Welcome to Hell: Gaza's unending misery

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"Israeli forces yesterday pounded dozens of targets in the Gaza Strip and dropped leaflets warning of an escalation in attacks, as southern Israel came under renewed Palestinian rocket fire. Last night, as flames and smoke rose over Gaza City, speculation grew that Israel was about to launch the so-called third stage of its offensive: the forcible entry into Gaza City by thousands of troops.

In response, Hamas said that the Gaza offensive had "killed the last chance for settlement and negotiation with Israel". Earlier yesterday, Israeli aircraft attacked more than 40 targets throughout Gaza, striking 10 rocket-launching sites, weapons-storage facilities, smuggling tunnels, an anti-aircraft missile launcher and gunmen. And civilians. In the day's bloodiest incident, an Israeli tank shell landed outside a home in the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya, killing nine people as they sat in their garden. They were all from the same clan, and, said health administrator Adham Hakim, their bodies were so mangled they were brought to hospital in the boot of a civilian car. Two were women and two were children.

This wretched pair will be added to the nearly 300 Gaza children who have been killed by Israeli fire. In the perversely disproportionate mathematics of this conflict, 13 Israelis have been killed – four of them by militant rockets. According to the Hamas-run Palestinian health ministry, the overall death toll now exceeds 800, more than a third of them children. The United Nations corroborates this, a report two days ago from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs putting the number of children killed at 265. The Israelis respond that Hamas often uses schools and homes, and therefore are the ones bringing down fire on Gaza's children. Last week, an Israeli attack outside a UN school killed nearly 40 people. Israel and Palestinian witnesses said militants carried out an attack from the area moments earlier. But it is Israeli fire, Israeli weapons and Israeli military that do the aiming – and Palestinian women and children being killed at a rate that is sickening world opinion, if not yet world leaders.

And behind the statistics, the pictures of broken bodies wrapped in winding sheets are the stories of real people. People such as Olvera Al-Jarou and her tiny son Yusuf. Mrs Al-Jarou, 36, originally from Ukraine and married to a Palestinian doctor, became the first foreigner to lose her life in Gaza. Her one-year-old son Yusuf, clinging to her in fright during a bombardment, also died when an Israeli shell hit their home. A daughter, Yasmine, was severely injured and is now in intensive care; another son, Abdulrahman, was also wounded but is expected to make a full recovery."

more

http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/news/uk-and-international-news/2009/01/11/israelis-accused-of-gas-strike-on-gaza-citizens-78057-21032132/

:wow:

in the US media?

Meh... what's one more war crime?

Not saying it was tear gas, just that the doctor quoted suspected tear gas, in which case it's not an illegal weapon. Deliberately targeting civilians with it is probably illegal, but then again our own police do that all the time...

Those pics are going to haunt me for a long time.
And the US government supports this shit!

But, the point is made.

I can't even imagine what it would be like trying to survive in a place like this...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7812295.stm

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1231424929369&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

the Hamas leaders will instruct their citizens to "fight to the end" and martyr themselves, as they sit cozily away from the conflict.

Cowards.

Just like the Hamasniks who hide in underground bunkers and put children on the rooftops.

Pity the innocents, who always suffer most.

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"At 8:45 A.M. Sunday, Mustafa called to say they had left their house. At 8:10 they had called a courageous friend who had a car, and they drove with the kids two kilometers north, to the rented apartment of his brother-in-law in the Gaza City neighborhood of Rimal. The brother-in-law rented it a week ago, after he fled with his family from their home in the northern edge of the city, the site of bombing and shooting. Now there are 15 people in a two-room apartment - with no water, of course. The main thing is that the explosions sound a little less loud.

After 15 days they could not take the pressure of tanks entering the Sheikh Ajleen neighborhood, the incessant shooting all night long and the shelling from the sea. The leaflets dumped from helicopters, calling on people to leave their homes - they, too, have been unnerving. But most frightening were the missiles that hit the nearby apartments and killed the neighbors, including Yasser Arafat's official photographer and his family.

As of Sunday, the streets of Gaza are full of people fleeing - both from Sheikh Ajleen, an area with open fields and houses, where battles between Hamas gunmen and Israel Defense Forces soldiers are taking place, but also from nearby neighborhoods. Everyone is carrying his possessions.

Thus, Mustafa and his family have joined the statistics of the newly displaced, whose numbers increase by the day. A relatively small number - some 20,000 - have found refuge in UNRWA schools. Many more have moved in with relatives and friends: in Gaza City, Rafah, Khan Yunis, Beit Hanun and the Nuseirat refugee camp.

The military is steadily forcing the areas known as "population concentrations" to move inward, "clearing" areas on the periphery - first the agricultural land, and now the neighborhoods bordering them - and pushing people into an increasingly smaller territory.

It is hard to count all the dead. However, there are reports of entire families being killed, and of numerous persons from the same family being killed, especially in peripheral areas that are emptying of people. The inhabitants are doing their best to avoid becoming part of the statistics of death.

Last Thursday, at 3:40 P.M., medical teams pulled four bodies out of the rubble - three of them children - in the Atatra neighborhood, southwest of Beit Lahiya. According to the report, the four had been killed several days earlier. On Friday at 3:30 P.M., a UAV fired a warning missile at the home of Faiz Salha in Jabalya. The family did not make it out of the house before heavier artillery slammed into it two minutes later, killing six of them."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054551.html