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Gaza – A Horrifying Statistic

Posted by Jon King on Jan 21, 2009

Tagged with: conspiracy, gaza, hamas, human rights, israel, new world politics, palestine, palestinian, terrorism, war crimes, war on gaza

As the Palestinian death toll in Gaza continues to rise with every ounce of rubble cleared, the sheer scale of devastation following Israel’s recent three-week onslaught there already paints a horrifying statistic…

Gaza – A Horrifying Statistic

As the Palestinian death toll in Gaza continues to rise with every ounce of rubble cleared, the sheer scale of devastation following Israel’s recent three-week onslaught there already paints a horrifying statistic.

5000+ homes are now known to have been destroyed in the relentless land, sea and air bombardment, and more than 100,000 people have been left homeless.

Though Israel claimed it would target only Hamas buildings and fighters, 90+% of the casualties are now known to have been civilian, while at least a third of the 1300+ killed were children.

To add to this, UNWRA chief John Ging revealed that 500,000 people were without water during the bombardment, and that huge numbers were without electricity. All this while as many as a dozen bombs rained down on Rafah, Jabaliya and Gaza City every hour, according to local reports.

Meanwhile the rest of the world — Egypt and the Arab League, the United Nations, the White House — sat back and allowed the massacre to happen.

In an effort to gain some kind of perspective, we should also consider the sheer weight of technological weaponry deployed by the Israeli military:

* 250-pound GBU-39 ‘smart bombs’;

* Computer-precise ‘bunker buster bombs’;

* The psychologically torturous ‘unmanned surveillance drones’ constantly whirring overhead;

* US-built-and-supplied F16 fighter-bombers darkening Gazan skies, night and day;

* US-built-and-supplied Apache helicopter gunships, pounding civilian homes, UN compounds, schools, hospitals…

...Little wonder Israel called upon itself the condemnation of an entire world population.

And there is a rather more contentious issue to be raised.

It is now known that Israel deployed white phosphorous bombs during the conflict, weaponry banned by the terms of the Geneva Convention when used in densely populated areas. If the Gaza Strip is anything, of course, it is a densely populated area.

But it’s not only the use of white phosphorous which is under scrutiny here, though this in itself is surely sufficient that Israel should be made to answer to the UN War Crimes Commission.

The fact that the 1,500,000-strong Palestinian population in Gaza was held captive in what is effectively a walled-off ghetto while the bombardment ensued, unable to flee its borders to safety, must surely constitute a war crime in itelf—as bad as any committed since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, in which, ironically, 5000 Jews were slaughtered by their Nazi captors.

One can only conclude that the incomprehensible courage of those Warsaw Jews and the murderous cowardice of today’s Israeli government and military is quite simply impossible to reconcile.

There is one final statistic.

The United Nations defines a ‘massacre’ as the killing of 50 or more innocent civilians.

In the weeks and months to come, perhaps the UN might at least start to repair its image as the world’s most impotent, most meaningless and ineffective legislative body by invoking international law and bringing the Israeli government to justice for the massacre of so many innocent civilians in Gaza.

image source: BBC