[WCUSP] Fwd: Israeli invasion of Gaza today kills 45, including many children

Sun Mar 2 16:47:34 CST 2008

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Karen deslierres <karendes at umich.edu>
Date: Mar 2, 2008 12:56 AM
Subject: Israeli invasion of Gaza today kills 45, including many children
To: Karen deslierres <karendes at umich.edu>

Friends sorry for all the repeats previously. I hope it's solved for
the moment by changing every last password into hieroglyphics.
PLEASE contact your Congress people and all media you can to demand
coverage of this.
karen

From: Fred Bush

It seems possible that the threatened invasion of the Gaza Strip by
the Israeli army has begun. The Yahoo News article this morning
begins:

Israeli troops backed by tanks and aircraft went after Gaza militants
who bombarded southern Israel with rockets and mortars Saturday,
killing 46 Palestinians in the deadliest day in Gaza since Islamic
Hamas militants seized control in June.

For the terrible toll in the deaths of children that this invasion is
taking, click on the following link on the website of the Defense for
Children International Palestine Section:

www.dci-pal,org/english/display.cfm?DocId=693&CategoryId=1

Here is the rest of the Yahoo News article:
Israeli-Palestinian clashes kill 45 Palestinians

By Ibrahim Barzak, Associated Press, Yahoo News, 8:11 AM, March 1 2008

. . . .

As many as two dozen civilians died in the fighting, including at
least two babies and two other children. Two Israel soldiers were also
killed. Gaza Health Ministry official Dr. Moaiya Hassanain said 160
people were wounded and 14 were in critical condition.

The intense battles pushed the Palestinian death toll to 76 since
fighting flared Wednesday. About 40 of them were civilians.

Palestinians leaders called the killings "genocide" and threatened to
call off peace talks with Israel.

"We tell the world, watch and judge what's happening, and judge who is
committing ... terrorism," said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia said Palestinian leaders
including Abbas recommended suspending peace talks at a meeting
Saturday in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

"I think it will be suspended," Qureia said. "What is happening in
Gaza is a massacre of civilians, women and children, a collective
killing, genocide," Qureia added. "We can't bear what the Israelis are
doing, and what the Israelis are doing doesn't led the peace process
any credibility."

In Syria, exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal described Israeli attacks
against civilians in Gaza as "the real Holocaust."

Israeli officials met Saturday to discuss the Gaza violence and its
implications for peacemaking. Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel
said talks didn't preclude fighting. Talks are "based on the
understanding that when advancing the peace process with pragmatic
(Palestinian) sources, Israel will continue to fight terror that hurts
its people," he said.

On Friday, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai renewed a
threat to invade Gaza to crush militant rocket squads that attack
southern Israel daily.

The spike in violence came just days before Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice was to arrive in the region on her latest
peacekeeping mission.

Palestinian fighters kept up a steady stream of rocket and mortar
attacks on Israeli targets, undeterred by Israeli troops backed by
tanks and attack aircraft. Six Israelis were wounded, all but one of
them slightly, in rocket fire that reached as far north as Ashkelon,
11 miles from Gaza.

The bloodletting began before midnight Friday in the northern town of
Beit Hanoun, where a 13-month-old girl, Malak Karfaneh, was killed by
shrapnel. Hamas blamed Israel, but residents said a militant rocket
fell short and landed near the baby's house.

Before dawn Saturday, the battleground shifted to Jebaliya, a center
of militant activity in northern Gaza. Israeli aircraft also traveled
further south to demolish a two-story house belonging to a Hamas
militant in Gaza City. In that attack, a woman and baby were killed
alongside another Palestinian. By early evening, 46 Palestinians were
dead.

Palestinian rocket fire earlier in the week also killed an Israeli
man. On Thursday, militants raised the stakes by firing Iranian-made
rockets into Ashkelon, a coastal city of 120,000 people closer to
Israel's heartland.

Not all of the Gazans killed on Saturday were immediately identified,
but at least 13 militants and 17 civilians died. The civilians
included two unidentified children, a 17-year-old girl and her
16-year-old brother, a 45-year-old man and his 20-year-old son, and
two sisters thought to be in their early 20s.

The sisters and another civilian were killed by tank shells that
struck two houses in separate attacks, Palestinian officials said.

The Israeli military said it was unaware of tank shells hitting
houses. At one of the damaged houses, paramedics rushing an unmoving
woman lying on a stretcher, her face covered with a cloth, out of a
room clouded with dust.

One of the unidentified boys was killed during a series of four
evening airstrikes, a medical official said.

Elsewhere in Jebaliya, a wounded man and boy lay in a gutter near a
dead man. Ambulance workers took away the dead man as a youth appealed
to paramedics to treat the wounded.

"Take them, they are still alive," he pleaded. Another man urged the
wounded to "bear witness," or proclaim their Muslim faith before they
die. The two began reciting a Muslim prayer near a boy whose lower
body was ripped by shrapnel.

Tareq Dardouna, a Jebaliya resident, said a relative was killed
outside his home in the crossfire that began at 3 a.m.

"His body is still on the ground," Dardouna said in a telephone
interview from his home, where he was tending to four wounded people
amid screaming children. "Ambulances tried to come, but they came
under fire. ... We are in a real war."

Israeli government spokesman David Baker said Israel was "compelled to
continue to take these defensive measures" to protect more than
200,000 Israelis living under the threat of Palestinian rocket
barrages.

Militants "hide behind their own civilians, using them as human
shields, while actively targeting Israeli population centers," Baker
said. "They bear the responsibility for the results."

The Israeli soldiers died in the morning but publication had been held
up by the Israeli military censorship until their families could be
notified. Seven Israeli soldiers were wounded in the clashes, and two
children and a woman were slightly injured in rocket attacks in and
near Ashkelon, the military said.

The U.N. shuttered 37 schools it runs in northern Gaza because of the
fighting, affecting some 40,000 students said Christopher Gunness, a
U.N. official. Mosques across northern Gaza and Hamas-affiliated radio
issued a call for civilians to stay at home, while militants vowed to
fight on.

Hamas remained defiant.

"We will respond to any aggression ... with all available means," said
Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas' military wing.

Mashaal also blamed his Fatah rivals for helping along Israel's attacks.

"I accuse the president of the Palestinian Authority of providing
coverage of this holocaust in Gaza," Mashaal said in Damascus. Hamas
has said Abbas' condemnation of rocket fire has given a pretext to
Israel's assault on Gaza.

Hamas military spokesman Abu Obeida vowed retaliation.

"We will respond to any aggression...with every available means," he said.

Journalists also came under fire in Jebaliya and a cameraman for Dubai
TV, Mahmoud Ajrami, was wounded.

A health official said 35 ambulances were lying idle because they did
not have fuel to power them. Israel, which supplies all of Gaza's
fuel, cut back supplies in recent months in an effort to increase
pressure on Hamas to rein in the rocket launchers.

Israeli-Palestinian talks resumed in November after a seven-year
breakdown at a U.S.-sponsored conference. At the gathering, the two
sides pledged to try to reach an accord by the end of this year. In
recent weeks, negotiators have met almost daily.

But the rising tide of violence was overshadowing peace efforts. The
violence could mar Rice's visit to the region next week, meant to
nudge Israel and Palestinians closer to an accord.

But even when violence is at a lower level, Abbas' efforts are
compromised by the fact that he only rules the West Bank, while Gaza
is controlled by Hamas. And Israel's fragile government would be hard
pressed to make concessions to the Palestinians while Gaza militants
pummel southern Israel.