Photos of the Gaza Attacks

Posted by shergald | Dec 30, 2008 | 9 |

Pictures and words, which are more compelling? These photos were supplied by a Palestinian exile, Haitham Sabbah, proprieter of Sabbah’s Blog.

The one above shows a bit of irony. The others speak for themselves.

Palestinians in the West Bank demonstrated against the Israel air strikes in Gaza and reportedly attacked Israeli soldiers with stones.

There are really no words to adequately describe the horrors of Israel’s attack of besieged Gaza.

About The Author

shergald

9 Comments

idredit on December 30, 2008 at 11:52 am

Israel will not escape the CONSEQUENCES.

Consequences that are unavoidable.

The neocons never take lessons from their actions:

In 2006 Israel’s 34 days of bombardment to destroy Hezbollah served to strengthen the Hezbollah leadership.

Hamas, like Hezbollah is a political and social organization. Bombardment does not destroy an ideology or a Movement. Like Lebanon, the same outcome can be expected in Gaza. Gaza will rise from the rubble.

Prof Juan Cole notes:

Al-Maliki’s Party Calls for Boycott of Israel

Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s Fatwa on Gaza

Olmert, Barak, Sharon and all those complicit will all be tried for war crimes, — alive or post humous.
- Hurria on December 31, 2008 at 2:52 am
  
  Israel has always escaped the consequences.
  - idredit on December 31, 2008 at 2:06 pm
    
    Hurria,
    
    Be comforted. CONSEQUENCES are unavoidable. Consequences from our actions and choices may be delayed (yes, 60 years is long) but in the end, they ARE unavoidable. Goes for those who are leaders and for individuals.
    
    Israel. will. face. CONSEQUENCES. That I know is bankable.
    
    On the fifth day Israel rejected the proposal for a 48-hr truce to allow humanitarian needs. Even in World Wars 1 and II corridors were allowed for the dead and wounded. Add that to the Israelis long list of War crimes. And America is complicit.
    
    It will soon be visible that the worm has turned. So Barack Obama had best hop to it. He’s demonstrated his first major failure – a bad omen:
    
    America’s Crimes “Never Happened”
    May We No Longer Be Silent
    
    – Paul Craig Roberts
    
    The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, John Bryson Chane, delivered on October 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church. The bishop’s eyes were opened to Israel’s persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine. In his sermon he called on “politicians seeking the highest office in [our] land” to find the courage to “speak out and condemn violations of human rights and religious freedom denied to Palestinian Christians and Muslims” by the state of Israel.
    
    Bishop Chane’s courage was to no avail. When America’s new leader of “change” was informed of Israel’s massive air attack on the Gaza Ghetto, an area of 139 square miles where Israel confines 1.4 million Arabs and tightly controls the inflow of all resources–food, medicine, water, energy–America’s president-elect Obama had “no comment.”
    
    More
    
    Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
    
    ~~~~~
    
    Consider Consequences for U.S. and Israel
    
    Official Apathy
    The Gaza Ghetto and Western Can’t
    
    – Tariq Ali
    
    As result of official apathy, one outcome of this latest attack will be to inflame Muslim communities throughout the world and swell the ranks of those very organisations that the West claims it is combating in the `war against terror’.
    
    The bloodshed in Gaza raises broader strategic questions for both sides, issues related to recent history. One fact that needs to be recognised is that there is no Palestinian Authority. There never was one. The Oslo Accords were an unmitigated disaster for the Palestinians, creating a set of disconnected and shrivelled Palestinian ghettoes under the permanent watch of a brutal enforcer.
    
    The PLO, once the repository of Palestinian hope, became little more than a supplicant for EU money. Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office. The West and Israel tried everything to secure a Fatah victory: Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted threats and bribes of the `international community’ in a campaign that saw Hamas members and other oppositionists routinely detained or assaulted by the IDF, their posters confiscated or destroyed, us and EU funds channelled into the Fatah campaign, and US
    
    Congressmen announcing that Hamas should not be allowed to run. Even the timing of the election was set by the determination to rig the outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till January 2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza–in the words of an Egyptian intelligence officer: `the public will then support the Authority against Hamas’. Popular desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this.
    
    More
    
    ~~~~~~~
    
    Consider the nub and rub of it
    
    Gaza: Israel, Hamas and the logic of colonial power
    
    As so often, the term ‘terrorism’ has proved a rhetorical smokescreen under cover of which the strong crush the weak
    
    – Nir Rosen
    
    [.]
    
    The Bush administration began its tenure with Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel committing one of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of occupying Palestinian land. Bush’s final visit to the country he chose to occupy ended with an educated secular Shiite Iraqi throwing his shoes at him, expressing the feelings of the entire Arab world save its dictators who have imprudently attached themselves to a hated American regime.
    
    Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action. Even some Arab outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance with the might of the Israeli military machine. And none of this is a surprise. The Israelis just concluded a round-the-world public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of Arab states like Egypt.
    
    The international community is directly guilty for this latest massacre. Will it remain immune from the wrath of a desperate people? So far, there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The people of the Arab world will not forget. The Palestinians will not forget. “All that you have done to our people is registered in our notebooks,” as the poet Mahmoud Darwish said.
    
    I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the American government could bring about the needed changes. An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.
    
    Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism,..
    
    [.]
    
    It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
    
    Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.
    
    More
    
    Eventuality colonial powers are vanquished.
    
    the history of mankind, lacking in humanity, is piled high and lays bare the CONSEQUENCES.
    
    We never learn from the experience of our forefathers…so we need suffer the consequences of our actions.
  - Mattes on December 31, 2008 at 6:02 pm
    
    Even when killing Americans.
    - Hurria on December 31, 2008 at 6:50 pm
      
      Indeed! Remember the USS Liberty!
      - Mattes on December 31, 2008 at 7:46 pm
        
        Can’t find where I got that comment, usually I always post link, but I think it was one of those boxes, and I got lazy.
anarchronarchist on December 30, 2008 at 5:21 pm

Here is a site that shows some of the Israeli victims of Qassam rocket attacks in the recent past.

While it may be extremely unscientific and ultimately irrelevant, there is a definite difference in sheer gore and horror between the above images and these:

http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/c.hsJPK0PIJpH/b.3883061/k.AFB4/Photos_of_victims_of_Hamas_rocke
t_attacks_on_Sderot_Israel.htm

With so much of the Israeli economy and political elite directly dependent on the endless cycle of violence, one wonders how peace can be made without cutting that connection first.

If your nation cannot exist without war, peace itself becomes an ‘existential threat’.

Retch.
- Hurria on December 31, 2008 at 2:55 am
  
  I have mentioned this before, but it is worth mentioning again. There are those who believe that peace is an existential threat to Israel because war is the glue that holds the society together. There is an existential fear in much of Israeli society that without war their society would would shatter into pieces, leading to the end of the Great Zionist Experiment.
  - boran2 on December 31, 2008 at 5:56 pm
    
    While the expoitation of fear may have worked to Bush’s advantage in the Global War on Terror (tm), at least for a time, to assert that it is the thing that binds Israeli society together rather than some 5700 years of Jewish history and tradition, is, sadly, bordering on the absurd and decidedly not a thing worth mentioning again.

Recent Posts

Recent Comments