Tag: Gaza

Retired professor on epic voyage to honor USS Liberty dead

7 September 2011 | Arab News

GAZA: A retired college professor from the US state of Texas who has sailed approximately 8,000 miles to the eastern Mediterranean in an epic voyage, is heading toward his destination — the exact location where Israeli forces tried to sink a US Navy ship in 1967, killing or injuring over 200 American servicemen.

Larry Toenjes, 74 years old, will remain 12 miles off the coast of Gaza in international waters, where the attack took place.

He is planning to hold a memorial service for those killed on board the ship, the USS Liberty, on Thursday.

Toenjes, who departed from Galveston, Texas, almost four months ago, in a 39-foot sailboat, is accompanied by Marine veteran Rusty Glenn, a veteran who joined him in Malta.

While there has been concern that Israel might interfere with their voyage as it has other boats in the Mediterranean, ramming and hijacking some, so far Israel seems to be ignoring the voyage.

Israel shelled and torpedoed the ship, an electronics surveillance ship, in an attack that lasted as long as the attack on Pearl Harbor.

While Israel and its partisans have tried to claim that the attack was “a mistake,” a 2003 inquiry by an independent commission led by a retired four-star Navy admiral, announced on Capitol Hill that all the evidence indicated that the attack had been intentional and  consisted of an act of war against the United States by Israel.

The panel also said that it found that a cover-up had been ordered by the White House.

In addition, the commission found that rescue flights had been recalled by President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. While almost no media covered the Capitol Hill briefing, a full record of its findings are in the Congressional Record and Stars and Stripes military newspaper.

In a column published by the Galveston News, Toenjes explained that he was undertaking the voyage for two primary purposes: To honor the men who died in service to their country and to try to draw attention to attempts by their surviving families and crewmates to obtain the full government investigation that is legally required but that has been blocked by the powerful Israel Lobby.

Toenjes’ trip is being tracked on the website of the Council for the National Interest (CNI).

When he arrives at his destination, the CNI website will stream live his memorial service, which will be carried by satellite phone to a radio program hosted by a Liberty survivor, Phil Tourney.

While the national media have ignored this voyage, Toenjes and Liberty survivors hope that the American public will learn about his undertaking by word of mouth, blogs, and social media.

Statement for USS Liberty memorial service

7 September 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

This statement was submitted for tonight’s memorial service off the coast of the Gaza Strip.

We join Larry Toenjes, Joe and Sherrie Wagner, Rusty Glenn, and all supporters of the s/v Liberty in remembering the deaths of 34 USS Liberty servicemen killed by the State of Israel on June 8, 1967, and the wounding of 174 more.

As crew members of the Oliva, a civilian craft monitoring Israeli naval crimes against fishermen off the coast of Gaza, and as observers on board Palestinian fishing trawlers, we have observed, and at times endured, Israel’s unprovoked use of live gunfire, water cannons, and other military aggression against peaceful vessels. These violent attacks often produce lethal results.

We also remember the nine Turkish citizens, including one Turkish-American, killed on the MV Mavi Marmara by Israeli naval commandos during their May 30, 2010 aerial assault on the first Freedom Flotilla, and the brutality endured by survivors of this attack on a humanitarian mission.

As we mourn the casualties of this aggression, we call on the governments of the world to join the Republic of Turkey and the State of Qatar in imposing meaningful sanctions for Israel’s ongoing crimes against humanity, and for global civil society to organize boycotts and divestments demanding Israel’s compliance with international law and respect for human rights.

Today we planted in Gaza’s buffer zone

6  September 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza Strip

Today, like every Tuesday in Beit Hanoun, we marched into the buffer zone to protest it and the illegal Israeli occupation.  In many ways it was the same as every Tuesday.  We gathered at the Agricultural College, we marched down the road that leads to the buffer zone, we sang, and we chanted.

What was different this week?

The demonstration was bigger than it has been in a long time, Ramadan is over, and the people are newly energized.  Also people were more afraid than they had been in a long time.  Israel has just finished its latest round of heavy violence on Gaza.  We were worried that Israel would fire on us, we are always afraid of this.

Israel often shoots at us when we go to the buffer zone, and  this week we marched with the recent attacks fresh on our minds as we stopped fifty meters from reaching the wall.

Something else was different though.

When we reached the buffer zone it was newly plowed.  If you didn’t know better you might have thought that the buffer zone, the zone of death, had disappeared and that farmers had been to their land and readied it for planting.

This wasn’t true though.  The buffer zone is still there. The land had been bulldozed by Israel, not to prepare it for planting but instead to make sure that nothing lives in the buffer zone.  Neither plants nor people indigenous to the land were allowed to grow here.

We went to the buffer zone to bring life to it, so that people will not forget that their land and history is still living.  We went to the buffer zone to remind the world that this strip of death is not natural, the land now called the buffer zone used to be a thriving place of agriculture, people lived there, children played there.

The land was newly bulldozed, but sadly we did not have olive trees with us to plant upon the land, so we planted what we had, a Palestinian flag.

13-year-old Gaza boy dies eight days after Israeli airstrike

1 September 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

After clinging to life for eight days, 13-year-old Haitham Ahmed Marouf succumbed to injuries received in an Israeli airstrike on Beit Lahia and died on the morning of Monday, August 29.

The Palestinian boy had been farming with his father, Ahmed Marouf, on Sunday, August 21. Shortly after 11:00 am, a missile fired by an Israeli drone struck the field next to him.

The explosion shredded the left side of Haitham’s body, filling it with shrapnel from his shoulder to his thigh. His left leg was completely destroyed, while his right femur was broken.

His abdomen was so deeply wounded that his uncle Mohammed Marouf, a staff nurse at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, recalled, “I could have put my hand inside it.”

After he received initial treatment at al-Shifa Hospital, Haitham’s family secured permission from the Israeli government to transfer him to a hospital under its control. He was transported through the Erez Crossing on Wednesday, August 24.

Despite the advanced treatment he received in an Israeli Intensive Care Unit, including the surgical extraction of shrapnel and cleaning of his wounds, Haitham died at 10:00 am on August 29.

When he met with the International Solidarity Movement on Wednesday, August 31, Ahmed Marouf was too shaken by the death of his son to comment.

Gaza children injured by Israeli airstrike

19 August 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Two Palestinian children were wounded when their house, in the Ameer project of Gaza City’s Soudania neighborhood, was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike early in the morning of Friday, August 19.

After the building lost power around midnight, ten-year-old Marihan Atif abu Samarah and her five-year-old brother, Moustafa, joined their family around light from a generator to wait for Suhoor, the early morning meal eaten before the daily Ramadan fast.

Shortly afterward, an Israeli missile exploded outside, demolishing an empty guard tower for a former government building nearby, as well as the family’s home, leaving only the bathroom standing.

All of the family was injured by falling rubble, but only the two children required hospitalization. Both of Marihan’s legs were broken, one seriously enough to require surgery to properly set it. Moustafa likewise needed surgery on his one broken leg.

When the family met with the International Solidarity Movement on Tuesday, their father, Atif abu Samarah, expressed hope that the children’s condition might improve enough for al-Shifa Hospital, which treated them, to release them within two days.