*excerpts
Israeli arms producers profit from Gaza’s pain:
“As Palestinians in the Gaza Strip begin to pick up the pieces during an uneasy ceasefire agreed between the Israeli government and Hamas following a month of airstrikes and ground operations that killed almost 2,000 Palestinians, Israeli weapons manufacturers are celebrating the business opportunities the war will bring them.
The Nazareth-based Israel Military Industries (IMI) now see a turn around to years of bad business which has led to the gradual privatization of their company, after new weaponry they developed for the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) look likely to attract new customers having been successfully ‘battle-tested.’
IMI provides a wide range of weapons and ammunition for the IDF and Israeli Artillery Corps, from 5.56 mm bullets to Kalanit and Hatzav tank shells, which explode in midair and release shrapnel. Among the arms is the new MPR-500 multipurpose rigid bomb, which is designed to penetrate reinforced concrete structures. These were all used in the recent attacks on Gaza for the first time.
Already awaiting a back payment of 5.6 billion shekels for these weapons from the Israeli state, the IMI now expects more interest in its products from abroad.
Eli Gold, the CEO of SK Group’s Meprolight, which manufactures sights for sniper rifles and night-vision equipment which sells 90% of its products to customers abroad, told Haaretz: “After every campaign of the kind that is now taking place in Gaza, we see an increase in the number of customers from abroad,” adding, “Of course, we marketing abroad aggressively, but IDF operations definitely affect marketing activity.”
Barbara Opall-Rome, the Israel bureau chief for the U.S. magazine Defense News, was also quoted by Haaretz saying: “Combat is like the highest seal of approval when it comes to the international markets. What has proven itself in battle is much easier to sell. Immediately after the operation, and perhaps even during, all kinds of delegations arrive here from countries that appreciate Israel’s technological capabilities and are interested in testing the new products.”
Senior military correspondent Amir Rapaport and editor of Israel Defense said “Operation Protective Edge saw many weapons systems and other technology that had been under development since the time of the Second Lebanon War in 2006 enter the field of battle, for instance a unique communications system designed to link air, sea and ground forces to the same infrastructure.”
…At least 1939 Palestinians have been killed thus far in Israel’s deadly offensive against the Gaza Strip, while around 10,000 Palestinians have been injured, according to Palestinian officials.”
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Month-old Palestinian girl dies of wounds from Israeli attack:
“A month-and-a-half-old child injured in an Israeli attack on Gaza died of her wounds Monday, health ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra said.
The death of Mayda Mohammed Aslan in a central Gaza attack brings to 1,940 the number of Palestinians killed since Israel launched its terror campaign against the besieged strip on July 8.
The killing of the infant makes her one of the youngest victims of Israel’s US-backed assault, now in its 35th day.
As of Sunday night, 467 children, 243 women and 87 elderly have been killed in the assault, Qudra wrote on Twitter. Of the 10,000 Palestinians injured, 3,009 were children, 1,912 women, and 359 elderly.”
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Israeli Genocide and its Willing Accomplices:
Policymakers in the genocidal state run a highly militarized society where citizens and soldiers, criminals and professionals, torturers and sociopaths can and do coexist within the same person. Cold rationality is harnessed to mass murder, technology to massive devastation, language to euphemisms, and executioners parade themselves as victims (and vice versa). Moral precepts become debased and supplanted by the ethics of mass murder. Moralists, rabbis, and ethical philosophers all join to bless the bombs dropped on hospitals and schools and homes and all living things – even the dead and buried do not rest in peace when the cemeteries are bombed.
Rulers, imbued with a genocidal vision, see only military objectives – an oppressed people do not exist – all human existence and institutions in the target areas are to be demolished. The destruction of human life, of Palestinian daily existence has become the ultimate goal of this obscene operation.
The practical decision to exterminate Palestinians was conscious, planned, and pursued with implacable resolve at the very top and carried out with savage enthusiasm by Israel’s ‘citizen army’.
The unfolding of this deadly plan began with what appeared a ‘generous’ peace offer. In 2004, Israel’s war criminal Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon ‘granted’ the Palestinians self-government in Gaza and in August 2005 withdrew a few thousand Jewish settlers and their Israeli ground troops. The consequence of this benevolence: Over 1.4 million Palestinians were to be locked and crowded into the most densely open air prison in the world: the largest ghetto in history. This was a sickening reminder of the Nazi roundup of Polish Jews herding them into the Warsaw ghetto, where they too were granted ‘self-government’. Once the Jewish settlers were removed (and paid up to $300,000 per family ‘compensation’), Israel’s military closed all of Gaza’s entrances and exits. Land, sea, and airspace were blockaded and total control imposed on the entry of food, medicine, school books and the exit of Palestinians for medical treatment, university studies, normal travel, and commerce of any kind. This mirrored the Nazi policy toward those trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Palestinian farmers were shot tending their fields, acts of brutality reminiscent of the Nazi starvation blockade of Leningrad.
Obviously, if the Gazans could not travel, farm, fish and trade by normal means, they would dig tunnels for supplies and fight against their relegation to the status of caged animals by the Israeli state. The next steps after the successful enclosure would be systematic and pre-meditated: the Zionists, like the Nazis, launched total war against the inevitable acts of resistance by the oppressed. They sent planes, tanks, missiles, and bombs to level populated areas, especially neighborhoods where young fighters rose up to resist this unendurable cruelty. The heroic young fighters of Gaza, like their Warsaw predecessors, resisted their totalitarian enemies time and again. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Israeli Jews cheered the devastation while claiming to be the victims and young overseas Jews volunteered to join the IDF in its slaughter of the Palestinians, just as the German population celebrated, along with the overseas German Bund, their leaders’ totalitarian crimes. Their responses were almost identical although in different times and places: Chosen People and Aryans of the world have united against what they both termed ‘terrorists’ claiming their tunnels will become their graves!
In line with this super race mythology, Israel’s killing machine is really most effective at murdering unarmed civilians — invalids who cannot run, doctors who stay to care for the wounded, and mothers and children in their flimsy shelters — and rather pathetic when it confronts face to face determined armed resistance fighters. As of 6 August 2014, the Israeli Air Force, Navy, and artillery slaughtered 1,594 Palestinian civilians — via long distance high tech warfare — compared to 3 civilians in Israel (one Bedouin, one Thai farm worker and an Israeli Jew), a mind-boggling ratio of over 1,500 Palestinian civilians to one of the ‘Chosen’. But when it came to ‘ground fighting’, 64 Israeli soldiers were killed compared to 281 Palestinian partisans, a 4.4 to 1 ratio. Despite all the Israeli air cover support and high tech protective gear, the Israelis took heavy military casualties when their invasion came down to a more level fighting field where poorly equipped partisans are willing to die for their homes and liberation.
Clearly the commanding officers of the Israeli armed forces, the self-styled Israel Defense Forces, who are responsible for the systematic land, aerial, and maritime attacks on civilians, hospitals, schools, refugee sanctuaries are first in line for the war crimes docket. They should be joined by Israeli military strategists and policy makers who systematically and criminally targeted homes, neighborhoods, water purification and sewage plants, electrical grids and power plants in a deliberate planned effort to destroy any possibility of normal daily existence for almost 2 million Palestinians. They have committed grave Crimes against Humanity, according to the Geneva Conventions and legal standards established at Nuremberg. There is eye-witness testimony and documentation showing middle and lower rank soldiers engaged in wanton shootings of school children, shoppers, and mothers with babies fleeing combat zones.
More than 90% of Israeli Jews gave unstinting support to the ongoing blood bath, knowing, indeed cheering daily from grandstands erected on hills overlooking Gaza, the criminal consequences of their support – they also are an essential part of this criminal enterprise. They celebrated the carnage and they violently attacked the few Israelis who openly questioned this ‘war’. Israelis have no claim to ‘innocent ignorance’; they cannot call this a “tragic conflict between two peoples”. No Israeli can absolve himself by claiming ignorance of the nature of the crimes committed in their name – nor do they want to claim ignorance! The majority of informed Israeli Jews demanded this war from the beginning, many joining racist marches with banners and chants demanding ‘Death to Arabs’! They wear their endorsement of the Gaza holocaust as a badge of honor. Ninety percent of the Jewish citizens in Israel rejected any humanitarian ceasefire.
Ideological affinities and ethno-religious loyalties aside, many Israeli Jews also have a major, material stake in robbing and expelling the people of Palestine: Seized Palestinian lands result in new cheap subsidized housing, swimming pools for Jews only, developments on lands where olive groves once flourished and extended families had lived and died. Middle and working class Jews obtain free housing; real estate speculators seize choice ocean front properties for luxury condos and tourist destinations. Building contractors secure lucrative construction contracts from the state. Pillage forms an important material basis for Israel’s high standard of living, many times higher than that of Palestinians, much higher that that of Israel’s non-Jewish population and higher even than the Americans who have been forced to subsidize the ‘Jewish State’ for almost 50 years.
Equally important, Israel’s assault on Gaza serves as a testing ground for its weapons of mass destruction and its anti-missile Dome. In this regard, the slaughter in Gaza serves as a dress rehearsal (and a graphic warning) for new wars across the region in association with the US and its clients.
Israel’s total war against Gaza has provoked condemnation from millions of people around the world, greater outrage at their crimes against humanity, and calls for an international war crimes tribunal.
Powerful Zionist organizations, not only secure US opposition to any UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli war crimes, but unanimous (100%) Congressional and White House approval and an ‘emergency allocation’ of over $250 million tax-payer dollars’ to re-supply Israel with the bombs and missiles it had dropped on the people of Gaza.” [NOTE: these are excerpts, the entire article is an important read]
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Gaza in Ruins, Heinous Crimes: Israel’s IDF Conscripts “Take the Lives of Palestinian Women and Children in the Same Way they would Switch-off the Ignition in a Car”:
“1,938 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the launch of Israel’s military campaign. What kind of men; what kind of soldiers; what kind of army kills 400 children and leaves 3000 other young people injured, maimed and crippled in a bloody war crime that has seen homes, hospitals and schools blown apart with tank shells and aircraft fired missiles upon a predominately civilian population?
What kind of men, claiming to be from a western-style democracy, would commit such an atrocity before the eyes of the world, and then disclaim responsibility for such heinous, hateful killings?
These men are not soldiers in any accepted use of the word. They are conscripts who take the lives of women and children in the same way they would switch-off the ignition in a car before going to the pub for a drink.
And as the killings continue, the Israeli government remains adamant that it will continue to keep the 1.8 million indigenous people of Gaza in the world’s largest prison camp; under a blockade that is now in its seventh year and which is tacitly condoned by the rest of the world under instructions from the Israel-lobby-controlled US Congress.”
Filed under: Zionists wars on Gaza