Ceasefire!

Yay!!! Ceasefire! Barak in Office.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/01/18/gaza-doctor.html Gaza doctor with offer to U of T

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gs90Wad9DuaogJj9QDPVHfoe2aTw Ceasefire

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Gaza- is the Worst Yet to Come

The attacks on Gaza bears a striking similiar to the attacks on Beirut in 1984, including the attacks on the UN facilities. This was written shortly before the attacks on the UN facility. In intelligence, one finds that they can predict the movement of an army by its modus operandi. Armies are organized and have a limited method of operations, once you know them, you can predict its moves.

In December 1982, the UN declared Sabra and Chatila an act of genocide. It was followed by bombings in synagogues Milan and Rome. To recall PLO plane hijackings. In 1983, the American Ambassador to Sudan was assassinated. The modus operandi of the IDF troop formations is almost identical to the siege of Beirut. It has been almost identical to Beirut 1982, step by step. This can potentially create new terrorist organizations if nothing is done about it.

Israel discovered oil in Gaza, George Bush is leaving office, and Israeli elections are coming up. Livni and Barak do not have their rival, Netanyhu's military experiance. The situation is reminscent of George Orwell's 1984. This is why the operation is conducted on this scale, with these particular formation with this degree of planning. Judging by the tank formations alone, it was 5 months planning, during the cease fire, and OCHA states they blockaded medicines three months before the rockets, which was also during the ceasefire.

Some could have argued in 1982 that Fatah alone was responsible for lobbing rockets from the camps, in much the same way as you did. When it withdrew, a brutal massacre of a civilians in the Sabra and Chatila camps was recorded. History repeats itself like a broken record. Here is an eye witness account of a physician, Dr. Ain Swee Lee, in From Beirut to Jerusalem,

The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon killed over 30,000 civilians. The siege of Beirut lasted for 70 days, Beirut was subjected a relentless barrage of air, naval, and artillery bombardment. The Israeli bombardment was random and indiscriminate. Food, electricity and water supplies were cut off - over 500,000 people were driven from their homes. The IDF calculated that they had used some 960 tons of ammunition in trying to destroy the city.

This is very similar to what is going on in Gaza, food, electricity supplies are cut off, and Gazan Canadians say their families only have what is in their water-tanks. The quantity of ammunition used would be similar in estimates.

The price asked by Israel to stop the destruction of Beirut was for the 14,000 PLO fighters to abandon the city - leaving behind their families. The US brokered peace deal guaranteed the safety of the Palestinians left behind in the camps - a multinational peacekeeping force would be deployed to protect them.

She describes what happened, three weeks later as the US didn’t honor its obligations
[15:00] Gaza Hospital was protected by the International Red Cross, despite that Gaza Hospital has been bombed – it was 11 floors high and the top 2 floors were blown off, the doctors quarters were shelled.

At 4:30pm news arrived at the Gaza Hospital that Israeli troops had invaded Akka Hospital [just outside the camp], nurses had been raped and killed, doctors and patients shot dead. (p. 55, 79) from the book” From Beirut To Jerusalem”

Shortly thereafter, the following occurred as journalist Robert Fisk described it in, Pity the Nation,

Bill Foley of AP(Associated Press) had come with us. All he could say as he walked round was "Jesus Christ" over and over again. We might have accepted evidence of a few murders; even dozens of bodies, killed in the heat of combat. But there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies - blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition - tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.

Where were the murderers? Or to use the Israelis' vocabulary, where were the "terrorists"? Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines. The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old… Someone had slit open the woman's stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.

Names of Casualites, ages, etc.

For a comprehensive list of casualities, ages and names, check out

For today: http://www.mezan.org/site_en/press_room/press_detail.php?id=944

In general:

http://www.mezan.org/site_en/index.php

48 Canadians Returned from Gaza

48 Canadians returned from Gaza, 8+ still missing. For more, and interview with returning Canadians with Toronto Star:

http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/564240

48 evacuees relieved to be free of war-zone terrors but remain fearful for family members left behind
Jan 09, 2009 04:30 AM

Oakland Ross MIDDLE EAST BUREAU

EREZ CROSSING, Israel–"I want to go to Canada."
A powerful longing for home – in this case, the peace and calm of London, Ont. – was among Nisreen el-Mathoul's uppermost sentiments yesterday, on her escape from Gaza following nearly two weeks of almost constant bombardment and deprivation.
"There's no food," she said of her ordeal in Gaza. "No water. No electricity. It's black at night. You have to stay in the middle of the home to be away from the windows."
El-Mathoul and her two young sons – Vais, 7, and Mahmoud, 3 – were among 48 Canadians who fled Gaza yesterday (article continued on Toronto Star website)

Interview with Nassim, Ottawa Man with Relatives in Gaza

I asked Nassim, a Palestinian Canadian who has relatives in Gaza, if he could be interviewed for the blog. He agreed. I want to find out the general sentiment. He is in his 40s-50s.

"To be honest with you, I have not slept for the past fifteen days. Sometimes, I sleep for two hours, but then I wake up because I have a nightmare because I dream that my mother may have been killed." His brother and sister, in addition to his mother live there, in a densely populated area near the center of Gaza city.

"My brother does not get much sleep either. He is a nurse for a hospital for the United Nations. It used to be a clinic, but now it became a hospital. He sees horrible things, bodies without heads, people without arms or missing legs, mainly civilians. He can't sleep at night, but you do what you have to do, as someone has to do the job"

I asked what life was like in his neighborhood,

"Our house has two cracks and may collapse from the sound of the shelling. The neighbor's house was demolished, and this affected our house. We have no windows. " It is winter in Gaza. From his neighborhood of 9 families, two people died, a child and a young policeman on his first job.

"Water is a luxury. People are rationing the water tanks wisely. Gone are the days when people took showers or had the luxury of washing their clothes. There is a market that sells vegetables. But there is no gas for cars, and no public transportation. Cheap taxis used to be public transportation, but they became immediate targets of F-15 planes. The Israelis would assume all taxis may carry suspicious people and would shoot all. People rely on neighbors cars, and saving gas to visit relatives in the hospital. The cars you see on TV have rationed gas to drive a short distance."

"For heat and cooking, people take wood from their homes, and from the ruins of neighbors' homes and burn it to survive."

I asked what the situation was:

"The Israelis destroyed a row of houses on the Rafah border and divide Gaza into the three towns, surrounded and sealed the three towns. What they are doing is collective punishment. They are cutting of the means to live because we exercised our right to vote. Some, but by far not all Palestinians, voted for Hamas, which is why they are making life unlivable for the Palestinian civilians so that they force Hamas out of hiding. They won't. One Israeli general said on TV that he will turn Gaza back to the 1950s, to the horrible conditions when we were deprived of all means of life. I didn't believe it when I saw it on TV, but now he kept his word."

"They are not targeting Hamas. They are targeting the civilian population, because they think if life is harsh enough of the civilians, they'll make Hamas surrender. It is not Hamas, but the civilian Palestinian population that is punished collectively because it exercised its democratic right to vote. We are punished because some, but not all of Palestinians voted for Hamas. We will not surrender. The Israelis don't understand. We could live in luxury without democracy. However, it would be a life without dignity. We can not live without dignity. We can not live without our democratic rights. Therefore, we can not surrender. Israel doesn't understand. If they kill our children, we will just have more children, but they can't wipe every Palestinian off the face of the earth."

I asked him what are the prospects of peace and the future.

"It is hard to live a normal life. This gives me a lot of pain. It is impossible, will take so many years to forgive, if at all. I can't believe what Palestinians may think peace is possible after something like this! How can you make peace after Guernica? We will never forget, and it will always cause us pain. Take the Israelis for instance, after what happened to the Jews in the second world war, even today, 60 years later, some of them still go on TV and describe their pain. We are no different. We will never forget this. The pain won't go away. For us, this attack on the civilian population will always give us pain, pain for many years to come. It is impossible to forgive after that, will take many years to forgive, many years for the pain to go away. It will take many, many years for me to live a normal life after this." "I can't sleep at night, I worry about my family."

Sadness to the World!The Lord Should Come

On Orthodox Christmas:
An author of the blog, I, received an email from a colleague from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. My mother is Russian Orthodox. Russians, Arabs, Greeks, and Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on a different day, the 7th of January. This line really struck me.

"Thanks so much, yes it was the Orthodox Christmas here yeserday, but no one celebrated,we are all mourning." The email is of course private, but I feel that it was very important to share this line. I think the West Bank and Gaza have been visited by the Grinch. He actually stole Christmas this time.