from: If Americans Knew
**(update: the number of murdered Palestinians in Gaza is now at least 625)
Contrary to U.S. media spin, the violence didn’t begin when the three Israelis were abducted and killed in June. From January to June of this year, Israeli forces abducted at least 2,330 Palestinians, and killed approximately 30 Palestinians, 4 of whom were children. But Americans didn’t hear about it because the media didn’t think their lives mattered.
It’s also important to recognize that rocket attacks from Gaza began decades after Israel had already been militarily occupying Palestinian territory. The first rocket (largely home-made projectiles that rarely caused any death, injuries, or even damage) was fired from Gaza in April 2001 – after Israeli forces had already killed 35 Gazans that year, and had repeatedly shelled Gazan neighborhoods. From April 2001 through July 2014, rockets killed approximately 29 Israelis. During the same period, Israeli forces killed over 4,700 Gazans.Here are the facts:
- From January 1 to May 31 of this year, Israel kidnapped 2,330 Palestinians and held them in Israeli prisons. During these months, there were an average of 203 Palestinian children in Israeli jails on any given day. Palestinians help captive by Israel can be denied access to a lawyer for up to 90 days, and torture is routine. But the media only expresses outrage when Israelis are kidnapped and held prisoner by Palestinians.
- From January 1 to June 12 of this year, Israelis killed approximately 30 Palestinians, 4 of them children. None of the Israeli killers were held accountable for the murders. Mainstream media outlets almost never reported on any of these killings. Yet everyone was made aware of the names of the three Israelis abducted and murdered in June.
- Since “Operation Protective Edge” began (June 8 through July 21), Israeli forces have killed 572 Palestinians, 110 of them children. During this time, Palestinian resistance forces killed 28 Israelis, none of whom were children. Approximately 76 percent of the Palestinians killed during this period were civilians, while approximately 7 percent of the Israelis killed were civilians.
- Israel actually rejected a legitimate ceasefire offer, not Hamas. The ceasefire Hamas has offered Israel would ensure that Gazans have the same freedoms that most people view as basic human rights (right to trade with other nations, right to travel freely, right to worship at Holy places, etc).
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How many people have died from Gaza rockets into Israel?:
This page provides a current listing of total fatalities resulting from Gaza rockets and mortar shells into Israel and will be updated when necessary.
As I noted in my previous rocket fatality count, numbers distributed by Israeli agencies are wildly inaccurate and often contradictory. This is propounded by sources such as Wikipedia, which at the time of this writing repeats the discredited and unaccounted numbers provided by Israeli agencies.
As I also reported, injuries resulting from rocket and mortar strikes are exaggerated. Israel’s casualty counts always incorporate numbers of people who have been treated for “shock and anxiety,” as well as “light injuries” resulting from the rush to safety, such as “falling down the stairs.”
This practice is not employed in Gaza, nor for any other conflict.
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Israeli forces killing Gazans with lethal shells:
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says the Israeli forces keep firing flechette shells toward the village of Khuzaa, east of Khan Younis over the past few days.
Experts say this type of shell explodes in the air and releases thousands of metal darts.
The Israeli military has not denied using the shells in its onslaught. The Israeli regime has formerly used flechette shells in Gaza and Lebanon.
The revelation comes as reports say that Israel is using white phosphorous bombs, which are considered as banned weapons in civilian areas.
Medics say some Palestinians in the besieged enclave have been wounded by a new type of weapon that even doctors with previous experience in war zones do not recognize.
Israel had also used depleted-uranium and white phosphorus shells in the besieged region during their previous assaults.
**note, I met victims of such dart/flechette shells in the 2009 war on Gaza, and a medic with whom I worked was brutally murdered when the Zionist army fired such a dart bomb at his ambulance. See: Ensuring maximum casualties in Gaza and White Phosphorous: The patient came back smoking
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Press TV: Israel drops white phosphorus bombs on Gazans
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The Guardian:
They hid at the El-Wafa hospital.
They hid at the Al-Aqsa hospital.
They hid at the beach, where children played football.
They hid at the yard of 75-year-old Muhammad Hamad.
They hid among the residential quarters of Shujaya.
They hid in the neighbourhoods of Zaytoun and Toffah.
They hid in Rafah and Khan Younis.
They hid in the home of the Qassan family.
They hid in the home of the poet, Othman Hussein.
They hid in the village of Khuzaa.
They hid in the thousands of houses damaged or destroyed.
They hid in 84 schools and 23 medical facilities.
They hid in a cafe, where Gazans were watching the World Cup.
They hid in the ambulances trying to retrieve the injured.
They hid themselves in 24 corpses, buried under rubble.
They hid themselves in a young woman in pink household slippers, sprawled on the pavement, taken down while fleeing.
They hid themselves in two brothers, eight and four, lying in the intensive burn care unit in Al-Shifa.
They hid themselves in the little boy whose parts were carried away by his father in a plastic shopping bag.
They hid themselves in the “incomparable chaos of bodies” arriving at Gaza hospitals.
They hid themselves in an elderly woman, lying in a pool of blood on a stone floor.
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Self-defense or provocation: Israel’s history of breaking ceasefires
Jonathan Cook: Calls for genocide enter Israeli mainstream
AIC: Israeli academic: raping Palestinian women would deter attacks:
Dr. Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli scholar of Arabic literature and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, declared Monday that raping the wives and mothers of Palestinian combatants would deter attacks.
“The only thing that could deter a suicide bomber is knowing that if caught, his sister or his mother would be raped,” said Kedar during a radio talk show.
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PHOTOS: A Gaza funeral for 26 members of one family
At approximately 7:50 pm on Sunday, 20 July 2014, Israeli warplanes bombarded the house of Tawfiq Ahmad Abu Jame’. The three-story-house is inhabited by five families and is located in the Bani Suhaila town, east of Khan Younis district in the south of the Gaz Strip. The house, which was attacked without prior warning, was completely destroyed in the attack. Civil defense and ambulances crews rushed to the destroyed house to uncover the bodies buried under the rubble. It took them until the next day, Monday 21 July 2014, to uncover the victims. Medics found 26 bodies, 18 children and five women. Only three residents survived, and they sustained with varying injuries.
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ISM: Video of Israeli sniper killing wounded civilian:
Yesterday, international and Palestinian volunteers accompanied Civil Defence and other rescue crews, as well as family members, into Shajiya neighbourhood in Gaza. They attempted to locate survivors of overnight and ongoing shelling by the Israeli army. A young Palestinian man in a green shirt hoped to find his family. He was shot by an Israeli soldier while crossing an alley between buildings. Two additional rounds struck him as he lay injured on the ground. His dead body could not be retrieved.
The ambulance shown in the video was shelled by the Israeli military, killing paramedic Faud Jaber.
Dr Mona el-Farra of the Red Crescent Society in Gaza told ISM that, “The Israeli military is targeting medical facilities. 77% of medical facilities in Gaza have sustained damage, some of which have been completely destroyed.”
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Massacre in Shejaiya: Nearly ninety people were killed by Israeli forces today, most of them in one of Gaza’s poorest and most crowded neighborhoods:
“Those of us who worked in Shifa can say that last night was the worst night of our lives,” says Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor at Shifa. He has come to Gaza many times to provide medical assistance, including during the previous two Israeli assaults in 2008/2009 and 2012.
“Israeli impunity is a huge medical problem,” Gilbert says. “Every single dead child and adult, and all the injuries, all the amputations, are one hundred percent preventable. This is a man-made disaster. Cynically planned and brutally executed by the government of Israel.”As we watch the horrifying slaughter unfold in Gaza, bear in mind the Israeli psychosis that fuels and justifies it. Here are comments from three rightwing Israelis – two leading politicians and a professor – who very much reflect a strain of mainstream thinking in Israel, one that the international media largely avoids noting.
Each, in their different ways, is advocating a genocide of the Palestinians.
Ayelet Shaked, of economics minister Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, calls on her Facebook page for murdering the mothers of what she terms Palestinian “terrorists” (a very broad concept indeed in current Israeli thinking) so that they cannot give birth to more “little snakes”:They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists. They are all our enemies and their blood should be on our hands. This also applies to the mothers of the dead terrorists. …
[The terrorists] are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer on Arabic literature at Bar Ilan University, believes the sisters and mothers of Palestinian “terrorists” should be raped:
A terrorist, like those who kidnapped the boys [in the West Bank on June 12] and killed them, the only thing that will deter them, is if they know that either their sister or mother will be raped if they are caught. What can we do? This is the culture that we live in.
Note that his university did not reprimand him. They defended his comments:
The purpose was to define the culture of death of the terrorist organizations. Dr Kedar illustrated in his words the bitter reality of the Middle East and the inability of a modern and law-abiding country to fight the terror of suicide bombers.
And finally we have Moshe Feiglin, a deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament and a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, urging the Israeli army to kill Palestinians in Gaza indiscriminately and use every means possible to get them to leave:
[Netanyahu] announces that Israel is about to attack military targets in their area and urges those who are not involved and do not wish to be harmed to leave immediately. Sinai is not far from Gaza and they can leave. This will be the limit of Israel’s humanitarian efforts. … All the military and infrastructural targets will be attacked with no consideration for ‘human shields’ or ‘environmental damage’. …
The IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations. … The enemy population that is innocent of wrong-doing and separated itself from the armed terrorists will be treated in accordance with international law and will be allowed to leave. Israel will generously aid those who wish to leave.- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2014-07-21/calls-for-genocide-enter-israeli-mainstream/#sthash.NQ9LVECi.7zZyIM2w.dpuf
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In Syria, the west’s favourite terrorists continue to attack civilian areas, injuring and killing more daily.
SANA: Five civilians killed, 38 injured in terrorist attacks in many areas:
A citizen was killed and six others were injured after terrorists opened fire on their bus between the villages of Harran, Jarin and al-Dweiri, located between Daraa and Sweida provinces.
A source at Sweida Police Command told SANA reporter on Tuesday that the wounded persons were submitted to the national Hospital in Sweida.
In Damascus, nineteen civilians got injured in terrorist attacks with mortar shells on al-Zablatani and al-Abasyeen areas.
A source at Damascus Police Command said terrorists fired 11 shells that fell down in the surrounding area of the vegetable market in al-Zablatani neighborhood, injuring 18 citizens and causing material damage to a number of shops and cars.
Eight other shells fell on many areas in al-Abasyeen, causing the injury of a civilian and material damage to the properties in these areas.
In Hasaka, three citizens were killed and 5 others were injured by explosive device planted by terrorists inside a market in Hasaka city.
A source at the governorate’s Police Command told SANA that the terrorists planted the explosive device inside a market in Sinema al-Cahira Street in Hasaka downtown.
In Damascus Countryside, a civilian was killed and eight others were wounded by terrorist mortar shells that targeted Jaramana.
A source at the Police Command said the terrorists fired a mortar shell on al-Rawda neighborhood, adding that the shell also caused material damage to the properties in the area.
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A friend in Syria updated: “After crucifixion (literal), beheadings, chopping off limbs (from either sides).. ISIS now announces the new rule about “girls circumcision” in areas under their control.”
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Jul 21, SANA: Two citizens killed in terrorist mortar attacks in Damascus countryside
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“Why haven’t they supported Gaza with money and arms? Where are their jihadists, and why didn’t they send them to defend our people in Palestine? …what’s happening in Gaza is not a separate, random event. The occupation of Palestine, invasion of Iraq, division of Sudan, and attempts to divide Iraq today are linked events.
Events are planned by ‘Israel’ and the West, we never doubt that. However, doing their dirty work were always the states of tyranny and backwardness in our Arab world.
Was it not Abdul Aziz al-Faisal who told Britain that he doesn’t mind giving Palestine to the ‘poor’ Jews in 1915?
Didn’t these same countries support and fund the crimes of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Satanic Brotherhood, in Syria in the 70s and 80s?
When ‘Israel’ attacked Lebanon (2006), these states on behalf of Saud called the Resistance irresponsible, adventurous. They encouraged ‘Israel’ and the West to reject a cease-fire until the Lebanese Resistance was destroyed.
…The Arab League’s role became to call on NATO to besiege Arab peoples and states that failed to comply. All these events, and other events that may seem smaller in importance, are a chain to achieve one aim.
This aim is to liquidate the Palestinian cause. And here they are in Gaza, assuming the same role they played in Syria. In Gaza, using “Israeli’ terrorism, and in Syria, using terrorism from 83 different nationalities.
The methods differ but the aim remains the same.”
Filed under: Syria, Zionists attacks on Gaza, Zionsts wars on Gaza