[News] One year since Israel attacked Gaza - Call from Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Haidar Eid – A Call From Gaza


Dec 20th, 2009 at 14:50 •
http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/12/20/haidar-eid-a-call-from-gaza/

This week marks one year since Israel began its 
attack on the Gaza Strip: a year since phosphorus 
bombs, DIME bombs and other weapons of death and 
destruction were unleashed on a defenseless 
civilian population. A year since the people of 
the world demanded that Israel end its attack on Gaza.

In this Israeli war of aggression on the occupied 
Gaza Strip, many of our civilians were massacred 
by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, condemned by 
UN experts and leading human rights organizations 
as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This 
assault left over 1,440 Palestinians dead, 
predominantly civilians, of whom 431 were 
children. Another 5380 Palestinians were injured. 
We, the 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged 
Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of whom are 
refugees who were violently expelled from our 
homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected 
to three weeks of relentless Israeli state 
terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically 
targeted civilian areas, reduced whole 
neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure 
to rubble and partially destroyed scores of 
schools, including several run by the UN, where 
civilians were taking shelter. This came after 18 
months of an ongoing, crippling, deadly hermetic 
Israeli siege of Gaza, a severe form of 
collective punishment described by John 
Dugard,the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights as “a prelude to genocide.”

The war on Gaza was predicated and advocated for 
by Israeli generals and politicians. Matan 
Vilnai, ex-Deputy Defense Minister of Israel, 
told Army Radio during "Operation Hot Winter" (29 February 2008):

They will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah 
because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.

In the days following this statement, 107 
Palestinians, including 28 children, were killed. 
The international community failed to take 
action. This inaction, followed by European 
declarations of intentions to upgrade their trade 
agreements with Israel, served as a green light 
for the atrocities that were to be committed in January 2009.

But the attack on Gaza is not yet over: we, the 
Palestinians of Gaza are still living with our 
physical, mental and emotional wounds. Our bodies 
cannot heal because the medicine that we require 
is not allowed into the Gaza Strip. Our homes 
cannot be rebuilt and the mangled steel and 
concrete cannot be removed because the trucks and 
bulldozers that can remove them are not allowed into the Gaza Strip.

Never before has a population been denied the 
basic requirements for survival as a deliberate 
policy of colonization, occupation and apartheid, 
but this is what Israel is doing to us, the 
people of Gaza, today: 1.5 million people live 
without a secure supply of water, food, 
electricity, medicines, with almost half of them 
being children under the age of 15.

It is a slow genocide of the kind unparalleled in human history.

Earlier this month, Ronnie Kasrils, ex South 
African Intelligence Minister and member of the 
ANC, said in the UK, that what Israel is doing to 
the Palestinians is far worse than what was done 
to black South Africans under apartheid. And, 
former American president Jimmy Carter said, on 
his visit to Gaza, that the Palestinian people 
trapped in Gaza are being treated "like animals."

The people of Gaza need your support to end the 
blockade. Over 1400 international activists from 
over 42 countries will be in Gaza on December 31. 
They will march with us to demand that Israel 
lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip immediately 
and permanently. We ask you to show your 
solidarity with Gaza on the same day: wherever 
you may be, organize a protest, a march or a 
petition collection in your own country.

There are 1.5 million people in Gaza: we want to 
see 1.5 million people around the world support 
us as we take our demands to the Israeli state.

We need you to show Israel that we have a common 
humanity; that you watch what it does and you 
will not tolerate it because silence is complicity.

We need you to show Israel on December 31 2009 
that there is no place for their kind of war 
mongering and barbarism in the world and that the 
people of the world reject it.

We need you to show us, the people of Gaza, that 
you remember the horror that we face each day, 
and that you are with us as we fight against the 
Israeli-apartheid killing machine.

Gaza
20.December.2009

Signed by:

Academic Sector

Boycott National Committee

PNGO (Civil Society  Sector)

Labor Sector

Women's Sector

Students' Sector

Youth Sector




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