‘Israel’ is always seen to be responding to attacks from Palestinians. They act in self-defence or strike back against Palestinians who have disrupted the peace.
The argument of whether Palestinian abstention from supposed ‘rocket fire’ and other ‘militant acts’ would cause an environment of concord to prevail, is often put forward by many Western commentators and even some ‘enlightened’ Muslims.
One wonders what these people would say when faced with the fact that Israel threatened to turn the Gaza Strip into a "bigger holocaust" using the term "shoah", a Hebrew word meaning holocaust and a word which has been traditionally exclusively used by Jews to refer to the holocaust. Israel has additionally threatened to use any and all types of actions and have not ruled out the possibility of ‘occupation’.
The current invasion of the Gaza and the wild killing spree that amounted to over 120 deaths (by Sunday) including many women, elderly and children was nothing short of a holocaust. The Israeli offensive continues with many more lives being lost, and it is strange that the Western world still continues to assume that the Israeli action is a response and that too a legitimate response.
Ramzy Baroud of Al-Jazeerah writes in the Arab News that the uneven numbers of casualties speak volumes. He says
“While Yechiah’s (supposedly killed by rocket fire) death is tragic, he was the “first person killed by rocket attacks from Gaza since May 2007, and the 14th overall since the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian armed clashes in September 2000,” according to a Human Rights Watch press release on Feb. 29, citing Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.
B’Tselem reported that “1,259 of the 2,679 Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces in the Gaza Strip (since September 2000) were not participating in hostilities when they were killed, and 567 were minors.”According to a news agency report published in Al-Arabiya website, as of Feb. 22, 190 Palestinians were killed since the resumption of the peace process following the Annapolis talks last November. That number increased when the Israeli Army escalated its attacks on the Gaza Strip, killing 34 Palestinians in 48 hours between Feb. 27-28, not counting several other Palestinians killed in the West Bank during the same period.Despite the facts, Israel’s actions are repeatedly accepted by most media as a legitimate ‘response’ to Palestinian violence.”
Among the many killed, Islam Online provides a brief story of one young twelve year old girl. The report states:
"There must have been an Israeli sniper on a rooftop because he fired one shot and hit her in the stomach," Raad Abu Seif told the Telegraph on Monday, March 3.
His 12-year-old daughter Safa died in his arm inside the family home in the Zimo Square area of Jabaliya in northern Gaza. The father, his wife and seven children had bunkered down inside their home when Israeli troops trudged through the Jabaliya refugee camp. Safa was going up upstairs to join her uncle and his family when an Israeli bullet penetrated her young body. "She was still about four meters from a window and up on the first floor."
The horrified father rushed to the phone and called an ambulance to save his child, but the car came under Israeli fire and was not able to reach the house. In a desperate attempt, Abu Seif carried the girl out of the house, raising a white flag. An Israeli tank fired warning shots above his head, forcing him to dive for cover.Shortly, the 12-year-old child breathed her last in her father's arms.
"I stroked Safa's hair," said Abu Seif, his voice hoarse. "And then her eyes rolled backwards in her head. "I tried to massage her heart for a minute, two minutes, three minutes, I don't remember. And then I felt there was nothing."
During a winter more severe and intense than most in terms of its coldness, and in a winter where Palestinians have found themselves without food, medicines and other basic necessities, the Israelis attacked the Gaza in full-scale invasion cynically given the designation ‘Operation Warm Winter’.
The humanitarian situation has degenerated to the extent where one wonders where the champions of human rights have hidden themselves. Never mind the rights to issues such as honour and dignity, the right to needs that would ensure basic survival have and are being continuously denied with such impunity that the perpetrators of such crimes are bold enough to justify their inhumanity. Food is scarce, electricity is limited, medicines donated by those with human hearts have been withheld at the port of entry causing the deaths of innocent infants and kids and now Palestinians have been warned that they must boil any drinking water since chemicals necessary from purifying water have been continuously denied to the authorities in Palestine.
At the same time, the Al-Aqsa Foundation for Rehabilitating Islamic Sites issued a press statement on Tuesday where they claimed that unknown perpetrators climbed over the fence surrounding the Hassan Bek Mosque in Jaffa and vandalized sections of the mosque.
US Secretary of State, Rice, meanwhile blamed the Palestinians and urged them to stop ‘firing’ their home-made rockets and return to the talking-table. George Bush, on the other hand, insisted that “he is still optimistic there will be a Middle East peace deal before he leaves office”.
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