Author: ISM Media Group

In Gaza: Updates

By Eva Bartlett

To view Eva’s blog please click here

8:33 am Wednesday:

6 more blasts from the Israeli naval ships, in 2 sets.

No power, nor internet last night, no way to keep updating. I didn’t go to Jabaliya, to my terrified friends, because it was too late, impossible to travel there without being a target. They live on the eastern side of Jabaliya, and the roads which lead to their home are within an even more targeted area than other parts of Jabaliya, especially Salah al Din street, a main north-south road.

At 7 am, the blasts renewed, 8 blasts in sets of 2. Ten minutes later, 3 blasts.

I learn that the Council of Ministers, hosting the Prime Minister’s Office, was targeted last night, at 8:50 pm, along with the Ministry of Interior in Tel al Hawa, which was targeted for the 3rd time. Both were completely destroyed. The port, across from where I tried to sleep, was targeted, the Port Authority building destroyed and the dock repeatedly shelled, the impact of the shells some of the closest and most deafening I’ve felt yet, rivaling the shelling 30 m from my friends home in Jabaliya which we experienced three nights ago. The target: an olive orchard in the back yard of a fence-in neighbour’s house.

10:20 am: 6 more blasts, sets of 2, direction of the port

11:00 am

I learn that a member of the Palestinian emergency medical services was killed early this morning in northern Gaza when his team was targeted by an Israeli strike.

11:30 am

Fatema texts me to let me know that they finally have water, thanks to last night’s rain.

8:40 pm Tuesday

Three hits to report, within minutes of each other [bearing in mind that the air-strikes have continued until this point but in different areas of Gaza City and the entire Strip]

1) Prime Minister’s office hit, destroyed

2) Interior Ministry building hit

3) Council of Ministers, hosting PM’s office, further hit

8:57 pm

missile shot from Apache lands outside the apartment we are staying in tonight, hitting the Port Authority building just 150 m away.

9:18 pm

missile shot from an Apache hits the port, 400 m from the apartment we are staying in

*drones continue to fly over this building, and over the building which I visited one hour before (near the bombed Minister’s compound)

9:33 pm

2 shots from Israeli naval boats, targets as yet unknown

9:34

3 more shots

9:40

2 more shots; “They are aiming at the breakwater in Gaza’s harbour,” Mahfouz, a sailor living just down the road, tells me: “They are warning that they are out there. They want to show us their power. They did the same thing yesterday.” [Mahfouz received a shell beside his front yard two nights ago. His family –one teenage son and several young girls, is terrified.]

[the power cuts, I’m unable to continue updating and unable to know what is happening around me]

Vittorio Arrigoni writes from Gaza

By Vittorio Arrigoni in Gaza

Translated from Il Manifesto

To view original article, published by Il Manifesto on the 29th December, click here

6:05 PM, Marna house, Gaza city

An acrid smell of sulphur fills the air while the sky is shaken by earth-shattering rumbles. My ears are now deaf to the explosions while my eyes are all out of tears from all the corpses. I stand in front of Al Shifa hospital, Gaza’s main hospital, and we’ve just received Israel’s terrible threat that they intend to bomb its under construction wing. This would be nothing new, as Wea’m hospital was bombed just yesterday, along with a medicine warehouse in Rafah, the Islamic university, which was also destroyed, along with various mosques scattered along the Strip. Not to mention many CIVILIAN structures.

Apparently, they can no longer find “sensible” targets, the air force and the navy is killing time targeting places of worship, schools and hospitals. It’s another 9/11 every single hour, every minute around here, and tomorrow is always a new day of mourning, always identical to the previous one. You notice the helicopters and airplanes constantly overhead, you see a flash, but you’re already a goner and it’s too late to take flight. There are no bunkers against the bombs in the Strip and no place is really safe. I can’t contact my friends in Rafah, not even those who live North of Gaza City, hopefully because the phone lines are overloaded. Hopefully. I haven’t slept in 60 hours, and same goes for every Gazan.

Yesterday three other ISM members and I spent the entire night at the al Awda hospital in the Jabalia refugee camp. We were there because we were fearing the much dreaded ground raid that never happened. But the Israeli tanks are posted all along the Strip’s border, and their corpse-hungry creaks will apparently form a funeral march tonight. Around 11:30 PM a bomb fell about 800 metres from the hospital, the shock wave blow several windows apart, injuring the injured. An ambulance arrived, then they blew up a mosque, thankfully empty at that time. Unfortunately, though it actually has nothing to do with bad luck but with the criminal and terroristic will to massacre civilians, the Israeli bomb has also struck the building adjacent to the mosque, which was also destroyed. We watched as the tiny bodies of six little sisters were pulled out of the rubble – five are dead, one is in life-threatening conditions. They laid the little girls out on the blackened asphalt, and they looked like broken dolls, disposed of as they were no longer usable.

This wasn’t a mistake, but a voluntary, and cynical horror. We’re at a toll of 320 dead, more than a thousand wounded and, according to a doctor at Shifa, 60% of these are destined to die in the next few hours or days, after a prolonged agony.There are many missing, and for the last two days despairing wives have been searching for their husbands or children in hospitals, often to no avail.

The morgue is a macabre spectacle. A nurse told me that after hours of searching, a Palestinian woman recognised her husband from his amputated hand. All that’s left of her husband, and the wedding band on her finger from the eternal love they had sworn one another. Out of a house inhabited by two families, very little has remained of their bodies. They showed their relatives half of one bust and three legs.

Right now, one of our Free Gaza Movement boats is leaving the port in Larnaca, Cyprus. I spoke to my friends on board. They’ve heroically amassed medicine and steeped it everywhere in the boat. It should reach the port of Gaza tomorrow around 8:00 AM. Here’s to hoping that the port will still exist after another night of endless bombing. I’ll be in touch with them for the entire night. Please, someone stop this nightmare.

Choosing to remain silent means somehow lending support to the genocide unfolding right now. Shout out your indignation, in every capital of the “civilised” world, in every city, in every square, covering our own screams of pain and terror. A slice of humanity is dying in pitiful in a useless listening.

Al Arabiya: Hollywood stars shun pro-Israeli diamond store

To view original article, published by Al Arabiya News Channel on the 1st January, click here (Arabic version here)

Hollywood stars have called for their pictures to be removed from the website of a diamond company that is associated with settlement expansion in Israel and human rights violations in Africa.

The diamond stores owned by Jewish-American billionaire Lev Leviev had to remove pictures of several actresses after they complained of being linked to a company that funds settlements in the Palestinian occupied territories, a statement issued by the pro-Palestinian human rights group Adalah- New York said.

The actresses include Salma Hayek, Sharon Stone, Whitney Houston, Halle Berry, Drew Barrymore, Brooke Shields, Andie Macdowell, and Lucy Liu.

The celebrities were contacted by the rights group Adalah and the New York based ‘Jews Against the Occupation’ and asked them to distance themselves from a corporation that supports the Zionist project.

The organizations sent letters to the actresses and held negotiations with their representatives to inform them of the human rights violations Leviev is involved in in Palestine and South Africa. As a result the actresses demanded that pictures of them wearing his diamonds were removed from the company’s website.

“Unethical business”

In October, the ambassador of Oxfam International aid agency Kristin Davis demanded that the Leviev’s company remove her pictures from its website.

In June, UNICEF announced its refusal to receive any future donations from Leviev for his involvement in building settlements in the West Bank.

UNICEF justified its decision by stating that it does not receive donations from any parties in conflicts.

“We are gratified that these stars have joined UNICEF, Oxfam and a growing list of others who have distanced themselves from Leviev over his companies’ settlement construction in violation of international law in Palestine, and rights abuses in Angola and Namibia,” Ethan Heitner from Adalah- NY said.

“Some immediately expressed concern when we explained that Leviev was using their photos to whitewash his unethical business practices,” he said, adding “their actions show that Leviev’s wealth and diamonds can’t buy impunity.”

Translated from Arabic by Sonia Farid

Young man in critical condition after being shot three times in the head by Israeli forces during demonstration for Gaza

December 29th 2008 – Abu Dis

A young Palestinian man is in critical condition after having been shot three times with rubber-coated steel bullets by Israeli forces. He was shot from two metres away while attending a demonstration in solidarity against the Israeli massacres in Gaza on the 29th December. He is currently in critical condition in Muqassad Hospital in Jerusalem.

The demonstration in support of the people in Gaza took place at 5pm in Abu Dis in the centre of the town, near the mosque.

Hammam Al-Ashari, 18 years old, was on his way with his friends to the main street of the city at 6:30pm. As he walked up a stairway, Israeli soldiers shot him with three rubber-coated steel bullets in the head from 2 metres away. Three other people were also hit, but were treated at the local clinic.

The military prevented the waiting ambulance from reaching Hammam for half an hour. When the medics finally reached him they saw from the blood track near the boy that the soldiers had dragged Hammam several meters along the ground. First the medics assumed that the soldiers had treated Hammam because of a bandage around his head, but they soon realised that the soldiers had not even cleaned the wounds.

Hammam was immediately taken to the Muqassad Hospital in Jerusalem and treated for 7 hours. From the CT scan of his head the doctors could see two of the bullets, but from the wounds to his head they knew been shot three times. They found the last bullet in the back of his brain, but because of the plastic that covers the bullets, it had made a reflection and the bullet had not appeared on the CT pictures.

The doctors assessed that the treatment from the soldiers and the plastic around the rubber-coated steel bullet were two factors that had worsened Hammams condition.

Hammam al-Ashari is still unconscious and in a critical condition.

Mohammed Khawaje, shot by Israeli forces in Ni’lin while demonstrating in solidarity with Gaza, has died

A Palestinian man, who was left brain-dead on the 28th December after being shot in the head with live ammunition by Israeli forces in the village of Ni’lin, died this evening.

Israeli forces shot 20 year old Mohammed Khawaje in the forehead with live ammunition as he was demonstrating in the village of Ni’lin against the Israeli massacres in Gaza. He was pronounced brain-dead on the evening of the 31st December.

Arafat Khawaje, 22, was shot in the back and killed by Israeli soldiers at the same demonstration on the 28th December.

17-year-old Muhammad Hamid was also killed on the 28th December as he protested close to an Israeli watchtower. He was transferred to Ramallah Hospital where medics announced he had sustained three gunshot wounds in his abdomen and chest. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

ISM volunteers based in the village of Ni’lin witnessed the shootings by Israeli soldiers.

Sara Weinberg, a resident of Chicago, said, “The internationals that live in the village went out in solidarity with Ni’lin residents to demonstrate against the massacre on Gaza. I was standing about 15 meters from the boys, when we heard the sound of live ammunition. I heard screams and saw that 3 had been shot. One man was shot in the leg, another in the head right above the eyebrow and a third was shot in the back. Men carried all three, the one shot in the head was bleeding profusely. The one that was shot in the back was unconscious. We ran down to the street from the olive fields and the soldiers would not stop shooting tear gas at us. It took the soldiers at least 5 minutes to let the ambulance through the checkpoint at the entrance to the village.”

Ibrahim Amira, member of the Popular Committee in Ni’lin said;

“The Occupation is going to turn Ni’lin into a ghetto as it has turned Gaza into a ghetto. And the same way that a massacre is taking place in Gaza against those resisting the siege, a massacre is now taking place in Ni’lin against those resisting the Aparthied Wall”

Two other young men are currently in critical conditions after having been shot in the head by Israeli forces while demonstrating in solidarity with Gaza.

18 year old Hammam Al-Ashari, from Abu Dis, was shot three times in the head with rubber-coated steel bullets on the 29th December. He is now in critical condition in Muqassad Hospital, Jerusalem. Muhammad Jaber, 17 years old, was shot in the head near the Ibrahim Mosque on the 28th December, Hebron, with live ammunition. His condition is also classified as critical.