Major Israeli Invasions into the West Bank and Gaza

 Videos about the Dec 2008 - Jan 2009 Attack on Gaza 
This section contains a number of videos on the December 2008 - January 2009 attack on Gaza. more

 Statement of the President of the 63rd Session of th UN General Assembly 
Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, Ma’an News - The behavior by Israel in bombarding Gaza is simply the commission of wanton aggression by a very powerful state against a territory that it illegally occupies. more

 Israel claims success in the PR war 
Anshel Pfeffer, The Jewish Chronicle - The Gaza attack is the first major demonstration of Israel’s total overhaul of its ‘hasbara’ operation following the Second Lebanon War. While the military aspects of the operation were meticulously planned, a new forum of press advisers was also established which has been working for the past six months on a PR strategy specifically geared to dealing with the media during warfare in Gaza. more

 Gaza and the world: Will anything change? 
Ramzy Baroud, Ma’an News - In times of crisis, most Arabs tune in to Al-Jazeera television. Sometimes it’s comforting for the truth to be stated the way it is, with all of its gory and unsettling details, without blemishes and without censorship. When Israel carried out massive air strikes against Gaza on Saturday, 27 December, terrorizing an already hostage and malnourished population, I too tuned in to Al-Jazeera. more

 Molten Lead 
Uri Avnery, Ma’an News - Just after midnight Al-Jazeera’s Arabic channel was reporting on events in Gaza. Suddenly the camera was pointing upwards towards the dark sky. The screen was pitch black. Nothing could be seen, but there was a sound to be heard: the noise of airplanes, a frightening, a terrifying droning. more

 Analysis: Operation Cast Lead extends a war doomed to fail 
Editorial, Ma’an News - Israel’s offensive in Gaza has not, and will not, achieve its stated goals. Either the goals are different from what has been stated publically, or the military establishment has backed itself into a corner and has no option other than proceeding with a course doomed to failure. more

 Gazans face ‘humanitarian crisis’ as Israeli raids intensify 
Kim Sengupta, The Independent - After six days of Israeli bombardment, aid agencies say that Gazans are facing a humanitarian crisis with air strikes causing severe problems in getting food, medicine and fuel supplies to the besiegedcivilian population. more

 The Facts about Israel’s War on Gaza 
Adam Sheets - It is crucial that one has her/his facts straight about Israel’s war on Gaza. What events brought about this dreadful situation? What needs to be done to make it stop? These questions will be answered in the content of this article, using concrete facts from a variety of news sources. more

 Israel’s ‘Crime Against Humanity’ 
Chris Hedges, TruthDig - Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw. more

 Gaza children too scared to step outside 
Mohammed Dawwas, The Independent - You can tell those moving about Gaza City by the mattresses on the car roofs. The streets are mostly deserted but some people are shifting from one house to another, trying to guess where the bombs might land and put distance between themselves and possible targets. Others are heading to the bakeries where there are long queues for bread. There is wreckage everywhere. more

 Five sisters killed in Gaza while they slept 
Donald Macintyre and Said Ghazali, The Independent - The five Palestinian sisters were fast asleep when a night-time Israeli airstrike hit the next-door mosque in Gaza. One of the walls collapsed on to their small asbestos-roofed home and they were all killed in their beds. The eldest sister, Tahrir, was 17 years old, the youngest, Jawaher, just four. more

 Statement by Prof. Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories 
United Nations Human Rights Council - The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war. more

 Bloodied in Gaza 
Laila El-Haddad, Guardian - Silently, the world watches. And silently, governments plotted: how shall we make the clouds rain death on to Gaza? more

 December 2008 Attack on Gaza 
This section contains a number of articles on the December 2008 attack on Gaza. more

 Stripping Palestinians has Become Common Practice: Eyewitness Accounts 
Suzanne Russ, Palestine Chronicle - On Monday, November 25, Israeli soldiers ordered a young resident of the town of Nablus to strip completely naked in the street, according to Palestinian witnesses. more

 Siege of Al Ain Refugee Camp 
Alison Weir - I've been outside the Ain camp in Nablus, where the Israeli military has people under siege. They shot a crippled man early this morning and then would not allow the ambulance in to treat him. He died -- he was a civilian, not part of the resistance. more

 Aid agencies condemn Gaza carnage 
BBC - International aid agencies have reacted with dismay to the violence in Gaza in which at least 18 Palestinian civilians are known to have died. more

 Palestinian human rights NGOs condemn Beit Hanoun Massacre; call for international investigation 
11 Human Rights Organizations - The Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) have committed an appalling act of mass murder in the town of Beit Hanoun today, one day after they redeployed around it. At dawn, the IOF fired eleven artillery shells on six homes in the town killing 18 civilians; seven of whom are children and six of whom are women. 53 others were wounded; of whom 25 are children and 12 are women. With this, the number of Palestinians who have been killed since the commencement of the IOF operation in Beit hanoun on 1 November 2006 has reached 77. more

 Shooting and Hitting 
Shahar Ginossar in Yediot Ahronot, Translated from Hebrew by Mark Marshall -
‘Another paediatrician and another baker
Got a bullet in the face from a paratroopers unit
All day we search houses and kill children’
From a song of a paratroopers’ unit that participated in Operation Calm Waters in Nablus, beginning of 2004 more

 New year, old story 
Gideon Levy in Haaretz - During operations last weekend in the Gaza Strip, the army demolished 14 Palestinian homes, injured 30 Palestinians and killed 10, including a mentally disabled youth. Ringing in 2005. more

 Death in a cemetery 
Gideon Levy in Haaretz Daily - How many of us can imagine the night of horror that the Salah family endured? To lie on the floor of the living room for what seemed an eternity, embracing as one being, trembling with fear as the house was blasted with bullets and missiles; to watch the sniper’s laser ray doing its dance of death across the apartment, searching out its victims; to see the missiles slamming into the walls of the house, missile after missile, as though an earthquake had struck... more

 In Jenin, Seven Shattered Dreams 
Molly Moore in the Washington Post - As Mahmoud Kaneri, 25-year-old stonemason, traced the name across the polished tombstone in the Jenin Martyrs Cemetery, he was transported to another time and another place – a theater stage where he and his closest childhood friends once stood in shimmering robes and delivered lines imbued with optimism. more

 An Old Refrain that Stabs at the Heart 
Meron Benvenisti in Ha’aretz - The sights of Rafah are too difficult to bear – trails of refugees alongside carts laden with bedding and the meager contents of their homes; children dragging suitcases larger than themselves; women draped in black kneeling in mourning on piles of rubble. And in the memories of some of us, whose number is dwindling, arise similar scenes that have been a part of our lives, as a sort of refrain that stabs at the heart and gnaws at the conscience, time after time, for over half a century – the procession of refugees from Lod to Ramallah in the heat of July 1948; the convoys of banished residents of Yalu and Beit Nuba, Emmaus and Qalqilyah in June 1967; the refugees of Jericho climbing on the ruins of the Allenby Bridge after the Six-Day War. more

 Activists say Border Police held boy, 13, as human shield  
Reuters and Ha’aretz Service - When older Palestinian boys started throwing stones at Border Police officers in the flashpoint West Bank village of Biddu last week, 13-year-old Muhammed Badwan went along to watch. He ended up on the hood of a Border Police jeep, at least one of his skinny arms tied to a wire mesh screen that blocks the windshield from incoming stones. more

 One year after the shooting of Brian Avery 
Lasse S. (ISM) - Yesterday a year ago an Israeli soldier shot my American friend Brian Avery in the face. Yesterday a year ago I stopped running, turned around, and saw Brian laying on his stomach faced down on a street in Jenin. Yesterday a year ago my white T-shirt turned red. more

 UNRWA Suspends Emergency Food Aid in Gaza 
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) today stopped distributing emergency food aid to some 600,000 refugees in the Gaza Strip, or approximately half of the refugees receiving UNRWA food aid in the occupied Palestinian territory, following restrictions introduced by Israeli authorities at the sole commercial crossing through which the Agency is able to bring in humanitarian assistance. Stocks of rice, flour, cooking oil and other essential foodstuffs that UNRWA provides to refugees reduced to poverty, or otherwise affected by a humanitarian crisis now in its 42nd month, have been fully depleted. more

 Hell walking on earth 
Mustafa Barghouti in the Al-Ahram Weekly - The disastrous cycle of violence gripping Israel and Palestine receives plentiful news coverage. Largely unreported however, are the more insidious aspects of the conflict. Israel has committed a litany of atrocities during its occupation of Palestine, but the crimes visited daily upon the innocent civilians of Rafah are among the most heinous. Even in the wider context of the occupation as a whole, Rafah’s situation is particularly tragic, and the conditions imposed on its citizens increasingly desperate. There can be no doubt that Israeli policy in Rafah amounts to a process of ethnic cleansing, and, as has been so often the case throughout history, a humanitarian catastrophe is being allowed to continue unimpeded. The world sits idly by. more

 Palestinians run ‘popular schools’ to get around Israeli curfew 
Mohammed Daraghmeh - The children of the Al Qasr neighborhood dodge Israeli military patrols on the way to class in a cramped dorm room. They sit on chairs brought from home or crouch on mattresses. Their teachers have no textbooks, only a blackboard. The “popular school” in Al Qasr is one of several that have sprung up in mosques, empty factories and apartments in Nablus, the West Bank’s largest city, since Israel first imposed a round-the-clock curfew June 21 to prevent Palestinian militants from attacking Israeli civilians. more

 Time to clean up the battlefield of a dirty war 
Jonathan Cook in the UK Guardian - After the week-long frenzy of concern in mid-April, the current silence of the international community is truly scandalous. One cannot but suspect that the world has chosen to forget Jenin. more

 Someone even managed to defecate into the photocopier 
Israeli journalist Amira Hass in Ha’aretz - No one deluded himself that the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, which takes up five of the eight floors of a new building in the center of El Bireh, would be spared the fate of other Palestinian Authority offices in Ramallah and other cities — that is, the nearly total destruction of its contents and particularly its high-tech equipment. more

 From the ruins of Jenin, the truth about an atrocity 
Phil Reeves in the London Independent - All the dead in Jenin refugee camp have yet to be collected from the putrid ruins, but a new battle has already begun. It is being fought not with bullets, but words. Israel has launched a huge publicity drive to counter the international community’s anger over the events of the last fortnight. The prize—ultimately—is history itself. Israel’s task has been made easier by Palestinian officials who rushed to declare a “massacre”—an allegation which has not been proved. Israel’s host of government spokesmen and its media have seized on such claims to mount an argument tantamount to saying that, as there is no proof of a massacre, there is no case to answer at all. This is akin to a policeman being called out to investigate a murder, and—finding only a rape—ignoring the crime altogether. But enough is already known about what went on in Jenin to say Israel has committed an appalling atrocity. more

 “I made them a stadium in the middle of the camp” 
Israeli journalist Tsadok Yeheskeli in Yediot Aharonot; translated by Gush Shalom - “I entered Jenin, driven by madness, by desperation, in the worst condition possible. I told my wife: ‘If anything happens to me, at least someone will take care of you’. The funny bit was, I didn’t even know how to operate the D-9. Within two hours, they taught me to drive forwards, and make a flat surface. I tied the ‘Beitar’ football team flag to the back of the bulldozer and told them: ‘Move away, let me work’. For three days, I just erased and erased. I kept drinking whisky to fight off fatigue. I didn't see dead bodies under the blade of the D-9, but I don't care if there were any.” more