The Gaza Strip–Photo Britannica
Enclosure of Gaza as a “Prison Territory”: High Tech Surveillance Wall to Separate Gaza from Israel
Global Research, June 20, 2018
Region: Middle East & North Africa
Theme: Law and Justice, Police State & Civil Rights, Poverty & Social Inequality
In-depth Report: PALESTINE
First published in June 2017
From the outset, Israel’s project was to enclose Gaza.
1..85 million Palestinians imprisoned in the Gaza Strip “Prison enclosure”. An act of genocide and the “international community” remains silent.
In the wake of the April-May 2018 Gaza massacre, the unfolding consensus among Western leaders is that “Israel has the Right to defend Itself”.
IDF snipers will shoot anybody who approaches the Surveillance Wall.
“Once the entire wall has been completed, it will seal off the Gaza Strip’s land border with Israel ‒ leaving only its Mediterranean maritime border as a possible route into Israel,” according to the Jerusalem Post’s Yossi Melman.
Michel Chossudovsky, May 20, 2018
Israeli 2017 media reports confirm the construction of a new high tech 65 km security and surveillance wall equipped with cameras and sensors “to separate Gaza from Israel” thereby reinforcing the enclosure of Gaza as a de facto “prison territory” with a population of more than 1.85 million.
This initiative constitutes the latest stage of a process started in 1994 with the establishment of the so-called Israel Gaza security barrier. As we recall the barrier was in part torn down during the Second Intifada in 2000 and was then rebuilt.
There has been virtually no coverage or analysis of this latest project. “The ambitious project, budgeted to cost 3 billion shekhels ($850 million), will see an integrated wire fence, 6 to eight metres high, equipped with sensors and cameras built above the ground, over the 65-kilometre Gazan border, while heavy concrete slabs strengthened with iron rods will be built dozens of metres underground.”
The existing Gaza-Israel Wall
Screenshot Rafah Wall
The Jerusalem Post (June 23, 2017) heralds the newly proposed 65 km Gaza Fence and underground wall as “the biggest and most complex engineering projects Israel has undertaken and is unique even on a global scale”:
This underground wall will be equipped with sensors produced by the Israeli defense manufacturer Elbit Systems …
Above ground, a six to eight meter integrated wire fence armed with sensors and cameras will be erected. Observation, control and command centers will be built along its length and the entire barrier, above and below ground, will be linked online to a command center located in a rear military base in the vicinity.
…
observation towers, control and command centers will be built along the length of the wall, above and below ground, linked to a command center situated in a nearby military base.
Israeli construction and engineering firms will spearhead the project, with support from similar Chinese, Australian, French and South Korean firms. More than 1,000 engineers, construction workers and project management personnel from Israel and abroad, but excluding Palestinians, have been engaged for the work.
Tenders for the project, called for by the Israel Defense Ministry in collaboration with the Israel Defense Forces were awarded last month.
The social and economic impacts of this newly designed wall are devastating.
1..85 million Palestinians imprisoned in the Gaza Strip “Prison enclosure”. An act of genocide and the “international community” remains silent:
“Once the entire wall has been completed, it will seal off the Gaza Strip’s land border with Israel ‒ leaving only its Mediterranean maritime border as a possible route into Israel,” according to the Jerusalem Post’s Yossi Melman.
Remember the Warsaw Ghetto? Is it comparable?
400,000 Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest Nazi ghetto in Poland.
The original source of this article is Global Research
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Jews ‘Terrified’ They’ve Fallen From Inordinately Over-Represented To Merely Vastly Over-Represented In Power
By CFT Team — 21 Comments
(Tablet Magazine) The latest Jewish complaint is that they are literally “disappearing” — that Jews no longer “count” has become a mantra — that once again they are “victims” of the “woke” culture that they themselves created — that their minority golems have turned on them and want to “erase” them from the Marxist racial utopia that they have worked so hard to establish because they believed that it would ultimately be “good for the Jews”:
“Suddenly, everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing…
…It’s gauche to count but you can’t help yourself: In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City — anywhere American Jews once made their mark — our influence is in steep decline.
For many Jews, the first instinct is to look inward: We blame intermarriage, assimilation, the loss of the immigrant work ethic. This is, of course, a cope. Because the most significant cause of the decline isn’t Jews themselves, but that American liberalism, our civic religion, has turned on us. Where Jewish success was once upheld as a sign of America’s strength and progress over its prejudices, Jewish “over-representation” is again something to be solved, not celebrated.
A tenure-track humanities professor at a prestigious public university tells of the finalists for her department’s next graduate school cohort. Of the 20 or so candidates, four to five are Jews. One is a working-class yeshivish applicant with an incredible backstory and even better recommendations. He is passed over for not being “diverse” enough….In the end, not a single Jew is offered admission…
…Using YouGov data, Eric Kaufmann finds that just 4% of elite American academics under 30 are Jewish (compared to 21% of boomers). The steep decline of Jewish editors at the Harvard Law Review (down roughly 50% in less than 10 years) could be the subject of its own law review article.
The same pattern holds across America’s elite institutions: a slow-moving downward trend from the 1990s to the mid-2010s — likely due to all sorts of normal sociological factors — and then a purge so sweeping and dramatic you almost wonder who sent out the secret memo.
Museum boards now diversify by getting Jews to resign. A well-respected Jewish curator at the Guggenheim is purged after she puts on a Basquiat show. At the Art Institute of Chicago, even the nice Jewish lady volunteers are terminated for having the wrong ethnic background…
…In 2014 there were 16-20 Jewish artists featured at the Whitney Biennial. After a very public campaign against a Jewish board member with ties to the Israeli defense establishment, the curators got the message. The 2022 biennial featured just 1-2 Jews.
Comb through the dozens of Jewish names for the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship (I count 30-40). You’ll have a much harder time finding them 10 years later (14-16)…
…Today American Jews watch with Solomonic bemusement as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is argued before the Supreme Court….Maybe [Asians] really are the new Jews, facing the same barriers — insidious racism, personality scores, rural geographic preferences — that we once did.
On the other hand, fancying ourselves to be high caste members of a beneficent elite, we pretend not to notice that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is a cudgel used to exclude certain groups of Americans, including Asians and Jews.
Desperate to maintain their waning status within the liberal coalition, Jewish communal organizations ignore these contradictions. Once a protector of specifically Jewish interests but now secure in its new role as handmaiden to power, the Anti-Defamation League filed an amicus brief—in support of Harvard.
In the 1940s, the ADL took a different tack. For decades unofficial quotas at most Ivy League universities limited Jews to around 10% of the student body, despite evermore qualified Jewish applicants. Jewish organizations made it their mission to break this invisible barrier and by the end of the 1950s the quotas were a dead letter. The long summer of American Jewish success had begun.
But the seasons always change. A FIRE/Yougov survey found that self-identified Jews now number just 7% of Ivy League students, compared to 10% during the height of the antisemitic quotas.
In his gripping podcast Gatecrashers, about the history of Jews in the Ivy League, Mark Oppenheimer describes the troubled state of Jewish campus life. Harvard has gone from being 25% Jewish in the 1990s and 2000s to under 10% today. “In theory it could be the case that Jews are the same percentage of whites at Harvard as they always were,” he explains…
…Data from the Yale Chaplain’s Office—which appears to be the only Ivy League university that still tracks religious affiliation—shows a similar trend: The Jewish population went from 19.9% in the 2000s to 16.4% in the 2010s. A couple of years ago, the school’s chaplain told Meir Chaim Posner, the Chabad rabbi at Yale, that around 11% of Yale undergraduates were Jewish. “It’s dropped slightly since then,” Rabbi Posner told me in November.
“The university has decided that DEI is the overarching principle of admissions,” one Hillel director told me. “There’s a general consensus that it’s more difficult for Jewish students to get into top tier schools…”
…The 1999 Hillel College Guide now reads like a map to a lost civilization. Harvard and Yale have 1,500 Jewish undergrads apiece. There are 5,000 Jewish students and grad students at Columbia, 6,000 at Penn, 14,000 at NYU. It’s hard to imagine that as recently as 2008, articles were being written about the “race” to attract Jewish students.
What was normal less than two decades ago sounds like a siren call from a distant golden age. To even suggest that a 15%-20% Jewish undergraduate student body might be acceptable in a country in which Jews make up 2.4% of the total population is anathema in today’s liberal society.
In New York — the seat of American Jewish political power — there are almost no Jews left in power. A decade ago the city had five Jewish congressmen, a Jewish mayor, two Jewish borough presidents, and 14 Jewish City Council members. Today just two congressmen and a single borough president remain…
…“What you have is a lack of identity of Jews as Jews,” the Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf told The Washington Post. “And they don’t have the power to ensure that there’s more than one Jewish congressman. It’s astounding.”
Younger Jews are being excluded from the liberal organizations their parents and grandparents helped create. Identitarian meltdowns roil the progressive world. The Women’s March, the ACLU, and the SPLC all get rid of Jewish leadership. There will be no more “Mighty Iras” in our lifetime. Not even the Jewish president of the Audubon Society is safe.
There are still powerful Jews in Washington—neo-Nazis on Twitter like to post photos of Biden’s cabinet—but the influence is waning…
…Of the 114 federal judges appointed by Joe Biden (as of this writing), just 8-9 appear to be Jewish—in a field that’s historically been at least 20% Jewish. Liberals worship Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a magical Jewish Teletubby, but they wouldn’t dare nominate another “white woman” to the highest court anytime soon. We are back to the single Jewish seat on the court…
…Thanks to the odious new Hollywood house style that requires a detailed ethnic and racial classification at the top of all capsule biographies, we can see just how many self-identified Jews are in the Sundance writers and directors labs, or the NBC, Paramount, and Disney writers and apprenticeship programs—it is zero. It seems not being Jewish is actually a primary qualification. So much for Jewish control of Hollywood.
The decline is so rapid—and the golden age so close to living memory—it’s a running joke. On the latest season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David meets with a group of younger non-Jewish studio executives to convince them to cast a Mexican American girl as Young Larry’s Jewish love interest…
…Not even Hollywood’s Jewish history belongs to Jews anymore. The new Academy Museum, dedicated to “radical inclusivity” and paid for with Haim Saban’s Jewish money, couldn’t bring itself to include Hollywood’s Jewish founders. In “Babylon,” Damian Chazelle’s epic flop about Hollywood’s golden age, the director follows an ahistorical Mexican studio executive and an Asian American lesbian rather than any of the very real Jewish moguls or screenwriters or directors of the era….
What remains of Jewish Hollywood lives on borrowed time. Spielberg can make his Fabelmans, James Gray his Armageddon Time, but only because these are nostalgia pieces. Soon there will be no more RBG’s, no more Spielbergs, just a few off-brand Seinfelds doing a heritage act….
…In the 1950s, after Stalin’s death, after the purges, the Politburo turned to another pressing issue: the over-representation of Jews in Soviet life. Proportional representation (3% Tajik! 2% Uzbek! 12% Ukrainian!) became official policy, and the next decade saw the quick erosion of the Jewish nomenklatura. Soviet Jews — who had disproportionately contributed to and benefited from the building of the communist state — had outlived their usefulness…
…As true believers in the postwar liberal project, American Jews spent decades advocating for tolerance and equality of opportunity, not least because we were the prime beneficiaries. The ADL didn’t fight the quotas in the 1950s so Jews could matriculate in proportion to their percentage of the population. But there’s a tension between meritocracy and representation. The new DEI regime treats any disparity between groups as evidence of unfair advantage — and yet we’re supposed to think it’s a coincidence that Jewish representation plummets at the exact moment America frantically pushes to racially re-balance all high-status industries.
Because what is framed as a backlash against America’s “white” centers of power is in many cases a clever sleight of hand. Jews are being disproportionately purged from liberal institutions because Jews disproportionately exist within those institutions.
When activists and journalists and executives talk about how Broadway or NPR or publishing is “too white,” what they really mean is “too Jewish”….Twenty years ago, if Pat Robertson spoke along these lines — making the same complaints about the same people and industries and institutions — there would have been a rush to condemn it as antisemitic. Today it passes for social justice…
…Asian Americans have the dignity of looking at admissions practices and demanding fair representation. The Jews, as ever, are a people apart. From civil rights to Vietnam to the spectacular bounty of their cultural and political achievements, liberal Jewish boomers always managed to be on the right side of history. It is a supreme irony that they’ve helped empower a movement that now places their children and grandchildren on the wrong side.
…Harvard and Yale can magically lose nearly half their Jewish students in less than a decade and we’ll take it on the chin. That this is occurring with the full acquiescence of a terrified liberal Jewish establishment should tell you just how much power Jews in America still have.”
Jews gloated when they replaced the long-entrenched WASP elite in America — and then they lied to themselves that they were able to do so because they were just smarter and worked harder — not because they figured out how to cheat on the SAT — and then used the same in-group nepotism to consolidate their gains.
But Jews took it one step further — they didn’t merely want to replace the White Christian elite — they wanted to destroy it — as Jewish Yale professor Noel Ignatiev demanded — they wanted to completely erase “whiteness” from the American landscape.
It appears that these kvetching Jews at Tablet didn’t get the memo — “Liberalism eats its young” — and it does so because liberalism is based on an insane premise — the egalitarian myth — that a utopian Marxist society must be “color blind”, but to be “color blind” it must be obsessed with race — a culture of grievances based on imaginary victimhood at the hands of genocidal White Christians.
Jews can rest assured that at the very top of the pyramid of power, the Jewish elite are even more powerful than they ever have been — and they are more than willing — for appearances sake — throw a few middle class entitled Jews under the bus to gaslight Whites — and even Jews themselves — that they are willing to share their power with non-Whites.
If middle class Jews are becoming less over-represented, it’s not by accident — it’s by design — and its gives the Jewish supremacists the “proof” that they don’t “own the whole freaking country” when, in fact, they still do — even more so.
Mandatory “diversity” — under the guise of Critical Race Theory — is a Jewish brainchild by their own admission — and it’s becoming so obvious that Jews are behind it that even a mother at a school board meeting in Arizona flatly stated “It’s the Jews.”
And if even soccer moms have figured out that “It’s the Jews,” maybe it’s time for Jews to step back behind the curtain once again to calm down the restless White natives by making it appear that Jews are drastically losing their inordinate market share of institutional power.
But it’s not that Jews really have any particular love for people of color — rather promoting them despite their incompetence ultimately benefits Jews — by demoralizing Whites and dividing people racially while at the same time promoting miscegenation — to bring their Kalergi Plan to fruition where an elite cabal of Jews rule over a mixed race multitude at each other’s throats vying for power that they will never achieve.
What helped Jews ascend so rapidly in post-WWII America — aside from their penchant for playing the White guilt Holocaust Card™ — was their ability to “pass” as White — but colored minority “victims” see them as just another kind of privileged White people — and now that their “whiteness” has become a liability, they have failed miserably trying to convince these racially-juiced minorities that they are not, in fact, White.
Yes, it’s “gauche” to obsess about their relative statistical over-representation, but that’s what Jews have always done — as their inordinate “success” has increased, so has the inevitable “antisemitic” backlash
But they’ve always found a way of making “antisemitism” work to their advantage — in fact, Jews hold up “antisemitism” as proof of their well-deserved success.
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Eva Bartlett – IN GAZA and beyond…..
About Me
I am an independent journalist with extensive experience in Syria and in the Gaza Strip, where I lived a cumulative three years (from late 2008 to June 2010, and back in 2011 off and on to March 2013). I’ve also reported from the Donbass and Venezuela.
In 2017, I was short-listed for the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. The award rightly was given to the amazing journalist, the late Robert Parry [see his work on Consortium News].
In March 2017, I was awarded “International Journalism Award for International Reporting” granted by the Mexican Journalists’ Press Club (founded in 1951). Co-recipients included: John Pilger and political analyst Thierry Meyssan.
I was also the first recipient of the Serena Shim award, and am honoured to share that with many excellent journalists since.
I documented the 2008/9 and 2012 Israeli war crimes and attacks on Gaza while riding in ambulances and reporting from hospitals. For a detailed list, see the bottom of this entry.
Since 2007 I’ve been writing from and on issues in the Middle East, mainly occupied Palestine [see also here and here] and from 2014 from on the ground in Syria, a nation fighting for its existence under a foreign war of aggression.
For 8 months in 2007, I reported on the ground in West Bank areas of occupied Palestine, where I saw invasions and lockdowns of villages by the heavily-armed Israeli army, excessive brutality against truly unarmed protesters, and the unchecked violence of illegal Jewish colonists against Palestinian civilians, among other crimes. Twice arrested there due to solidarity work, ultimately deported after a third 4 day arrest by the Zionists, in December 2007 I was deported & banned from returning to Palestine by the same criminal Zionist entity.
I entered Gaza in November 2008 by boat, traversing Palestinian waters, part of a volunteer movement to bring focus to the dire siege on Gaza. As we approached Gaza, an Israeli gunboat flanked our simple vessel to the north, menacing us to turn around. We powered on to Gaza, where a harbour of small fishing vessels and countless Palestinians greeted us.
From Nov 2008 to June 2010 I stayed continuously in the Gaza Strip, doing solidarity work (volunteer) with fishers and farmers, coming under fire from the Zionists on the sea and along the border, writing about the criminal siege on Gaza. I finally exited through the Egyptian-controlled border, Rafah in June 2010, returning via Egypt to Gaza in mid-2011 and staying there, on and off, for another year and a half till March 2013.
In, my years in Gaza from 2011 until March 2013, I lived in a home with a Palestinian family near the refugee camp of Deir al-Balah, taking local public transport and enduring the same extreme power outages, lack of water and Zionist warplane flyovers and bombings.
Since April 2014, I’ve visited Syria 15 times (including two delegations), the second last visit being from March to late September, 2020, and my last being during the presidential elections in May 2021. Prior visits included two months in summer 2016 and one month in Oct/Nov 2016, and my more recent visits in June 2017 (to Aleppo, Homs, al-Waer, Madaya, al-Tall, Damascus) and in April and May 2018, notably going to Douma, the site of alleged chemical attacks in eastern Ghouta and taking the testimonies of medical staff and civilians there, who all said there had not been a chemical attack. Underneath the medical facility where alleged victims were allegedly treated, I filmed a segment of the labyrinth of tunnels terrorists used to move undetected.
I also went to Kafr Batna and Saqba where the White Helmets had a centre 200 metres from a terrorist mortar and missile workshop.
On my April/May 2018 visit, I went to Dara’a under terrorists shelling, Hadar repeatedly attacked by al-Qaeda, Aleppo where life is renewed, Hama and liberated areas of Qalamoun.
In September and October, I returned to Syria, going to Mhardeh–a northern Hama village under attack by terrorists, ignored by corporate media; to Maaloula where their ancient, annual, Cross Festival was held again; back to Daraa, a different city following expulsion (by military and reconciliation means) of terrorist factions, and met with a number of people, including Syria’s Minister of Health, the father of a Christian martyr who died fighting alongside Hezbollah fighters, and more, outlined here.
In October, I also interviewed Syria’s Grand Mufti, Dr. Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun.
In December 2018, I passed New Year’s Eve observing Syrians in the streets celebrating the return of peace to Syria and the victory over the Western war on Syria.
All of my writings and videos on this and more can be found here and here.
My early visits to Syria included interviewing residents of the Old City of Homs (see here, here, and here), which had just been secured from militants, and visiting historic Maaloula after the Aramaic village had been liberated of militants. In December 2015, I returned to old Homs to find life returning, small shops opened, some of the damaged historic churches holding worship anew, and citizens preparing to celebrate Christmas once again.
On my 5th visit in June-August 2016, I went twice to Aleppo, as well as the village of Nubl which had been besieged by terrorists (related articles here and here), also visiting: liberated Palmyra; Masyaf to interview survivors of the terrorist attacks on Aqrab and Adra; survivors of the May 23 terrorist attacks on Jableh & Tartous; and the Barzeh district of Damascus, as well as returning again to Maaloula and Latakia.
In Maaloula, I took the testimony of a woman whose brother and two relatives were point-blank assassinated by the west’s “moderates” in September 2013. She herself was critically-injured in the attack.
In Latakia, I visited a center for internally-displaced Syrians (internal refugees), where they were being given shelter, food, health care, education and social services by the state. I also met several internal refugees, who had fled from their homes in Aleppo, fleeing the terrorists which the west dubs “moderates” and rebuilding their lives in government-secured Latakia. In Damascus, I visited a restaurant the day after a mortar fired from a terrorist-occupied area east of Damascus, killed many civilians. I also visited a hospital where maimed survivors (all young women) were being treated. Read my Updates From on the Ground in Syria: June to August 11.
On my sixth visit to Syria, in October and November 2016, I visited Aleppo twice more, as well as areas around Damascus. The testimonies I gathered in Aleppo starkly contrasted narratives corporate media had been asserting.
On my seventh visit to Syria in June 2017, I returned to liberated Aleppo, visiting eastern areas formerly occupied by al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorist factions. I saw the Eye Hospital complex, which also included the Children’s Hospital, in which terrorists (including ISIS, FSA and al-Qaeda), had imprisoned civilians, trying them in Sharia courts, torturing and executing them.
I also met the media-exploited “boy in the ambulance”, Omran Daqneesh, interviewing his father the day after Mohammad Daqneesh went public to Syrian and allied press about the exploitation of and lies around his son.
I visited the Quds hospital in al-Sukkari, Aleppo, which MSF had reported “destroyed” in 2016, reduced “to rubble”. It was of course not destroyed, still intact, and inside the militarized hospital were logos of the FSA.
On that June visit, I went to Madaya, a town NW of Damascus which had been the hub of media crocodile tears for “Assad is starving civilians”, and learned that the civilians were being starved by Ahrar al-Sham, al-Nusra, and other such “moderates”. I also visited recently-secured al-Waer, Homs, and found the same thing. [Many photos and videos from both areas in this article and extended blog post]
My published Syria writings, videos, photos can be found at this link.
I have gone multiple time to the Donbass, first in 2019 and more recently in March & April/May 2022, June, July and August. [Related: What I’ve seen of Ukraine’s war crimes against civilians in the Donbass over the past few months]
Some highlights of my writing from occupied Palestine include:
-Documenting the crimes of illegal Jewish colonists and the Israeli army against Palestinian civilians in Hebron (Khalil), Susiya, Bil’in, Nablus, and towns surrounding Nablus, including attacks on Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest (in 2007).
-Documenting, while volunteering with and riding in the ambulances of the Palestinian Red Crescent in northern areas of Gaza, Israeli war crimes during the December 2008/ January 2009 Israeli bombardment, including:
*Israel’s widespread use of White Phosphorous (see here, here, here, here, and here ) , as well as post-attack documentation and taking of testimonies in February 2009. See videos here.
*Israel’s targeting of Palestinian medics: in this example, an Israeli sniper fired on two uniformed medics and on the ambulance I was in. An Israeli soldier also targeted and killed a medic I had worked with, firing a flechette bomb (“dart bomb”) directly at he and the ambulance he stood at.
*Israel’s targeting Palestinian media. A media building I was on a higher level floor in was targeting by shelling. [account and video]
*Israel’s holding civilians as human shields: see here
*Israel’s point-blank assassinations of children (see here, here, here, and here)
*The widespread, intentional, destruction of homes and infrastructure (see entries from late January and February 2009
*Videos:
-First Strikes: Abbas police station Omar Mukthar street Dec 27 VIDEO
-Shifa Hospital: Too Critical. After the very first strikes on Gaza during Israel’s 23 day massacre of Gaza, nurses in Shifa hospital’s ICU describe some of the patients on their deathbeds. VIDEO
-Brain Matter Out: Nurses in Shifa hospital’s ICU describe some of the patients on their deathbeds. VIDEO
-American High School, NW Gaza, Bombed: Bombed by Israeli warplanes on the night of January 3. Upon arriving at the bombed school, a search for survivors or martyrs was done. In the pitch dark, without adequate lighting and under threat of at any moment being bombed again by the Israeli warplanes, we were unable to find the martyr’s body and had to return at first light. The youth, a teen from the area, was the night watchman at the school. His dead body was burned and mutilated by the bombing. VIDEO
–Survivors From Ezbet Abed Rabbo: transporting some of the over 5000 Palestinians injured by Israeli bombing and firing during the 23 day Israeli massacre of Gaza. Gaza’s Palestinians had no bomb shelters, no air raid sirens, no safe havens, no means of escaping the Strip which was being bombed in its entirety. The residents of Ezbet Abed Rabbo faced some of the worst atrocities at the hands of the occupying Israeli soldiers, including point-blank shooting to kill, denial of water, food and medication, assault, detention in vast mud walled pit, and bombing of homes in which families resided.VIDEO
-Transporting Injured Palestinian Civilians VIDEO
-Husband of Drone Strike Martyr: After an initial Israeli bombing outside his home (during the 23 day Israeli war on Gaza in 2008-2009), the man’s wife ran out to help any injured. within minutes a second Israeli bombing in the same place, a precision drone missile, torn her apart. While trying to help collect her pieces and load her onto a stretcher, the husband wails his grief. VIDEO
-Documenting, during the November 2012 bombardment of Gaza, Israeli war crimes, from a central Gaza hospital, including the drone strike killing of a youth just hours before the ceasefire
-Documenting (often under heavy Israeli fire at close proximity) examples of the Israeli army and navy’s near-daily armed assaults against unarmed Palestinian fishers and farmers (including elderly, children, women, families, young men working to support their families).
-Writing about the devastating effects of the full siege Israel has imposed on all aspects of life in Gaza.
-Giving no-entrance-fee lectures on Palestine throughout the US, Canada, and also in Ireland and the UK.
*For a longer summary, including many photos, look here.
This interview further outlines some of my experiences. Excerpts include:
“…being in dangerous areas became normal after my experiences in West Bank areas of occupied Palestine, on the ground for eight months in 2007 where I saw invasions and lockdowns of villages by the heavily-armed Israeli army, excessive brutality against truly unarmed protesters, and the unchecked violence of illegal Jewish colonists against Palestinian civilians, among other crimes.
Twice arrested there due to solidarity work, ultimately deported by the Zionists and banned from Palestine, in November 2008, I entered Gaza, by boat, traversing Palestinian waters, part of a volunteer movement to bring focus to the dire siege on Gaza. As it happened, I stayed for a cumulative three years, witnessing and documenting two major Zionist massacres of the people of Gaza, and the Zionists’ daily wars on farmers, fishers, industry and all aspects of life in Gaza.
Going to Syria was something I felt the need to do—as should any person capable of doing so—in order to see and hear directly for myself what Syrians actually have to say about the fake ‘revolution’ and the hell they have been living since its inception in 2011. As with being in Palestine under Zionist bombs and attacks, being in Syria under attacks of the NATO and allied terrorists, one doesn’t think of fear and one takes strength from the people defying these attacks and somehow continuing their beautiful traditions, living, marrying, resisting the Saudi death cultists by celebrating life even amidst war.”
GLOBAL CIR: During 2012 you reported and documented the stories from Central Hospital in Gaza. What did you witness there and can a person and in what way continue to function normally, to go to work, to laugh…? How this what you do influence your life?
“In November 2012, Israel heavily bombarded all over Gaza for over one week. At that time, I was living in central Gaza and as my instinct was to document the Zionists’ war crimes, I went to the main hospital there, to document the victims and the martyrs.
By this point I had experienced the December 2008/January 2009 massacre, my first such experience. Then, I was one of around eight international solidarity activists based in Gaza, and throughout the weeks of savage bombings I was on the ground in some of the most hard-hit areas, particularly northern Gaza districts, riding in the ambulances of Palestinian medics. One ambulance I was in came under intense sniper fire while retrieving the corpse of a Palestinian civilian. Riding in the ambulances was an attempt to discourage the Israeli army from targeting medics as is their standard practise. It also enabled me to document first-hand some of the victims of Israel’s war crimes, including their using White Phosphorous on residential districts and close range point-blank shootings.
After the massacre, I followed up by taking testimonies of families whose loved ones, including infants and toddlers, were point-blank shot dead by Israeli soldiers, others who were murdered or mutilated by White Phosphorous, and others whose loved ones were murdered by flechette (dart) bombs, as was a medic friend of mine.
By the time of the November 2012 massacre, I had also experienced the routine Israeli army firing on farmers, while accompanying them on their land, with bullets flying past within inches of my head and body on a routine basis. So the concept of ‘danger’ was long gone, and sadly I had become accustomed to the sight of injured and dead. However, on the last day of the bombings in 2012, two children were brought to the hospital; their stories broke my heart: within two hours before a full cease-fire was to be implemented, a 4 year old girl was brought in and died on the emergency room table. Shortly after, a 14 year old boy was brought in, also dead on arrival. The boy’s body was so mutilated by the drone strike which killed him that I sobbed as I hadn’t since 2009. Sometimes a tragedy breaks the defensive emotional wall one builds to cope with such crimes.
I believe that Palestinians continue on in spite of such horrific losses because they have no other choice. A number of them find comfort in religion. And during the hardest times, many I know were even able to find something to laugh at in their absurd, tragic situation. For myself, it is the bravery and resilience of Palestinians, or Yemenis, Syrians, anyone in such unjust circumstances, which keeps me grounded and inspired to do whatever possible to contribute to bringing an end to their suffering…”
*More photos at this Facebook post.
*In Bil’in, Palestine, 2007, at a demonstration against the wall Israel has built on false premises of “security”, stealing 60% of the residents’ land. The Israeli army routinely abducts Bil’in residents in hopes that they will cease to protest the theft of their land. Prior to the tear gassing, soldiers surrounded us kicking at our bodies and heads. Full account here. Video here.
BIG BROTHER in the 21. Century 