The military and the politicians are divided not only over whether to go to phase three, but what it is intended to achieve.
Brom said one goal would be to ensure that Hamas could no longer smuggle weapons into Gaza through tunnels under the border with Egypt.
"If there is breakdown in the next ceasefire the rockets will be launched not only against Be'er Sheva but Tel Aviv," he said. "We want to prevent it, and that was not achieved yet. That is not simple to achieve because we don't expect Hamas to deliver it.
"We expect the Egyptians to deliver it, so one of the purposes of the continuation of the fighting is to put pressure on Egypt or the international community to put pressure on Egypt."
If that is the goal, then the focus of the next phase of the assault will be along the border with Egypt where Israel may reoccupy the frontier and bring the Gazan town of Rafah under its control. Israel has tried occupying Rafah before and been forced out by the high number of Israeli casualties.
However, there are those in the military who see phase three as serving another purpose entirely.
The Israeli press reported yesterday that the officer in command of military operations in Gaza had urged the cabinet to allow the army to make the most of a "once in a generation" opportunity.
"If we don't do that we'll be missing a historic opportunity," Major General Yoav Galant is reported to have said.
Brom said Galant's history opportunity was a desire to topple Gaza's Islamist government.
"I think the main risk in this campaign is that through a series of incremental decisions to go a step further we may find ourselves in a situation in which eventually we change the objective of the war, and instead of the objective being to create this new balance of deterrence, the objective will be to topple Hamas, to destroy Hamas," he said.
Such a move would be fraught with danger, not least the risk of becoming trapped in Gaza in order to maintain control if the Hamas administration is toppled, he continued. "I think we are capable of taking the city of Gaza with a relatively small number of casualties.
"The problem is whether we are not changing our political aims and creating a situation in which we are bogged down in Gaza, in the sense that we reoccupy the Gaza Strip and now we have to decide what we are going to do with this poisonous beast."
Military stages
Phase One On the first day of the week-long air bombardment of Gaza about 250 Gazans were killed, many of them policemen at a graduation ceremony. In the following days, much of the public infrastructure was bombed.
Phase Two During the ground invasion a week later, Israeli tanks and troops seized large parts of northern Gaza, principally areas from where Hamas fired rockets into Israel. They also laid siege to towns and refugee camps.
Phase Three This is the planned ground operation into urban areas such as Gaza City. Hamas has said the city streets will be the soldiers' graveyard. But some in the army believe Hamas has been considerably weakened and such an operation would topple it from power.
Phase Four Plans for the complete reoccupation of Gaza have been drawn up, but the Israeli government says this is not on the cards.
'This one to the morgue, this one to intensive care'
Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem and Hazem Balousha in Gaza City The Guardian, Monday 12 January 2009 Article history
Karem Batniji, a young surgeon at the Shifa Hospital, Gaza's main medical facility, worked straight through the first 48 hours of Israel's war in Gaza. These have been gruelling days for Gaza's doctors: long hours, immense pressure and thousands of horrifically wounded patients to treat - many of them civilians. In the initial days of the Israeli offensive, hundreds of patients would arrive at once.
"I was dealing with some people in the corridor, even making operations in the corridors," he said. "On the first day we were just looking for the good cases, the people most likely to make it. With the badly injured we'd spend a long time, exhaust ourselves and take up a lot of staff, so we just had to find the good cases and focus on them," he said.
"When they brought the bodies in, I found myself standing there saying: this one to the morgue, this one to the intensive care unit, this one the morgue ... It was very hard." Among the dead have been medics: at least 11 medical staff had been killed and another 17 injured as of Wednesday last week, according to health officials.
After two days on duty, Batniji went home. "I couldn't sleep. I was just remembering: the cases, the blood, the operations, the corridors. I thought a lot about the difference between life and death. It's often just a few seconds."
Batniji, 29, trained to be a doctor in Egypt. But nothing there prepared him for what he now sees every hour in the operating room.
After operating on a 50-year-old woman with a serious stomach injury one day last week, he slipped out for a quiet cigarette. Before he could finish it he was called back in for emergency surgery on Osama Lobbed, 18, who his family insisted was a civilian. A first-year university student, he was hit by shrapnel from an Israeli shell as he stood outside his Beit Lahiya home. He was clinging to life: both his legs almost completely severed, his stomach full of shrapnel, his liver sliced in two.
The boy's family stood outside in the corridor to wait. Three hours later, the patient was sent down by lift to the intensive care unit, with a nurse operating a manual ventilator, and the family crowded round Batniji as he stepped out of the theatre. "What's going on? How's Osama?" they all shouted at once. "He's in a very bad situation," the surgeon told them. What he could not bring himself to say was that although he had avoided amputating Lobbed's legs, the boy would almost certainly die.
Batniji and some colleagues later discussed the contorted politics of Gaza. "Sometimes I disagree with these Hamas people but we are human beings, we are one people. I'm a doctor and dealing with patients as a doctor," he said. "Nothing more."
Even some of the world's most experienced war surgeons have found the situation at the Shifa particularly difficult. "It's quite gruesome. The hospital is the place where you have the ultimate confrontation with the facts of this kind of armed conflict," said Harald Veen, a Dutch surgeon who is part of a four-person team from the International Committee of the Red Cross who have spent the past week helping at the Shifa.
Because the hospital is in the centre of a city under heavy bombardment, patients who might otherwise have died are often brought in and operated on within 20 minutes of being hurt and sometimes survive, though with terrible scars and disabilities.
He said the doctors, whom he knows well from several years of visits to the Shifa, were well trained and that any large western hospital would be overwhelmed by the number of casualties they had seen. He was struck by the commitment of the doctors but said even for Gaza this was an unprecedented burden. "It's never been like this. That's obvious for everybody," he said.
Veen has worked in conflicts for the past 16 years, most recently in Iraq and Chad. But he is still struck by the appalling injuries. "One day started with a girl, six years old, with one arm blown away and a tear in her lung, and that's just the first operation," he said. "If they survive it's a lifelong disability. The day before, a man with both legs blown away. I fear in the western media we are too clean. War wounds are horrible, especially blast injuries due to high explosives. Simply put, bombing causes horrible injuries. This is the routine of daily life in the Shifa."
Karem Batniji, a young surgeon at the Shifa Hospital, Gaza's main medical facility, worked straight through the first 48 hours of Israel's war in Gaza. These have been gruelling days for Gaza's doctors: long hours, immense pressure and thousands of horrifically wounded patients to treat - many of them civilians. In the initial days of the Israeli offensive, hundreds of patients would arrive at once.
"I was dealing with some people in the corridor, even making operations in the corridors," he said. "On the first day we were just looking for the good cases, the people most likely to make it. With the badly injured we'd spend a long time, exhaust ourselves and take up a lot of staff, so we just had to find the good cases and focus on them," he said.
"When they brought the bodies in, I found myself standing there saying: this one to the morgue, this one to the intensive care unit, this one the morgue ... It was very hard." Among the dead have been medics: at least 11 medical staff had been killed and another 17 injured as of Wednesday last week, according to health officials.
After two days on duty, Batniji went home. "I couldn't sleep. I was just remembering: the cases, the blood, the operations, the corridors. I thought a lot about the difference between life and death. It's often just a few seconds."
Batniji, 29, trained to be a doctor in Egypt. But nothing there prepared him for what he now sees every hour in the operating room.
After operating on a 50-year-old woman with a serious stomach injury one day last week, he slipped out for a quiet cigarette. Before he could finish it he was called back in for emergency surgery on Osama Lobbed, 18, who his family insisted was a civilian. A first-year university student, he was hit by shrapnel from an Israeli shell as he stood outside his Beit Lahiya home. He was clinging to life: both his legs almost completely severed, his stomach full of shrapnel, his liver sliced in two.
The boy's family stood outside in the corridor to wait. Three hours later, the patient was sent down by lift to the intensive care unit, with a nurse operating a manual ventilator, and the family crowded round Batniji as he stepped out of the theatre. "What's going on? How's Osama?" they all shouted at once. "He's in a very bad situation," the surgeon told them. What he could not bring himself to say was that although he had avoided amputating Lobbed's legs, the boy would almost certainly die.
Batniji and some colleagues later discussed the contorted politics of Gaza. "Sometimes I disagree with these Hamas people but we are human beings, we are one people. I'm a doctor and dealing with patients as a doctor," he said. "Nothing more."
Even some of the world's most experienced war surgeons have found the situation at the Shifa particularly difficult. "It's quite gruesome. The hospital is the place where you have the ultimate confrontation with the facts of this kind of armed conflict," said Harald Veen, a Dutch surgeon who is part of a four-person team from the International Committee of the Red Cross who have spent the past week helping at the Shifa.
Because the hospital is in the centre of a city under heavy bombardment, patients who might otherwise have died are often brought in and operated on within 20 minutes of being hurt and sometimes survive, though with terrible scars and disabilities.
He said the doctors, whom he knows well from several years of visits to the Shifa, were well trained and that any large western hospital would be overwhelmed by the number of casualties they had seen. He was struck by the commitment of the doctors but said even for Gaza this was an unprecedented burden. "It's never been like this. That's obvious for everybody," he said.
Veen has worked in conflicts for the past 16 years, most recently in Iraq and Chad. But he is still struck by the appalling injuries. "One day started with a girl, six years old, with one arm blown away and a tear in her lung, and that's just the first operation," he said. "If they survive it's a lifelong disability. The day before, a man with both legs blown away. I fear in the western media we are too clean. War wounds are horrible, especially blast injuries due to high explosives. Simply put, bombing causes horrible injuries. This is the routine of daily life in the Shifa."
Fighting intensifies as Olmert says Israel is nearing its goal• Civilians in suburbs try to find shelter in city centre
• Mortar shell that killed 43 in UN school was off targetRory McCarthy in Jerusalem and Ed Pilkington New York
The Guardian, Monday 12 January 2009 Article history
Israeli troops were last night pushing towards Gaza's towns and cities amid heavy fighting as Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said Israel was nearing its goals in the conflict.
Many Gazans in the outlying suburbs of Gaza City were moving into the centre, desperately looking for apartments or shelter to escape the combat. Israel and Egypt have refused to open their borders to allow Gazans to flee the fighting.
About a dozen Palestinians, among them several gunmen, were killed early yesterday in Sheikh Ajleen, close to the north of Gaza City, and troops were reported to be less than a mile from the city's southern neighbourhoods last night. Tanks had moved towards the city, but then pulled back by the end of the day. At least 27 Palestinians were killed.
In a sign that a new phase of the offensive was near, Israel's military last night sent reserve units into the Strip. Brigadier General Avi Benayahu, the top military spokesman, said the units were already in Gaza, but he would not say if this meant the next stage was imminent - an invasion deep into the main towns and cities.
Olmert said the war in Gaza, now in its third week, would continue and he spoke out defiantly against the growing international criticism of Israel's killing of hundreds of Palestinians, many civilians. A UN security council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire late last week did nothing to halt the conflict and diplomacy has moved only haltingly since.
"No decision, present or future, will deny us our basic right to defend the residents of Israel," Olmert told a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
Defence officials said Hamas had been damaged but that it was unlikely ever to admit defeat. Some Israeli generals were eager to invade Gaza's urban areas.
Major General Yoav Galant, head of southern command, said an escalation was a "once in a generation" opportunity to strike at Hamas. "If we don't do that we'll be missing an historic opportunity," he was quoted as saying in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.
Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas who lives in exile in Damascus, said the offensive had ended any chance of a broader peace deal with the Palestinians.
Addressing Israel, Meshal said in a televised speech on Saturday: "You have destroyed the last chance for negotiations. No one will now believe you. What is needed is fierce resistance in Gaza and fierce support from the Arab, Islamic and international street until the aggression ends and the enemy withdraws."
Palestinian militants continued to fire rockets into southern Israel, several hitting the town of Be'er Sheva, though there were no serious casualties.
The Palestinian death toll rose to around 870 dead, of whom nearly half were women and children, with about 3,700 injured. On the Israeli side 13 people have been killed, three of them civilians.
The US president-elect, Barack Obama, described the death of civilians in the conflict as heartbreaking after being asked if his silence over the crisis could be interpreted as callousness.
"When you see civilians, whether Palestinian or Israeli, harmed, it's heartbreaking. Obviously what that does, it makes me much more determined to try and break a deadlock that has been going on for decades," he said on ABC television.
He vowed to act quickly after his inauguration to position the US as a trusted third party that could act as an interlocutor between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Israel's military admitted its bombing of a UN school last week, which killed 43 and injured 100 others, was the result of an Israeli mortar shell that missed its target by 30 metres. Previously the military had said militants inside the school compound were firing at their troops and that the troops simply returned fire.
Military sources were reported as saying that the UN school was clearly marked on the maps used by the troops.
Human Rights Watch said its researchers had seen Israeli forces using artillery-fired white phosphorus over densely populated residential areas of Gaza in violation of international humanitarian law. The weapon, used as a smokescreen, can cause serious burns. Israel has refused to detail which weapons are being used in the Gaza war, but says all its weapons are used within international rules.
The Guardian, Monday 12 January 2009 Article history
Israeli troops were last night pushing towards Gaza's towns and cities amid heavy fighting as Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said Israel was nearing its goals in the conflict.
Many Gazans in the outlying suburbs of Gaza City were moving into the centre, desperately looking for apartments or shelter to escape the combat. Israel and Egypt have refused to open their borders to allow Gazans to flee the fighting.
About a dozen Palestinians, among them several gunmen, were killed early yesterday in Sheikh Ajleen, close to the north of Gaza City, and troops were reported to be less than a mile from the city's southern neighbourhoods last night. Tanks had moved towards the city, but then pulled back by the end of the day. At least 27 Palestinians were killed.
In a sign that a new phase of the offensive was near, Israel's military last night sent reserve units into the Strip. Brigadier General Avi Benayahu, the top military spokesman, said the units were already in Gaza, but he would not say if this meant the next stage was imminent - an invasion deep into the main towns and cities.
Olmert said the war in Gaza, now in its third week, would continue and he spoke out defiantly against the growing international criticism of Israel's killing of hundreds of Palestinians, many civilians. A UN security council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire late last week did nothing to halt the conflict and diplomacy has moved only haltingly since.
"No decision, present or future, will deny us our basic right to defend the residents of Israel," Olmert told a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
Defence officials said Hamas had been damaged but that it was unlikely ever to admit defeat. Some Israeli generals were eager to invade Gaza's urban areas.
Major General Yoav Galant, head of southern command, said an escalation was a "once in a generation" opportunity to strike at Hamas. "If we don't do that we'll be missing an historic opportunity," he was quoted as saying in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.
Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas who lives in exile in Damascus, said the offensive had ended any chance of a broader peace deal with the Palestinians.
Addressing Israel, Meshal said in a televised speech on Saturday: "You have destroyed the last chance for negotiations. No one will now believe you. What is needed is fierce resistance in Gaza and fierce support from the Arab, Islamic and international street until the aggression ends and the enemy withdraws."
Palestinian militants continued to fire rockets into southern Israel, several hitting the town of Be'er Sheva, though there were no serious casualties.
The Palestinian death toll rose to around 870 dead, of whom nearly half were women and children, with about 3,700 injured. On the Israeli side 13 people have been killed, three of them civilians.
The US president-elect, Barack Obama, described the death of civilians in the conflict as heartbreaking after being asked if his silence over the crisis could be interpreted as callousness.
"When you see civilians, whether Palestinian or Israeli, harmed, it's heartbreaking. Obviously what that does, it makes me much more determined to try and break a deadlock that has been going on for decades," he said on ABC television.
He vowed to act quickly after his inauguration to position the US as a trusted third party that could act as an interlocutor between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Israel's military admitted its bombing of a UN school last week, which killed 43 and injured 100 others, was the result of an Israeli mortar shell that missed its target by 30 metres. Previously the military had said militants inside the school compound were firing at their troops and that the troops simply returned fire.
Military sources were reported as saying that the UN school was clearly marked on the maps used by the troops.
Human Rights Watch said its researchers had seen Israeli forces using artillery-fired white phosphorus over densely populated residential areas of Gaza in violation of international humanitarian law. The weapon, used as a smokescreen, can cause serious burns. Israel has refused to detail which weapons are being used in the Gaza war, but says all its weapons are used within international rules.
'Some were decapitated. My cousin and his son died in front of me'
Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem and Hazem Balousha in Gaza City The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009 Article history
In the houses at the edge of Zeitoun, a rundown neighbourhood on the outskirts of Gaza City, dozens of Palestinian families woke to discover that Israel's invasion had brought troops and tanks to their doorstep.
In the darkness the military had set up a position in the rubble of a former Jewish settlement. The soldiers ordered out residents from higher buildings and those closest to the former Netzarim settlement. The soldiers then took up positions on the upper floors.
In one case around 110 Palestinians were moved into a single-residence house. Half were children; all were told to stay indoors. Yesterday the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs described what happened next: "Twenty-four hours later, Israeli forces shelled the home repeatedly, killing approximately 30." Many more bodies may still be hidden in the rubble of that building.
The killings at Zeitoun happened on Monday but it was only yesterday that the full horror became clear. According to accounts the strongest among the survivors carried injured children for more than a mile until they found drivers willing to take them to the Shifa hospital in Gaza City. By the time they arrived, three of the children were dead.
Israel's ground invasion has been littered with many deadly incidents but the UN described Zeitoun as "one of the gravest" and one which the UN's top human rights official said appears to have "all the elements of war crimes".
There has been a rapid increase in the number of children killed, which as of late Thursday stood at 257 - but could be many more. Already the death toll on the Palestinian side stands at 760, nearly half women and children - a far higher rate of death even than Israel's devastating war in southern Lebanon two years ago. On the Israeli side 13 have died, three of them civilians.
One of most compelling accounts of the Zeitoun killings comes from Meysa Samouni, 19. She told the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem that she and 13 others from her family were ordered at gunpoint out of their home at 9am on Sunday morning by Israeli soldiers who eventually took them to join others in a concrete warehouse. Around 70 neighbours and relatives were in the building, without food or drink.
At around 6am on Monday, she said, four of the men left to bring other relatives to the shelter. "The moment they left the house, a missile or shell hit them," she said. One was killed instantly, the others were injured.
"My husband went over to them to help and then a shell or missile was fired on to the roof of the warehouse," she said. She believed from the size of the strike that it was a bomb dropped by a fighter jet.
"When the missile struck, I lay down with my daughter under me. Everything filled up with smoke and dust and I heard screams and crying." She said 20 to 30 people were killed - among them her husband Tawfiq, 21, and both her husband's parents, Rashed, 41, and Rabab, 38. Another 20 were injured, some severely. A piece of shrapnel had sliced off the thumb and two fingers from the left hand of her nine-month-old daughter, Jumana.
Eventually, after two of the men with her were detained and blindfolded by soldiers, she and her daughter made it to hospital. "As far as I know, the dead and wounded who were under the ruins are still there," she said.
Nafaz Samouni, 42, estimated there were around 50 people in the house. "When the shelling started more than half of the people in the house were killed," he said from al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, where he was recovering from leg wounds. "Some were decapitated. My cousin and his son died in front of me."
His son Ahmad, 12, was shot in the arm and the chest - doctors said the bullet hit his heart. The boy was due to be transferred to hospital in Egypt.
But Nafaz Samouni could not leave the house until medics from the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived on Wednesday afternoon, when Israel for the first time paused its fighting for three hours to allow in desperately needed aid. "We spent four days without food. We had just a kerosene lamp and very little water," he said. "As we left we saw dead bodies around us. Dogs were eating them."
The Red Cross described the Zeitoun killings as "a shocking incident" and recounted how its staff found children too weak to stand and sitting by the dead bodies of their mothers. It was "unacceptable," it said, that the military prevented earlier access by ambulances.
The Israeli military said it would investigate "once such a complaint is received formally, within the constraints of the current military operation." The military did not address the details of the killings, but said: "The Israel Defence Forces is engaged in a battle with the Hamas terrorist organisation that has deliberately used Palestinian civilians as human shields ...
"The IDF in no way intentionally targets civilians and has demonstrated its willingness to abort operations to save civilian lives and to risk injury in order to assist innocent civilians."
However there is little doubt Israeli forces are using intense fire power. Even the soldiers admit this. "We do not balk at any means to protect the lives of our soldiers," one unnamed unit commander told the Ha'aretz newspaper.
About 20,000 Gazans in the north have fled their homes and several thousand more have fled in Rafah on the Egyptian border. But even they are not safe. In the second major incident of the week, at least 43 Palestinians were killed in a UN school in Jabalia on Tuesday.
At least three mortar rounds landed in the compound, even though the UN had given Israel the co-ordinates of all its installations in Gaza to prevent any such attack. It was one of several times UN staff or buildings were hit this week, forcing the UN Relief and Works Agency to suspend all movement of its staff.
The Israeli military said an initial inquiry had shown that several mortar shells were fired at Israeli forces from within the school. It released a video on YouTube of a mortar being fired from a UN school to support its case - but the footage dated back to October 2007.
However, the UN insisted the Israeli account was wrong. "I am very confident now that there was no militant activity. If anybody has evidence to the contrary, then let's bring it forward," said John Ging, director of Gaza operations for UNRWA.
In the houses at the edge of Zeitoun, a rundown neighbourhood on the outskirts of Gaza City, dozens of Palestinian families woke to discover that Israel's invasion had brought troops and tanks to their doorstep.
In the darkness the military had set up a position in the rubble of a former Jewish settlement. The soldiers ordered out residents from higher buildings and those closest to the former Netzarim settlement. The soldiers then took up positions on the upper floors.
In one case around 110 Palestinians were moved into a single-residence house. Half were children; all were told to stay indoors. Yesterday the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs described what happened next: "Twenty-four hours later, Israeli forces shelled the home repeatedly, killing approximately 30." Many more bodies may still be hidden in the rubble of that building.
The killings at Zeitoun happened on Monday but it was only yesterday that the full horror became clear. According to accounts the strongest among the survivors carried injured children for more than a mile until they found drivers willing to take them to the Shifa hospital in Gaza City. By the time they arrived, three of the children were dead.
Israel's ground invasion has been littered with many deadly incidents but the UN described Zeitoun as "one of the gravest" and one which the UN's top human rights official said appears to have "all the elements of war crimes".
There has been a rapid increase in the number of children killed, which as of late Thursday stood at 257 - but could be many more. Already the death toll on the Palestinian side stands at 760, nearly half women and children - a far higher rate of death even than Israel's devastating war in southern Lebanon two years ago. On the Israeli side 13 have died, three of them civilians.
One of most compelling accounts of the Zeitoun killings comes from Meysa Samouni, 19. She told the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem that she and 13 others from her family were ordered at gunpoint out of their home at 9am on Sunday morning by Israeli soldiers who eventually took them to join others in a concrete warehouse. Around 70 neighbours and relatives were in the building, without food or drink.
At around 6am on Monday, she said, four of the men left to bring other relatives to the shelter. "The moment they left the house, a missile or shell hit them," she said. One was killed instantly, the others were injured.
"My husband went over to them to help and then a shell or missile was fired on to the roof of the warehouse," she said. She believed from the size of the strike that it was a bomb dropped by a fighter jet.
"When the missile struck, I lay down with my daughter under me. Everything filled up with smoke and dust and I heard screams and crying." She said 20 to 30 people were killed - among them her husband Tawfiq, 21, and both her husband's parents, Rashed, 41, and Rabab, 38. Another 20 were injured, some severely. A piece of shrapnel had sliced off the thumb and two fingers from the left hand of her nine-month-old daughter, Jumana.
Eventually, after two of the men with her were detained and blindfolded by soldiers, she and her daughter made it to hospital. "As far as I know, the dead and wounded who were under the ruins are still there," she said.
Nafaz Samouni, 42, estimated there were around 50 people in the house. "When the shelling started more than half of the people in the house were killed," he said from al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, where he was recovering from leg wounds. "Some were decapitated. My cousin and his son died in front of me."
His son Ahmad, 12, was shot in the arm and the chest - doctors said the bullet hit his heart. The boy was due to be transferred to hospital in Egypt.
But Nafaz Samouni could not leave the house until medics from the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived on Wednesday afternoon, when Israel for the first time paused its fighting for three hours to allow in desperately needed aid. "We spent four days without food. We had just a kerosene lamp and very little water," he said. "As we left we saw dead bodies around us. Dogs were eating them."
The Red Cross described the Zeitoun killings as "a shocking incident" and recounted how its staff found children too weak to stand and sitting by the dead bodies of their mothers. It was "unacceptable," it said, that the military prevented earlier access by ambulances.
The Israeli military said it would investigate "once such a complaint is received formally, within the constraints of the current military operation." The military did not address the details of the killings, but said: "The Israel Defence Forces is engaged in a battle with the Hamas terrorist organisation that has deliberately used Palestinian civilians as human shields ...
"The IDF in no way intentionally targets civilians and has demonstrated its willingness to abort operations to save civilian lives and to risk injury in order to assist innocent civilians."
However there is little doubt Israeli forces are using intense fire power. Even the soldiers admit this. "We do not balk at any means to protect the lives of our soldiers," one unnamed unit commander told the Ha'aretz newspaper.
About 20,000 Gazans in the north have fled their homes and several thousand more have fled in Rafah on the Egyptian border. But even they are not safe. In the second major incident of the week, at least 43 Palestinians were killed in a UN school in Jabalia on Tuesday.
At least three mortar rounds landed in the compound, even though the UN had given Israel the co-ordinates of all its installations in Gaza to prevent any such attack. It was one of several times UN staff or buildings were hit this week, forcing the UN Relief and Works Agency to suspend all movement of its staff.
The Israeli military said an initial inquiry had shown that several mortar shells were fired at Israeli forces from within the school. It released a video on YouTube of a mortar being fired from a UN school to support its case - but the footage dated back to October 2007.
However, the UN insisted the Israeli account was wrong. "I am very confident now that there was no militant activity. If anybody has evidence to the contrary, then let's bring it forward," said John Ging, director of Gaza operations for UNRWA.
More than 260 children killed Toni O'Loughlin in Jerusalem
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009 Article history
Up to one third of the people killed in Gaza are children who have nowhere to run for shelter, according to UN reports. As Israel's soldiers and tanks have moved from farmland at Gaza's edge into the broken-down refugee camps and towns of the territory, the child death toll has more than quadrupled.
From 60 child deaths in the first eight days of aerial bombardment, the number of children who have been killed now stands at 265.
Eight children were killed yesterday as the overall death toll climbed to 800 in an area that is sealed off from the world by Israel's 18-month blockade, and is just 38 miles long and 8 miles wide.
"There is no safe space in the Gaza Strip, no safe haven, no bomb shelters and the borders are closed and the civilians have no place to flee," the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a weekly report.
Schools, mosques and houses, where people have been sheltering, have been hit. But Israel says Hamas is to blame and accuses the militant group of storing and mounting attacks from sites used by civilians.
"Hamas uses homes, mosques and hospitals to fire from and civilian casualties are unavoidable," said Major Jacob Dallal, a spokesman for the military.
Israel's military also insists that the majority of deaths have been Hamas members. Yet Al-Mezan, a Palestinian human rights groups, which is trying to verify the UN's casualty numbers which come from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, says the military is attacking unarmed civilians.
It says, for example, that on the morning before the ground invasion began, a father and his three sons were scavenging for wood for cooking and heating when they were hit by a missile. Children are also dying because rescue teams and ambulances cannot retrieve them from the wreckage.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, which is also trying to verify the death toll, said that on the seventh day of aerial bombardment a 10-year-old boy, Hamada Ibrahim Musabebeh, lost his feet after his house was shelled and he eventually died.
Despite three-hour lulls that Israel has introduced to allow aid and rescue teams to operate, many children in need of urgent attention remain trapped, says Physicians for Human Rights (PFHR), an Israeli human rights group.
"It's impossible to know how many such children are waiting for help," PFHR's Mary Weingarten, said.
Up to one third of the people killed in Gaza are children who have nowhere to run for shelter, according to UN reports. As Israel's soldiers and tanks have moved from farmland at Gaza's edge into the broken-down refugee camps and towns of the territory, the child death toll has more than quadrupled.
From 60 child deaths in the first eight days of aerial bombardment, the number of children who have been killed now stands at 265.
Eight children were killed yesterday as the overall death toll climbed to 800 in an area that is sealed off from the world by Israel's 18-month blockade, and is just 38 miles long and 8 miles wide.
"There is no safe space in the Gaza Strip, no safe haven, no bomb shelters and the borders are closed and the civilians have no place to flee," the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a weekly report.
Schools, mosques and houses, where people have been sheltering, have been hit. But Israel says Hamas is to blame and accuses the militant group of storing and mounting attacks from sites used by civilians.
"Hamas uses homes, mosques and hospitals to fire from and civilian casualties are unavoidable," said Major Jacob Dallal, a spokesman for the military.
Israel's military also insists that the majority of deaths have been Hamas members. Yet Al-Mezan, a Palestinian human rights groups, which is trying to verify the UN's casualty numbers which come from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, says the military is attacking unarmed civilians.
It says, for example, that on the morning before the ground invasion began, a father and his three sons were scavenging for wood for cooking and heating when they were hit by a missile. Children are also dying because rescue teams and ambulances cannot retrieve them from the wreckage.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, which is also trying to verify the death toll, said that on the seventh day of aerial bombardment a 10-year-old boy, Hamada Ibrahim Musabebeh, lost his feet after his house was shelled and he eventually died.
Despite three-hour lulls that Israel has introduced to allow aid and rescue teams to operate, many children in need of urgent attention remain trapped, says Physicians for Human Rights (PFHR), an Israeli human rights group.
"It's impossible to know how many such children are waiting for help," PFHR's Mary Weingarten, said.
Friday, 23 January 2009
Children of Gaza: stories of those who died and the trauma for those who survived
Rory McCarthy reports from Gaza City on the individual stories of some victims and the physical and psychological toll on an estimated 350,000 youngsters
guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 January 2009 17.34 GMT Article history
photo stories of dead Palestinian children
Video
Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed today with her right leg in plaster, and held together by a line of steel pins dug deep into her skin. For several days after her operation Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even now talks only in a low whisper.
In her past are bitter memories: watching her father die in the street outside their home, then hearing another shell land and kill her brother Ala'a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16, and then the three days that she spent alone, injured and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a neighbour's abandoned house before she could be rescued last Sunday.
Ahead of her, she has a long recovery. First there is an imminent flight to France for the best possible medical treatment, many more operations and then months of rehabilitation and psychiatric care.
Only now, after most of the dead have been buried, is the first properly researched reckoning of the toll emerging. What already stands out is the striking cost borne by the children of Gaza, who make up more than half of the 1.5 million people living in this overcrowded strip of land.
The Palestinian death toll after three weeks of Israel's war was 1,285, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, or 1,268, according to the al-Mezan Human Rights Centre. Among those dead were at least 280 children.
The impact will be felt by many more for years to come. Among the more than 4,000 people injured more than a quarter were children, some left with severe disabilities. The Gaza Community Health Programme estimates that half Gaza's children – around 350,000 – will develop some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Amira Qirm, who lived in Tel al-Hawa, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in Gaza City, is among the few in line to receive medical treatment abroad.
Already she has a dream to fulfil once she returns to Gaza. "I want to be a lawyer," she said today , "and to stand in court facing the Israelis for what they have done."
Most of the other children will have to make do with treatment in Gaza. Last week some psychologists were walking through the ruins of a house in Atatra, talking to a boy from the Abu Halima family who had lost his father, three brothers and an infant sister in a horrific fire after an Israeli phosphorus shell hit the house.
"The problem is they are not feeling safe even in their own homes, on the streets, in the mosques," said Ehassan Afifi, the psychologist. "This boy is seeing what happened as if it is an endless movie. The physically affected can be operated on, sometimes cured. But these mental problems may lead to problems for the rest of their lives."
Israel has consistently rejected international criticism that its forces used excessive and indiscriminate firepower.
Asked about the criticisms, the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in an interview yesterday in the Israeli paper Ma'ariv that the mental health of the children of southern Israel had suffered in recent years. He added: "So now there is talk about Israel's cruelty. When you win, you automatically hurt more than you've been hurt. And we didn't want to lose this campaign. What did you want, for hundreds of our soldiers to die? That, after all, was the alternative."
On the Israeli side 13 died in this conflict, three of them civilians. In total in the past eight years, 20 people in Israel have died from rocket and mortar attacks launched by militants in Gaza.
Halting this rocket fire was Israel's primary goal and for the last few days, at least, it has achieved its aim.
But Eyad al-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist who leads the Gaza community health programme, said that years of violence in Gaza had only fostered radicalism among its young people, who have seen their fathers humiliated and now left defenceless.
His organisation is training 1,000 people to spread out across Gaza to offer help with grief and mourning and to pass serious cases on to professional therapists.
Already there were reports, he said, of children bed-wetting, stuttering, falling mute, having trouble sleeping, becoming violent or restless and losing their appetites.
The difference between this war and the uprisings, like the first intifada of the late 1980s, was that whereas there was once a frontline, with tanks near the border, now the bombing and artillery reached deep inside Gaza's urban areas and into the homes of ordinary families. "Yes, we have developed a coping strategy but we are still frightened of the Israelis doing this again and again," said al-Sarraj.
"The devastation is a reminder of what the Israelis will do. You need to give children a protective environment and give a chance to the fathers to regain their status as protectors and providers by giving them jobs and homes to live in … This is a massive, man-made disaster and we have to tackle the results."
guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 January 2009 17.34 GMT Article history
photo stories of dead Palestinian children
Video
Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed today with her right leg in plaster, and held together by a line of steel pins dug deep into her skin. For several days after her operation Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even now talks only in a low whisper.
In her past are bitter memories: watching her father die in the street outside their home, then hearing another shell land and kill her brother Ala'a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16, and then the three days that she spent alone, injured and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a neighbour's abandoned house before she could be rescued last Sunday.
Ahead of her, she has a long recovery. First there is an imminent flight to France for the best possible medical treatment, many more operations and then months of rehabilitation and psychiatric care.
Only now, after most of the dead have been buried, is the first properly researched reckoning of the toll emerging. What already stands out is the striking cost borne by the children of Gaza, who make up more than half of the 1.5 million people living in this overcrowded strip of land.
The Palestinian death toll after three weeks of Israel's war was 1,285, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, or 1,268, according to the al-Mezan Human Rights Centre. Among those dead were at least 280 children.
The impact will be felt by many more for years to come. Among the more than 4,000 people injured more than a quarter were children, some left with severe disabilities. The Gaza Community Health Programme estimates that half Gaza's children – around 350,000 – will develop some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Amira Qirm, who lived in Tel al-Hawa, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in Gaza City, is among the few in line to receive medical treatment abroad.
Already she has a dream to fulfil once she returns to Gaza. "I want to be a lawyer," she said today , "and to stand in court facing the Israelis for what they have done."
Most of the other children will have to make do with treatment in Gaza. Last week some psychologists were walking through the ruins of a house in Atatra, talking to a boy from the Abu Halima family who had lost his father, three brothers and an infant sister in a horrific fire after an Israeli phosphorus shell hit the house.
"The problem is they are not feeling safe even in their own homes, on the streets, in the mosques," said Ehassan Afifi, the psychologist. "This boy is seeing what happened as if it is an endless movie. The physically affected can be operated on, sometimes cured. But these mental problems may lead to problems for the rest of their lives."
Israel has consistently rejected international criticism that its forces used excessive and indiscriminate firepower.
Asked about the criticisms, the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in an interview yesterday in the Israeli paper Ma'ariv that the mental health of the children of southern Israel had suffered in recent years. He added: "So now there is talk about Israel's cruelty. When you win, you automatically hurt more than you've been hurt. And we didn't want to lose this campaign. What did you want, for hundreds of our soldiers to die? That, after all, was the alternative."
On the Israeli side 13 died in this conflict, three of them civilians. In total in the past eight years, 20 people in Israel have died from rocket and mortar attacks launched by militants in Gaza.
Halting this rocket fire was Israel's primary goal and for the last few days, at least, it has achieved its aim.
But Eyad al-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist who leads the Gaza community health programme, said that years of violence in Gaza had only fostered radicalism among its young people, who have seen their fathers humiliated and now left defenceless.
His organisation is training 1,000 people to spread out across Gaza to offer help with grief and mourning and to pass serious cases on to professional therapists.
Already there were reports, he said, of children bed-wetting, stuttering, falling mute, having trouble sleeping, becoming violent or restless and losing their appetites.
The difference between this war and the uprisings, like the first intifada of the late 1980s, was that whereas there was once a frontline, with tanks near the border, now the bombing and artillery reached deep inside Gaza's urban areas and into the homes of ordinary families. "Yes, we have developed a coping strategy but we are still frightened of the Israelis doing this again and again," said al-Sarraj.
"The devastation is a reminder of what the Israelis will do. You need to give children a protective environment and give a chance to the fathers to regain their status as protectors and providers by giving them jobs and homes to live in … This is a massive, man-made disaster and we have to tackle the results."
Amid the horror and doom of Gaza, the IRA precedent offers hope
The Northern Ireland example is instructive. Through dialogue even the most implacable of enemies can make peace
Jonathan Freedland The Guardian, Wednesday 14 January 2009 Article historyThe smart money in the Middle East is always on pessimism. Events can be relied on to get worse and worse. But perennial gloom has a flaw. Its unstated assumption is that the war between Israelis and Palestinians is somehow unique - that it is the only conflict in the history of the world that cannot be solved or even ended.
Yet even as the horror continues in Gaza, it's worth recalling that people were once just as fatalistic about battles now long settled. Whether it was apartheid in South Africa or the 30-year bloodshed in Northern Ireland, there were plenty of dark days when the blood seemed as if it would never stop.
Which is why the mention of Northern Ireland, once a byword for strife, is now an invocation of hope. If republicans and unionists - who once wished each other dead - can sit in government together, then surely Israelis and Palestinians are not fated to fight for ever.
That message is in the air just now, with both the Irish prime minister and Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams urging the warring parties of the Middle East to learn their lesson and begin "dialogue". Meanwhile, Tony Blair has been citing his own Northern Ireland experience as a useful precedent. Is he right? And if he is, what exactly are the lessons?
It's a statement of the obvious that the two conflicts are not the same: none ever are. The wildest elements of the IRA were never committed, even rhetorically, to the destruction of Great Britain. Yet Hamas's charter does call for the eradication of the state of Israel. (Those close to the organisation insist the document has in effect lapsed.)
Moreover, whatever brutalities were meted out by the British forces in Northern Ireland, they never pounded Belfast from the air using fighter jets. There was state collusion in killings, but the British army did not bomb entire buildings in the Falls Road because it suspected an IRA cell lurked within.
Nevertheless, there are important similarities. The two sides were fighting over the future of a small piece of territory. The unionist majority often complained that it stood alone, uncomprehended by the rest of the world. Demographics mattered, the notion that one group might soon outnumber the other. And religion was never far below the surface.
What though of the solution? There are at least a few steps that brought eventual peace to Northern Ireland that could be emulated in the Middle East - but they would require an enormous leap of imagination on all sides.
Perhaps the very first move would be a true declaration of intent from Israel. This would be an analogue of the statement in 1990 by the then Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Brooke, that the British government had no "selfish strategic or economic interest" in retaining the province. If Israel were to make an equally unambiguous declaration that it planned to end its occupation of the West Bank and dismantle the settlements necessary to make room for a viable Palestinian state, that could have a similarly profound effect.
Those who say no Israeli would ever be so bold should read the extraordinary interview Ehud Olmert gave to Yediot Achronot the day he tendered his resignation last September. "We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the [occupied] territories," Olmert said. Signalling that he understood the wisdom of the Brooke manoeuvre, he suggested that Menachem Begin's "genius" in forging a peace with Egypt was that he "started from the end. He began by saying, 'I am ready to pull out of the entire Sinai - now let us negotiate'."
It's galling to read those words now, to realise that the Olmert who understood how to make peace then is the same Olmert waging war today. But it shows what is possible.
The second move has to take place inside the heads of both sides: it is the realisation that no military solution will ever be possible. The road to peace in Northern Ireland began when the British army concluded it could never fight the IRA to more than an "honourable draw" and when the IRA realised it would never bomb British troops out of the province. Hamas has similarly to conclude that suicide bombs on Israeli buses and rockets aimed at Israel's southern towns will delay, not bring, an end to occupation. Israel has to understand that a movement like Hamas, rooted in the soil of Gaza, cannot be crushed by force. That, on the contrary, raining fire on Gaza will have the same effect on Hamas that internment had on the IRA: it will recruit a new generation of fighters, making it stronger not weaker.
The next stage is the hardest. Adams has called on Israel to enter direct dialogue with Hamas, learning the Irish lesson that for peace to work it must include even those on the extremes. But it's not quite that simple. Republicans did not get their seat at the table until they had forsworn violence and agreed to pursue their goals by exclusively peaceful means. Israel could truthfully cite the Ulster precedent when it says it cannot sit down with Hamas until it renounces violence.
Yet such a statement would be fraught with risk. Because what has been the key advice of those republicans who have met Hamas leaders? Keep the movement together. It helps no one if the Hamas top brass follow Sinn Féin's lead and sign up for peaceful means, only for a "Real Hamas" to pop up the next day to take their place. Adams and Martin McGuinness resisted any move that would cause a republican split. The result is that when they were finally ready to do a deal, the deal held.
Once negotiations have begun, Northern Ireland offers paradoxical advice: each side must strengthen its adversary. London and Dublin were always careful to ensure that any move on either the nationalist or unionist side did not go unrewarded. If it had, those making the compromises would have lost face in the eyes of their own people.
Israel has not been as wise. Hamas is strong now in part because their Fatah rivals were made to look like dupes before their fellow Palestinians. They gave up the "armed struggle", they recognised Israel - and what did they get for it? More checkpoints and settlers on the West Bank than before.
In this context, one of the greatest missed opportunities was the 2005 Israeli pullout from Gaza. Instead of symbolically handing over the territory to the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, thereby giving the moderates a prize, Israel withdrew unilaterally - allowing Hamas to claim it as a victory for violence.
It is too late to undo that now. Instead Israel will have to emulate the long, patient work that finally brought peace to Northern Ireland. It will have to use indirect channels to reach those within Hamas - and they exist - who are reconcilable. It will then have to cajole and encourage them towards the position that would enable them to be part of peace talks.
That need not take decades. There are elements within Hamas readier than most Israelis realise to negotiate an end to occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines. But Israel has to decide that a meaningful peace is its goal too, starting with an understanding that this problem will never be solved by force. But it can be solved.
freedland@guardian.co.uk
Jonathan Freedland The Guardian, Wednesday 14 January 2009 Article historyThe smart money in the Middle East is always on pessimism. Events can be relied on to get worse and worse. But perennial gloom has a flaw. Its unstated assumption is that the war between Israelis and Palestinians is somehow unique - that it is the only conflict in the history of the world that cannot be solved or even ended.
Yet even as the horror continues in Gaza, it's worth recalling that people were once just as fatalistic about battles now long settled. Whether it was apartheid in South Africa or the 30-year bloodshed in Northern Ireland, there were plenty of dark days when the blood seemed as if it would never stop.
Which is why the mention of Northern Ireland, once a byword for strife, is now an invocation of hope. If republicans and unionists - who once wished each other dead - can sit in government together, then surely Israelis and Palestinians are not fated to fight for ever.
That message is in the air just now, with both the Irish prime minister and Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams urging the warring parties of the Middle East to learn their lesson and begin "dialogue". Meanwhile, Tony Blair has been citing his own Northern Ireland experience as a useful precedent. Is he right? And if he is, what exactly are the lessons?
It's a statement of the obvious that the two conflicts are not the same: none ever are. The wildest elements of the IRA were never committed, even rhetorically, to the destruction of Great Britain. Yet Hamas's charter does call for the eradication of the state of Israel. (Those close to the organisation insist the document has in effect lapsed.)
Moreover, whatever brutalities were meted out by the British forces in Northern Ireland, they never pounded Belfast from the air using fighter jets. There was state collusion in killings, but the British army did not bomb entire buildings in the Falls Road because it suspected an IRA cell lurked within.
Nevertheless, there are important similarities. The two sides were fighting over the future of a small piece of territory. The unionist majority often complained that it stood alone, uncomprehended by the rest of the world. Demographics mattered, the notion that one group might soon outnumber the other. And religion was never far below the surface.
What though of the solution? There are at least a few steps that brought eventual peace to Northern Ireland that could be emulated in the Middle East - but they would require an enormous leap of imagination on all sides.
Perhaps the very first move would be a true declaration of intent from Israel. This would be an analogue of the statement in 1990 by the then Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Brooke, that the British government had no "selfish strategic or economic interest" in retaining the province. If Israel were to make an equally unambiguous declaration that it planned to end its occupation of the West Bank and dismantle the settlements necessary to make room for a viable Palestinian state, that could have a similarly profound effect.
Those who say no Israeli would ever be so bold should read the extraordinary interview Ehud Olmert gave to Yediot Achronot the day he tendered his resignation last September. "We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the [occupied] territories," Olmert said. Signalling that he understood the wisdom of the Brooke manoeuvre, he suggested that Menachem Begin's "genius" in forging a peace with Egypt was that he "started from the end. He began by saying, 'I am ready to pull out of the entire Sinai - now let us negotiate'."
It's galling to read those words now, to realise that the Olmert who understood how to make peace then is the same Olmert waging war today. But it shows what is possible.
The second move has to take place inside the heads of both sides: it is the realisation that no military solution will ever be possible. The road to peace in Northern Ireland began when the British army concluded it could never fight the IRA to more than an "honourable draw" and when the IRA realised it would never bomb British troops out of the province. Hamas has similarly to conclude that suicide bombs on Israeli buses and rockets aimed at Israel's southern towns will delay, not bring, an end to occupation. Israel has to understand that a movement like Hamas, rooted in the soil of Gaza, cannot be crushed by force. That, on the contrary, raining fire on Gaza will have the same effect on Hamas that internment had on the IRA: it will recruit a new generation of fighters, making it stronger not weaker.
The next stage is the hardest. Adams has called on Israel to enter direct dialogue with Hamas, learning the Irish lesson that for peace to work it must include even those on the extremes. But it's not quite that simple. Republicans did not get their seat at the table until they had forsworn violence and agreed to pursue their goals by exclusively peaceful means. Israel could truthfully cite the Ulster precedent when it says it cannot sit down with Hamas until it renounces violence.
Yet such a statement would be fraught with risk. Because what has been the key advice of those republicans who have met Hamas leaders? Keep the movement together. It helps no one if the Hamas top brass follow Sinn Féin's lead and sign up for peaceful means, only for a "Real Hamas" to pop up the next day to take their place. Adams and Martin McGuinness resisted any move that would cause a republican split. The result is that when they were finally ready to do a deal, the deal held.
Once negotiations have begun, Northern Ireland offers paradoxical advice: each side must strengthen its adversary. London and Dublin were always careful to ensure that any move on either the nationalist or unionist side did not go unrewarded. If it had, those making the compromises would have lost face in the eyes of their own people.
Israel has not been as wise. Hamas is strong now in part because their Fatah rivals were made to look like dupes before their fellow Palestinians. They gave up the "armed struggle", they recognised Israel - and what did they get for it? More checkpoints and settlers on the West Bank than before.
In this context, one of the greatest missed opportunities was the 2005 Israeli pullout from Gaza. Instead of symbolically handing over the territory to the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, thereby giving the moderates a prize, Israel withdrew unilaterally - allowing Hamas to claim it as a victory for violence.
It is too late to undo that now. Instead Israel will have to emulate the long, patient work that finally brought peace to Northern Ireland. It will have to use indirect channels to reach those within Hamas - and they exist - who are reconcilable. It will then have to cajole and encourage them towards the position that would enable them to be part of peace talks.
That need not take decades. There are elements within Hamas readier than most Israelis realise to negotiate an end to occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines. But Israel has to decide that a meaningful peace is its goal too, starting with an understanding that this problem will never be solved by force. But it can be solved.
freedland@guardian.co.uk
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
The Children of Gaza
Five years to the day after her son was killed by an IDF sniper, Jocelyn Hurndall writes on the deaths of children in Gaza as the Israeli onslaught there continues
Today, faced with the killing of more than 300 Gazan children in barely a fortnight, I can’t help but replay the image of my son, Tom, reaching out to three Palestinian toddlers sheltering from Israeli sniper fire behind a mound of rubble in Rafah.
In his Middle East journal Tom wrote, “Strange, isn’t it, that no matter what the hardship suffered by children in London, it will never compare with what is experienced in Baghdad, Cairo or Amman. The world is clearly an unfair place and the loudest call is for self-preservation. Without the sight of the suffering that exists elsewhere being forced on us, we don’t even contemplate it.”
Over the last two weeks, seldom has it been more tragically apparent that innocent children are completely unprotected when bombs start to fall. With mounds of rubble being turned into mountains, ambulances are unable to collect injured children or those buried beneath their own homes.
Other children, ordered by Israeli forces to take refuge in a school with their families, are then shelled, left to cling to the bodies of their dead mothers for days. Meanwhile, the Israelis repeat their mantra that they are taking the greatest possible pains to avoid civilian casualties. Is it difficult for Israeli pilots and artillerymen to avoid coordinates unconnected to Hamas? It is not. And yet they bomb them. We are forced to draw our own conclusions as to whether the Israeli forces are systematically inept…or callous beyond comprehension. Or both.
We each agonise over what can be done to stop this great loss of innocent life - and for those who manage to survive, the loss of their childhood innocence. It is unfathomably frustrating that we can’t seem to do more to safeguard the children of Gaza.
In the weeks following Tom’s shooting we had to make sense of what had happened emotionally, politically, diplomatically, legally, and medically. It became quickly apparent that we were going to get no help from the Israelis. We had to quickly develop an insight into the intention behind what people said, or were pointedly not saying to us. The Israelis wouldn’t meet, discuss evidence, or even gather any. Instead, they produced a report that was a fabrication and a cover up.
Right up until the moment they charged an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) smiper with shooting an unarmed civilian - my son, they insisted that they were really shooting at a gunman. The Israelis asked the British coroner for all the information we had gathered from the British pathologist and the British police before Tom’s inquest was held. In return, they refused to disclose a single shred of their own evidence.
What this experience showed us is that where their own actions are concerned the Israelis are not greatly interested in truth or justice, or even apology. For them, anyone injured or killed by their forces is de facto a militant, or a terrorist, or an associate of terrorists. Very occasionally they allow that an innocent has been caught in crossfire between their soldiers and terrorists, though often with an imputation that said victim should not have been so close to terrorists to have been caught up in the battle. In the current offensive, innocents have died in such horrific numbers that they have even stopped saying this.
I remember the journey to Be’ersheva from Ben Gurion airport back in 2003. The well-informed British Military Attache turned to me and said, “I have to warn you, don’t expect too much of the Israelis”. It made me recall the time I was Tom’s age, when I was working on a kibbutz, and a kibbutznik told me that Israel had ‘the most moral army in the world’. I’d thought at the time, why should an army of a democratic country claim morality as its badge of honour? It rang hollow even then. As everyone except the most cynical spin doctor knows, “morality” and “army” should never knowingly be uttered in the same sentence. War has rules but no morals. It would be a start if Israel even acknowledged the rules.
Yesterday, I spoke to my good friend, Erella, an Israeli who lives on a kibbutz outside Be’ersheva. I asked her about the reaction of the Israeli public to the killings in Gaza. She replied, “best not to talk about the Israeli public. More and more people are against the war, but the media is creating reality and people don’t know what’s really going on. Even though the Gazans don’t have electricity, some of the homes have their own generators and so they manage to send emails, but not many.” She can hear every bomb that falls on the Gaza Strip. While the people paying the price are innocent children she isn’t interested in who is right and who is wrong. She speaks with her friends in Gaza each day, who say, “We are sitting in our house, waiting our turn”.
With all the clarity of a young voice, Nour Kharma, from Gaza writes: “Today is the eighth day of this horrible war. To me yesterday was the worst day of all. When I woke up in the morning one of my friends called, his voice was very weird. He told me Christine died. I was in a big shock, and till now I don’t believe it. I threw the phone and started crying. Her parents did the best they can do, but it wasn’t enough so the result was dying. What if my parents couldn’t protect me and give me the support I need...will I die too? What I can say now is that my future is almost destroyed. An Israeli rocket hit my school this morning, and the school was destroyed completely. I really can’t imagine how come they’re bombing mosques, schools, and universities. In every explosion we feel our house shaking and about to be destroyed; what about the people that already lost their homes? I’m crying for the loss of one of my friends... what about the people that lost at least five of their relatives? Depression and fear are filling our souls and surrounding our homes…what’s next? I actually don’t wish for anything as much as I wish that this war will end soon and that the Palestinian people can live like any other people and Palestinian children can enjoy their childhood like any children in the world. Help us because we’re all human beings”.
I am often asked, what is it like to lose a child? It’s like this. Between the instant of receiving the news and the next instant in which you have to comprehend it, you somehow realise that every cell in your body is about to be shaken furiously, and you freeze to delay the moment of impact. Your entire existence becomes concertinaed into the space between the blow and the pain, and nothing will ever, or can ever be the same again. With vast international pressure why can’t there be agreement between all sides that Gazan children and mothers should be safely housed? That no more Gazan children shall go without their mothers, and no more Gazan mothers told that they have lost their children.
In the first instance, let us work as hard as we are able towards bringing an end to the mounting deaths of the innocent on both sides. And then hold those responsible to account…
Jocelyn Hurndall Development Director Friends of Birzeit University
Israel must acknowledge Hamas as the democratic choice of a majority of Palestinians
The devastating air assault on the Gaza Strip which began on 27 December, and the ground invasion that followed, are the latest stages in the unequal war between the state of Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by the acronym Hamas. The onslaught has so far led to the deaths of more than 600 Palestinians, many of them children, including those killed in an air strike on the UN-run al-Fakhura school in the Jabaliya refugee camp. Since Hamas's unexpected victory in legislative elections in January 2006, Israel has been attempting to loosen the organisation's grip on the Palestinian territories. Although the elections were widely acknowledged to be free and fair, neither Israel nor any of its western allies was prepared to recognise a Palestinian Authority run by what they regard as a terrorist organisation. A civil war broke out between Hamas and Fatah, Israel's so-called partner for peace which runs the PA, and in June 2007, Hamas fighters ousted their rivals from Gaza. The Israelis responded by imposing a blockade on the coastal territory, and Fatah began attempting to excise Hamas from the West Bank.
As Edward Platt reported in the New Statesman recently ("Israel v Hamas: the war that can never end", 3 November 2008), Hamas derives much of its support from the network of charitable institutions it runs and on which many Palestinians depend for survival. Having outlawed Hamas's executive and military wings, the PA and the Israeli army began to close down the schools and orphanages, claiming that they had become breeding grounds for a new generation of terrorists and a means of raising funds for terrorist activities. Hamas called it a "declaration of war on the poor and the needy". It was.
In Gaza, the campaign proceeded by even blunter means. At the end of February, Israel launched a five-day strike intended to put an end to the barrage of Qassam rocket fire that various paramilitary groups, including Hamas's military wing, had been directing from Gaza into southern Israel. Like the current campaign, it ended with incursions by the Israeli army, and resulted in the deaths of many non-combatants; according to the Palestinian human rights organisation al-Mezan, 65 of the 119 Palestinians killed were civilians.
"Operation Warm Winter" did not immediately achieve its aim of ending the barrage, but a ceasefire came into effect in June and held for six months. As usual, both sides blame the other for breaking it, though the first recorded incident of the latest stage of the war occurred on 4 November, when Israeli special forces entered the Gaza Strip and killed six militants. On 5 November, Hamas resumed its rocket attacks and Israel increased the severity of the blockade, which it had never fully lifted, and which has turned Gaza into a kind of open prison, a place of misery and hopelessness. Supplies of food, fuel and medicine were cut off and it was plain that a humanitarian disaster was developing.
In the circumstances, that Hamas continued to fire rockets into Sderot and other towns in south-west Israel was a grotesque and pointless provocation. Yet it could claim, with some justification, that it was only responding to the greater Israeli aggression of the blockade, and its defiance may play well to a section of its domestic audience. But the majority of the population that it claims to represent has suffered terribly as a result. Public opinion in Israel demanded a response to the relentless Qassam attacks that had led to the deaths of 24 of the country's citizens, and, predictably, it has come in time - and with George Bush still nominally in power in the US - to restore the prospects of Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak, foreign minister and defence minister in the current coalition government, who will lead Kadima and Labour in next month's elections.
Yet it is hard to see how Israel will benefit from its instinctive reversion to force, grotesquely disproportionate in this latest war. It is also hard not to see this invasion of Gaza, as well as the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, as proxy wars in the larger conflict with Syria and Iran.
The campaign is unlikely to damage Hamas as much as Israel seems to hope - its military wing need only retain a rudimentary fighting capacity to claim a victory of sorts, and because of its willingness to resist the invasion, it may yet emerge from the conflict with its status enhanced. It is hard to predict what Hamas will do next; its pronouncements are often contradictory, yet it seems to have accepted the idea of establishing a Palestinian state on pre-1967 borders. However, with prospects for a two-state solution rapidly receding, such openings should be exploited to the full, and we must hope that President-elect Obama has a broader grasp of the needs of the region than the callous and inadequate administration seeing out its last days in office.
When the fighting ends, international pressure must be brought to bear to ensure the blockade is lifted and the next truce must be monitored with greater vigilance than the last. Yet, so long as Israel remains committed to Hamas's destruction, and Hamas continues to strike against Israeli civilians, there will be no lasting peace. It may be unpalatable to deal with a group that endorses suicide bombing and which is virulently anti-Semitic, but Israel, and its sponsor, the US, must acknowledge Hamas as the democratic choice of the Palestinians and seek grounds for compromise. In the long run, negotiations will provide a more effective and infinitely more humane way of protecting Israeli citizens than attempting to batter the Gazans into submission.
As Edward Platt reported in the New Statesman recently ("Israel v Hamas: the war that can never end", 3 November 2008), Hamas derives much of its support from the network of charitable institutions it runs and on which many Palestinians depend for survival. Having outlawed Hamas's executive and military wings, the PA and the Israeli army began to close down the schools and orphanages, claiming that they had become breeding grounds for a new generation of terrorists and a means of raising funds for terrorist activities. Hamas called it a "declaration of war on the poor and the needy". It was.
In Gaza, the campaign proceeded by even blunter means. At the end of February, Israel launched a five-day strike intended to put an end to the barrage of Qassam rocket fire that various paramilitary groups, including Hamas's military wing, had been directing from Gaza into southern Israel. Like the current campaign, it ended with incursions by the Israeli army, and resulted in the deaths of many non-combatants; according to the Palestinian human rights organisation al-Mezan, 65 of the 119 Palestinians killed were civilians.
"Operation Warm Winter" did not immediately achieve its aim of ending the barrage, but a ceasefire came into effect in June and held for six months. As usual, both sides blame the other for breaking it, though the first recorded incident of the latest stage of the war occurred on 4 November, when Israeli special forces entered the Gaza Strip and killed six militants. On 5 November, Hamas resumed its rocket attacks and Israel increased the severity of the blockade, which it had never fully lifted, and which has turned Gaza into a kind of open prison, a place of misery and hopelessness. Supplies of food, fuel and medicine were cut off and it was plain that a humanitarian disaster was developing.
In the circumstances, that Hamas continued to fire rockets into Sderot and other towns in south-west Israel was a grotesque and pointless provocation. Yet it could claim, with some justification, that it was only responding to the greater Israeli aggression of the blockade, and its defiance may play well to a section of its domestic audience. But the majority of the population that it claims to represent has suffered terribly as a result. Public opinion in Israel demanded a response to the relentless Qassam attacks that had led to the deaths of 24 of the country's citizens, and, predictably, it has come in time - and with George Bush still nominally in power in the US - to restore the prospects of Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak, foreign minister and defence minister in the current coalition government, who will lead Kadima and Labour in next month's elections.
Yet it is hard to see how Israel will benefit from its instinctive reversion to force, grotesquely disproportionate in this latest war. It is also hard not to see this invasion of Gaza, as well as the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, as proxy wars in the larger conflict with Syria and Iran.
The campaign is unlikely to damage Hamas as much as Israel seems to hope - its military wing need only retain a rudimentary fighting capacity to claim a victory of sorts, and because of its willingness to resist the invasion, it may yet emerge from the conflict with its status enhanced. It is hard to predict what Hamas will do next; its pronouncements are often contradictory, yet it seems to have accepted the idea of establishing a Palestinian state on pre-1967 borders. However, with prospects for a two-state solution rapidly receding, such openings should be exploited to the full, and we must hope that President-elect Obama has a broader grasp of the needs of the region than the callous and inadequate administration seeing out its last days in office.
When the fighting ends, international pressure must be brought to bear to ensure the blockade is lifted and the next truce must be monitored with greater vigilance than the last. Yet, so long as Israel remains committed to Hamas's destruction, and Hamas continues to strike against Israeli civilians, there will be no lasting peace. It may be unpalatable to deal with a group that endorses suicide bombing and which is virulently anti-Semitic, but Israel, and its sponsor, the US, must acknowledge Hamas as the democratic choice of the Palestinians and seek grounds for compromise. In the long run, negotiations will provide a more effective and infinitely more humane way of protecting Israeli citizens than attempting to batter the Gazans into submission.
The conflict within hamas
The recent reports that President-elect Barack Obama is considering opening "low-level talks" with Hamas mark a welcome break with the attitude of the outgoing US administration, and yet they prompt questions about the nature of the Islamist group that has ruled the Gaza Strip since July 2007. How genuine is its commitment to democracy, and how will it respond to diplomatic overtures from America? As the death toll in Gaza rises inexorably, is there any prospect of meaningful negotiations between Israel and Hamas?
These are not easy questions to answer, for Hamas is not a monolithic organisation with a simple agenda - it consists of many different wings and factions, with conflicting aims and philosophies. It was founded in 1987, at the beginning of the first intifada, by the leadership of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, with the aim of directing resistance against the Israeli occupation (the name "Hamas" is an acronym of Harakat al-Muqa wama al-Islamiya - "Islamic Resistance Movement", though it also means "zeal"). The new organisation shared the Muslim Brothers' aim of Islamicising Palestinian society, but it differed from its philosophy in one crucial respect: it reserved the right to commit violence.
"The movement struggles against Israel because it is the aggressing, usurping and oppressing state that day and night hoists the rifle in the face of our sons and daughters," said Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, one of Hamas's founders, who was assassinated by an Israeli helicopter gunship in Gaza in 2004.
In the west, it is known mainly as a terrorist organisation, which is hardly surprising, given that it has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israeli citizens. And yet, in the past 20 years, it has also developed a political wing and maintained a network of schools, clinics and orphanages in the Palestinian territories.
Unlike the notoriously corrupt Palestinian Authority, which is dominated by the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah party, it has acquired a reputation for fairness and keeping its hands clean, which was partly responsible for its victory in the legislative elections of January 2006.
Dr Khaled Hroub, of the Cambridge Arab Media Project, believes that Hamas has long since outgrown the crude anti-Jewish sentiments of its founding charter, which was written by one member of the "Old Guard" of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. He says that we should judge it on the "government platform" delivered by the newly elected prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, on 27 March 2006. "The entire thrust of the statement is confined directly and indirectly to the parameters of the concept of a two-state solution," he says. "There is no mention or even the slightest hint of the destruction of Israel or the establishment of an Islamic state in Palestine. It reflects very little inclination to radical positions and religious overtones.
"Someone who read this document without knowing that it had been produced by Hamas could justifiably think that it had been written by any other secular Palestinian organisation."
Unfortunately, Hamas never had a chance to implement its programme for government. Neither Israel nor the so-called Quartet on the Middle East - the United States, Russia, the EU and the United Nations - was prepared to recognise a Palestinian Authority run by Hamas, or the Saudi-sponsored government of national unity, which comprised ministers from both Hamas and Fatah. Its first year in office was beset by problems: the international aid that it required to run the government was cut off, and the domestic power struggle erupted into a civil war that left Hamas in control of Gaza while Fatah regained power in the West Bank.
The interplay of factions within Hamas has favoured the rise of armed militias, and given the party control of Gaza’s illegal economy
Dr Claire Spencer, head of the Middle East programme at Chatham House, believes that the rejection of its electoral victory sowed the seeds of the movement's radicalisation, though it might be more accurate to say that it strengthened the radical elements it had always contained. In Gaza in particular, there were leading members of Hamas who had always been opposed to its participation in the elections. Nizar Rayan, the most prominent casualty of the current onslaught on Gaza, who was both a clerical authority and a leading figure in Hamas's military wing, was so opposed to the democratic process that he refused to acknowledge the authority of the new prime minister. When Ismail Haniyeh pledged to put a stop to mortar attacks on Israel, Rayan held a press conference at his mosque in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, at which he announced that Hamas's military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was developing rockets capable of reaching the Israeli city of Ashkelon.
Rayan also embodied the most rebarbative elements of Hamas's jihadist tendencies - he was so enamoured of the odious practice of suicide bombing that he sent one of his sons on a mission that resulted in his death, and the deaths of two Jewish settlers in Gaza. He achieved "martyrdom" himself in the assault on Gaza that began on 27 December last year. The International Crisis Group in Jerusalem says that Israel bombed the homes of Hamas's 25 most senior field commanders in the first few days, and yet early this month, its fighters in Gaza were claiming that very few of them had been killed: it seems that all of them had left their houses when the war began, yet Rayan had refused, reportedly insisting "that was the mistake the Palestinians made in 1948". His four wives and at least six of his 14 children are thought to have died with him when the Israeli Air Force bombed his house in Jabaliya on 1 January.
Were Rayan an anomalous reversion to Hamas’s early days, his story would matter less, and yet Matthew Levitt, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says that his kind has come to the fore in the Gaza branch of Hamas in the past six months. In August last year, Gazan extremists affiliated with the group’s military wing dominated the secret ballot for the “shura council”, which directs the group’s various functions to such an extent that the political moderates didn’t stand. The ballot is believed to have resulted in the election of officials such as Ahmed Jabari, the “chief of staff” who used to oversee Hamas’s military wing, creating a group that has no interest in compromise – Levitt believes it regards discussions as just a means of removing it from power and forcing it to compromise on its commitment to confronting Israel through violence.
He concludes that there is nothing to be gained by engaging Hamas in talks, as this will only weaken the anti-Hamas PA and further weaken the prospects of diplomatic progress. Yet others disagree - Claire Spencer points out that no one has ever seriously tried to talk to Hamas, and she believes that, given "politically acceptable terms", its political wing is "sufficiently pragmatic" to engage with the Israeli government. What those terms will be remains unclear. Spencer says that the population of Gaza has become dependent on "the interplay of factions and clan warfare" within the broader Hamas movement, which has favoured the rise of armed militias and given Hamas control of the territory's illegal economy.
"The only way to create any durable settlement for Gaza, and reduce the political stranglehold of the militant wing of Hamas, is to reinstate a functioning official economy," she says. In the short term, when fighting stops, the Israelis will be required to lift the blockade of Gaza and allow its brutalised population to resume a semblance of normal life. But meaningful talks in the long term will also require a change in the Israeli position: "With the requisite US pressure, [Yitzhak] Rabin compromised in 1993, and Obama may choose the same path with whomever wins Israel's February 2009 elections," says Spencer.
After all, it is hardly fair to expect Hamas to live up to international obligations while Israel continues to ignore its own, as Haniyeh pointed out in February 2006. When told that Hamas must recognise Israel, accept all existing agreements made by the Palestine Liberation Organisation and renounce violence, he said that the same conditions should be put to Israel as well. "Let Israel recognise the legitimate rights of the Palestinians first," he told the Washington Post. "Which Israel should we recognise?" he mused. "The Israel of 1917; the Israel of 1936; the Israel of 1948; the Israel of 1956; or the Israel of 1967? Which borders and which Israel?
"Israel has to recognise first the Palestinian state and its borders and then we will know what we are talking about."
Edward Platt is the author of "Leadville" (Picador, £7.99) and a contributing writer of the New Statesman
These are not easy questions to answer, for Hamas is not a monolithic organisation with a simple agenda - it consists of many different wings and factions, with conflicting aims and philosophies. It was founded in 1987, at the beginning of the first intifada, by the leadership of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, with the aim of directing resistance against the Israeli occupation (the name "Hamas" is an acronym of Harakat al-Muqa wama al-Islamiya - "Islamic Resistance Movement", though it also means "zeal"). The new organisation shared the Muslim Brothers' aim of Islamicising Palestinian society, but it differed from its philosophy in one crucial respect: it reserved the right to commit violence.
"The movement struggles against Israel because it is the aggressing, usurping and oppressing state that day and night hoists the rifle in the face of our sons and daughters," said Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, one of Hamas's founders, who was assassinated by an Israeli helicopter gunship in Gaza in 2004.
In the west, it is known mainly as a terrorist organisation, which is hardly surprising, given that it has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israeli citizens. And yet, in the past 20 years, it has also developed a political wing and maintained a network of schools, clinics and orphanages in the Palestinian territories.
Unlike the notoriously corrupt Palestinian Authority, which is dominated by the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah party, it has acquired a reputation for fairness and keeping its hands clean, which was partly responsible for its victory in the legislative elections of January 2006.
Dr Khaled Hroub, of the Cambridge Arab Media Project, believes that Hamas has long since outgrown the crude anti-Jewish sentiments of its founding charter, which was written by one member of the "Old Guard" of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. He says that we should judge it on the "government platform" delivered by the newly elected prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, on 27 March 2006. "The entire thrust of the statement is confined directly and indirectly to the parameters of the concept of a two-state solution," he says. "There is no mention or even the slightest hint of the destruction of Israel or the establishment of an Islamic state in Palestine. It reflects very little inclination to radical positions and religious overtones.
"Someone who read this document without knowing that it had been produced by Hamas could justifiably think that it had been written by any other secular Palestinian organisation."
Unfortunately, Hamas never had a chance to implement its programme for government. Neither Israel nor the so-called Quartet on the Middle East - the United States, Russia, the EU and the United Nations - was prepared to recognise a Palestinian Authority run by Hamas, or the Saudi-sponsored government of national unity, which comprised ministers from both Hamas and Fatah. Its first year in office was beset by problems: the international aid that it required to run the government was cut off, and the domestic power struggle erupted into a civil war that left Hamas in control of Gaza while Fatah regained power in the West Bank.
The interplay of factions within Hamas has favoured the rise of armed militias, and given the party control of Gaza’s illegal economy
Dr Claire Spencer, head of the Middle East programme at Chatham House, believes that the rejection of its electoral victory sowed the seeds of the movement's radicalisation, though it might be more accurate to say that it strengthened the radical elements it had always contained. In Gaza in particular, there were leading members of Hamas who had always been opposed to its participation in the elections. Nizar Rayan, the most prominent casualty of the current onslaught on Gaza, who was both a clerical authority and a leading figure in Hamas's military wing, was so opposed to the democratic process that he refused to acknowledge the authority of the new prime minister. When Ismail Haniyeh pledged to put a stop to mortar attacks on Israel, Rayan held a press conference at his mosque in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, at which he announced that Hamas's military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was developing rockets capable of reaching the Israeli city of Ashkelon.
Rayan also embodied the most rebarbative elements of Hamas's jihadist tendencies - he was so enamoured of the odious practice of suicide bombing that he sent one of his sons on a mission that resulted in his death, and the deaths of two Jewish settlers in Gaza. He achieved "martyrdom" himself in the assault on Gaza that began on 27 December last year. The International Crisis Group in Jerusalem says that Israel bombed the homes of Hamas's 25 most senior field commanders in the first few days, and yet early this month, its fighters in Gaza were claiming that very few of them had been killed: it seems that all of them had left their houses when the war began, yet Rayan had refused, reportedly insisting "that was the mistake the Palestinians made in 1948". His four wives and at least six of his 14 children are thought to have died with him when the Israeli Air Force bombed his house in Jabaliya on 1 January.
Were Rayan an anomalous reversion to Hamas’s early days, his story would matter less, and yet Matthew Levitt, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says that his kind has come to the fore in the Gaza branch of Hamas in the past six months. In August last year, Gazan extremists affiliated with the group’s military wing dominated the secret ballot for the “shura council”, which directs the group’s various functions to such an extent that the political moderates didn’t stand. The ballot is believed to have resulted in the election of officials such as Ahmed Jabari, the “chief of staff” who used to oversee Hamas’s military wing, creating a group that has no interest in compromise – Levitt believes it regards discussions as just a means of removing it from power and forcing it to compromise on its commitment to confronting Israel through violence.
He concludes that there is nothing to be gained by engaging Hamas in talks, as this will only weaken the anti-Hamas PA and further weaken the prospects of diplomatic progress. Yet others disagree - Claire Spencer points out that no one has ever seriously tried to talk to Hamas, and she believes that, given "politically acceptable terms", its political wing is "sufficiently pragmatic" to engage with the Israeli government. What those terms will be remains unclear. Spencer says that the population of Gaza has become dependent on "the interplay of factions and clan warfare" within the broader Hamas movement, which has favoured the rise of armed militias and given Hamas control of the territory's illegal economy.
"The only way to create any durable settlement for Gaza, and reduce the political stranglehold of the militant wing of Hamas, is to reinstate a functioning official economy," she says. In the short term, when fighting stops, the Israelis will be required to lift the blockade of Gaza and allow its brutalised population to resume a semblance of normal life. But meaningful talks in the long term will also require a change in the Israeli position: "With the requisite US pressure, [Yitzhak] Rabin compromised in 1993, and Obama may choose the same path with whomever wins Israel's February 2009 elections," says Spencer.
After all, it is hardly fair to expect Hamas to live up to international obligations while Israel continues to ignore its own, as Haniyeh pointed out in February 2006. When told that Hamas must recognise Israel, accept all existing agreements made by the Palestine Liberation Organisation and renounce violence, he said that the same conditions should be put to Israel as well. "Let Israel recognise the legitimate rights of the Palestinians first," he told the Washington Post. "Which Israel should we recognise?" he mused. "The Israel of 1917; the Israel of 1936; the Israel of 1948; the Israel of 1956; or the Israel of 1967? Which borders and which Israel?
"Israel has to recognise first the Palestinian state and its borders and then we will know what we are talking about."
Edward Platt is the author of "Leadville" (Picador, £7.99) and a contributing writer of the New Statesman
Gaza under Fire: John Pilger
Every war Israel has waged since 1948 has had the same objective: expulsion of the native people and theft of more land. But why are we in the west silent on this truth?
"When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear that the silence on Gaza is broken. The small cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents, and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea can be witnessed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia's incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemera we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it, and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.
They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel's right to exist". They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine's right to exist was cancelled 61 years ago and that the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous "Plan D" of 1947-48 resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Israeli army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing". Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon: "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, 'Expel them'".
The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapam party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the road with them because such is the imperative of strategy. And this we say . . . who remember who used this means against our people during the [Second World] War . . . I am appalled."
Every subsequent "war" Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first against Israel. Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Shlaim, Noam Chomsky, Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein have undermined this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called Zionism. "It seems," wrote the Israeli historian Pappé on 2 January, "that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system . . . Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology - in its most consensual and simplistic variety - allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide]."
In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, fall within the international standard of the Genocide Convention. "Is it an irresponsible overstatement," asked Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and international law authority at Princeton University, "to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not."
In describing a “holocaust-in-the making”, Falk was alluding to the Nazis’ establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland. For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews, led by Mordechaj Anielewicz, fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the Nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew. Today’s holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben-Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250lb “smart” GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza, having been approved by a Congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4bn in warmaking “aid”, give Washington de facto control. It beggars belief that President-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken about Russia’s war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama has maintained a silence on Palestine that marks his approval, which is to be expected, given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as his secretary of state and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings “Think”, her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama’s inauguration on 20 January, I trust someone with the brave heart of Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: “Gaza!”
The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now "Operation Cast Lead", which is the unfinished "Operation Justified Vengeance". This was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with George W Bush's approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time.
Why are the academics and teachers silent? Are British universities now no more than “intellectual Tescos”?
In that same year, the authoritative Jane's Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the "green light" to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel's secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of new Labour's enduring complicity in Palestine's agony. However, the Israeli plan, reported Jane's, needed the "trigger" of a suicide bombing which would cause "numerous deaths and injuries [because] the 'revenge' factor is crucial". This would "motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians". What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, then Israeli chief of staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On 23 November 2001 Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud and got their "trigger": the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.
Something uncannily similar happened on 4 November last year when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda "trigger": a ceasefire sustained by the Hamas government - which had imprisoned its violators - was shattered as a result of the Israeli attacks, and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be called Palestine before its Arab occupants were "cleansed". On 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel's charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Behind this sordid game is the "Dagan Plan", named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon during his bloody invasion of Leba non in 1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organisation, Dagan is the author of a "solution" that has brought about the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, now effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah, under Mahmoud Abbas, is Dagan's achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign, relayed through mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in the US, which say Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israel's destruction and is to "blame" for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, since long before its creation. "We have never had it so good," said the Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. "The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine."
In fact, Hamas's real threat is its example as the Arab world's only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians' oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as "Hamas's seizure of power". Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce reported as a historic recognition of the "reality" of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, most states agree. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a "monstrosity".
When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a "1948-style solution" - the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority, followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller "cantonments", and perhaps, finally, into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed . . . Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it."
Dr Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Iraq and Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. "Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic," she wrote on 31 December. "But I'm not talking about the World War II, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [the president of Iran] or Ashkenazi Jews. What I'm referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years . . . Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy doesn't get more anti-Semitic than this." She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young American who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. "I am in the midst of a genocide," wrote Corrie, "which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible."
Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of "responsibility". Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction, but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform. With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable, invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-Semitism. The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.
Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plead for help? Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than “intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries”?
Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third American Writers' Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure that the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 2,500 jammed the auditorium. Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete; the literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance; false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabo kov: "The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are."
If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised people. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants war criminals impunity and immunity through our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or it gives us the power to speak out. For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza: of the people's courage and resistance and their "luminous humanity", as Karma Nabulsi put it. On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No one had told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and a few of them climbed on to a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, in the belief that the world will not forget them.
"When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear that the silence on Gaza is broken. The small cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents, and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea can be witnessed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia's incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemera we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it, and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.
They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel's right to exist". They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine's right to exist was cancelled 61 years ago and that the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous "Plan D" of 1947-48 resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Israeli army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing". Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon: "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, 'Expel them'".
The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapam party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the road with them because such is the imperative of strategy. And this we say . . . who remember who used this means against our people during the [Second World] War . . . I am appalled."
Every subsequent "war" Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first against Israel. Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Shlaim, Noam Chomsky, Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein have undermined this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called Zionism. "It seems," wrote the Israeli historian Pappé on 2 January, "that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system . . . Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology - in its most consensual and simplistic variety - allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide]."
In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, fall within the international standard of the Genocide Convention. "Is it an irresponsible overstatement," asked Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and international law authority at Princeton University, "to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not."
In describing a “holocaust-in-the making”, Falk was alluding to the Nazis’ establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland. For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews, led by Mordechaj Anielewicz, fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the Nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew. Today’s holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben-Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250lb “smart” GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza, having been approved by a Congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4bn in warmaking “aid”, give Washington de facto control. It beggars belief that President-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken about Russia’s war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama has maintained a silence on Palestine that marks his approval, which is to be expected, given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as his secretary of state and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings “Think”, her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama’s inauguration on 20 January, I trust someone with the brave heart of Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: “Gaza!”
The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now "Operation Cast Lead", which is the unfinished "Operation Justified Vengeance". This was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with George W Bush's approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time.
Why are the academics and teachers silent? Are British universities now no more than “intellectual Tescos”?
In that same year, the authoritative Jane's Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the "green light" to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel's secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of new Labour's enduring complicity in Palestine's agony. However, the Israeli plan, reported Jane's, needed the "trigger" of a suicide bombing which would cause "numerous deaths and injuries [because] the 'revenge' factor is crucial". This would "motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians". What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, then Israeli chief of staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On 23 November 2001 Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud and got their "trigger": the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.
Something uncannily similar happened on 4 November last year when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda "trigger": a ceasefire sustained by the Hamas government - which had imprisoned its violators - was shattered as a result of the Israeli attacks, and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be called Palestine before its Arab occupants were "cleansed". On 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel's charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Behind this sordid game is the "Dagan Plan", named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon during his bloody invasion of Leba non in 1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organisation, Dagan is the author of a "solution" that has brought about the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, now effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah, under Mahmoud Abbas, is Dagan's achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign, relayed through mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in the US, which say Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israel's destruction and is to "blame" for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, since long before its creation. "We have never had it so good," said the Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. "The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine."
In fact, Hamas's real threat is its example as the Arab world's only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians' oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as "Hamas's seizure of power". Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce reported as a historic recognition of the "reality" of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, most states agree. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a "monstrosity".
When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a "1948-style solution" - the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority, followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller "cantonments", and perhaps, finally, into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed . . . Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it."
Dr Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Iraq and Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. "Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic," she wrote on 31 December. "But I'm not talking about the World War II, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [the president of Iran] or Ashkenazi Jews. What I'm referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years . . . Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy doesn't get more anti-Semitic than this." She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young American who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. "I am in the midst of a genocide," wrote Corrie, "which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible."
Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of "responsibility". Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction, but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform. With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable, invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-Semitism. The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.
Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plead for help? Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than “intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries”?
Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third American Writers' Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure that the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 2,500 jammed the auditorium. Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete; the literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance; false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabo kov: "The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are."
If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised people. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants war criminals impunity and immunity through our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or it gives us the power to speak out. For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza: of the people's courage and resistance and their "luminous humanity", as Karma Nabulsi put it. On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No one had told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and a few of them climbed on to a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, in the belief that the world will not forget them.
Brown under pressure as Lords prepares to reject 42-day law
Nicholas Watt and Sam Jones The Guardian, Monday 13 October 2008 Article history
Controversial plans to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 42 days are likely to be rejected overwhelmingly by the House of Lords today, piling fresh pressure on Gordon Brown to abandon the proposal.
The strength of feeling among peers is highlighted today by Lord Goldsmith, Tony Blair's long-serving attorney general. In an article for the Guardian, Goldsmith writes: "This pernicious provision should be removed from this bill now. I regard it as not only unnecessary but also counterproductive; and we should fight to protect the liberties the terrorists would take from us, not destroy them ourselves. This proposal is wrong in principle and dangerous in practice."
Peers will today have their first chance to vote on the detention plan when the government's counterterrorism bill is debated at committee stage in the upper house. It is widely expected that peers will reject the measure in large numbers, with Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and cross-bench peers joining forces.
Rejection by the Lords would mean that Brown would have to muster a majority in the Commons for a series of new votes if he wants to see the measure passed into law. Peers are prepared for a lengthy session of parliamentary "ping pong", the process in which an amended bill is thrown back and forth from one chamber to another for repeated votes. If this ends in deadlock, Brown would have to wait a year before using the Parliament Act to force the measure through against the will of the Lords.
Campaigners against 42-day detention believe that Brown is not prepared for such a battle as he cannot guarantee another Commons majority. The measure was passed in the Commons in June by only nine votes after the nine Democratic Unionist MPs supported the government. Since then, the number of opposition MPs has increased by two. John Howell replaced Boris Johnson, who had already stood down as MP for Henley and therefore did not vote, and John Mason won Glasgow East for the SNP from Labour.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said: "We are all learning the lessons of abandoning ethics in the marketplace. But it is just as dangerous to abandon them in the fight against terrorism. We hope and believe that the Lords will reject the discredited plan and that in the spirit of national unity the government will then drop it."
The vote comes as 42 British writers come together to make plain their anger at the detention plans. Among those involved in the campaign, which is coordinated by Liberty, are Philip Pullman, Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, Ian Rankin, Alain de Botton, Ali Smith and AL Kennedy. Each has produced work attacking the legislation, which is published online at 42writers.com.
Controversial plans to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 42 days are likely to be rejected overwhelmingly by the House of Lords today, piling fresh pressure on Gordon Brown to abandon the proposal.
The strength of feeling among peers is highlighted today by Lord Goldsmith, Tony Blair's long-serving attorney general. In an article for the Guardian, Goldsmith writes: "This pernicious provision should be removed from this bill now. I regard it as not only unnecessary but also counterproductive; and we should fight to protect the liberties the terrorists would take from us, not destroy them ourselves. This proposal is wrong in principle and dangerous in practice."
Peers will today have their first chance to vote on the detention plan when the government's counterterrorism bill is debated at committee stage in the upper house. It is widely expected that peers will reject the measure in large numbers, with Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and cross-bench peers joining forces.
Rejection by the Lords would mean that Brown would have to muster a majority in the Commons for a series of new votes if he wants to see the measure passed into law. Peers are prepared for a lengthy session of parliamentary "ping pong", the process in which an amended bill is thrown back and forth from one chamber to another for repeated votes. If this ends in deadlock, Brown would have to wait a year before using the Parliament Act to force the measure through against the will of the Lords.
Campaigners against 42-day detention believe that Brown is not prepared for such a battle as he cannot guarantee another Commons majority. The measure was passed in the Commons in June by only nine votes after the nine Democratic Unionist MPs supported the government. Since then, the number of opposition MPs has increased by two. John Howell replaced Boris Johnson, who had already stood down as MP for Henley and therefore did not vote, and John Mason won Glasgow East for the SNP from Labour.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said: "We are all learning the lessons of abandoning ethics in the marketplace. But it is just as dangerous to abandon them in the fight against terrorism. We hope and believe that the Lords will reject the discredited plan and that in the spirit of national unity the government will then drop it."
The vote comes as 42 British writers come together to make plain their anger at the detention plans. Among those involved in the campaign, which is coordinated by Liberty, are Philip Pullman, Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, Ian Rankin, Alain de Botton, Ali Smith and AL Kennedy. Each has produced work attacking the legislation, which is published online at 42writers.com.
Amid the ruins, a fragile truce and a fragile future for Gaza
Video Link
Rory McCarthy in Rafah guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 January 2009 20.57 GMT Article history
For the first time since fighting erupted 22 days ago, journalists were allowed to enter the Gaza Strip on Sunday and speak to residents Link to this video Surrounded by the air strikes, artillery shelling and the destruction of Israel's three-week war in Gaza, Jawad Harb found the hardest thing to take were the questions from his children. On the seventh day, his son Ziad, six, turned to him and asked: "When are we going to die?"
"That really broke my heart," he said. He tried to comfort them. "It's just temporary," he told them. "It will come to an end soon. The whole world will not keep silent while this is going on in Gaza." His daughter, Bamias, 15, turned to him and silenced him with one sentence. "It's temporary forever," she said.
As a fragile truce took hold in Gaza yesterday and an equally fragile future began to emerge, Harb and his wife and their six children were left to reflect on what was left. Finally, for the first time since the war began, people were out on the streets last night, shopping for food and water, exploring for themselves the extent of the damage wreaked on their city. It was apparent everywhere: in the ruins of destroyed houses, the rubble of mosques, police stations, the devastation visited on even the Muntasser park in the heart of the city, the only children's park in Rafah.
Harb's family sat out the war in their second floor apartment in the southern town of Rafah. On the first day they removed the glass from their windows, the cold wind a price worth paying for the most elementary protection. But they were effectively on the front line. Less than 700m away is the border with Egypt. Along the border, hundreds of smuggling tunnels, some bringing weapons to the armed factions, many others simply skirting Israel's long and painful blockade of the Gaza strip to supply food, medicine, even sheep and goats.
For Israel they were a prime target, and so for three weeks Rafah was hit repeatedly with missiles that dug deep into the soil, shaking the ground and delivering profound fear into the hearts of the city's people.
The nights were spent cowering inside, the days spent sleeping, rushing out to collect drinking water and hoping for the end. The nights were worst towards the end, even as negotiations moved towards a ceasefire. On Friday afternoon as the shelling intensified there were rumours in Harb's neighbourhood that a Hamas-run benevolent association, closed since the start of the war, was to be a target.
The building stands barely a few metres from the back of his apartment. Hundreds of people ran from their homes into the streets outside, seeking shelter only in the road. Although the UN had set aside schools nearby as shelters, they were already overcrowded with desperately poor sanitation.
"Sometimes I feel you lose the words to describe what we have been through," said Harb, 44, a qualified nurse who works for the aid agency Care International. "They were trying to terrify us, to intimidate us. Gazans felt abandoned by the whole world. We just heard speeches on the television, but nobody was doing anything for us. I felt completely helpless."
Even as he spoke Israeli drones still circled overhead. Thousands of Israeli troops were still deployed deep inside the Gaza strip. It was a war that Israel did not want the world to see, a war in which Gazan schools, hospitals and UN buildings were shelled and in which hundreds of civilians died. It was a war that Israel's triumphant leaders said was justified by rocket attacks that have terrified the population of southern Israel and killed 20 people in the last eight years. Journalists were banned from entering Gaza, until the Egyptians finally allowed some to cross their border. By then the devastation was too much to hide.
After 22 days of air strikes, artillery from land and sea, tank shelling and ground combat the Palestinian death toll stands at more than 1,200, with bodies being discovered every day under the rubble. Around 5,000 were injured, many of them left with terrible disabilities. On the Israeli side 13 were killed, three of them civilians and four soldiers mistakenly hit by their own troops.
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, announcing a "unilateral ceasefire" on Saturday night, said his forces had struck a "heavy blow" against Hamas, the Islamist movement that won Palestinian elections three years ago and which now runs Gaza.
Even though Hamas in turn announced a week-long ceasefire yesterday, many Gazans already fear that a return to conflict is only days away.
Last night Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas adviser and one of the more moderate voices in the movement, predicted a return to violence. He said Israel's "unilateral ceasefire" left many questions.
"Do they want to keep their forces in Gaza? Make more time for themselves, impose more conditions? Without a comprehensive compromise you cannot have security and safety in Gaza," he said, as he stood at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. "If the occupation goes on, the resistance will go on also."
Rory McCarthy in Rafah guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 January 2009 20.57 GMT Article history
For the first time since fighting erupted 22 days ago, journalists were allowed to enter the Gaza Strip on Sunday and speak to residents Link to this video Surrounded by the air strikes, artillery shelling and the destruction of Israel's three-week war in Gaza, Jawad Harb found the hardest thing to take were the questions from his children. On the seventh day, his son Ziad, six, turned to him and asked: "When are we going to die?"
"That really broke my heart," he said. He tried to comfort them. "It's just temporary," he told them. "It will come to an end soon. The whole world will not keep silent while this is going on in Gaza." His daughter, Bamias, 15, turned to him and silenced him with one sentence. "It's temporary forever," she said.
As a fragile truce took hold in Gaza yesterday and an equally fragile future began to emerge, Harb and his wife and their six children were left to reflect on what was left. Finally, for the first time since the war began, people were out on the streets last night, shopping for food and water, exploring for themselves the extent of the damage wreaked on their city. It was apparent everywhere: in the ruins of destroyed houses, the rubble of mosques, police stations, the devastation visited on even the Muntasser park in the heart of the city, the only children's park in Rafah.
Harb's family sat out the war in their second floor apartment in the southern town of Rafah. On the first day they removed the glass from their windows, the cold wind a price worth paying for the most elementary protection. But they were effectively on the front line. Less than 700m away is the border with Egypt. Along the border, hundreds of smuggling tunnels, some bringing weapons to the armed factions, many others simply skirting Israel's long and painful blockade of the Gaza strip to supply food, medicine, even sheep and goats.
For Israel they were a prime target, and so for three weeks Rafah was hit repeatedly with missiles that dug deep into the soil, shaking the ground and delivering profound fear into the hearts of the city's people.
The nights were spent cowering inside, the days spent sleeping, rushing out to collect drinking water and hoping for the end. The nights were worst towards the end, even as negotiations moved towards a ceasefire. On Friday afternoon as the shelling intensified there were rumours in Harb's neighbourhood that a Hamas-run benevolent association, closed since the start of the war, was to be a target.
The building stands barely a few metres from the back of his apartment. Hundreds of people ran from their homes into the streets outside, seeking shelter only in the road. Although the UN had set aside schools nearby as shelters, they were already overcrowded with desperately poor sanitation.
"Sometimes I feel you lose the words to describe what we have been through," said Harb, 44, a qualified nurse who works for the aid agency Care International. "They were trying to terrify us, to intimidate us. Gazans felt abandoned by the whole world. We just heard speeches on the television, but nobody was doing anything for us. I felt completely helpless."
Even as he spoke Israeli drones still circled overhead. Thousands of Israeli troops were still deployed deep inside the Gaza strip. It was a war that Israel did not want the world to see, a war in which Gazan schools, hospitals and UN buildings were shelled and in which hundreds of civilians died. It was a war that Israel's triumphant leaders said was justified by rocket attacks that have terrified the population of southern Israel and killed 20 people in the last eight years. Journalists were banned from entering Gaza, until the Egyptians finally allowed some to cross their border. By then the devastation was too much to hide.
After 22 days of air strikes, artillery from land and sea, tank shelling and ground combat the Palestinian death toll stands at more than 1,200, with bodies being discovered every day under the rubble. Around 5,000 were injured, many of them left with terrible disabilities. On the Israeli side 13 were killed, three of them civilians and four soldiers mistakenly hit by their own troops.
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, announcing a "unilateral ceasefire" on Saturday night, said his forces had struck a "heavy blow" against Hamas, the Islamist movement that won Palestinian elections three years ago and which now runs Gaza.
Even though Hamas in turn announced a week-long ceasefire yesterday, many Gazans already fear that a return to conflict is only days away.
Last night Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas adviser and one of the more moderate voices in the movement, predicted a return to violence. He said Israel's "unilateral ceasefire" left many questions.
"Do they want to keep their forces in Gaza? Make more time for themselves, impose more conditions? Without a comprehensive compromise you cannot have security and safety in Gaza," he said, as he stood at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. "If the occupation goes on, the resistance will go on also."
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