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<h2><b>Haidar Eid – A Call From Gaza</b></h2><font size=2> <br>
Dec 20th, 2009 at 14:50 • <br>
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<a href="http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/12/20/haidar-eid-a-call-from-gaza/" eudora="autourl">
http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/12/20/haidar-eid-a-call-from-gaza/</a>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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):<br>
<br>
<b><i>They will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use
all our might to defend ourselves.<br>
</i></b> <br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>It is a slow genocide of the kind unparalleled in human history.</b>
<br><br>
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." <br><br>
<b>The people of Gaza need your support to end the blockade.</b> 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. <b>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.</b> <br><br>
<b>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. <br><br>
</b>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 <b>silence is
complicity</b>. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
Gaza<br>
20.December.2009<br><br>
Signed by: <br><br>
<b>Academic Sector<br><br>
Boycott National Committee<br><br>
PNGO (Civil Society Sector)<br><br>
Labor Sector<br><br>
Women's Sector<br><br>
Students' Sector<br><br>
Youth Sector <br><br>
<br><br>
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