Il Manifesto: The angel factories

By Vittorio Arrigoni

Translated from Il Manifesto

To view original article, published by Il Manifesto on the 30th December 2008, click here

Jabilia, Bet Hanun, Rafah, Gaza City are the legs of the journey in my personal map of hell. Whatever the press releases from the summit of the Israeli military may say, recited parrot-style all over Europe and the US via the disinformation experts, in the last few days I’ve been an eye witness to the bombing of mosques, schools, universities, hospitals, markets and many, many civilian buildings.

The medical director at Al Shifa hospital has confirmed he received calls from members of the IDF, the Israeli Army, ordering him to evacuate the hospital, or else face being showered by missiles. But they didn’t let the Army intimidate them.

I should be sleeping at the port (though we haven’t shut our eyes once in Gaza for at least 4 days), but it’s being constantly bombed at night. You no longer hear the sirens of ambulances in a mad chase, simply because there isn’t a living soul left at the port or its environs. Everyone is dead, and it feels like treading a cemetery in the aftermath of an earthquake.

The situation is really that of an unnatural catastrophe, a hate-fuelled and cynical upheaval catapulted onto the people of Gaza like molten lead, tearing human bodies apart. Contrarily to their predictions, it unites all Palestinians, brought together and turned into a sole entity. These are people who may not even have greeted one another until recently, on account of belonging to opposing factions.

When the bombs shower like rain down from the sky, from a height of ten thousand metres you can be sure they make no distinction between a hamas or fatah banner hanging from your window sill. They’re no less explosive even when you’re Italian. There’s no such thing as a surgically precise military operation. When the Air Force and the Navy start bombing, the only surgical operations are those tackled by the doctors, unhesitatingly amputating limbs reduced to a pulp, even though those same arms and legs may have been saved. There’s no time, you have to run, and the time used to treat a seriously injured limb may spell death for the next wounded patient in line awaiting a transfusion. At Al Shifa hospital 600 inpatients are in serious conditions, with only 29 breathing machines.

They’re short of everything, especially experienced staff. For this exact reason, tired as we were (not so much by the sleepless nights as by the apathy and compliance of Western governments, at all effects accomplices of Israel’s crimes), we decided that one of our Free Gaza Movement boats would leave the port of Larnaca, Cyprus last night, carrying three tons of medicine and medical staff. I waited for them in vain – they ought to have docked the boat at 8 AM this morning. Instead, they were intercepted by 11 Israeli war ships at 90 nautical miles from Gaza. They tried to sink them in full international waters. They rammed into them three times, producing an engine failure and a leak in the hull. By pure chance the crew and passengers are still alive, and have managed to dock the boat at a Lebanese port.

Feeling increasingly frustrated by the “civilised” world’s deafening silence, my friends will make a second attempt soon. They’ve in fact unloaded the medicine from our damaged boat, the Dignity, and filled another boat ready for departure, heading straight to Gaza.

We’re certain that the criminal will of Israel, in trampling all over human rights and international law, will never be as strong as our determination in the defense of human rights.

Many journalists interviewing me ask me about the humanitarian situation of Palestinians in Gaza, as if the problem amounted just to food, water, electricity and fuel shortages, rather than the matter being about who’s the actual cause of all this, by obstructing the borders, bombing the water plant or electric power stations.

There are endless queues at the few bakeries with their shutters still semi-open; they have 40 or 50 people scuffling to grab the last chunk of bread. One of the bakers, Ahmed, is a friend of mine, and he’s told me about his greatest fears of the last few days. He dreads the bakeries being mobbed more than the bombs. Brawls have already exploded in front of his shop. The police were around to keep public order until recently, especially in front of bakeries, but you won’t see a single uniformed policeman in all of Gaza now. Some are in hiding at the moment. The others are all buried under two metres of earth, including some of my friends.

Another massacre of children in Jabilia: two little brothers, were struck by an Israeli bomb while driving a donkey-drawn cart in the as-Sekka street in Jabalia.

Mohammad Rujailah, a partner in the ISM, took a photo which is more than just a still image: it’s a history, the revelation of the tragedy we’re intensely consumed by every minute, counting every hour while losing friends, brothers, relatives. Tanks, fighter planes, drones, Apache helicopters, the world’s largest and fiercest army attacking a people who use donkeys as their main means of transportation, just like in Jesus Christ’s time:

—here the picture—-

According to Al Mizan, a human rights monitoring centre, while I write 55 children are involved in bombings, 20 are being killed and 40 are being seriously injured.

Israel has turned the Palestinian hospitals and morgues into angel factories, not realising just how much hatred they are generating in Palestine and the rest of the world.

The angel factories are churning angels out at the rate of a non-stop production line tonight as well, I can tell from the rumbles of explosions I hear outside my window.

Those tiny dismembered and amputated bodies, those lives snuffed out before they could even blossom, will be a recurrent nightmare for the rest of my life. If I can still find the strength to talk about their end it’s only because I want to bring justice to those who no longer have a voice, those who’ve never had a hint of a voice, perhaps for the benefit of those who’ve never had any ears.

Stay human

Vittorio Arrigoni

Ynet: British telecom firm severs ties with Israeli counterparts

UK’s FreedomCall informs Israeli company of decision via email, blames Gaza operation

By Meir Orbach

To view original article, published by Ynet on the 31st December 2008, click here

British telecommunications firm FreedomCall has terminated its cooperation with Israel’s MobileMax due to the IDF operation in Gaza.

“We received an email from the British company informing us that it is severing all ties with us and any other Israeli company following Israel’s strike in Gaza,” said CEO Raanan Cohen.

“We weren’t expecting this from them and there was no prior warning. I don’t intend to appeal to them or answer the letter.”

The email from FreedomCall said, “As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company.”

MobileMax, established in 2004, produces a program providing cellular phones with inexpensive international service.

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

Maan: Five Palestinian sisters killed in Israeli raid on Jabalia

To view original article, published by Maan News Agency on the 29th December, click here

Gaza – Ma’an – No sooner had a Gazan mother run away with her baby boy and two other baby girls seeking shelter did an Israeli airstrike kill her five daughters before she could return and transfer them, as well.

The girls were identified by Palestinian medical sources as Ayah, Eiman, Ikram, Tahrir and Samar Ba’lousha. They were killed after an Israeli airstrike hit their family home near the Imad Aqil Mosque in Jabalia, which was subsequently destroyed.

Dozens of houses in Jabalia have been destroyed and several victims remain under debris since shortly before midnight on Saturday; Palestinian rescue workers are still trying to get them out.

Israeli air raids also killed three children from the Al-Absi family in the Tal Al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, as well as a brother and his sister from the Kishku family in the Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza City.

On Saturday, an Israeli missile claimed the lives of seven students from a vocational training center affiliated with the United Nations on Al-Muhafadha street in Gaza City while they were waiting for a school bus to take them home.

Three other Palestinians from the Ar-Rayyis family were killed in front of their own shop on the same street. A father and his son were later killed in the same area.

Seeking shelter for Gazan children became impossible as the strip lacks fortified places to protect Palestinians from air raids, unlike nearby Israeli towns.

On Monday, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, confirmed that at least 51 innocent civilians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since the airstrikes began on Saturday, purportedly to root out armed groups that have been firing barrages of rockets toward southern Israeli targets.

Since Saturday, two Israelis have been killed and about 20 others are injured from projectile attacks.

Gaza is the most densely populated place on the planet, with nearly 1.5 million Palestinians contained to a 20 square meter strip on the Mediterranean coast. Palestinians living in Gaza have been without food, electricity or water in their homes for several weeks.