Eighty percent of the people in Gaza are essentially dependent on outside food aid, either from UNWRA or the World Food Program. Not because there isn’t food in the shops – there is – but they can’t afford it, or they can’t afford enough of it because any livelihoods that there were, any jobs that there were outside the government have effectively disappeared. Most private businesses have been destroyed, essentially by the blockade – bulldozed – and the rest finished off by Cast Lead. Read more »
“The Karni crossing won’t resume operating,” said one. “At least not as long as Hamas controls the Strip.” Until June 2007, Karni was the principal cargo crossing into Gaza, despite a series of terror attacks that targeted both the crossing and the surrounding area.
IOA Editor: The strangulation of Gaza will continue. And now we know, from official sources, that it is not due to “terrorism.” Separately, as Amira Hass reports in Expulsion without trucks, Palestinians continue to be squeezed out of the occupied West Bank, as a matter of long-standing Israeli policy. And Hamas is not in power on the West Bank, at least not yet. Ethnic cleansing is the overall purpose of Israeli actions, now and in the past. Read more »
The decision to develop Iron Dome appears to have been, from the start, an effort to keep the Rafael scientists employed and compensate the company for not benefiting from the research and development funding for the Arrow system, which is being developed by Israel Aerospace Industries.
IOA Editor: So much for Israeli security and for defending our people from Gaza-based terrorism. There’s no business like War Business (there’s even an Irving Berlin Broadway-tune to go with it). Israeli war profiteering is an important part of the equation. See also:
Amira Hass: Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay
Who Profits?
Wikipedia – Iron Dome Read more »
The wall of shame, as Egyptians call it, will complete the transformation of Gaza into an open-air prison. It is the cruellest example of the concerted Israeli-Egyptian-US policy to isolate and prevent Hamas from leading the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Hamas is habitually dismissed by its enemies as a purely terrorist organisation. Yet no one can deny that it won a fair and free election in the West Bank as well as Gaza in January 2006. Read more »
Sharvit-Baruch… was concerned by the Goldstone report’s negative effect on Israel’s legitimacy in the global arena, and that Israel could potentially turn into “a kind of South Africa or Serbia” or a “criminal” or “racist” state in international opinion…. [S]he added, “We are now in a situation in which we need to give our friends – who don’t want to see lawsuits filed against us in their own courts – the tools to do away such claims, along with other charges against us,” she said. “If they need a commission of inquiry then that’s what we’ll give them,” she added.
IOA Editor: Israel is clearly very concerned about damage to its image in the aftermath of the Goldstone report. Yet, if there is any ‘regret’ here, it is strictly a tactical PR and legal issue: Let’s help our friends help us get out of the legal mess our own Gaza war-crimes put us in. Read more »
[M]any, across the political spectrum, are deeply uncomfortable with the shift in policy that has turned the Palestinians, from historical “brothers,” into something like enemies… [T]he columnist Fahmi Huwaydi remarks that Egypt’s “strategic vision has changed, and Egypt has come to reckon the Palestinians and not the Israelis a danger. And if this sad conclusion is correct, then I cannot avoid describing the steel wall…as a wall of shame.” Read more »
UN team find remains of aircraft-dropped bombs, contradicting Israeli report on military conduct during three-week conflict.
IOA Editor: UN evidence vs. Israeli propaganda. Who’s going to win? Read more »
The Israel Defense Forces on Monday denied that two of its senior officers had been summoned for disciplinary action after headquarters staff found that the men exceeded their authority in approving the use of phosphorus shells during last year’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip, as the Israeli government wrote in a recent report.
IOA Editor: Looking past Israel’s propaganda smoke screen, it is apparent that at the IDF no evil deed goes punished. Read more »
“The Goldstone report is a defamation written by an evil, evil man,” Dershowitz said.
IOA Editor: The use of the term “traitor” is important: a Traitor loses a good deal of protection provided by civil society, and may become a target of assassination. Such a declaration is as close to a Fatwa as Jewish society gets – including secular, “Western” Jewish circles. Read more »
“Egypt’s steel wall does not serve the interests of any Arab party,” Hamas’ al-Masri said Monday. “The Israeli occupation benefits from it, because it has killed the last lifeline keeping the Gaza Strip alive after two and a half years of siege.” Read more »
