Its been a whole year since the Israeli attack in Gaza, while Israeli threats remain to terrorize the civilians in Gaza, especially after the killing of 3 civilians in Gaza 2 days ago and another 3 in Nablus, the siege, which is the major problem for the 1.5 million people living in Gaza, the world remains silent against these continuous breaks of all human rights doctrons!
Kadima’s website has been hacked for 19 hours so far, Below is a screenshot of how the website looks at the moment.
In cas you dont know, Kadima is the party that one the Israeli election around 4 days ago! here is a youtube video about the hack:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOzdz_iYR6o
Israel’s current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. Rather, it involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes. Senior Israeli political and military leaders may bear personal liability for their offenses, and they could be prosecuted by an international tribunal, or by nations practicing universal jurisdiction over grave international crimes. Hamas fighters have also violated the laws of warfare, but their misdeeds do not justify Israel’s acts.
The United Nations charter preserved the customary right of a state to retaliate against an “armed attack” from another state. The right has evolved to cover nonstate actors operating beyond the borders of the state claiming self-defense, and arguably would apply to Hamas. However, an armed attack involves serious violations of the peace. Minor border skirmishes are common, and if all were considered armed attacks, states could easily exploit them — as surrounding facts are often murky and unverifiable — to launch wars of aggression. That is exactly what Israel seems to be currently attempting.
Dead children in Gaza from Israeli attacks
Israel had not suffered an “armed attack” immediately prior to its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Since firing the first Kassam rocket into Israel in 2002, Hamas and other Palestinian groups have loosed thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israel, causing about two dozen Israeli deaths and widespread fear. As indiscriminate attacks on civilians, these were war crimes. During roughly the same period, Israeli forces killed about 2,700 Palestinians in Gaza by targeted killings, aerial bombings, in raids, etc., according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
But on June 19, 2008, Hamas and Israel commenced a six-month truce. Neither side complied perfectly. Israel refused to substantially ease the suffocating siege of Gaza imposed in June 2007. Hamas permitted sporadic rocket fire — typically after Israel killed or seized Hamas members in the West Bank, where the truce did not apply. Either one or no Israelis were killed (reports differ) by rockets in the half year leading up to the current attack.
Israel then broke the truce on Nov. 4, raiding the Gaza Strip and killing a Palestinian. Hamas retaliated with rocket fire; Israel then killed five more Palestinians. In the following days, Hamas continued rocket fire — yet still no Israelis died. Israel cannot claim self-defense against this escalation, because it was provoked by Israel’s own violation.
An armed attack that is not justified by self-defense is a war of aggression. Under the Nuremberg Principles affirmed by U.N. Resolution 95, aggression is a crime against peace.
Israel has also failed to adequately discriminate between military and nonmilitary targets. Israel’s American-made F-16s and Apache helicopters have destroyed mosques, the education and justice ministries, a university, prisons, courts and police stations. These institutions were part of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. And when nonmilitary institutions are targeted, civilians die. Many killed in the last week were young police recruits with no military roles. Civilian employees in the Hamas-led government deserve the protections of international law like all others. Hamas’s ideology — which employees may or may not share — is abhorrent, but civilized nations do not kill people merely for what they think.
Deliberate attacks on civilians that lack strict military necessity are war crimes. Israel’s current violations of international law extend a long pattern of abuse of the rights of Gaza Palestinians. Eighty percent of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents are Palestinian refugees who were forced from their homes or fled in fear of Jewish terrorist attacks in 1948. For 60 years, Israel has denied the internationally recognized rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes — because they are not Jews.
Although Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005, it continues to tightly regulate Gaza’s coast, airspace and borders. Thus, Israel remains an occupying power with a legal duty to protect Gaza’s civilian population. But Israel’s 18-month siege of the Gaza Strip preceding the current crisis violated this obligation egregiously. It brought economic activity to a near standstill, left children hungry and malnourished, and denied Palestinian students opportunities to study abroad.
Israel should be held accountable for its crimes, and the U.S. should stop abetting it with unconditional military and diplomatic support.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
I always hear this question, why is the US hated so much in the Arab and Muslim world, well maybe this can help answer the question.
By Reuters
The United States is seeking to hire a merchant ship to deliver hundreds of tons of arms to Israel from Greece later this month, tender documents seen by Reuters show.
The U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command said the ship was to carry 325 standard 20-foot containers of what is listed as “ammunition” on two separate journeys from the Greek port of Astakos to the Israeli port of Ashdod in mid-to-late January.
A “hazardous material” designation on the manifest mentions explosive substances and detonators, but no other details were given.
“Shipping 3,000-odd tons of ammunition in one go is a lot,” one broker said, on condition of anonymity.
“This (kind of request) is pretty rare and we haven’t seen much of it quoted in the market over the years,” he added.
The U.S. Defense Department, contacted by Reuters on Friday in Washington, had no immediate comment.
The MSC transports armor and military supplies for the U.S. armed forces aboard its own fleet, but regularly hires merchant ships if logistics so require.
The request for the ship was made on Dec. 31, with the first leg of the charter to arrive no later than January 25 and the second at the end of the month.
The tender for the vessel follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
A German shipping firm which won that tender confirmed the order when contacted by Reuters but declined to comment further.
Shipping brokers: Charters are ‘rare’
Shipping brokers in London who have specialized in moving arms for the British and U.S. military in the past said such ship charters to Israel were rare.
Israel is one of America’s closest allies and both nations regularly sell arms to each other.
A senior military analyst in London who declined to be named said that, because of the timing, the shipments could be “irregular” and linked to the Gaza offensive.
The ship hired by the MSC in December was for a much larger cargo of arms, tender documents showed.
That stipulated a ship to be chartered for 42 days capable of carrying 989 standard 20-foot containers from Sunny Point, North Carolina to Ashdod.
The tender document said the vessel had to be capable of “carrying 5.8 million pounds (2.6 million kg) of net explosive weight”, which specialist brokers said was a very large quantity.
The ship was requested early last month to load on December 15.
In September, the U.S. Congress approved the sale of 1,000 bunker-buster missiles to Israel. The GPS-guided GBU-39 is said to be one of the most accurate bombs in the world.
Finally news of the continued Israeli crimes are coming out, its a well known fact that Israeli soldiers have used Palestinians as human shields, its something they have been doing for years, check out the image below the quoted news.
Date: 07 / 01 / 2009 Time: 23:59
Bethlehem - Ma’an -Amnesty International said on Wednesday that both Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters were endangering the lives of Palestinian civilians–including by using them as human shields and by battling in densely populated residential areas.
“Our sources in Gaza report that Israeli soldiers have entered and taken up positions in a number of Palestinian homes, forcing families to stay in a ground-floor room while they use the rest of their house as a military base and sniper position,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program director.
“This clearly increases the risk to the Palestinian families concerned and means they are effectively being used as human shields,” he said.
Both Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen are continuing to fire at each other from areas close to civilian homes, endangering their inhabitants. Israeli forces have bombed civilian homes and other buildings, arguing that they had been used as cover by gunmen firing at Israeli targets, although Palestinian fighters usually vacate the areas as soon as they have fired.
“The Israeli army is well aware that Palestinian gunmen usually leave the area after having fired and that any reprisal attack against these homes will in most cases cause harm to civilians–not gunmen,” said Smart. “Fighters on both sides must not carry out attacks from civilian areas. Any such attacks are unlawful.”
“The use of these tactics at a time when armed confrontations are taking place in streets in the middle of densely populated residential areas underlines the failure of both sides to respect the protected status of civilians in armed conflict,” Smart said.
He added that “it underlines, too, the urgent need for an independent investigation into alleged abuses, including possible war crimes, by both sides and for perpetrators to be held to account.”
Amnesty International USA said it is not enough for Israel to halt military operations in Gaza for three hours a day, which will do little to stop the suffering and unfolding humanitarian catastrophe there. The human rights organization repeated its call that Israel, Hamas and Palestinian armed groups observe a full humanitarian truce to respond to the needs of the beleaguered civilian population.
“A truce that lasts for a few hours a day is simply insufficient. It’s too short to address the urgent and massive needs of the civilians who are caught in the hostilities and suffering heavy casualties,” said Curt Goering, senior deputy executive director, Amnesty International USA.
“Israel has severely blockaded aid for nearly all of 2008. The [Israeli military] can’t let aid in for three hours and pretend that is sufficient. Nor would a daily brief ‘recess’ guarantee the safety of humanitarian workers,” Goering noted.
“A three-hour respite from the bombing understates the scale of what is happening and the need to evacuate the wounded and provide safe refuge for civilians wishing to flee the conflict zone. This cannot be accomplished in such a short period of time,” Goering said.
Amnesty International has repeatedly urged Israel, Hamas, and other Palestinian armed groups to end attacks on civilians and other violations of international humanitarian law and to allow access to humanitarian assistance. The organization has urged the U.N. Security Council and the international community to ensure compliance with international law.
Following Tuesday’s attack on a school in Jabaliya Refugee Camp, an Israeli government spokesperson said their forces shelled the school after Palestinian gunmen fired at them from it, but this is disputed. The artillery strike that killed some 40 Palestinians, including children, and wounded more than 50 others, “appears clearly to have been a disproportionate attack,” Amnesty International said in a statement.
The practice by Israeli soldiers of taking over Palestinian civilians’ homes and holding their inhabitants as human shields while using the house as a shooting position has been very common in the past eight years both in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank. The use of human shields in conflict is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions.
Palestinian families caught up in the current fighting in the Gaza Strip report that in some cases Palestinian gunmen have agreed to vacate areas near civilian homes without firing at Israeli forces when local residents have objected to their presence.
In other cases, they have refused the residents’ requests and only left after firing. In still other cases, residents say they were too scared to ask the gunmen to leave.
Israeli forces using a kid as a human shield!