A Palestinian child walks on rubble after an Israeli airstrike on Gaza.
Sun Aug 3, 2014 | By Yuram Abdullah Weiler
‘Biased Obama must return peace prize’
US Congress under AIPAC control“There is no more just war than this one that our heroic sons are fighting.”
—Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
As the death toll in the latest episode of the ongoing Gaza genocide approaches 1,700, the United States once again has given carte blanche support to its Zionist ally.
Ignoring sharp condemnations by the United Nations Human Rights Council of “widespread, systematic and gross violations of international human rights and fundamental freedoms” in Gaza, Washington is rearming Tel Aviv with weapons from its billion-dollar stash kept inside the Israeli entity.
Once again, the Zionist regime has launched a bloody assault on Gaza for the alleged purpose of defending “Israeli” citizens against a hostile entity, Hamas. The excuse for the latest operation was the kidnapping of three teenagers, Gilad Sha’ar, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrah, which Netanyahu immediately blamed on Hamas, although the resistance movement apparently had nothing to do with it.
Nevertheless in a ten-day operation called Brother’s Keeper, Israeli occupation forces arrested approximately 800 Palestinians without charge or trial, killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings in the Occupied West Bank.
According to journalist Max Blumenthal, the Zionist regime withheld information on the three murdered teens for two weeks deliberately to incite violence, racial tension and justify another military rampage against Gaza.
To squelch evidence that the kidnapped teenagers had been murdered by members of the Qawasmeh clan possibly as early as June 12, the Zionist security agency Shin Bet obtained a gag order, giving Netanyahu more time to build his case for another military campaign against Hamas. When the bodies of the victims were finally found on June 30 by volunteers and not the Israeli occupation forces incidentally, Netanyahu immediately tweeted, “Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay. May the memories of the 3 boys be blessed.”
As a result of Netanyahu’s fanning the flames of racial hatred over the slain Israeli teens, a Palestinian youth, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, was kidnapped and murdered by three Zionist lunatics in a revenge killing.
According to the initial police report, the perpetrators had poured gasoline on him and burned him alive. The three main suspects, who have already confessed to the gruesome act, will likely plead temporary insanity, while three others associated with the same extremist cell already have been released.
And as if this weren’t enough grief for the victim’s family, Zionist police detained Muhammad’s American cousin, 15-year-old Tariq Abu Khdeir, and beat him unmercifully, prompting calls from the Zionist-controlled Washington regime for an investigation into the incident.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s inflammatory strategy worked, allowing him to execute another bloody massacre on the Palestinians of Gaza, about whom he remarked, “They are not like us. We sanctify life, they sanctify death!” However, the opposite would appear to be true judging by the number of vicious campaigns the Zionist regime has launched against the residents of besieged coastal enclave since Hamas took over the government in 2007.
First, a battle for control of Gaza took place from June 7 to 15, 2007 between U.S.-supported forces aligned with Muhammad Dahlan, the former head of Gaza’s PA Preventative Security Service (PSS).
Then on September 19, the Zionist entity declared Gaza as “a hostile entity” in order to legitimize and escalate collective punishment operations by its occupation forces, which took the lives of 394 Palestinians that year.
In 2008, Operation Hot Winter began on February 29 and by mid-year, 409 Palestinians had been killed. Later that same year, Operation Cast Lead began on December 27 and lasted until January 18, 2009, during which Zionist forces killed 1,417 Palestinians.
In 2010, 72 Gazans were killed Zionist forces while in 2011, 112 more were killed despite the unofficial Tahdi’a (lull) agreement between Zionist occupation forces and Palestinian resistance groups.
In March 2012, the Zionist regime launched Operation Returning Echo killing 80 Palestinians, followed by Operation Pillar of Defense from November 14 to 21, which claimed the lives of another 171 Palestinians.
By the end of 2013, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights had documented the killings of 7,032 Palestinians by occupation forces and illegal settlers since the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000.
This number includes 1,328 children. Additionally, the Israeli entity has established Access Restricted Areas (ARA) on the eastern and northern borders of Gaza, and along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Access to these vaguely defined buffer zones is prohibited to Gazans and enforced by live fire from trigger-happy Zionist troops, who add to the ever-increasing Palestinian death toll daily.
In spite of Zionist military officials’ claims that these areas are 300 meters wide, farmers attempting to tend to their crops as far away as 1,200 meters have been killed by snipers shooting from guard towers.
The current terror campaign named Operation Protective Edge is the longest and bloodiest launched against Gaza so far. In addition to deploying banned depleted-uranium, white phosphorus and DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive) weapons that emit superheated micro-shrapnel, the Zionist war machine has targeted al-Wafa Rehabilitation Center and Al Aqsa Hospital in Gaza.
Furthermore, according to UN reports, 79 health facilities and 133 schools have been either shelled or damaged during Zionist bombardments.
“None of this appears to me to be accidental,” declared UN human rights chief Navi Pillay on July 31. “There appears to be deliberate defiance of obligations that international law imposes on Israel.”
Besides bombing schools and hospitals, the Zionists have imposed a 7-year-long blockade on Gaza that has cut off food, medical supplies, and other essentials, thereby creating a humanitarian nightmare.
This closure of Gaza border crossings has restricted the number of trucks allowed entry into Gaza from 570 per day in 2007 to 160 per day on the average in 2013, placing the Zionist blockade within the UN legal criteria for genocide as enumerated in General Assembly Resolution 260A (III) Article 2 dated December 9, 1948. Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has called Zionist aggression in Gaza a “genocide.” Nevertheless, 90% of Israelis believe this genocide against Palestinians is justified.
According to Zionist logic, since all of Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians are human shields for Hamas, the solution to the “rocket problem” is to systematically destroy the 360 square-kilometer strip of land and to expect a world watching in horror to accept this genocide as mere collateral damage. However, facts refute this warped logic, as well as Netanyahu’s “just war”:
1. The Israeli entity is an occupying power that denies Palestinians the right to self-govern and protect themselves, while simultaneously invoking its right to self-defense.
2. Despite removing 8,000 settlers and the military infrastructure, the Zionist entity has maintained effective control of Gaza and thus remains the occupying power as defined by Article 47 of the Hague Regulations.
3. Hamas has fired rockets in retaliation for Zionist aggressions, but had not fired any rockets in the year-and-a-half since Operation Pillar of Defense ended in a ceasefire, and has even has apprehended Fatah operatives firing rockets at the Israeli entity.
4. The Zionist regime deliberately targets civilians and infrastructure, as Major General Gadi Eizenkot explained, “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. … We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there.”
5. The Zionist entity–not Hamas–has systematically used Palestinians as human shields since the incursion into the West Bank in 2002, by tying young Palestinians onto the hoods of their vehicles or forcing them to go into homes in advance of search operations.
While the Zionists loudly shriek, “Stop the rockets,” Miko Peled, the son of an Israeli occupation force general, correctly points out that if the Zionists don’t like rockets, they should decolonize Palestine.
Meanwhile until the occupation ends, every Zionist strike on Hamas only results in further popular sympathy and support for the Islamic resistance movement.
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