Category Archives: Gaza

How Israel is turning Gaza into a super-max prison

Jonathan Cook writes: It is astonishing that the reconstruction of Gaza, bombed into the Stone Age according to the explicit goals of an Israeli military doctrine known as “Dahiya”, has tentatively only just begun two months after the end of the fighting.

According to the United Nations, 100,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, leaving 600,000 Palestinians – nearly one in three of Gaza’s population – homeless or in urgent need of humanitarian help.

Roads, schools and the electricity plant to power water and sewerage systems are in ruins. The cold and wet of winter are approaching. Aid agency Oxfam warns that at the current rate of progress it may take 50 years to rebuild Gaza.

Where else in the world apart from the Palestinian territories would the international community stand by idly as so many people suffer – and not from a random act of God but willed by fellow humans? [Continue reading…]

Where else?

How about Lebanon, buckling under the strain of supporting 1.5 million Syrian refugees and where 200,000 children are being forced to work in a situation “perilously close to slave labour.”

I point this out not to diminish concern about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, but because among pro-Palestinian activists in the West, a myopic fixation on those who have suffered at the hands of Israelis has often come with an apparent indifference towards those whose misery was precipitated by the brutal rule of one of Israel’s next door neighbors.

How much concern there is about those who suffer sometimes appears to depend on who caused the suffering.

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Palestinian Authority forces take control of Gaza crossings as donors pledge millions for reconstruction

Ma’an reports: The Palestinian Authority is set to assume responsibility for the Erez and Kerem Shalom crossings in Gaza on Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Muhammad Mustafa said.

Mustafa, who is also head of a reconstruction committee for Gaza, told Ma’an Friday that the PA will take charge of building materials entering Gaza and the movement of Palestinians between Gaza and the West Bank.

Representatives in the health, agriculture, housing and civil affairs ministries will be in charge of monitoring materials for their respective sector.

The Associated Press reports: Qatar pledged $1 billion Sunday toward the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip after this year’s devastating Israel-Hamas war, once again using its vast wealth to reinforce its role as a regional player as Gulf Arab rival the United Arab Emirates promised $200 million.

The pledges followed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry earlier announcing immediate American assistance of $212 million, though Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said Gaza needs $4 billion to rebuild.

Human Rights Watch says: Donor countries at the October 12, 2014 conference on assistance to Palestine should press Israel to lift sweeping, unjustified restrictions on the movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip, Human Rights Watch said today. The United Nations Security Council should reinforce previous resolutions ignored by Israel calling for the removal of unjustified restrictions.

Blanket Israeli restrictions unconnected or disproportionate to security considerations unnecessarily harm people’s access to food, water, education, and other fundamental rights in Gaza. Israel’s unwillingness to lift such restrictions will seriously hinder a sustainable recovery after a seven-year blockade and the July-August fighting that damaged much of Gaza, Human Rights Watch said.

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From Syria to Gaza: The search for a better life

Linah Alsaafin reports: Mohammad Farid Yousef’s family has been detained at Cairo airport for almost a month. They left the Gaza strip in the aftermath of Israel’s recent 51-day invasion this past summer, which killed over 2,000 Palestinians and injured 11,000 more, creating widespread destruction.

Since the uprising in Syria began in March 2011, an estimated 191,000 people have been killed, including over 2,000 Palestinian refugees. Three million have been displaced, with refugee camps sprouting in the neighbouring countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. A further 6.5 million are internally displaced, meaning that half of the Syrian population in total have fled their homes.

Prior to the ouster of former Egyptian president Mohammad Al-Morsi, Syrians and Palestinian Syrians could obtain a visa from the airport in Egypt, which encouraged a number to set up life there, until Syria was safe enough to go back to. Yet the 30 June military coup, the rising xenophobia and hateful media incitement endangered the lives of Syrians and Palestinians living there, forcing many of them to flee elsewhere.

Mohammad and his family fled the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus in 2013. They arrived in Gaza through the Rafah border crossing in April of the same year after a brief stop in Egypt, deciding that they could at the very least lead a dignified life in the coastal enclave.

“We had nowhere to go,” Mohammad, 29, told the Middle East Monitor. “I came to Egypt during Morsi’s reign with relative ease, but the negative attitude of the Egyptian people towards us and their exploitation made my family rethink our options. We found we had nowhere to go except Gaza, especially since travelling by boats from Egypt to seek asylum in Europe had not started then. It began in May, a month after we had already left to Gaza.”

The Palestinian refugee population in Syria had numbered around 600,000. Now, almost half have escaped the fighting in search of security and stability, but face heavy restrictions by various Arab governments, such as Lebanon, which has announced it will not grant entry to Palestinian Syrians. [Continue reading…]

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Hamas agrees to relinquish control of Gaza

The Guardian reports: The two main Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, have reached a “comprehensive” agreement that would turn over the civil administration of Gaza immediately to officials of a Palestinian unity government led by President Mahmoud Abbas.

The agreement, negotiated in Cairo, is designed to ease the long blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt and open the way to reconstruction of the war-ravaged coastal entity. A recent Palestinian Authority study estimated the cost of reconstruction in Gaza following this summer’s 50-day conflict with Israel at $7.8bn (£4.8bn).

Palestinian officials said the agreement would allow the Palestinian Authority to take control over the border crossings of the Gaza Strip, including the crucial Rafah crossing into Egypt – a key demand of Egypt’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.

According to sources in Egypt close to the talks, Palestinian Authority security forces would also control the Philadelphia corridor, a key strip adjoining the border with Egypt.

Officials from the rival factions began meeting in Cairo on Wednesday to try to overcome their differences and strengthen their hand for talks with Israel slated for late next month.

The breakthrough deal would formally bring an end to Hamas’s seven-year long rule of Gaza, during which time it has fought three wars with Israel. Hamas asserted its control over the Gaza Strip in 2007 after winning Palestinian legislative elections the year before.

“Fatah and Hamas have reached a comprehensive agreement for the unity government to return to the Gaza Strip,” said Jibril Rajoub, a senior official in Fatah.

Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk and Fatah’s head of delegation, Azam al-Ahmad, later confirmed a deal had been reached, the details of which are expected to be formally announced later on Thursday. [Continue reading…]

Middle East Eye adds: Thursday’s announcement is the second such agreement on a unity government to be reached in under a year, and there are already signs of disunity within the warring camps.

Less than an hour after publicly celebrating the deal, Hamas spokesperson Izzat al-Risheq shared the doubts of Palestinians regarding the agreement and its implementation.

“We want action not words”, he wrote on his Facebook page. “This is the most frequent comment I have heard after the agreement between Hamas and Fatah. These people are right: they have already seen so many agreements, and not a thing has changed.”

Chris Doyle [director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding] told MEE that there are also divisions within Fatah.

“Even if there is agreement at leadership level, there remain plenty of other parties within Hamas and Fatah, as well as the Israeli authorities, who will oppose this.

“It’s one thing to sign up to a deal and for leaders to say that this will happen. It’s quite another to implement it on the ground. There is still precious little trust between [Fatah and Hamas].”

Sam Bahour, a West Bank-based businessman and political analyst, agrees, citing the weakness of both Fatah and Hamas.

“In any real political system both of these failed parties would be laughed out of office.”

While Doyle warns that the deal will be “tough to implement” on the ground, he says that unity is essential after the 51-day war that caused huge loss of life and damage to basic infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

“There is really only one way forward for Palestinians to try to resolve the crisis in Gaza. The level of destruction that was meted out over that 51-day Israeli operation means that they need to engage in a very serious reconstruction programme. They need to get this unity agreement in place so they can open up the borders and get building materials in. The domestic pressure within Gaza is utterly huge; people are desperate. Ultimately, there is no other option than a unified approach.” [Continue reading…]

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The war about the war

Mark Perry writes: The August beheading of American journalist James Foley shocked Washington’s policy elite, sparking concern over how the U.S. should respond to the emerging threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In retrospect, the gruesome murder was a kind of tipping point for the Obama administration, which had been scrambling to shape a response to both ISIS and the growing perception that its foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, was hopelessly adrift.

At the same time that Foley’s videotaped execution was spurring a series of high-level State Department, Pentagon and White House meetings over the crisis in Iraq and Syria, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was calculating how he might use Foley’s death to explain why his country had killed over 2,100 Palestinians in Gaza over the previous eight weeks.

On the day following the release of a videotape showing the beheading, Netanyahu referred to the Foley murder during an evening press conference in Jerusalem, comparing the extremist group that murdered Foley with Hamas. “Hamas is like ISIS. ISIS is like Hamas,” he said. “They’re branches of the same tree.” The next day, in a message circulated on the Israeli prime minister’s twitter account, he reiterated the claim. “RT THIS,” Netanyahu wrote. “Hamas is ISIS. ISIS is Hamas. They’re enemies of Peace. They’re enemies of civilized countries.” The tweet had the snazzy look of a logo, along with scenes from the beheading video, which were deleted the next day after being widely criticized as inappropriate. [Continue reading…]

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How the ‘peace process’ sustains the status quo in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Nathan Thrall writes: In the early days of the Gaza war that took the lives of some 2,150 Palestinians and 72 Israelis, a number of officials in Washington, Ramallah, and Jerusalem began to speak of renewing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations mediated by the United States. As the fighting dragged on, this talk intensified, again showing that the “peace process” gains greatest urgency from the threat of Israeli-Palestinian violence, as well as from the U.S.’s desire to calm a roiling region, including by helping Arab allies justify pro-American stances to their publics. This was why the 1991 Madrid talks occurred during the first Palestinian intifada and immediately following Arab support of the United States in the 1991 Gulf War. It was why President George W. Bush’s 2003 Road Map for Middle East Peace was drafted during the second intifada and as the U.S. assembled a coalition for the 2003 Iraq War. And it is why the United States may soon seek to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, following sharply increased Israeli-Palestinian confrontation not just in Gaza but also in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and after Israel’s actions in Gaza were given both tacit and overt support by Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority.

There is little reason to believe that renewed talks would succeed. The obstacles that caused the failure of the negotiations led by Secretary of State John Kerry have not disappeared. Many of them have grown larger. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his political program of nonviolence and negotiation have been weakened by Hamas’s strategy in Gaza, which impressed many Palestinians, although the costs were enormous. Hamas sent thousands of rockets into Israel, killing seven civilians, while Israeli air strikes and artillery killed hundreds of children, devastated large parts of Gaza, and left tens of thousands of people homeless. Reconstruction will cost many billions and take years.

Still, Hamas demonstrated that its militancy and its willingness to endure a ferocious Israeli attack could achieve more in weeks than Abbas’s talks have achieved in years. During the Gaza war, Israel did not announce a single new settlement in the West Bank. Although Israel did not agree to some of Hamas’s most important requests—for example, the opening of a seaport and the release of recently arrested prisoners—it showed eagerness to negotiate with the Palestinians and willingness to make significant concessions, including the easing of some border crossings, extending fishing rights, facilitating the supply of construction materials, and offering to begin working in Gaza with the new Palestinian government formed in June. [Continue reading…]

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Thousands of Gazans fleeing to Europe, hundreds die at sea

Haaretz reports: Thousands of Palestinians have left the Gaza Strip for Europe using tunnels, traffickers and boats, testimonies obtained by Haaretz show.

Gazans have been fleeing the Strip since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge, but their escape was hardly covered in the media since they have been leaving clandestinely, with the help of paid smugglers.

The sinking of two ships carrying Palestinians from Gaza — one off the coast of Malta last week, and the other off the coast of Egypt — and the drowning of hundreds of passengers have focused attention on the trend.

The Palestinian Embassy in Greece reported yesterday that the ship that sank off the coast of Malta was carrying more than 450 passengers, most of them Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, and that it was rammed intentionally by another ship run by rival smugglers. Continue reading →

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Israeli drone conference is features aircraft recently used to attack Gaza

Quartz: A few weeks after Israel and Hamas signed an open-ended truce to end their nearly two-month-long war in Gaza, Israeli defense contractors are parading weapons used in the conflict at a conference in Tel Aviv. The annual Israel Unmanned Systems conference, which began Sunday and runs through Friday (Sept. 19), is jointly hosted with the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. According to its website, attendees include “senior officials from commercial and government entities” from Europe, Asia, North and South America.

The conference’s sponsors include the largest Israeli private defense contractors, among them Haifa-based Elbit Systems. Elbit’s Hermes 450 (pdf), a “multi-role tactical high-performance unmanned aircraft system” (UAS)—in other words, a battle drone—operated this summer in the Gaza Strip, and may have carried out attacks. [Continue reading…]

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Veterans of elite Israeli intel unit refuse reserve duty, citing mistreatment of Palestinians

The New York Times reports: Denouncing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians under occupation, a group of veterans from an elite, secretive military intelligence unit have declared they will no longer “take part in the state’s actions against Palestinians” in required reserve duty because of what they called “our moral duty to act.”

In a letter sent Thursday night to their commanders as well as Israel’s prime minister and army chief, 43 veterans of the clandestine Unit 8200 complained that Israel made “no distinction between Palestinians who are and are not involved in violence” and that information collected “harms innocent people.” Intelligence “is used for political persecution,” they wrote, which “does not allow for people to lead normal lives, and fuels more violence, further distancing us from the end of the conflict.”

The letter, revealed Friday in Israel’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper as well as The Guardian in Britain, echoes similar periodic protests by reservists over the years, including a group of 27 pilots who refused to participate in what Israel calls targeted assassinations, and 13 members of the vaunted commando unit known as Sayeret Matkal, both in 2003. But it is the first public collective refusal by intelligence officers rather that combat troops. Unit 8200 has a special role in Israeli society as a coveted pipeline to its high-technology industry.

“After our service we started seeing a more complex picture of a nondemocratic, oppressive regime that controls the lives of millions of people,” said one of the group’s organizers, a 32-year-old sergeant major who was on active duty from 2001 to 2005. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because the military prohibits Unit 8200 members from being publicly identified. [Continue reading…]

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For Gaza’s children, ‘safety’ is just a word

Samer Badawi writes: As the smoke clears over Gaza and its residents begin to assess the damage of Israel’s 50-day war, no group has been more traumatized than this enclave’s children. They represent roughly half of Gaza’s population and, according to a report released on August 27, died at a rate of twelve a day, every day, during the conflict. Their parents, too, have perished in unprecedented numbers, leaving more than 1,500 of Gaza’s children orphaned.

Alaa Balata is one of them.

I met Alaa during one of the war’s temporary ceasefires. Israeli drones buzzed overhead, and the 17-year-old was surrounded by relatives who had been keeping a close eye on him since his parents perished. It had been fewer than two weeks since the incident, and Alaa spoke in the steady understatement of a person in shock, damming the sadness — at least for now.

When I asked him what happened, Alaa gestured toward the heap of rubble that was his uncle’s home. We were sitting on plastic chairs in a dirt alley flanked by cinder-block walls — a familiar scene in any Palestinian refugee camp. But here, in the heart of Jabalia, the path was strewn with shrapnel—the same dense metal that tore through every member of Alaa’s immediate family on the afternoon of July 29.

“It was the second day of Eid,” Alaa told me. A day earlier, on the first day of the Muslim feast marking the end of Ramadan, Alaa’s father decided to move the family to his brother’s house, which was was deep inside the camp and farther from the Israeli tanks shelling everywhere along Gaza’s border.

“He thought we would be safer here,” Alaa said. [Continue reading…]

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Noam Chomsky: The fate of the Gaza ceasefire

Is there nowhere on the face of the Earth where opinion polls aren’t taken? In the wake of the 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza, parts of that tiny strip of land now look, according to photographs, like a moonscape of destruction. At least 10,000 homes were obliterated and thousands more damaged; at least 175 major factories were pummeled into the dust. Its only power plant was destroyed, damaging electricity, water, and sewage systems. Large apartment houses, as well as the ministry of education, schools, and other sites, were hit and sometimes reduced to so much rubble. It was all part of a massive Israeli assault on Hamas, several of whose senior leaders were assassinated, but also on the Palestinian population, involving what looked like collective punishment for its support of that organization or simply living in proximity to it. And indeed, with almost no hope of rebuilding much of their world any time soon, you might think that Palestinians would hold the Hamas leadership at least somewhat responsible for the destruction that has rained down, as assumedly the Israelis wanted them to. But a recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), begun in the last day before the ceasefire took hold, and carried out, in part, amid the rubble that is now Gaza, suggests otherwise.

It finds that Palestinian opinion couldn’t be clearer.  Support hasn’t been this high for Hamas since 2006, when it won a fair and square democratic election. If a presidential vote were held today, the pollsters of PSR discovered, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would beat Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas hands down. Here are just a few of the findings: “79% [of Palestinians] believe that Hamas has won the Gaza War; 3% believe Israel came out the winner; and 17% believe the two sides were losers… If new presidential elections are held today and only two [candidates] were nominated, Haniyeh, for the first time since we have started asking about his popularity about eight years ago, would receive a majority of 61% and Abbas would receive 32%. [The] vote for Haniyeh stands at 53% in the Gaza Strip and 66% in the West Bank. Abbas receives 43% in the Gaza Strip and 25% in the West Bank… A majority of 53% believe that armed confrontation is the most effective means to establish a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel. Only 22% believe negotiation is the best means to establish a Palestinian state and 20% believe that popular non-violent resistance is the most effective route to statehood.”

As historically has often been the case, massive bombings and other assaults do not destroy the support of populations for movements or governments, but tend to solidify it. In other words, Israeli policy is reducing civilized life for Palestinians in a major way and yet increasing the urge both to fight on and the desire for revenge. It’s an ugly pattern and, as TomDispatch regular Noam Chomsky (whose latest book, Masters of Mankind, is due out this week) indicates today, it’s been going on in this same fashion for a remarkably long time, as Israel continues to gobble up Palestinian lands on the West Bank, while working to hem Palestinians in yet further in the Gaza Strip. Tom Engelhardt

Ceasefires in which violations never cease
What’s next for Israel, Hamas, and Gaza?
By Noam Chomsky

On August 26th, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) both accepted a ceasefire agreement after a 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza that left 2,100 Palestinians dead and vast landscapes of destruction behind. The agreement calls for an end to military action by both Israel and Hamas, as well as an easing of the Israeli siege that has strangled Gaza for many years.

This is, however, just the most recent of a series of ceasefire agreements reached after each of Israel’s periodic escalations of its unremitting assault on Gaza. Throughout this period, the terms of these agreements remain essentially the same.  The regular pattern is for Israel, then, to disregard whatever agreement is in place, while Hamas observes it — as Israel has officially recognized — until a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by even fiercer brutality. These escalations, which amount to shooting fish in a pond, are called “mowing the lawn” in Israeli parlance. The most recent was more accurately described as “removing the topsoil” by a senior U.S. military officer, appalled by the practices of the self-described “most moral army in the world.”

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For Israel, the beginning of wisdom is to admit its mistakes

Avi Shlaim writes: Israel has a habit of justifying its actions in the occupied Palestinian territories, however illegal and indecent, in the name of security. But denying any security to the other side only perpetuates the conflict.

Five days after reaching a ceasefire with Hamas to end the latest round of fighting in Gaza, the Israeli cabinet decided to appropriate 988 acres of land on the West Bank, near the place where three Israeli teenagers were recently abducted and murdered, to make way for another illegal Jewish city. This is the biggest land grab in three decades. As the justice minister, Tzipi Livni, pointed out: “It was a decision that weakens Israel and damages its security.” What it proves, if further proof is needed, is that Israel’s leaders are determined to prevent a two-state solution to the conflict.

Operation Protective Edge, which came to an end after 50 days of fighting, was the third and deadliest war in six years between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement that rules Gaza. Israel lost 66 soldiers and six civilians. On the Palestinian side, the war left 2,104 dead, mostly civilians, and 12,656 injured; 17,000 houses were destroyed or damaged; 520,000 people, out of a population of 1.8 million, were displaced. The damage to buildings and to the civilian infrastructure, estimated at $6bn, will take many years to repair.

What did Israel gain by unleashing the deadly firepower of the IDF against the caged population of this tiny coastal enclave? Virtually nothing. [Continue reading…]

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Failure in Gaza

Assaf Sharon writes: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long ago become a shouting match over moral superiority. With seventy Israelis and more than two thousand Palestinians, most of them civilians, dead, the latest round of violence in Gaza, too, is being analyzed and discussed mostly on ethical grounds. But as fighting goes on, moral condemnation will likely do little to prevent the next round. Understanding how we got to this point — and, more importantly, how we can move beyond it — calls for an examination of the political events that led up to the operation and the political context in which it took place.

In Israel, endless controversy over Gaza has overlooked one question: How did we get here in the first place? Why, after a considerable period of relative calm, did Hamas resume rocket fire into Israel?

Before the current operation began, Hamas was at one of the lowest points in its history. Its alliance with Syria and Iran, its two main sources of support, had grown weak. Hamas’s ideological and political affinity with the Muslim Brotherhood turned from an asset into a burden, with the downfall of the Brotherhood in Egypt and the rise of its fierce opponent, General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi. Egypt’s closure of the Rafah crossing and the tunnels on its border with Gaza undermined Hamas’s economic infrastructure. In these circumstances, Hamas agreed last April to reconciliation with its political rival Fatah, based on Fatah’s terms. For example, the agreement called for a government of technocrats largely under the control of the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas.

But Benjamin Netanyahu viewed the reconciliation as a threat rather than an opportunity. While the separation of Gaza from the West Bank may not serve Israel’s interest (namely, effective government in the Palestinian Territories), it benefits Netanyahu’s policy of rejecting solutions that would lead to a separate Palestinian state. The reconciliation agreement robbed him of the claim that in the absence of effective rule over Gaza, there is no point in striking a deal with Abbas. [Continue reading…]

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The Hannibal Directive: How Israel killed its own troops and massacred Palestinians to prevent soldiers’ capture

Max Blumenthal writes: In the southern city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, Aug. 1, 2014 is known as Black Friday. This was the day the Israeli military bombarded the city with almost every mode of destruction available to it, from F-16 missiles to Apache rockets to naval shelling to drone strikes and mortars.

Bulldozers ripped down homes at random while tanks barreled through neighborhoods, shelling anything in sight. In a matter of hours, at least 500 artillery shells and hundreds of missiles were dumped on the city, almost entirely in civilian areas. By the end, at least 190 people had been killed, so many that unequipped local hospitals were forced to store their corpses and body parts in ice cream coolers.

The target of the operation was not necessarily Rafah’s civilian population, though attacking it was part of the Israeli military’s underlying logic. Instead, the army apparently aimed to kill one of its own. Indeed, Israeli forces had invoked the Hannibal Directive, opening up an indiscriminate assault on the entire circumference of the area where one of its soldiers, Lt. Hadar Goldin, was allegedly taken captive by an ambush team from the Hamas military wing known as the Qassam Brigades.

It was one of possibly three instances during Israel’s 51-day war with Hamas that it initiated the Hannibal Directive. [Continue reading…]

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Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza neighborhood shocked the Pentagon

Mark Perry writes: The cease-fire announced Tuesday between Israel and Palestinian factions — if it holds — will end seven weeks of fighting that killed more than 2,200 Gazans and 69 Israelis. But as the rival camps seek to put their spin on the outcome, one assessment of Israel’s Gaza operation that won’t be publicized is the U.S. military’s. Though the Pentagon shies from publicly expressing judgments that might fall afoul of a decidedly pro-Israel Congress, senior U.S. military sources speaking on condition of anonymity offered scathing assessments of Israeli tactics, particularly in the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City.

One of the more curious moments in Israel’s Operation Protective Edge came on July 20, when a live microphone at Fox News caught U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry commenting sarcastically on Israel’s military action. “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,” Kerry said. “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation.”
Rain of high-explosive shells

Kerry’s comment followed the heaviest bombardment of the war to that point, as Israeli artillery rained thousands of high-explosive shells on Shujaiya, a residential area on the eastern edge of Gaza City. A high-ranking U.S. military officer said that the source of Kerry’s apparent consternation was almost certainly a Pentagon summary report assessing the Israeli barrage on which he had been briefed by an aide moments earlier.

According to this senior U.S. officer, who had access to the July 21 Pentagon summary of the previous 24 hours of Israeli operations, the internal report showed that 11 Israeli artillery battalions — a minimum of 258 artillery pieces, according to the officer’s estimate — pumped at least 7,000 high explosive shells into the Gaza neighborhood, which included a barrage of some 4,800 shells during a seven-hour period at the height of the operation. Senior U.S. officers were stunned by the report. [Continue reading…]

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Reflections on the war on Gaza

Azzam Tamimi writes: First: For the people of Gaza, the recent ceasefire deal between the resistance and Israel did not accomplish all they were seeking. Yet, at the same time, it achieved none of what the Israelis were hoping for. Perhaps the reason the two sides managed to agree, finally, on a ceasefire, was their conviction that there was no way any of them could achieve more under the prevalent circumstances.

It is true that the Israelis have enjoyed unprecedented Arab support in their war against Gaza and continuous encouragement from certain Arab quarters to inflict as much damage as they could on Gaza to pressure Hamas into capitulation. Yet, they have not been able to cripple the resistance or force it to surrender. As for the resistance, it has indeed enjoyed the full and unconditional backing of the people of Gaza, despite the siege and the pain, in the hope that this latest round of conflict would led to lifting the siege that has been imposed on the Strip for nearly eight years. Yet, it has not been possible for the resistance to obtain guarantees that the siege would finally be ended.

Second: The artillery and the rockets have gone silent and the annoying buzzing and whizzing of Israeli warplanes in Gaza’s skies is no longer there, yet the propaganda warfare will continue for some time to come. Each side will seek to prove it came out victorious having achieved its objectives.

The Israelis consider the continuation of the siege a sign of their success whereas the resistance considers the failure of the Israelis to impose demilitarisation a sign of victory. However, one can see a marked difference between the two sides. As soon as the ceasefire deal went into effect, the masses in Gaza took to the streets to celebrate and express joy over what they truly believed was victory.

On the other side, the Israeli masses seemed confused and even distressed. Few Israelis believe that the war has accomplished much for them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started the offensive against Gaza with high expectations. He promised his public that he would dismantle the military infrastructure of Hamas and the other resistance factions, that he would destroy the tunnels and that he would put an end to the firing of the rockets from Gaza. However, none of this was achieved. [Continue reading…]

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