As a deluge of reports appear about Israeli war crimes during the December-January invasion of Gaza, one fact cannot be forgotten: the Palestinian people remain undefeated. Despite the Israeli atrocities and despite the continued siege of Gaza, there has been no rejection of the Hamas government in Gaza. On the other hand, the Palestine Authority under Mahmoud Abbas has been completely discredited by its collusion with the Zionists and imperialism. In Britain, the Labour Party, which completely supported the Zionist onslaught, is now trying to isolate those who support the Palestinian people by threatening to cut links with the Muslim Council of Britain, while police are rounding up protesters from the January demonstrations in London against the attack on Gaza. BOB SHEPHERD reports.
On 19 March, Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, reported to the UN Human Rights Council that Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza ‘would seem to constitute a war crime of the greatest magnitude under international law’. He described the assault as ‘an inhuman form of warfare that kills, maims and inflicts mental harm’. A series of reports, testimonies and revelations and the many accounts given by Palestinians in Gaza of the atrocities committed by Israeli forces during the onslaught confirm his report.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published the testimonies of Israeli soldiers given to recruits at the Oranim College military academy. These testimonies expressed the racist contempt with which they treated the people of Gaza. One is quoted as saying, ‘the climate in general … I don’t know how to describe it…the lives of Palestinians, let’s say, are much, much less important than the lives of our soldiers’. Another quotes what one of his platoon said to him, ‘we need to murder any person who’s in there, yeah; any person who’s in Gaza is a terrorist’. One testimony describes an incident where an Israeli sniper shot and killed a Palestinian woman and her two children after they were told it was safe to leave their house. Haaretz also reported that Israeli soldiers who had been in Gaza ordered T-shirts afterwards with racist images such as one of a dead Palestinian baby with the slogan ‘Better use Durex’ and one of a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye over her belly and the slogan ‘1 shot, 2 kills’.
On 24 March, The Guardian reported investigations that detailed the use of young boys as human shields by Israeli troops, the targeting of medical workers and hospitals by Israel and the use of drones to target civilians. Three brothers, Al’a, Ali and Nafiz Al Attar, aged 14, 15 and 16, were taken and used as human shields by Israeli troops for five days; they were made to kneel in front of Israeli tanks to stop Resistance fighters from attacking and were placed in front of troops as they moved through Palestinian homes. The Guardian also covered the attacks on medical workers and hospitals: 16 Palestinian medics were killed by the Israelis with many more injured. The World Health Organisation reports that over half of Gaza’s 27 hospitals were damaged by Israeli bombs with two clinics destroyed and 44 damaged.
The newspaper also quoted from Amnesty International’s investigations into the use by Israel of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones, which killed at least 48 civilians. In one incident a missile fired by a drone in Gaza City killed a husband and wife and four of their children as they sat together drinking tea. Mounir Al Jarah, the dead woman’s brother, declared: ‘You cannot imagine the scene, a family sitting around together and then, in a matter of seconds, they were cut to pieces. Even the next day we found limbs and body parts on the roof, feet and hands.’
In a Lancet report, Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and Dr Swee Ang, who entered Gaza during the onslaught, wrote:
‘Gaza is very densely populated. It is eerie to see that the bombs used by Israel have been precision bombs. They have a 100% hit rate on buildings which are crowded with people. Examples are the central market, police stations, schools, the UN compounds used as a safety shelter from bombardment, mosques (40 of them destroyed), and the homes of families who thought they were safe as there were no combatants in them, and high rise flats where a single implosion bomb would destroy multiple families. This pattern of consistent targeting of civilians makes one suspect that the military targets are but collateral damage, while civilians are the primary targets.’
According to the latest figures from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) 1,434 Palestinians were killed during the invasion of whom 235 were resistance fighters. The rest were civilians and non-combatants including 288 children. 5,303 Palestinians were injured in the assault including 1,606 children.
The devastation Israel caused is immense: 90,000 people were made homeless, 22,000 buildings were partially or completely destroyed and 300,000 people still have no running water. This situation will continue as Israel refuses to allow any building material, pipes or concrete into Gaza. The devastation of buildings has left an estimated 600,000 tons of rubble that needs to be cleared. This requires heavy plant machinery which Israel also refuses to allow across the border.
Gazan agriculture was decimated with financial losses estimated at $200 million. Israeli forces deliberately destroyed greenhouses, egg incubators, wells, irrigation systems and farmland. Vast areas of fruit and vegetable farmland were uprooted and trashed by Israeli forces in a concerted effort to destroy any future Gazan agriculture. This was a deliberate policy to make Gaza even more dependent on external food aid, allowing Israel even more power over their lives. In February Oxfam reported that Israel was stopping half of the aid it, together with UNRWA, was trying to send. In the lead up to a conference of international donors in Sharm-el-Sheikh at the beginning of March, Oxfam declared:
‘The people of Gaza have been restricted to survival rations for now over 20 months. Restrictions on food types, clothing and school books are keeping innocent children underfed, cold and uneducated. Hospitals, schools and thousands of homes need to be rebuilt. We cannot talk seriously about rebuilding Gaza without the opening of all crossings.’
Representatives of 71 nations attended the Sharm-el-Sheikh conference and pledged $4.5bn for the reconstruction of Gaza. Hamas was excluded from the conference as the imperialists insisted that Hamas must neither control nor have access to the funds. They want to avoid a situation akin to Lebanon when, after Israel’s defeat, Hizbullah consolidated its support by rebuilding homes and providing aid to the people.
Israel now wants to link lifting the siege with the release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Hamas has always been clear that there can be no such linkage as the release of Shalit depends on Israel releasing Palestinian prisoners. However the Zionists will constantly manoeuvre to prevent any loss of control over the Gazan borders, and in this they rely on support from Egypt on the one hand, and the imperialists on the other. Socialists in Britain must continue to campaign for an end to the siege and an end to Labour’s defence of Zionist war criminals.
Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah will be speaking about his experiences in Gaza at an FRFI Student Society meeting on Tuesday 28 April 7-9.30pm at the London School of Economics, Houghton Street, WC2. Nearest tube Holborn.
FRFI 208 April / May 2009
