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By Jon Hurdle
The U.S. Army, struggling to ensure it has enough manpower as it fights wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is wooing young Americans with video games, Google maps and simulated attacks on enemy positions from an Apache helicopter.
Departing from the recruiting environment of metal tables and uniformed soldiers in a drab military building, the Army has invested $12 million in a facility that looks like a cross between a hotel lobby and a video arcade.
The U.S. Army Experience Center at the Franklin Mills shopping mall in northeast Philadelphia has 60 personal computers loaded with military video games, 19 Xbox 360 video game controllers and a series of interactive screens describing military bases and career options in great detail.
Potential recruits can hang out on couches and listen to rock music that fills the space.
The center is the first of its kind and opened in August as part of a two-year experiment. So far, it has signed up 33 full-time soldiers and five reservists -- roughly matching the performance of five traditional recruiting centers it replaced.
The U.S. military says it has been meeting or exceeding its recruiting and retention goals, with 185,000 men and women entering active-duty military service in the fiscal year that ended on September 30 -- the highest number since 2003.
Defense officials say the recession and rising unemployment were likely to boost recruiting.
The Philadelphia center lures recruits with a separate room for prospective soldiers to "fire" from a real Humvee on enemy encampments projected on a 15-foot-high (4.5-meter-high) battleground scenario that also has deafening sound effects.
In another room, those inclined to attack from above can join helicopter raids in which enemy soldiers emerge from hide-outs to be felled by automatic gunfire rattling from a simulator modeled on an Apache or Blackhawk helicopter.
The Army is not simply looking for new recruits, said First Sgt. Randy Jennings, who runs the center. It also aims to dispel misperceptions about Army life.
"We want them to know that being in the Army isn't just about carrying weapons and busting down doors," said Jennings, who wears slacks and a polo shirt rather than a uniform. About 80 percent of soldiers are not involved in direct combat roles, he said.
GLAMORIZING WAR?
Jesse Hamilton, a former Army staff sergeant who served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, said the use of video games glamorized war and misled potential recruits, calling it "very deceiving and very far from realistic."
"You can't simulate the loss when you see people getting killed," said Hamilton, who left the Army after his Iraq tour and is now a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
"It's not very likely you are going to get into a firefight," he said. "The only way to simulate the heat is holding a blow dryer to your face."
The center is an experiment in boosting urban recruitment, which has traditionally lagged behind that of rural areas.
Eddie Abuali, 20, who was waiting to take an Army aptitude test, said he felt more comfortable in the center than he would in a traditional recruiting office. "It's a more relaxed environment," said Abuali, who plans to join the Army when he graduates from college. "You don't feel like you are being pressured."
Project manager Maj. Larry Dillard said recruitment was more difficult about two years ago when the United States was struggling in Iraq and jobs at home were easier to get.
"Now the news coming out of Iraq is better and we are in an economic downturn. It will be easier," he said.
Friday, January 9, 2009
House Launches New Labor Agenda With Wage Discrimination Bills
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By Karoun Demirjian
By Karoun Demirjian
In a bid to advance an ambitious labor agenda in the 111th Congress, the House passed legislation Friday designed to strengthen the ability of workers to combat wage discrimination.
The measure (
The House also voted 256-163 for a second bill (
Under the rule governing the debate, that measure was combined with the Lilly Ledbetter bill and sent to the Senate as a package.
Democrats applauded the House action as an important step toward guaranteeing the right of workers to fair employment during an economic recession.
“This legislation hits home, it helps America’s working women face the challenges they face economically, and it ends discrimination,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif. “Pay equity, fairness in the workplace – I hope we have a big strong vote so the message will go out that this Congress has heard the message of change in the election . . . that this Congress is prepared to be relevant in its actions to the concerns of America’s working families.”
But critics said the bills will merely lead to more litigation, energy misdirected at a critical time.
“What signal does it send to the nation and the world that the first substantive order of business of the 111th Congress is not job creation or tax relief or economic stimulus but rather a trial lawyer boondoggle that can put worker pensions in jeopardy?” said Howard P. “Buck” McKeon , R-Calif., ranking minoirty member of the Education and Labor Committee “This doesn’t offer women any protections they don’t already enjoy.”
Early Test
Equal pay became a high-profile issue during the 2008 campaign season, with much attention centered on Ledbetter, an Alabama woman who worked as a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire Plant for nearly 20 years before discovering she had been paid about 20 percent less than her lowest-paid male colleague over that period.
The Supreme Court decided, in a 5-4 decision in the case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., that because she had not filed her claim within 180 days of the first discriminatory paycheck, she could not collect almost $4 million in damages awarded by the lower court.
The bill passed by the House allows a worker to file suit within 180 days of the last paycheck received that is affected by alleged employment discrimination. It is applicable to all discrimination based on race, gender, religion, national origin, age or disability.
Democrats highlighted Ledbetter as an everyday heroine whose story would resonate with struggling workers.
“No worker should have to put a full day’s work in and get a paycheck at the end of the week that is based upon their gender, race or religion without any recourse to justice,” said Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller , D-Calif., sponsor of the Lilly Ledbetter measure.
The House passed similar legislation in the last Congress, only to see if die in the narrowly divided Senate after falling three votes short of the 60 needed to surmount a filibuster. The Senate never attempted to pass the other bill (
With an enlarged Democratic majority in the Senate, the bill may face brighter prospects this year. But it is not clear whether supporters will be able to muster the votes likely to be needed to surmount another filibuster.
A early, successful showing in the Senate this year would likely embolden the Democrats to pursue other labor initiatives that are expected to pose more difficult legislative challenges. Among those are measures to expand the availability of paid family and medical leave, and establish “card-check” procedures for union organizing.
U.S. Weaponry Facilitates Killings in Gaza
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By Thalif Deen
The devastating Israeli firepower, unleashed largely on Palestinian civilians in Gaza during two weeks of fighting, is the product of advanced U.S. military technology.
The U.S. weapons systems used by the Israelis -- including F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles and a wide array of munitions -- have been provided by Washington mostly as outright military grants.
The administration of President George W. Bush alone has provided over 21 billion dollars in U.S. security assistance over the last eight years, including 19 billion dollars in direct military aid as freebies.
"Israel's intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S. supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars," says a background briefing released Thursday by the Arms and Security Initiative of the New York-based New America Foundation.
"The Bush administration has been unwilling to use its considerable influence -- as Israel's major military and political backer -- to dissuade the government in Tel Aviv from its pattern of claiming self-defence while perpetrating collective punishment, human rights violations and undertaking massively disproportionate attacks that harm and kill civilians," Frida Berrigan, senior programme associate at the New America Foundation, told IPS.
Besides military aid, the United States has contracted more than 22 billion dollars in arms sales to Israel in 2008 alone, including a proposed deal for 75 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, nine C-130J-30 military transport aircraft and four combat ships.
"So, when Israeli forces engage in combat in Gaza or the West Bank, they are more often than not using U.S.-designed systems that were either made in the United States or produced under licence in Israel," says the New America Foundation.
The two-week military onslaught has resulted in the deaths of over 700 Palestinians, including more than 300 civilians, mostly victims of U.S. weaponry.
In comparison, the Israeli death toll is about seven soldiers and four civilians, primarily due to "friendly fire", or victims of rocket attacks by Hamas.
Mouin Rabbani, contributing editor at the Washington-based Middle East Report, says the intimacy of the U.S.-Israeli military relationship, and the frequency with which Israel launches wars, means that the Israeli military also performs the function of testing newly-developed weapons systems in actual warfare, which is of value to both Israel and the United States.
"Twice over, in fact, because less effective versions of these same weapons systems are subsequently sold at hugely inflated prices to Arab states, which effectively subsidises the U.S. weapons industry and U.S. military grants to Israel," he told IPS.
Tracing historical links, Rabbani said Israel replaced South Vietnam as the primary recipient of U.S. foreign military aid in the 1970s and has maintained that status ever since.
With consistently fewer exceptions over the years, he pointed out, Israel has the run of the U.S. arsenal, particularly with regard to obtaining new and advanced weapons that are not sold (or, as in the present case, given) to non-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) allies.
He said that Israel is also permitted to participate in various U.S. weapons development programmes, meaning that in addition to weapons deliveries it benefits enormously from the transfer of military technologies.
"Israel also has access to various U.S. intelligence programmes and data, and the list goes on for quite some length," Rabbani added.
Last week, U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (Democrat of Ohio) wrote a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pointing out that Israel's use of U.S. weapons in Gaza may constitute a violation of the requirements of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) of 1976.
The AECA outlines the conditions under which countries may use U.S. weapons systems, primarily for "internal security" or "legitimate self defence".
The letter says that Israeli forces have used U.S.-supplied F-16 fighter planes and Apache helicopters "to precede and to support ongoing ground actions such as the one in which 40 Palestinians were killed while taking shelter in a U.N. facility."
"Israel is not exempt from international law and must be held accountable," he added.
Berrigan said that with the onslaught about to enter its third week, hundreds of Gazans killed and wounded, 10 Israelis killed and more wounded, Hamas continuing to launch rocket attacks and a grave danger that the conflict will widen to include Lebanon, President-elect Barack Obama "will step into a bed of molten hot quicksand on Jan. 20."
"It will be difficult for the new administration to turn the tide of U.S.-Israeli relations and challenge Israeli exceptionalism, but it is urgently necessary," she added.
Rabbani pointed out that given the level of U.S. military assistance to Israel, the deployment of these weapons in the current onslaught against the Gaza Strip, and U.S. political support for Israel during this crisis, Palestinians could be forgiven for insisting the U.S. shares direct responsibility.
"While I would by no means dismiss the issue of U.S. military transfers to Israel in their various forms and dimensions, the key issue is nevertheless the impunity with which these are used," he added.
It is this impunity, rather than the weapons transfers in and of themselves, that accounts for Israel's ability to sow widespread death and destruction throughout the Gaza Strip at will.
Asked if there would a change in policy under an Obama administration, Rabbani said: "I don't see any indication that things are set to change once Obama takes office".
He has attempted to wrap his silence in a cloak of decorum and statesmanship, "claiming he was left with no choice because he is not yet president, then -- in view of his constant pronouncements since Nov. 4 regarding the financial meltdown -- rather too cleverly in my view elaborated that this only applies to foreign policy."
"So we are supposed to believe that if instead 600 Israelis had been killed by Palestinian suicide bombers in the space of 10 days, or Russia had decided to suddenly advance on Tbilisi, you could still hear a pin drop in Washington? Unlikely."
By Thalif Deen
The devastating Israeli firepower, unleashed largely on Palestinian civilians in Gaza during two weeks of fighting, is the product of advanced U.S. military technology.
The U.S. weapons systems used by the Israelis -- including F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles and a wide array of munitions -- have been provided by Washington mostly as outright military grants.
The administration of President George W. Bush alone has provided over 21 billion dollars in U.S. security assistance over the last eight years, including 19 billion dollars in direct military aid as freebies.
"Israel's intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S. supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars," says a background briefing released Thursday by the Arms and Security Initiative of the New York-based New America Foundation.
"The Bush administration has been unwilling to use its considerable influence -- as Israel's major military and political backer -- to dissuade the government in Tel Aviv from its pattern of claiming self-defence while perpetrating collective punishment, human rights violations and undertaking massively disproportionate attacks that harm and kill civilians," Frida Berrigan, senior programme associate at the New America Foundation, told IPS.
Besides military aid, the United States has contracted more than 22 billion dollars in arms sales to Israel in 2008 alone, including a proposed deal for 75 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, nine C-130J-30 military transport aircraft and four combat ships.
"So, when Israeli forces engage in combat in Gaza or the West Bank, they are more often than not using U.S.-designed systems that were either made in the United States or produced under licence in Israel," says the New America Foundation.
The two-week military onslaught has resulted in the deaths of over 700 Palestinians, including more than 300 civilians, mostly victims of U.S. weaponry.
In comparison, the Israeli death toll is about seven soldiers and four civilians, primarily due to "friendly fire", or victims of rocket attacks by Hamas.
Mouin Rabbani, contributing editor at the Washington-based Middle East Report, says the intimacy of the U.S.-Israeli military relationship, and the frequency with which Israel launches wars, means that the Israeli military also performs the function of testing newly-developed weapons systems in actual warfare, which is of value to both Israel and the United States.
"Twice over, in fact, because less effective versions of these same weapons systems are subsequently sold at hugely inflated prices to Arab states, which effectively subsidises the U.S. weapons industry and U.S. military grants to Israel," he told IPS.
Tracing historical links, Rabbani said Israel replaced South Vietnam as the primary recipient of U.S. foreign military aid in the 1970s and has maintained that status ever since.
With consistently fewer exceptions over the years, he pointed out, Israel has the run of the U.S. arsenal, particularly with regard to obtaining new and advanced weapons that are not sold (or, as in the present case, given) to non-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) allies.
He said that Israel is also permitted to participate in various U.S. weapons development programmes, meaning that in addition to weapons deliveries it benefits enormously from the transfer of military technologies.
"Israel also has access to various U.S. intelligence programmes and data, and the list goes on for quite some length," Rabbani added.
Last week, U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (Democrat of Ohio) wrote a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pointing out that Israel's use of U.S. weapons in Gaza may constitute a violation of the requirements of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) of 1976.
The AECA outlines the conditions under which countries may use U.S. weapons systems, primarily for "internal security" or "legitimate self defence".
The letter says that Israeli forces have used U.S.-supplied F-16 fighter planes and Apache helicopters "to precede and to support ongoing ground actions such as the one in which 40 Palestinians were killed while taking shelter in a U.N. facility."
"Israel is not exempt from international law and must be held accountable," he added.
Berrigan said that with the onslaught about to enter its third week, hundreds of Gazans killed and wounded, 10 Israelis killed and more wounded, Hamas continuing to launch rocket attacks and a grave danger that the conflict will widen to include Lebanon, President-elect Barack Obama "will step into a bed of molten hot quicksand on Jan. 20."
"It will be difficult for the new administration to turn the tide of U.S.-Israeli relations and challenge Israeli exceptionalism, but it is urgently necessary," she added.
Rabbani pointed out that given the level of U.S. military assistance to Israel, the deployment of these weapons in the current onslaught against the Gaza Strip, and U.S. political support for Israel during this crisis, Palestinians could be forgiven for insisting the U.S. shares direct responsibility.
"While I would by no means dismiss the issue of U.S. military transfers to Israel in their various forms and dimensions, the key issue is nevertheless the impunity with which these are used," he added.
It is this impunity, rather than the weapons transfers in and of themselves, that accounts for Israel's ability to sow widespread death and destruction throughout the Gaza Strip at will.
Asked if there would a change in policy under an Obama administration, Rabbani said: "I don't see any indication that things are set to change once Obama takes office".
He has attempted to wrap his silence in a cloak of decorum and statesmanship, "claiming he was left with no choice because he is not yet president, then -- in view of his constant pronouncements since Nov. 4 regarding the financial meltdown -- rather too cleverly in my view elaborated that this only applies to foreign policy."
"So we are supposed to believe that if instead 600 Israelis had been killed by Palestinian suicide bombers in the space of 10 days, or Russia had decided to suddenly advance on Tbilisi, you could still hear a pin drop in Washington? Unlikely."
Citigroup Reaches Deal With Lawmakers on Home Loans
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By Renae Merle and Lori Montgomery
Citigroup, one of the nation's largest lenders, yesterday agreed to abandon its long-standing opposition to a plan to let bankruptcy judges modify the terms of mortgages, a move that could help millions of distressed borrowers stay in their homes, Senate Democratic leaders said yesterday.
The startling turnaround reflects the changed political and economic realities of the nation's deepening recession. Citigroup's approval puts pressure on other lenders, potentially opening a new and more aggressive chapter in the government's foreclosure-prevention effort by giving some of the most troubled borrowers leverage to force lenders to forgive debt.
Democratic lawmakers praised the agreement as a breakthrough and pledged to add the measure to the economic stimulus package moving through Congress.
Although the support of the banking industry would not guarantee passage, they said, it would go a long way toward breaking down opposition among Republicans and moderate Democrats who torpedoed the idea in the Senate last year. And lawmakers have yet to win the support of the Mortgage Bankers Association, a large lobbying group that has previously helped defeat the change.
"I want to commend Citigroup," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat. "They showed real leadership on this, the first major financial institution to step forward and say, 'We understand this is a crisis in America.' The current efforts, as good as they may be, have not resulted in a dramatic change or reduction in the number of foreclosures."
Since 2007, Durbin has pressed legislation that would allow a bankruptcy judge to change the terms of a loan by reducing its interest rate, extending its length, or lowering the principal or loan balance, known as cramdown provisions. Currently, judges are allowed to modify the terms of a mortgage for a second or vacation home but not a primary residence.
Industry officials fought off the legislation, but the political calculations have changed. President-elect Barack Obama has said he supports the change, Democrats have a larger majority in Congress, and banks that have accepted federal aid are facing pressure to do more to help homeowners. Citigroup, for example, received about $45 billion in government assistance last year.
Also, the foreclosure crisis has worsened in the past year, and industry and government efforts to keep people in their homes have had little impact. If the legislation passes, it could secure the kind of concessions the government has not been able to get from the industry through various voluntary foreclosure-prevention efforts.
"This legislation would represent an important step forward," Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup's chief executive, said yesterday in a letter to lawmakers. "Given today's exceptional economic environment, we support its swift passage."
Citigroup's involvement in negotiations was reported earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the breakthrough came last week, when Lewis B. Kaden, a Citigroup vice chairman, called him.
Citigroup's primary request, lawmakers said, was that only existing mortgage-holders would have access to the bankruptcy courts, not those who take out loans in the future. The bank also asked for provisions that would require homeowners to contact their lender at least 10 days before filing for bankruptcy and that would not permit a judge to void the mortgage debt for minor violations of the Truth in Lending Act, a consumer-protection law.
Durbin called those requests "eminently reasonable." He said House leaders have also endorsed the changes, though some have done so with reluctance.
"I think it should apply to all mortgages for all time," said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who joined the senators at the news conference. But in the face of the mounting foreclosure crisis, Miller said, "we have to do what's possible."
The Mortgage Bankers Association said in a statement that it remains opposed. "We were surprised by the suddenness of the announcement and are still evaluating the proposed deal, but we believe there remain a number of crucial issues that need to be addressed," the statement said.
The legislation should be limited to subprime loans, the group said, and expire after a predetermined period. "This legislation would have a significant effect on the mortgage markets, and we believe it ought to be subject to the normal legislative process, including hearings."
Troubled homeowners not in bankruptcy could benefit more than those in the process, supporters of the measure said. Lenders are more likely to attempt aggressive modifications when they can still control the terms, rather than allow a judge to set the limits. "Right now, the biggest impediment to meaningful foreclosure prevention is the lack of willingness of investors to make significant modifications," said John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a consumer advocacy group. Changing the way bankruptcy judges handle primary residences "would force people to the table to hopefully come up with meaningful modifications."
The lending industry has argued that allowing bankruptcy judges to change the terms of these mortgages would raise costs for all home buyers. But Schumer said yesterday that by limiting the agreement to current mortgages, it would not affect future interest rates. And the financial and housing industries began to acquiesce in recent weeks, starting with the National Association of Home Builders. Its president, Jerry Howard, said last week that the economic crisis is so severe that "every possible solution must be on the table."
The group is open to cramdowns but is still reviewing the details of the agreement negotiated by Citigroup, an NAHB spokesman said.
Schumer said Citigroup's support for the measure has since spurred "most of the major banks" to call his office, "wanting to hop on board."
By Renae Merle and Lori Montgomery
Citigroup, one of the nation's largest lenders, yesterday agreed to abandon its long-standing opposition to a plan to let bankruptcy judges modify the terms of mortgages, a move that could help millions of distressed borrowers stay in their homes, Senate Democratic leaders said yesterday.
The startling turnaround reflects the changed political and economic realities of the nation's deepening recession. Citigroup's approval puts pressure on other lenders, potentially opening a new and more aggressive chapter in the government's foreclosure-prevention effort by giving some of the most troubled borrowers leverage to force lenders to forgive debt.
Democratic lawmakers praised the agreement as a breakthrough and pledged to add the measure to the economic stimulus package moving through Congress.
Although the support of the banking industry would not guarantee passage, they said, it would go a long way toward breaking down opposition among Republicans and moderate Democrats who torpedoed the idea in the Senate last year. And lawmakers have yet to win the support of the Mortgage Bankers Association, a large lobbying group that has previously helped defeat the change.
"I want to commend Citigroup," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat. "They showed real leadership on this, the first major financial institution to step forward and say, 'We understand this is a crisis in America.' The current efforts, as good as they may be, have not resulted in a dramatic change or reduction in the number of foreclosures."
Since 2007, Durbin has pressed legislation that would allow a bankruptcy judge to change the terms of a loan by reducing its interest rate, extending its length, or lowering the principal or loan balance, known as cramdown provisions. Currently, judges are allowed to modify the terms of a mortgage for a second or vacation home but not a primary residence.
Industry officials fought off the legislation, but the political calculations have changed. President-elect Barack Obama has said he supports the change, Democrats have a larger majority in Congress, and banks that have accepted federal aid are facing pressure to do more to help homeowners. Citigroup, for example, received about $45 billion in government assistance last year.
Also, the foreclosure crisis has worsened in the past year, and industry and government efforts to keep people in their homes have had little impact. If the legislation passes, it could secure the kind of concessions the government has not been able to get from the industry through various voluntary foreclosure-prevention efforts.
"This legislation would represent an important step forward," Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup's chief executive, said yesterday in a letter to lawmakers. "Given today's exceptional economic environment, we support its swift passage."
Citigroup's involvement in negotiations was reported earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the breakthrough came last week, when Lewis B. Kaden, a Citigroup vice chairman, called him.
Citigroup's primary request, lawmakers said, was that only existing mortgage-holders would have access to the bankruptcy courts, not those who take out loans in the future. The bank also asked for provisions that would require homeowners to contact their lender at least 10 days before filing for bankruptcy and that would not permit a judge to void the mortgage debt for minor violations of the Truth in Lending Act, a consumer-protection law.
Durbin called those requests "eminently reasonable." He said House leaders have also endorsed the changes, though some have done so with reluctance.
"I think it should apply to all mortgages for all time," said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who joined the senators at the news conference. But in the face of the mounting foreclosure crisis, Miller said, "we have to do what's possible."
The Mortgage Bankers Association said in a statement that it remains opposed. "We were surprised by the suddenness of the announcement and are still evaluating the proposed deal, but we believe there remain a number of crucial issues that need to be addressed," the statement said.
The legislation should be limited to subprime loans, the group said, and expire after a predetermined period. "This legislation would have a significant effect on the mortgage markets, and we believe it ought to be subject to the normal legislative process, including hearings."
Troubled homeowners not in bankruptcy could benefit more than those in the process, supporters of the measure said. Lenders are more likely to attempt aggressive modifications when they can still control the terms, rather than allow a judge to set the limits. "Right now, the biggest impediment to meaningful foreclosure prevention is the lack of willingness of investors to make significant modifications," said John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a consumer advocacy group. Changing the way bankruptcy judges handle primary residences "would force people to the table to hopefully come up with meaningful modifications."
The lending industry has argued that allowing bankruptcy judges to change the terms of these mortgages would raise costs for all home buyers. But Schumer said yesterday that by limiting the agreement to current mortgages, it would not affect future interest rates. And the financial and housing industries began to acquiesce in recent weeks, starting with the National Association of Home Builders. Its president, Jerry Howard, said last week that the economic crisis is so severe that "every possible solution must be on the table."
The group is open to cramdowns but is still reviewing the details of the agreement negotiated by Citigroup, an NAHB spokesman said.
Schumer said Citigroup's support for the measure has since spurred "most of the major banks" to call his office, "wanting to hop on board."
Economy Loses 524,000 Jobs in December, Unemployment Rate Hits 7.2 Percent
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By Dean Baker
The December employment report showed the economy losing 524,000 jobs in December. It also showed sharp upward revisions to job losses in the prior two months, bringing job loss over the last three months to 1,531,000. This is the highest 3-month total since the months immediately following the end of World War II, although the job losses in the 1958 and 1974-75 recessions were larger relative to the size of the workforce.
The job loss was spread widely across sectors, but manufacturing and construction continue to be hit hardest. Manufacturing lost 149,000 jobs in December, bringing its loss over the last three months to 376,000. All manufacturing industries are losing jobs, but the largest job losses over the last three months were in fabricated metal products (63,600) and the auto industry (49,000). These declines are equal to 4.2 percent and 5.8 percent of total employment in these sectors, respectively. Over the year, total manufacturing employment fell by 9.6 percent.
Construction lost 101,000 jobs in December. The rate of job loss in non-residential construction continues to accelerate, with the sector shedding 34,300 jobs. Since peaking in August, the number of jobs in the sector has fallen by 124,000 or 3.7 percent.
Retail lost 66,600 jobs in December, bringing job loss in the sector to 309,000 since August or 2.0 percent of total employment. Employment services was also a big job loser, shedding 80,600 jobs. Over the last year, employment in the sector has fallen by 579,400 or 16.2 percent.
With the length of the average workweek getting shorter, the decline in hours worked has been even more rapid than the drop in employment. From September to December, the index of hours worked for production workers fell at a 9.4 percent annual rate. This rate of decline in hours would be equivalent to losing 12.8 million jobs over the course of a year, if the length of the workweek was constant.
The household survey shows an equally bleak picture. The unemployment rate jumped from a revised 6.8 percent to 7.2 percent in December. The employment to population ratio fell by 0.4 percentage points to 61.0 percent, 1.7 percentage points below the year ago level.
The unemployment rates for blacks and Hispanics both rose by 0.6 percentage points in December to 11.9 percent and 9.2 percent, respectively. The unemployment rates for both groups are up 3.0 percentage points from their year ago levels.
This recession seems to be more egalitarian than others; the unemployment rate for college-educated workers jumped 0.5 percentage points to 3.7 percent. While the unemployment rate for college-educated workers is still far lower than for less educated workers, it is more than twice its pre-recession level. This means that the risk of being unemployed has increased proportionately more for college-educated workers than for less-educated workers.
Remarkably, employment among older workers is continuing to increase even through this downturn. Employment among workers over age 55 rose by 233,000 since September. On the other side, employment for workers aged 35-44 fell by 559,000 or 1.7 percent, while employment for workers aged 25-34 fell by 488,000 or 1.6 percent.
Other measures in the household survey also show weakness. The percentage of long-term unemployed increased by 1.9 percentage points to 23.2 percent. The number of people involuntarily employed part-time jumped by 723,000. The U-6 measure of labor market slack jumped to 13.5 percent, the highest reading since the index was created in 1994.
The only piece of somewhat good news in this report is that nominal wages are still rising at healthy pace, increasing at a 3.4 percent annual rate over the last quarter. With the CPI showing flat or falling prices, this translates into a rapid rate of real wage growth for workers fortunate enough to keep their jobs.
The December employment report adds urgency to the passage of a large stimulus package. It shows an economy that is rapidly shedding jobs, with hours worked declining at an even more rapid pace. Health care is the only notable sector that is still adding jobs, and even this growth could be reversed in the months ahead.
By Dean Baker
The December employment report showed the economy losing 524,000 jobs in December. It also showed sharp upward revisions to job losses in the prior two months, bringing job loss over the last three months to 1,531,000. This is the highest 3-month total since the months immediately following the end of World War II, although the job losses in the 1958 and 1974-75 recessions were larger relative to the size of the workforce.
The job loss was spread widely across sectors, but manufacturing and construction continue to be hit hardest. Manufacturing lost 149,000 jobs in December, bringing its loss over the last three months to 376,000. All manufacturing industries are losing jobs, but the largest job losses over the last three months were in fabricated metal products (63,600) and the auto industry (49,000). These declines are equal to 4.2 percent and 5.8 percent of total employment in these sectors, respectively. Over the year, total manufacturing employment fell by 9.6 percent.
Construction lost 101,000 jobs in December. The rate of job loss in non-residential construction continues to accelerate, with the sector shedding 34,300 jobs. Since peaking in August, the number of jobs in the sector has fallen by 124,000 or 3.7 percent.
Retail lost 66,600 jobs in December, bringing job loss in the sector to 309,000 since August or 2.0 percent of total employment. Employment services was also a big job loser, shedding 80,600 jobs. Over the last year, employment in the sector has fallen by 579,400 or 16.2 percent.
With the length of the average workweek getting shorter, the decline in hours worked has been even more rapid than the drop in employment. From September to December, the index of hours worked for production workers fell at a 9.4 percent annual rate. This rate of decline in hours would be equivalent to losing 12.8 million jobs over the course of a year, if the length of the workweek was constant.
The household survey shows an equally bleak picture. The unemployment rate jumped from a revised 6.8 percent to 7.2 percent in December. The employment to population ratio fell by 0.4 percentage points to 61.0 percent, 1.7 percentage points below the year ago level.
The unemployment rates for blacks and Hispanics both rose by 0.6 percentage points in December to 11.9 percent and 9.2 percent, respectively. The unemployment rates for both groups are up 3.0 percentage points from their year ago levels.
This recession seems to be more egalitarian than others; the unemployment rate for college-educated workers jumped 0.5 percentage points to 3.7 percent. While the unemployment rate for college-educated workers is still far lower than for less educated workers, it is more than twice its pre-recession level. This means that the risk of being unemployed has increased proportionately more for college-educated workers than for less-educated workers.
Remarkably, employment among older workers is continuing to increase even through this downturn. Employment among workers over age 55 rose by 233,000 since September. On the other side, employment for workers aged 35-44 fell by 559,000 or 1.7 percent, while employment for workers aged 25-34 fell by 488,000 or 1.6 percent.
Other measures in the household survey also show weakness. The percentage of long-term unemployed increased by 1.9 percentage points to 23.2 percent. The number of people involuntarily employed part-time jumped by 723,000. The U-6 measure of labor market slack jumped to 13.5 percent, the highest reading since the index was created in 1994.
The only piece of somewhat good news in this report is that nominal wages are still rising at healthy pace, increasing at a 3.4 percent annual rate over the last quarter. With the CPI showing flat or falling prices, this translates into a rapid rate of real wage growth for workers fortunate enough to keep their jobs.
The December employment report adds urgency to the passage of a large stimulus package. It shows an economy that is rapidly shedding jobs, with hours worked declining at an even more rapid pace. Health care is the only notable sector that is still adding jobs, and even this growth could be reversed in the months ahead.
Gaza victims' burns increase concern over phosphorus
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By Michael Evans and Sheera Frenkel
Photographic evidence has emerged that proves that Israel has been using controversial white phosphorus shells during its offensive in Gaza, despite official denials by the Israel Defence Forces.
There is also evidence that the rounds have injured Palestinian civilians, causing severe burns. The use of white phosphorus against civilians is prohibited under international law.
The Times has identified stockpiles of white phosphorus (WP) shells from high-resolution images taken of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) artillery units on the Israeli-Gaza border this week. The pale blue 155mm rounds are clearly marked with the designation M825A1, an American-made WP munition. The shell is an improved version with a more limited dispersion of the phosphorus, which ignites on contact with oxygen, and is being used by the Israeli gunners to create a smoke screen on the ground.
The rounds, which explode into a shower of burning white streaks, were first identified by The Times at the weekend when they were fired over Gaza at the start of Israel's ground offensive. Artillery experts said that the Israeli troops would be in trouble if they were banned from using WP because it is the simplest way of creating smoke to protect them from enemy fire.
There were indications last night that Palestinian civilians have been injured by the bombs, which burn intensely. Hassan Khalass, a doctor at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, told The Times that he had been dealing with patients who he suspected had been burnt by white phosphorus. Muhammad Azayzeh, 28, an emergency medical technician in the city, said: “The burns are very unusual. They don't look like burns we have normally seen. They are third-level burns that we can't seem to control.”
Victims with embedded WP particles in their flesh have to have the affected areas flushed with water. Particles that cannot be removed with tweezers are covered with a saline-soaked dressing.
Nafez Abu Shaban, the head of the burns unit at al-Shifa hospital, said: “I am not familiar with phosphorus but many of the patients wounded in the past weeks have strange burns. They are very deep and not like burns we used to see.”
When The Times reported on Monday that the Israeli troops appeared to be firing WP shells to create a thick smoke camouflage for units advancing into Gaza, an IDF spokesman denied the use of phosphorus and said that Israel was using only the weapons that were allowed under international law.
Rows of the pale blue M825A1 WP shells were photographed on January 4 on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border. Another picture showed the same munitions stacked up behind an Israeli self-propelled howitzer.
Confronted with the latest evidence, an IDF spokeswoman insisted that the M825A1 shell was not a WP type. “This is what we call a quiet shell - it is empty, it has no explosives and no white phosphorus. There is nothing inside it,” she said.
“We shoot it to mark the target before we launch a real shell. We launch two or three of the quiet shells which are empty so that the real shells will be accurate. It's not for killing people,” she said.
Asked what shell was being used to create the smokescreen effect seen so clearly on television images, she said: “We're using what other armies use and we're not using any weapons that are banned under international law.”
Neil Gibson, technical adviser to Jane's Missiles and Rockets, insisted that the M825A1 was a WP round. “The M825A1 is an improved model. The WP does not fill the shell but is impregnated into 116 felt wedges which, once dispersed [by a high-explosive charge], start to burn within four to five seconds. They then burn for five to ten minutes. The smoke screen produced is extremely effective,” he said.
The shell is not defined as an incendiary weapon by the Third Protocol to the Convention on Conventional Weapons because its principal use is to produce smoke to protect troops. However, Marc Galasco, of Human Rights Watch, said: “Recognising the significant incidental incendiary effect that white phosphorus creates, there is great concern that Israel is failing to take all feasible steps to avoid civilian loss of life and property by using WP in densely populated urban areas. This concern is amplified given the technique evidenced in media photographs of air-bursting WP projectiles at relatively low levels, seemingly to maximise its incendiary effect.”
He added, however, that Human Rights Watch had no evidence that Israel was using incendiaries as weapons.
British and American artillery units have stocks of white phosphorus munitions but they are banned as anti-personnel weapons. “These munitions are not unlawful as their purpose is to provide obscuration and not cause injury by burning,” a Ministry of Defence source said.
Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian war surgery specialist working in Gaza, told The Times that he had seen injuries believed to have resulted from Israel's use of a new “dense inert metal explosive” that caused “extreme explosions”. He said: “Those inside the perimeter of this weapon's power zone will be torn completely apart. We have seen numerous amputations that we suspect have been caused by this.”
By Michael Evans and Sheera Frenkel
Photographic evidence has emerged that proves that Israel has been using controversial white phosphorus shells during its offensive in Gaza, despite official denials by the Israel Defence Forces.
There is also evidence that the rounds have injured Palestinian civilians, causing severe burns. The use of white phosphorus against civilians is prohibited under international law.
The Times has identified stockpiles of white phosphorus (WP) shells from high-resolution images taken of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) artillery units on the Israeli-Gaza border this week. The pale blue 155mm rounds are clearly marked with the designation M825A1, an American-made WP munition. The shell is an improved version with a more limited dispersion of the phosphorus, which ignites on contact with oxygen, and is being used by the Israeli gunners to create a smoke screen on the ground.
The rounds, which explode into a shower of burning white streaks, were first identified by The Times at the weekend when they were fired over Gaza at the start of Israel's ground offensive. Artillery experts said that the Israeli troops would be in trouble if they were banned from using WP because it is the simplest way of creating smoke to protect them from enemy fire.
There were indications last night that Palestinian civilians have been injured by the bombs, which burn intensely. Hassan Khalass, a doctor at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, told The Times that he had been dealing with patients who he suspected had been burnt by white phosphorus. Muhammad Azayzeh, 28, an emergency medical technician in the city, said: “The burns are very unusual. They don't look like burns we have normally seen. They are third-level burns that we can't seem to control.”
Victims with embedded WP particles in their flesh have to have the affected areas flushed with water. Particles that cannot be removed with tweezers are covered with a saline-soaked dressing.
Nafez Abu Shaban, the head of the burns unit at al-Shifa hospital, said: “I am not familiar with phosphorus but many of the patients wounded in the past weeks have strange burns. They are very deep and not like burns we used to see.”
When The Times reported on Monday that the Israeli troops appeared to be firing WP shells to create a thick smoke camouflage for units advancing into Gaza, an IDF spokesman denied the use of phosphorus and said that Israel was using only the weapons that were allowed under international law.
Rows of the pale blue M825A1 WP shells were photographed on January 4 on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border. Another picture showed the same munitions stacked up behind an Israeli self-propelled howitzer.
Confronted with the latest evidence, an IDF spokeswoman insisted that the M825A1 shell was not a WP type. “This is what we call a quiet shell - it is empty, it has no explosives and no white phosphorus. There is nothing inside it,” she said.
“We shoot it to mark the target before we launch a real shell. We launch two or three of the quiet shells which are empty so that the real shells will be accurate. It's not for killing people,” she said.
Asked what shell was being used to create the smokescreen effect seen so clearly on television images, she said: “We're using what other armies use and we're not using any weapons that are banned under international law.”
Neil Gibson, technical adviser to Jane's Missiles and Rockets, insisted that the M825A1 was a WP round. “The M825A1 is an improved model. The WP does not fill the shell but is impregnated into 116 felt wedges which, once dispersed [by a high-explosive charge], start to burn within four to five seconds. They then burn for five to ten minutes. The smoke screen produced is extremely effective,” he said.
The shell is not defined as an incendiary weapon by the Third Protocol to the Convention on Conventional Weapons because its principal use is to produce smoke to protect troops. However, Marc Galasco, of Human Rights Watch, said: “Recognising the significant incidental incendiary effect that white phosphorus creates, there is great concern that Israel is failing to take all feasible steps to avoid civilian loss of life and property by using WP in densely populated urban areas. This concern is amplified given the technique evidenced in media photographs of air-bursting WP projectiles at relatively low levels, seemingly to maximise its incendiary effect.”
He added, however, that Human Rights Watch had no evidence that Israel was using incendiaries as weapons.
British and American artillery units have stocks of white phosphorus munitions but they are banned as anti-personnel weapons. “These munitions are not unlawful as their purpose is to provide obscuration and not cause injury by burning,” a Ministry of Defence source said.
Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian war surgery specialist working in Gaza, told The Times that he had seen injuries believed to have resulted from Israel's use of a new “dense inert metal explosive” that caused “extreme explosions”. He said: “Those inside the perimeter of this weapon's power zone will be torn completely apart. We have seen numerous amputations that we suspect have been caused by this.”
Defeating the Multinationals Is Just the Start of the Problem for Anti-Globalization Movements
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By Jeff Conant
By Jeff Conant
Set in a landscape of dry brown hills and arroyos flooded with dust, Cochabamba, Bolivia's third-largest city, is not rich in water. Seen from the air in early September, at the tail end of the southern winter, the land is brown and barren from the ridgetops to the river valleys. A warm wind blows dust in billowing clouds. Thousands of feet below the soaring, icy peaks of the altiplano to the west, and thousands of feet above the lush coca fields of the Chapare to the east and the Amazon to the north, Cochabamba enjoys the mildest climate in the country, but suffers from what geographers call "water stress," compounded here, as everywhere, by climate change.
Five years ago, Mount Tunari, the wind-sculpted escarpment that reaches to 14,000 feet above Cochabamba's streets, was capped in snow year-round. Today, the mountain -- an important source of water for local agriculture and groundwater recharge -- has snow only three months of the year.
Cochabamba's water struggles were catapulted into international awareness in 2000, when the city's residents, along with their rural and peri-urban neighbors, organized to oust the multinational giant Bechtel, which had privatized the city's water and hiked tariffs far beyond most people's means.
The fight has been recognized as one of the moments that ignited the grassroots water-justice movement that spread throughout the world. Since Cochabamba's water war, the issue has gained attention everywhere, from the halls of the United Nations, where 2005-2015 has been declared the International Decade of Action: Water for Life, to the pages of Fortune magazine, where corporate CEOs tell us that water is "the oil of the 21st century." Is water a human right to be provided by governments through public management, or is it a commodity to be protected by the free market and measured and metered by private business?
As ground zero of the water war, how the issue plays out in post-Bechtel Cochabamba is a barometer of how it may play out elsewhere. In the years since Bechtel left, the gains of the water war have been difficult to consolidate, and Cochabamba has become a shining example of the massive challenges for a dry municipality in a deeply impoverished country to manage its water in a way that is both equitable and efficient. The water-justice movement is clamoring for public control of water, but as Cochabamba is showing, in an era dominated by corporate control and private capital, this is no easy feat.
How the Problems Began
Cochabamba's privatization struggle started in 1996, when the mayor announced that the World Bank would relieve the city's water stress with a $14 million loan. The next year, World Bank offered $600 million in foreign debt relief. But both packages came with the condition that Cochabamba's water utility, widely reputed for corruption and inefficiency, be taken over by a private company. In 1999, the company, SEMAPA (Servicio Municipal de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado), was bought out in a private bid, by Aguas de Tunari, majority controlled by San Francisco-based Bechtel.
Not long after, union leaders, environmental activists and rural-water stewards came together to form a coalition they called La Coordinadora Por la Defensa del Agua y la Vida, or simply La Coordinadora, to wrest back control of the water utility. What ensued -- street riots, hunger strikes, the occupation of the Central Plaza, the government's declaration of a state of siege, many wounded and one youth killed, and the eventual, ecstatic, ejection of Bechtel -- quickly passed into legend. Occurring only months after the Battle of Seattle, Cochabamba's water war became one of the most widely publicized stories of the anti-globalization movement -- a major triumph for the People, United.
When Bechtel was given the boot, SEMAPA passed into public hands, and it's reform became, for a time, a cause célèbre, and an attempt to put direct democracy into practice. Jim Shultz, the lanky, amiable North American director of the Democracy Center, a small nonprofit that supports Bolivia's popular movements, says: "In its first few months, SEMAPA enjoyed a wave of public goodwill. It rolled back rates to their pre-Bechtel levels, and water customers quickly began paying their overdue water bills. Everyone wanted Cochabamba's public company to succeed."
In an effort to develop "social control" in SEMAPA, a team of citizen directors was established, made up of a representative of Bolivia's new Ministry of Water, a representative of the provincial governor's office, the mayor of Cochabamba and four ordinary citizens representing the four major zones of the city, charged with overseeing the budget, ensuring transparency and watching over the company's director.
But, when it came time for the people of Cochabamba to elect SEMAPA's citizen directors, scarcely 4 percent of eligible voters turned out, and nobody seemed to know why. In a move typical of countries where corruption historically filters through all levels of society, the first elected director filled the company with friends and family and was removed from office by popular fiat in 2005. The second director did much the same and was removed two years later. When I asked one SEMAPA worker who had been active in the water war and remains active in the water workers' union what could be done to root out corruption, he said, "We threw out two directors already. If the next director is corrupt, we'll throw him out, too."
SEMAPA continues to suffer from all of the problems that plague public utilities throughout the developing world: unmanageable debt, leakage and infamously poor service. Local researchers now say that, if SEMAPA serves as a model for anything, it's a model of what can go wrong in public water management.
Making Progress
As a spokesman for the forces that ousted Bechtel in 2000, Oscar Olivera has a profound stake in the future of water management in Cochabamba. When I spoke with him in his office at a corner of the Cochabamba's central plaza, he was disarmingly honest.
"The truth is," he said, "I feel a mix of anguish and sorrow at the state of our movement. There's a sense of impotence, that what we've done isn't enough. There are a lot of questions about where to go. Because, essentially there have been two movements. One is a movement to expel the transnationals, a movement that managed to break free of the economic model that wants to privatize everything. The second is a movement to construct a new kind of social action, a new concept of development, a new way to measure well-being. It's a movement to establish a new society, one in balance with nature. I always like to point out that, behind the fight for water lies the struggle for democracy.
"We're in the midst of a struggle to preserve life itself. The problem is, we know how to resist. But we are only now learning how to construct something new."
Waxing hopeful, Olivera spoke of the water committees that had developed spontaneously in the Zona Sur, a sprawling neighborhood at Cochabamba's southern flank.
"The water committees have begun establishing a new kind of social organization, a new kind of conviviality, that, while it's not always optimal in terms of efficiency -- largely because of a lack of financing -- it has a tremendous component of solidarity, of transparency; the participation of these committees opens spaces that are very political, very combative and very clear in their defense of the common good."
That's what led me to visit Angel Hurtado, Education Director for ASICA Sur.
Hurtado met me outside his office, auspiciously located above a Cuban medical clinic in a neighborhood called Primero de Mayo. In a neat button-down shirt, gray wool vest, pleated trousers and gold-rimmed glasses and with his cell phone at his belt, Hurtado looked the part of a midlevel water utility manager. But he proved to be much more than just that.
"When I arrived here, in the '80s," Hurtado told me, "there was no water, no clinics, no schools. We had a spring, up the hill, and two natural wells, and the whole neighborhood drank from these sources. So we began building tanks and taps. From this effort was born, over time, the Association of Community Water Systems of the Southern Zone -- ASICA Sur. There was no one to help us. We had to do everything ourselves." Down the hill a group of men operated a large drill spitting up mud and soil, perforating a new well. "This project, it's taken months to get it going," Hurtado hollered over the shrieking of the drill. "We have our problems. But it's going."
Residents of Primero de Mayo, a sprawl of hilter-kilter concrete houses tumbling down the eroded slopes of the Cochabamba Valley, played a key role in the water war, and Hurtado's voice registered a quiet pride as he shared the story.
"We were militant," he said, "and very unified. We held a general assembly, and three of us were chosen to lead the mobilizations. I was in charge of security and making sure everybody had food and medicine. We marched every day, 14 kilometers into Cochabamba to fight in the streets, and 14 kilometers home at night. We had to fight every day, because the goal of the authorities was to destroy our leadership. But it didn't go so well for them. After months of fighting, we finally won."
Before coming to the Cochabamba Valley, Hurtado was a miner in Oruro, a high, barren province bereft of agriculture but rich in silver, copper, tin and tungsten. Like many others I would talk to over the course of two weeks in Cochabamba, Hurtado traces his history to a turning point in 1985. It was then that the country's New Economic Policy deregulated the mining industry, just as tin prices collapsed on the world market, throwing hundreds of thousands of Bolivian miners out of work. The mass migration that followed, known as the relocalization, produced the sprawling, informal growth that has become Cochabamba's Zona Sur. It also produced a revolutionary underclass that forms the backbone of Bolivia's fierce social movements.
"As miners, we came to Primero de Mayo from different parts of the country. This neighborhood, in my vision, it's a revolutionary neighborhood, a revolutionary army. Whenever there's a social struggle, there we are. But we don't struggle por loco. We struggle because we need to change the political system, the economic system. Ever since the relocalization, this is our function -- to bring about structural change."
Elsewhere in the Zona Sur, Fabian Condori, a weathered Aymara, directs the Asociacion de Produccion y Administracion de Agua y Saneamiento de Sebastian Pagador, or APAAS, the first water committee in the Zona Sur. Like Primero de Mayo, San Sebastian Pagador is a neighborhood made up of relocalized miners and displaced peasant farmers.
"The goal of the water war," Condori told me, "was to retake SEMAPA for the people. And I believe that SEMAPA should serve the people -- all of us. I don't believe we should need small community water services. But SEMAPA isn't doing its job, so we have to do it. We come from the neighborhood, we're self-sufficient, self-managed and autonomous. The cooperatives didn't emerge from an ideological vision, but from a common need."
In his office, Condori showed me a crumbling Styrofoam maquette of the water system he administered: from a deep well, drilled a quarter-century ago in Cochabamba's floodplain, water is pumped to the foothills some miles away. From there, a second pump, powered by a V8 engine still attached to the chassis of the automobile it had once served, lifts the water 200 meters over a mountain pass to a large tank perched atop a ridge. From there, the maquette showed a thin wire, representing the main pipe, running along the ridge to another set of tanks, from where it descends into the neighborhood for domestic use.
"Every Friday," Condori said, "our workers walk the entire line checking for leaks and clandestine connections. Just two workers check the whole line, every week. We have a 6 percent water loss from leaks. Compare that to SEMAPA's 54 percent. Not bad."
APPAS is an autonomous association, like a cooperative, managed by Condori but governed by the neighborhood itself. "We decide everything by assembly," Condori told me. "When there are enough complaints, we organize special assemblies. When 51 percent of the people vote for something, it becomes law. I don't decide for the people. They decide for themselves."
"What if someone can't pay?" I asked.
"If someone can't pay, we don't shut off the water. Not right away. We encourage neighbors to help out, or we allow them time to get the money together. If time passes, and they still don't pay, eventually we have to cut off the service. But we try to make it easy for everyone.
"In our neighborhood, we have 6,000 water users. When we hold an Assembly, 95 percent of them show up. If someone isn't happy with their service, they speak up."
Progress Spreads
Curious to learn more about the cooperatives, I traveled to the city of Santa Cruz, 150 miles and a world away from Cochabamba, to meet with Gregorio Jaldin, director of the Federacion Departamental de Cooperativas de Agua de Santa Cruz, a union of water cooperatives.
"There are cooperatives in Cochabamba, in La Paz, in Tarija, in Santa Cruz, and we're at the beginning of developing a National Federation of Cooperatives," he told me. "Why? Because we've seen that strengthening community water systems is the only way to build unity among the communities. In the area of health, for example, we've created a clinic to provide health services for free, just with the money that comes from water service. There's a solidarity fund to pay for funerals; if someone dies, the cooperative pays for their funeral. It's like a system of social security, but rather than being administered by the state, everything is run by popular assembly.
"I'll give you an example: Many cooperatives, with the few resources they have, can't buy a pump. But the larger cooperatives can lend them the money until they're able to pay back the loan. If they need pipes or tools, they can borrow them. If they need help digging trenches or expanding their water system, the other cooperatives come out to help.
"The cooperative system is so beautiful, because it's a system of mutual aid, always seeking equality among everyone; it's not about profit or personal gain. In my opinion, a National Federation of Cooperatives is really the answer to Bolivia's water problems."
"Does Evo support the cooperatives?" I asked him.
The question brought a smile, brightened yet more by Jaldin's prominent silver tooth. "People think Evo brought about all the changes in our country," he said. "The truth is, Evo is a product of the social movements."
The same was true, he told me, of the Water Ministry itself.
"Before Evo Morales was president, because of the sacrifices of the social movements and La Coordinadora, we got this ministry. It grew out of our demand that the government take our needs seriously."
Bolivia is the first country in the hemisphere to have a Cabinet-level position dedicated to water governance. According to Jaldin, this is one of the most important developments in his country in recent years.
"It sends a message that our little organizations can have a big impact. Now the human right to water is on everybody's mind, throughout Latin America and the world."
Like countries throughout Latin America, Bolivia is undergoing a process of constitutional reform, largely driven by the question of the right to water. In 2004, Uruguay enshrined the right to water in its constitution. In 2008, Ecuador ratified the world's first constitution that recognizes that nature itself has fundamental rights, on which human rights depend, including the right to water. Colombia and El Salvador have strong movements to include the right to water in their constitutions. And Bolivia's new constitution, drafted but not yet approved, declares water to be a right that is fundamentalisimo -- profoundly fundamental. If one wants a testament that water and democracy are linked, as Oscar Oliveria insists, this wave of constitutional reform certainly offers it.
Today's Struggle
During the last week of August 2008, a seminar took place in Cochabamba organized by a coalition of Latin American water rights groups called the Red Vida (whose acronym in Spanish means the Interamerican Network for the Vigilance of Water Rights). The title and theme of the event was, "The Public Management of a Common Good," and people involved in all aspects of water management had come from virtually every country in the Americas to share their experiences.
At long, open meeting sessions the national water workers union of Uruguay told of its solidarity with the deeply impoverished city of Potosi, where they were installing a new water system; a state bureaucrat from Venezuela argued forcefully and in a flurry of rhetoric that the state can meet the needs of the people only after the people take back the state from the oligarchs; a young activist from Ecuador shared tales of water-delivery systems run by rural communities on microcredit; a group of Colombians told how they had recently navigated several of that country's great rivers in their quest to collect a million-and-a-half signatures to reform their constitution; an Italian solidarity group announced a project for an Andean water school to be partially funded by the city of Venice. In short, the Cochabamba meeting was a platform for a tremendous diversity of popular organizations to share the lessons they were learning in forging what many participants referred to as "a new culture of water."
The Red Vida seminar was presided over by the directors of several local water committees -- ad-hoc groups responsible for supplying drinking water and sanitation services in marginal areas where Cochabamba' notoriously inefficient public utility fails to provide. Bolivia's Minister of Water Renee Orellana was present, as was Olivera.
The event opened with words by Eduardo Yssa, the Aymara director of ASICA Sur. With piercing eyes and wearing the traditional bowl-cut of the Aymara, Yssa, who had recently been in a near-fatal auto accident, put aside his crutches, thanked everyone for being present and got straight to the point.
"Compañeros," he said, "if we go much longer failing to recognize that water is life, we will have no life left."
Before a roomful of water managers from up and down the spine of the Americas, all struggling to construct a new politics of water, Yssa invoked his ancestors.
"Before," he said, "when there was no rain in the altiplano, the authorities were obliged to walk up to the springs, up in the mountains, on foot, and to carry a bottle of water back to the altiplano. There they would meet with another authority, who would bring music, autochthonous music. Then, in a special ritual, with the sacrifice of a goat or a llama, they would toss the water to the four winds, the four cardinal points, and they would pray, and then it would rain. They got results. Today, we come to the city like children, and we fail to practice these things. We fail to respect the water."
"Compañeros," he repeated in halting Spanish, "as long as we fail to recognize that water is life, because though you might have money, or gold, or silver, though you might have entire gold mines, you won't have life, until we respect the water, all of life is in danger."
Of course Yssa was right, but what does it mean to respect the water after centuries of plunder have left countries like Bolivia bereft of even the most basic resources, and after decades of dictatorship and crony capitalism have eroded the social fabric to the point where many people must choose between corruption and hunger? How we view the corruption and apparent failure of SEMAPA depends on how we understand the economics of scarcity that came before, and the problem of debt that wracks the country, and the depth of poverty that forces Bolivians, from the rank and file to the halls of government, to make incredibly difficult choices; how we judge the faltering democratic institutions in Bolivia depends on how we view the history of dictatorship, oligarchy and colonization from which these institutions emerge.
What the water war won, after all, is the political space to discuss and develop real alternatives -- something that hasn't been seen in Bolivia for somewhere in the vicinity of 500 years. Of course, water is always local, and this political space -- let's call it water democracy -- demands diverse means to thrive. One of the problems with water privatization is that it imposes a static, singular economic imperative on a subject that is, by its nature, fluid. The many struggles for water across the Americas reveal that building water democracy means encouraging new models to emerge.
As Olivera told me so eloquently after admitting to the difficulty of constructing something new, "The water war showed us that it's possible to change our lives, collectively; that even if our enemy is very powerful, he's not invincible. We learned that, maybe capitalism can privatize everything, but what it can never privatize is our capacity to dream. And as long as we have the capacity to dream, we have the obligation to keep struggling for a better world."
The Red Vida and other regional water networks are struggling to define what public management and community control of water might look like in the next century; what they are finding is that a diversity of models are needed to respond to a diversity of crises and conditions. At the Cochabamba seminar, this notion was perhaps best summed up by Adriana Marquisio of Uruguay's Comision Nacional en la Defensa del Agua y de la Vida when she said, "Popular control of water is a dream that does not belong solely to technicians and academics, but that is constructed from the accumulated wisdom and experience of all of our communities. To bring about true public management of water, we must get beyond the logic of politics -- fear of acting outside the electoral sphere; we must get beyond the logic of nationalism -- fear of acting beyond the borders of our own countries; and we must get beyond the logic of miracles -- recognizing that things won't change overnight, but at the same time allowing ourselves to imagine a profound and complete change."
As far as the means of the water struggle go, this may have been best captured by Anna Ella Gomez, a Red Vida member from El Salvador: "The water movement must be like water: transparent and always in motion."
What You'd Know About Israel If You Watched Al Jazeera TV
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By Shane Bauer
Throughout the 11 days of Israel's pummeling of Gaza, live coverage of the war hasn't made it into most American living rooms.
That's because Israel, America's staunch ally, isn't allowing journalists to enter Gaza while Al Jazeera, called anti-American and pro-terrorist by many in Washington, is the only network broadcasting live images from Gaza to the world.
The 350 reporters who descended on Israel when the conflict began are stuck at the border between Israel and Gaza. Israel says that opening border crossings to journalists would put their soldiers in danger, but many have accused them of trying to control the story. Instead of giving their viewers up-close pictorial evidence of what is occurring in Gaza, television networks have been restricted to showing their viewers plumes of smoke as they rise in the distance.
But Al Jazeera, the Qatari network that has previously undergone attacks and had its reporters arrested by the U.S. military, remains typically defiant. While other networks are increasingly severed from Gaza as phone lines are cut and 75 percent of the territory is without electricity, Al Jazeera is bringing its approximately 140 million English- and Arabic-speaking viewers live images of bombings, tanks rolling through Gaza's farmland, and interviews with civilians and aid workers inside Gaza city.
Like all of the networks, Al Jazeera gives constant hard-hitting interviews with politicians and analysts from Israel, the West Bank, and the rest of the Arab world. But while others can only balance pundits with more pundits, Al Jazeera has been taking the viewer to the scene to weigh the words of politicians against the reality on the ground.
Take Israel's claim that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. After showing an Israeli politician writing off the assertion of the existence of a humanitarian disaster, Al Jazeera cut to the Al Shifa hospital, the largest in all of Gaza. There, we saw that there were not enough medical supplies and civilians lying on bloody hospital beds told us that their lives were not only being crippled by bombs falling on their houses, but by the extreme lack of water and food for the people cowering inside them.
One man, as he held his dead, pale faced 7-month-old son in his arms, said, "We were in our house for three days before the bombs fell on us. We called for the Red Cross and humanitarian groups, but no one was able to reach us…We have no one but God."
Israeli officials continue to assert that they are allowing in humanitarian aid by opening the border, but as Al Jazeera's Ayman Moheyaldin reported from the inside, "The point is not that you open the crossings to allow in 30 to 40 trucks, but that you keep them open and allow a continuous amount of goods to enter for a sustainable amount of time."
The problem isn't only that supplies can't get in. People still can't get out. Most are left searching hopelessly for safety while their stories remain trapped within Gaza's walls.
"There is nowhere safe in Gaza," an enraged John Ging, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, told Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros in front of the Al Shifa hospital today. Those words came after the Israeli Defense Forces bombed a UN school that was being used as a refuge. Later in the day, a second UN school was struck by the Israelis, killing at least 40. "Everyone here is terrorized and traumatized and they have the right to be because there is no safe haven…This violence needs to stop now. Neither side can wait for the other to stop first," he said.
While Al Jazeera might be the only channel reporting from inside Gaza, scores of channels across the Middle East are airing constant commentary as well as images of wailing women, dead children, and burning buildings on loop. On the Syrian satellite station Al-Sham, for example, a pro-Hezbollah series about Israel's occupation of south Lebanon was alternated with a 20-minute musical piece sung over images of dead babies, American soldiers kicking men in orange jumpsuits, a naked Arab man with a bag over his head running from American military dogs, stone-throwing Palestinian children, and endless footage of blood-soaked Palestinians and Iraqis. The song's chorus, "The heart of humanity has died. It died between us brothers. Maybe we forgot one day that all Arabs are brothers," reflects the deep anger that people are feeling toward the inaction of Arab governments here.
By and large, media here is "all Gaza, all the time," and the more people see and hear about what is going on there, the angrier they seem to get. As I rode a bus into the Palestinian refugee camp, Yarmouk, a few days ago, the Syrian radio station was taking calls. A woman screamed into the airwaves, "The people of Gaza don't need food; they need guns to resist the Israelis!" The bus remained silent, full of straight-faced, clench-jawed passengers.
Many went home and watched the ground invasion live a couple of hours later in night vision-green on Al Jazeera. Since then, the death toll has climbed to at least 598, according to Al Jazeera, with 2,700 injured.
Meanwhile, the world's only live coverage of the tragedy is kept away from American eyes. While Al Jazeera English competes with CNN and BBC as one of the largest networks in the world, no major American cable provider has been willing to carry the channel since it launched in 2006. Some say cable providers are squeamish about working with a channel popularly perceived in the United States as giving airtime to terrorists.
But Al Jazeera is finding its way around the problem. Today, Americans hungry for inside coverage of Gaza can download Livestation, a free program that will let viewers watch Al Jazeera English among other international networks. Defiant as always, Al Jazeera might break through another media blackout, and into American homes.
By Shane Bauer
Throughout the 11 days of Israel's pummeling of Gaza, live coverage of the war hasn't made it into most American living rooms.
That's because Israel, America's staunch ally, isn't allowing journalists to enter Gaza while Al Jazeera, called anti-American and pro-terrorist by many in Washington, is the only network broadcasting live images from Gaza to the world.
The 350 reporters who descended on Israel when the conflict began are stuck at the border between Israel and Gaza. Israel says that opening border crossings to journalists would put their soldiers in danger, but many have accused them of trying to control the story. Instead of giving their viewers up-close pictorial evidence of what is occurring in Gaza, television networks have been restricted to showing their viewers plumes of smoke as they rise in the distance.
But Al Jazeera, the Qatari network that has previously undergone attacks and had its reporters arrested by the U.S. military, remains typically defiant. While other networks are increasingly severed from Gaza as phone lines are cut and 75 percent of the territory is without electricity, Al Jazeera is bringing its approximately 140 million English- and Arabic-speaking viewers live images of bombings, tanks rolling through Gaza's farmland, and interviews with civilians and aid workers inside Gaza city.
Like all of the networks, Al Jazeera gives constant hard-hitting interviews with politicians and analysts from Israel, the West Bank, and the rest of the Arab world. But while others can only balance pundits with more pundits, Al Jazeera has been taking the viewer to the scene to weigh the words of politicians against the reality on the ground.
Take Israel's claim that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. After showing an Israeli politician writing off the assertion of the existence of a humanitarian disaster, Al Jazeera cut to the Al Shifa hospital, the largest in all of Gaza. There, we saw that there were not enough medical supplies and civilians lying on bloody hospital beds told us that their lives were not only being crippled by bombs falling on their houses, but by the extreme lack of water and food for the people cowering inside them.
One man, as he held his dead, pale faced 7-month-old son in his arms, said, "We were in our house for three days before the bombs fell on us. We called for the Red Cross and humanitarian groups, but no one was able to reach us…We have no one but God."
Israeli officials continue to assert that they are allowing in humanitarian aid by opening the border, but as Al Jazeera's Ayman Moheyaldin reported from the inside, "The point is not that you open the crossings to allow in 30 to 40 trucks, but that you keep them open and allow a continuous amount of goods to enter for a sustainable amount of time."
The problem isn't only that supplies can't get in. People still can't get out. Most are left searching hopelessly for safety while their stories remain trapped within Gaza's walls.
"There is nowhere safe in Gaza," an enraged John Ging, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, told Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros in front of the Al Shifa hospital today. Those words came after the Israeli Defense Forces bombed a UN school that was being used as a refuge. Later in the day, a second UN school was struck by the Israelis, killing at least 40. "Everyone here is terrorized and traumatized and they have the right to be because there is no safe haven…This violence needs to stop now. Neither side can wait for the other to stop first," he said.
While Al Jazeera might be the only channel reporting from inside Gaza, scores of channels across the Middle East are airing constant commentary as well as images of wailing women, dead children, and burning buildings on loop. On the Syrian satellite station Al-Sham, for example, a pro-Hezbollah series about Israel's occupation of south Lebanon was alternated with a 20-minute musical piece sung over images of dead babies, American soldiers kicking men in orange jumpsuits, a naked Arab man with a bag over his head running from American military dogs, stone-throwing Palestinian children, and endless footage of blood-soaked Palestinians and Iraqis. The song's chorus, "The heart of humanity has died. It died between us brothers. Maybe we forgot one day that all Arabs are brothers," reflects the deep anger that people are feeling toward the inaction of Arab governments here.
By and large, media here is "all Gaza, all the time," and the more people see and hear about what is going on there, the angrier they seem to get. As I rode a bus into the Palestinian refugee camp, Yarmouk, a few days ago, the Syrian radio station was taking calls. A woman screamed into the airwaves, "The people of Gaza don't need food; they need guns to resist the Israelis!" The bus remained silent, full of straight-faced, clench-jawed passengers.
Many went home and watched the ground invasion live a couple of hours later in night vision-green on Al Jazeera. Since then, the death toll has climbed to at least 598, according to Al Jazeera, with 2,700 injured.
Meanwhile, the world's only live coverage of the tragedy is kept away from American eyes. While Al Jazeera English competes with CNN and BBC as one of the largest networks in the world, no major American cable provider has been willing to carry the channel since it launched in 2006. Some say cable providers are squeamish about working with a channel popularly perceived in the United States as giving airtime to terrorists.
But Al Jazeera is finding its way around the problem. Today, Americans hungry for inside coverage of Gaza can download Livestation, a free program that will let viewers watch Al Jazeera English among other international networks. Defiant as always, Al Jazeera might break through another media blackout, and into American homes.
Want to End the Violence in Gaza? Boycott Israel.
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By Naomi Klein
It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.
By Naomi Klein
It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.
In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era." The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions -- BDS for short -- was born.
Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the antiapartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves.… This international backing must stop."
Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. And they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counterarguments.
1. Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis. The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement." It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures -- quite the opposite. The weapons and $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends to Israel is only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first non–Latin American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent. A new trade deal with the European Union is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And on December 8, European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.
It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7 percent. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.
2. Israel is not South Africa. Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves that BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, back-room lobbying) have failed. And there are indeed deeply distressing echoes of South African apartheid in the occupied territories: the color-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said that the architecture of segregation that he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid." That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.
3. Why single out Israel when the United States, Britain and other Western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan? Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.
4. Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less. This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. In other words, I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.
Coming up with our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, e-mails and instant messages, stretching from Tel Aviv to Ramallah to Paris to Toronto to Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start implementing a boycott strategy, dialogue increases dramatically. And why wouldn't it? Building a movement requires endless communicating, as many in the antiapartheid struggle well recall. The argument that supporting boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at one another across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.
Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of those very high-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, the managing director of a British telecom specializing in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax. "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."
Ramsey says that his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."
It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.
The brutal face of Israel’s “total war” on Gaza
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By Bill Van Auken
While Israel has sought to conceal the atrocities that it is carrying out against Gaza’s civilian population, reports of aid workers and testimony of survivors have provided a searing picture of the carnage unleashed by its military assault.
The Israeli government has barred the international media from entering the besieged Gaza Strip for good reason. It wants as much as possible to limit the images of the dead and maimed civilian men, women and children from reaching the outside world and to prevent the Palestinians trapped inside the blockaded territory from telling their stories.
Nonetheless, accounts of war crimes carried out by the Israeli military continue to come out of Gaza. One source is the testimony gathered by Israeli human rights groups, which have sought to telephone Gaza residents, with increasing difficulty as the bombardment has disrupted telecommunications throughout the territory.
B’Tselem, the Israeli group that monitors human rights in the occupied territory, spoke to 19-year-old Meysa a-Samuni, a young woman with an infant daughter, who witnessed the massacre of much of her family in the Zeitun neighborhood south of Gaza City. They were killed when Israeli troops shelled a house which they and others had been ordered to enter.
She told B’Tselem: “On Sunday [4 January], around 9 a.m., soldiers came to the house of my father-in-law, Rashed a-Samuni, which is located next to a concrete engineering company. We were 14 people in the house, all of us from a-Samuni family: me, my husband, Tawfiq, 21, our infant, Jumana, nine months old, my father-in-law, Rashed, 41, my mother-in-law, Rabab, 38, and my husband’s brothers, Musa, 19, Walid, 17, Halmi, 14, Zeineb, 12, Muhammad, 11, Shaban, 9, Issa, 7, Islam, 12, Israa, 2.
“The soldiers came to the house on foot and knocked on the door. We opened and then, threatening us with weapons, they forced us to leave the house. They had bulletproof vests on and had automatic weapons. Their faces were painted black. We left the house. Walid ran from another door of the house, but the soldiers caught him.
“The soldiers led us by foot to the house of my father-in-law’s brother, Talal Halmi a-Samuni, 50, about 20 meters away. In the house were already about 20 people, and together we were 35. The soldiers left us, apparently to search my father-in-law’s house.
“About an hour later, the soldiers came back and ordered us to go with them to the house of Wail a-Samuni, 40. His house is a kind of concrete warehouse, about 200 square meters big, about 20 meters from Talal’s house, where we were. We reached Wail’s house at 11:00 a.m. There were already 35 people there, so now we were about 70 in total. We stayed there until the next morning. We didn’t have food or drink.
“Around six o’clock in the morning [Monday, 5 January], it was quiet in the area. One of the men in the family, Adnan a-Samuni, 20, said that he wanted to go and bring his uncle and family so they could be with us. My father-in law and his nephew, Salah Talal a-Samuni, 30, and his cousin Muhammad Ibrahim a-Samuni, 27, were standing at the door of the house and planned on going together to bring them. The moment they left the house, a missile or shell hit them. Muhammad was killed on the spot and the others were injured from the shrapnel. My husband went over to them to help, and then a shell or missile was fired onto the roof of the warehouse. Based on the intensity of the strike, I think it was a missile from an F-16.
“When the missile stuck, I lay down with my daughter under me. Everything filled up with smoke and dust, and I heard screams and crying. After the smoke and dust cleared a bit, I looked around and saw 20-30 people who were dead, and about 20 who were wounded. Some were severely wounded and some lightly.
“The persons killed around me were my husband, who was hit in the back, my father-in-law, who was hit in the head and whose brain was on the floor, my mother-in-law Rabab, my father-in-law’s brother Talal, and his wife Rhama Muhammad a-Samuni, 45, Talal’s son’s wife, Maha Muhammad a-Samuni, 19, and her son, Muhammad Hamli a-Samuni, five months, whose whole brain was outside his body. Razqa Muhammad a-Samuni, 50, Hanan Khamis a-Samuni, 30, and Hamdi Majid a-Samuni, 22.
“My husband’s brother, Musa, and I were lightly injured. Musa was injured in the shoulder and my left hand was injured. My daughter was injured in the left hand. Her thumb, second finger, and third finger had been cut off. I took a kerchief and wrapped her hand to stop the bleeding. The wounded who lay on the floor cried for help and couldn’t move. The small children and my husband’s grandmother, Shifaa a-Samuni, 70, were crying.
“About 15 minutes after the second strike, Musa said that it would be better to escape and go to the house of his uncle, Assad a-Samuni, about 20 meters away. We ran and knocked on the gate, but nobody answered. Musa jumped over the gate and opening it and we went inside. We were me, my daughter, Musa, and his little sisters Islam, five, and Isra, two. There were 40-50 soldiers in the house, and more people were gathered in one of the rooms. There were about 30 people, 7-10 of them men. The men were blindfolded.
“One of the soldiers came to me and gave me and my daughter first-aid. He bandaged our hands and checked our pulse. Then the soldiers tied Musa and blindfolded him.
“The soldiers told us that they would release us and leave only Musa and his uncle ’Emad in case Hamas came. I understood that they intended to use them as ‘human shields.’ They ordered us to leave the house, and we walked along the street about 400-500 meters until we found an ambulance, which took me and my daughter to a-Shifa Hospital. The others from my family continued to walk in the street. Later, some of them also arrived at the hospital.
“As far as I know, the dead and wounded who were under the ruins are still there. I didn’t see that any of them had been brought to the hospital.”
In another testimony gathered by B’Tselem, Abdallah Tawfiq Hamdan Kashku, a 44-year-old policeman with four children living in Gaza City, recounted:
“My family lives in a three-storey house in al-Zeitun, Gaza City. On Sunday [28 December], around 7 p.m., I was sitting with nine members of my family around a bonfire in the yard. It was cold, and we didn’t have electricity to heat the house. I turned on the generator to turn on the light. Then we heard the sound of planes in the sky. I heard a buzz and within a few seconds, I found myself under the rubble. I didn’t know what happened to me or to my family. I began to cry for help. The smoke was thick. I couldn’t see any of my family, who had been sitting with me a few moments earlier.
“It took a few moments before I realized the house had collapsed because of the bomb. Neighbors rushed to pull us from the rubble. People took my family to the hospital, some by car and some by ambulance. I was taken to al-Shifa Hospital where the doctors treated me. I was slightly wounded in the leg. I asked my relatives and the doctors where the rest of my family was. They told me my wife had a broken pelvis and that the others had suffered light wounds but that they hadn’t found my little daughter, Ibtihal. I felt horrible, worrying so much about her.
“Early the next morning, my brothers went home to look for Ibtihal. They looked under the ruins and found her body in the kitchen on the second floor.
“Our house was in a quiet area. I don’t think there are military targets in the area. We don’t have relatives or neighbors who are wanted. I am still in shock. In a few minutes, the life of my family was turned completely upside down.”
Yusef ’Abd al-Karim Barakeh Abu Hajaj, a resident of Juhar a-Dik, an agricultural area in the center of the Gaza Strip, described a January 4 attack on his home where 15 members of his family were staying:
“Around 7 a.m., an Israeli tank fired at our house. We decided to leave, and went to our neighbor, Hussein al-’Aydi. A little while later, we heard that the army told people to leave the houses in the area, and we decided to go to another place. We left together with the neighbor’s family. Together, we were 25 persons.
“When we went outside, we held up white cloth, so the soldiers would know we were civilians. We were afraid they would shoot us, but we walked anyway, having no alternative. Women and small children were in our group. When we got to a point opposite the tanks, they opened fire at us. My mother was hit and fell down. Then my sister Majda was hit in the back. Both were killed. We ran back, toward Hussein al-’Ayadi’s house. Mother and Majda remained lying on the ground.
“We immediately called the Red Crescent and the Red Cross to ask them to remove the bodies. Because of the shelling, nobody could get there. The next day, we realized we had to leave the area, and we fled.
“Now I’m living in the school in Nuseirat. We didn’t manage to coordinate removal of the bodies of Mother and Majda, and they are apparently still outside. We don’t know when we can move them. It is very crowded in the school, so some of my family went to stay in other places.”
Hussein al-’Ayadi, 60, also from Juhar a-Dik, spoke to B’Tselem on January 7:
“My house is made of concrete, which is why my brothers came to live with me when the fighting began,” he said.
“Saturday night [3 January], there was lots of tank fire and aerial bombing, and we all went into the main room, which is more secure. A shell fell on the roof of the house, tearing a hole into the ceiling and injuring a few of us lightly. We all went to the ground floor and then a tank fired another shell, which hit the house, injuring eight people in my family: Nur Hussein al-’Ayadi, 16, Wa’ed Adnan al-’Ayadi, 13, Raghda Adnan, 17, Hind Adnan, 14, Walid Adnan, 6, Kamela Hashem al-’Ayadi , 80, Doha Hassan al-’Ayadi, 80, and Doa’a Farid al-’Ayadi , 18. All were lightly injured.
“With the house damaged, we are now hiding in a small room in the yard. We have been in contact with all kinds of people in an attempt to get the army to let us take out the injured without getting fired at, but without success. The Red Cross told us that the army claims that nobody is trapped in our area, and is not willing to let them enter.
“We called Physicians for Human Rights and contacted Knesset members. Lots of people are trying to help us, but nothing has happened so far.
“We are eating what remained in the house and vegetation from the yard, which we cook, but we are a large number of people, and the food is beginning to run out.”
And the Reuters news agency carried the tragic account given by Dr. Awni Al-Jaru, a surgeon at the Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility, whose house in the Tuffah neighborhood of north Gaza was fired on by an Israeli tank Thursday.
“I was sitting inside the room when there was a boom and I ran out to the hall and saw my son Abdel-Rahim. I asked him where was his mother and brother Youssef.
“I found my wife Albina cut in two parts and my son Youssef completely blown apart. I could only recognize him from his teeth,” said the doctor.
Dr. Jaru’s wife was Ukrainian-born and could have left Gaza with other foreign-born residents before Israel unleashed its full fury against Gaza, but she refused to go. Their son Youssef was 18 months old.
By Bill Van Auken
While Israel has sought to conceal the atrocities that it is carrying out against Gaza’s civilian population, reports of aid workers and testimony of survivors have provided a searing picture of the carnage unleashed by its military assault.
The Israeli government has barred the international media from entering the besieged Gaza Strip for good reason. It wants as much as possible to limit the images of the dead and maimed civilian men, women and children from reaching the outside world and to prevent the Palestinians trapped inside the blockaded territory from telling their stories.
Nonetheless, accounts of war crimes carried out by the Israeli military continue to come out of Gaza. One source is the testimony gathered by Israeli human rights groups, which have sought to telephone Gaza residents, with increasing difficulty as the bombardment has disrupted telecommunications throughout the territory.
B’Tselem, the Israeli group that monitors human rights in the occupied territory, spoke to 19-year-old Meysa a-Samuni, a young woman with an infant daughter, who witnessed the massacre of much of her family in the Zeitun neighborhood south of Gaza City. They were killed when Israeli troops shelled a house which they and others had been ordered to enter.
She told B’Tselem: “On Sunday [4 January], around 9 a.m., soldiers came to the house of my father-in-law, Rashed a-Samuni, which is located next to a concrete engineering company. We were 14 people in the house, all of us from a-Samuni family: me, my husband, Tawfiq, 21, our infant, Jumana, nine months old, my father-in-law, Rashed, 41, my mother-in-law, Rabab, 38, and my husband’s brothers, Musa, 19, Walid, 17, Halmi, 14, Zeineb, 12, Muhammad, 11, Shaban, 9, Issa, 7, Islam, 12, Israa, 2.
“The soldiers came to the house on foot and knocked on the door. We opened and then, threatening us with weapons, they forced us to leave the house. They had bulletproof vests on and had automatic weapons. Their faces were painted black. We left the house. Walid ran from another door of the house, but the soldiers caught him.
“The soldiers led us by foot to the house of my father-in-law’s brother, Talal Halmi a-Samuni, 50, about 20 meters away. In the house were already about 20 people, and together we were 35. The soldiers left us, apparently to search my father-in-law’s house.
“About an hour later, the soldiers came back and ordered us to go with them to the house of Wail a-Samuni, 40. His house is a kind of concrete warehouse, about 200 square meters big, about 20 meters from Talal’s house, where we were. We reached Wail’s house at 11:00 a.m. There were already 35 people there, so now we were about 70 in total. We stayed there until the next morning. We didn’t have food or drink.
“Around six o’clock in the morning [Monday, 5 January], it was quiet in the area. One of the men in the family, Adnan a-Samuni, 20, said that he wanted to go and bring his uncle and family so they could be with us. My father-in law and his nephew, Salah Talal a-Samuni, 30, and his cousin Muhammad Ibrahim a-Samuni, 27, were standing at the door of the house and planned on going together to bring them. The moment they left the house, a missile or shell hit them. Muhammad was killed on the spot and the others were injured from the shrapnel. My husband went over to them to help, and then a shell or missile was fired onto the roof of the warehouse. Based on the intensity of the strike, I think it was a missile from an F-16.
“When the missile stuck, I lay down with my daughter under me. Everything filled up with smoke and dust, and I heard screams and crying. After the smoke and dust cleared a bit, I looked around and saw 20-30 people who were dead, and about 20 who were wounded. Some were severely wounded and some lightly.
“The persons killed around me were my husband, who was hit in the back, my father-in-law, who was hit in the head and whose brain was on the floor, my mother-in-law Rabab, my father-in-law’s brother Talal, and his wife Rhama Muhammad a-Samuni, 45, Talal’s son’s wife, Maha Muhammad a-Samuni, 19, and her son, Muhammad Hamli a-Samuni, five months, whose whole brain was outside his body. Razqa Muhammad a-Samuni, 50, Hanan Khamis a-Samuni, 30, and Hamdi Majid a-Samuni, 22.
“My husband’s brother, Musa, and I were lightly injured. Musa was injured in the shoulder and my left hand was injured. My daughter was injured in the left hand. Her thumb, second finger, and third finger had been cut off. I took a kerchief and wrapped her hand to stop the bleeding. The wounded who lay on the floor cried for help and couldn’t move. The small children and my husband’s grandmother, Shifaa a-Samuni, 70, were crying.
“About 15 minutes after the second strike, Musa said that it would be better to escape and go to the house of his uncle, Assad a-Samuni, about 20 meters away. We ran and knocked on the gate, but nobody answered. Musa jumped over the gate and opening it and we went inside. We were me, my daughter, Musa, and his little sisters Islam, five, and Isra, two. There were 40-50 soldiers in the house, and more people were gathered in one of the rooms. There were about 30 people, 7-10 of them men. The men were blindfolded.
“One of the soldiers came to me and gave me and my daughter first-aid. He bandaged our hands and checked our pulse. Then the soldiers tied Musa and blindfolded him.
“The soldiers told us that they would release us and leave only Musa and his uncle ’Emad in case Hamas came. I understood that they intended to use them as ‘human shields.’ They ordered us to leave the house, and we walked along the street about 400-500 meters until we found an ambulance, which took me and my daughter to a-Shifa Hospital. The others from my family continued to walk in the street. Later, some of them also arrived at the hospital.
“As far as I know, the dead and wounded who were under the ruins are still there. I didn’t see that any of them had been brought to the hospital.”
In another testimony gathered by B’Tselem, Abdallah Tawfiq Hamdan Kashku, a 44-year-old policeman with four children living in Gaza City, recounted:
“My family lives in a three-storey house in al-Zeitun, Gaza City. On Sunday [28 December], around 7 p.m., I was sitting with nine members of my family around a bonfire in the yard. It was cold, and we didn’t have electricity to heat the house. I turned on the generator to turn on the light. Then we heard the sound of planes in the sky. I heard a buzz and within a few seconds, I found myself under the rubble. I didn’t know what happened to me or to my family. I began to cry for help. The smoke was thick. I couldn’t see any of my family, who had been sitting with me a few moments earlier.
“It took a few moments before I realized the house had collapsed because of the bomb. Neighbors rushed to pull us from the rubble. People took my family to the hospital, some by car and some by ambulance. I was taken to al-Shifa Hospital where the doctors treated me. I was slightly wounded in the leg. I asked my relatives and the doctors where the rest of my family was. They told me my wife had a broken pelvis and that the others had suffered light wounds but that they hadn’t found my little daughter, Ibtihal. I felt horrible, worrying so much about her.
“Early the next morning, my brothers went home to look for Ibtihal. They looked under the ruins and found her body in the kitchen on the second floor.
“Our house was in a quiet area. I don’t think there are military targets in the area. We don’t have relatives or neighbors who are wanted. I am still in shock. In a few minutes, the life of my family was turned completely upside down.”
Yusef ’Abd al-Karim Barakeh Abu Hajaj, a resident of Juhar a-Dik, an agricultural area in the center of the Gaza Strip, described a January 4 attack on his home where 15 members of his family were staying:
“Around 7 a.m., an Israeli tank fired at our house. We decided to leave, and went to our neighbor, Hussein al-’Aydi. A little while later, we heard that the army told people to leave the houses in the area, and we decided to go to another place. We left together with the neighbor’s family. Together, we were 25 persons.
“When we went outside, we held up white cloth, so the soldiers would know we were civilians. We were afraid they would shoot us, but we walked anyway, having no alternative. Women and small children were in our group. When we got to a point opposite the tanks, they opened fire at us. My mother was hit and fell down. Then my sister Majda was hit in the back. Both were killed. We ran back, toward Hussein al-’Ayadi’s house. Mother and Majda remained lying on the ground.
“We immediately called the Red Crescent and the Red Cross to ask them to remove the bodies. Because of the shelling, nobody could get there. The next day, we realized we had to leave the area, and we fled.
“Now I’m living in the school in Nuseirat. We didn’t manage to coordinate removal of the bodies of Mother and Majda, and they are apparently still outside. We don’t know when we can move them. It is very crowded in the school, so some of my family went to stay in other places.”
Hussein al-’Ayadi, 60, also from Juhar a-Dik, spoke to B’Tselem on January 7:
“My house is made of concrete, which is why my brothers came to live with me when the fighting began,” he said.
“Saturday night [3 January], there was lots of tank fire and aerial bombing, and we all went into the main room, which is more secure. A shell fell on the roof of the house, tearing a hole into the ceiling and injuring a few of us lightly. We all went to the ground floor and then a tank fired another shell, which hit the house, injuring eight people in my family: Nur Hussein al-’Ayadi, 16, Wa’ed Adnan al-’Ayadi, 13, Raghda Adnan, 17, Hind Adnan, 14, Walid Adnan, 6, Kamela Hashem al-’Ayadi , 80, Doha Hassan al-’Ayadi, 80, and Doa’a Farid al-’Ayadi , 18. All were lightly injured.
“With the house damaged, we are now hiding in a small room in the yard. We have been in contact with all kinds of people in an attempt to get the army to let us take out the injured without getting fired at, but without success. The Red Cross told us that the army claims that nobody is trapped in our area, and is not willing to let them enter.
“We called Physicians for Human Rights and contacted Knesset members. Lots of people are trying to help us, but nothing has happened so far.
“We are eating what remained in the house and vegetation from the yard, which we cook, but we are a large number of people, and the food is beginning to run out.”
And the Reuters news agency carried the tragic account given by Dr. Awni Al-Jaru, a surgeon at the Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility, whose house in the Tuffah neighborhood of north Gaza was fired on by an Israeli tank Thursday.
“I was sitting inside the room when there was a boom and I ran out to the hall and saw my son Abdel-Rahim. I asked him where was his mother and brother Youssef.
“I found my wife Albina cut in two parts and my son Youssef completely blown apart. I could only recognize him from his teeth,” said the doctor.
Dr. Jaru’s wife was Ukrainian-born and could have left Gaza with other foreign-born residents before Israel unleashed its full fury against Gaza, but she refused to go. Their son Youssef was 18 months old.
Senate Democrats endorse Israeli war crimes
Go to Original
By Bill Van Auken
As evidence of Israeli war crimes mounted and amid signs that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are launching a new and even bloodier phase of the two-week war against the embattled people of Gaza, the Democratic leadership of the US Senate Thursday led the passage of a bipartisan resolution endorsing Israel’s actions. The resolution passed by a unanimous voice vote. The resolution begins by “recognizing the right of Israel to defend itself against attacks from Gaza and reaffirming the United States’ strong support for Israel in its battle with Hamas.” The preamble of the document contains 12 paragraphs vilifying Hamas as a “terrorist” organization and blaming it entirely for the ongoing war in Gaza. It includes one brief mention of the “humanitarian situation in Gaza,” but quickly adds that Israel has “facilitated humanitarian aid.” It goes on to declare “vigorous support and unwavering commitment to the welfare, security and survival of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with secure borders” and to recognize Israel’s “right to act in self-defense to protect its citizens against acts of terrorism.” It then demands that Hamas halt all rocket attacks, renounce violence, recognize Israel and accept all previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements. That Israel should curtail its blitzkrieg against the people of Gaza, which has claimed the lives of nearly 800 men, women and children and left over 3,200 others wounded, is not even remotely suggested by the Senate resolution. Speaking before the vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat from Nevada) declared, “When we pass this resolution, the United States Senate will strengthen our historic bond with the state of Israel, by reaffirming Israel’s inalienable right to defend against attacks from Gaza.” Reid invited his Senate colleagues to “imagine that happening here in the United States. Rockets and mortars coming from Toronto in Canada into Buffalo, New York. How would we as a country react?” While the absurd analogy must have proved unsettling for Canadians, one might just as well imagine how the population of New York state would react if Canada invaded, seized their homes and land and herded them all into Buffalo, subjecting them and their children to military occupation, near starvation and continuous armed attacks. Chiming in his agreement, the resolution’s co-sponsor, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, added, “The Israelis … are responding exactly the same way we would.” Indeed, it is no accident that the Israeli media have described the military onslaught against Gaza as “shock and awe.” Under conditions in which masses of people all over the world are expressing shock and revulsion over the one-sided slaughter that the Zionist military machine has unleashed against the virtually defenseless population of Gaza, this resolution is an obscenity. It is another telling piece of evidence that the Democratic Party and its elected officials represent not the sentiments or wishes of the American people, but rather those of a narrow ruling elite that is committed to advancing its aims through militarism and is utterly indifferent to the fate of the working class, the poor and the oppressed in Palestine, the US or any other country. While president-elect Barack Obama has maintained a discreet silence on Washington’s policy toward the bloodbath in Gaza since it began nearly two weeks ago, the resolution backed by his former Democratic colleagues in the US Senate speaks eloquently for him. There is no question that an Obama administration will maintain US imperialism’s backing for Israeli aggression and repression of the Palestinian people and will continue funneling the over $3 billion in annual military aid that provides the Israeli Defense Forces with the weaponry now being used to massacre innocent civilians. In another indication that in this crucial foreign policy arena the former candidate of “change” will carry out a policy of essential continuity with that of his predecessor, it was announced Thursday that former US diplomat Dennis Ross has been tapped to serve as the Obama administration’s “ambassador at large” and chief adviser on the Middle East. The announcement came first from Ross’s present employer, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israeli think tank that he joined after leaving the State Department in 2001. WINEP was founded by Martin Indyk, a research director for the American Israeli Political Action Committee who was later appointed US ambassador to Israel. Ross also became a foreign affairs analyst for Fox News and a supporter of the Project for the New American Century’s campaign for a US war against Iraq in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He later joined the steering committee of the I. Lewis Libby Defense Fund, organized to support the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted in connection with the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name in retaliation for her husband’s exposure of the Bush administration’s phony case for the Iraq war. While Ross was a leading figure in US-brokered talks between Israel and the Palestinians, all of the so-called peace initiatives that he helped push through quickly failed. According to one Arab negotiator quoted in a book on these negotiations, “The perception always was that Dennis started from the Israeli bottom line, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to the Arabs… He was never looked at … as a trusted world figure or as an honest broker.” Ross’s role was essentially that of Israel’s attorney, justifying its every violation of previous agreements while demonizing Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat as wholly responsible for the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations. Speaking at a synagogue in Maryland earlier this week, Ross took the same line as the Bush administration on the ongoing war against Gaza, declaring that the US should support a cease-fire only if it guarantees that Hamas “can’t rebuild.” The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a New York-based news agency which reported the speech, wrote that Ross added that “Israel left Lebanon and Gaza, and in both instances, ‘things got a whole lot worse’—which doesn’t provide much confidence about a withdrawal from the West Bank.” Assured of continued backing from both the current and the incoming US administrations, the Israeli government is intensifying its criminal war against the people of Gaza. The United Nations agency responsible for providing food and other basic necessities to the vast bulk of Gaza’s population announced Thursday that it is suspending operations in the Israeli-occupied territory because of what it described as the “deliberate targeting” of its aid workers, which made it impossible to guarantee their lives and safety. The action, which threatens to deepen what is already a humanitarian catastrophe, came after Israeli tanks shelled a UN convoy, killing two Palestinian forklift drivers and wounding two other aid workers. They were in trucks headed to the Erez crossing with Israel to pick up food and other humanitarian supplies during what the Israelis had claimed was a three-hour suspension of firing meant to facilitate such distributions. “They were coordinating their movements with the Israelis, as they always do, only to find themselves being fired at from the ground troops,” John Ging, the head of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, told the news agency Al Jazeera. In another incident, a UNRWA driver was shot to death by Israeli troops near the Kerem Shalom border crossing at the northern end of the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces also fired on a convoy of three UN vehicles during a Thursday mission to recover the body of another aid worker killed in a previous attack. UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said that the series of deaths made it impossible to resume operations until “the Israeli army can guarantee the safety and security of UN personnel. Gunness charged Israel with “deliberately targeting” aid workers, stressing that all of the locations of UN facilities and movements by its personnel are communicated to the Israeli military. This development follows the IDF’s shelling Tuesday of the UN’s school in the Jabalya refugee camp, which killed 45 people in one of the worst atrocities since the Israeli attacks began. UN officials have stressed that Israel’s so-called “humanitarian corridor,” opened three hours a day between relentless bombardments and killings, is wholly inadequate to distribute food to any significant portion of Gaza’s population. The attacks on UN personnel represent only one manifestation of a criminal policy of “total war” against Gaza’s population. One unintentional byproduct of the three-hour suspensions of Israeli bombardments is that they have served to further expose the atrocities perpetrated in the two-week operation as bodies are dug from the rubble and wounded survivors are retrieved from their homes. In one of the most appalling incidents, the International Red Cross in Geneva reported that on Wednesday its aid workers discovered four starving children lying next to their dead mothers in a house in the Zaytuon neighborhood south of Gaza City. The Red Cross had been trying since Saturday to send ambulances into the area, but only received permission from the Israeli military on Wednesday. The delay was a death sentence for many wounded civilians in the area. Medical crews from the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent reported finding 12 corpses lying on mattresses in the house together with the children and their murdered mothers. The children were so weak from hunger that they were unable to stand. The medical teams were compelled to evacuate surviving wounded on donkey carts because the Israeli military would not allow ambulances into the area. The Israeli troops threatened to fire on the ambulance teams if they did not leave, but the medical workers refused to stop their work until they were actually shot at. The Red Cross issued a rare denunciation of Israeli actions, calling them unacceptable and charging the Israeli government with having “failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.” In other words, it accused the Israeli regime of having carried out a war crime. “This is a shocking incident,” said Pierre Wettach, the Red Cross’s head of delegation for Israel and the Palestinian territories. “The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded.” The Geneva Conventions specify that warring parties must ensure “all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick” and stipulates that the wounded “shall not willfully be left without medical assistance and care.” Meanwhile, according to press reports, the Israeli cabinet has already voted to move ahead with a “third phase” of the operation, sending Israeli troops into the densely populated streets and alleys of Gaza City and other urban areas. “The next phase is inevitable,” one senior Israeli official told Time magazine.
By Bill Van Auken
As evidence of Israeli war crimes mounted and amid signs that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are launching a new and even bloodier phase of the two-week war against the embattled people of Gaza, the Democratic leadership of the US Senate Thursday led the passage of a bipartisan resolution endorsing Israel’s actions. The resolution passed by a unanimous voice vote. The resolution begins by “recognizing the right of Israel to defend itself against attacks from Gaza and reaffirming the United States’ strong support for Israel in its battle with Hamas.” The preamble of the document contains 12 paragraphs vilifying Hamas as a “terrorist” organization and blaming it entirely for the ongoing war in Gaza. It includes one brief mention of the “humanitarian situation in Gaza,” but quickly adds that Israel has “facilitated humanitarian aid.” It goes on to declare “vigorous support and unwavering commitment to the welfare, security and survival of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with secure borders” and to recognize Israel’s “right to act in self-defense to protect its citizens against acts of terrorism.” It then demands that Hamas halt all rocket attacks, renounce violence, recognize Israel and accept all previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements. That Israel should curtail its blitzkrieg against the people of Gaza, which has claimed the lives of nearly 800 men, women and children and left over 3,200 others wounded, is not even remotely suggested by the Senate resolution. Speaking before the vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat from Nevada) declared, “When we pass this resolution, the United States Senate will strengthen our historic bond with the state of Israel, by reaffirming Israel’s inalienable right to defend against attacks from Gaza.” Reid invited his Senate colleagues to “imagine that happening here in the United States. Rockets and mortars coming from Toronto in Canada into Buffalo, New York. How would we as a country react?” While the absurd analogy must have proved unsettling for Canadians, one might just as well imagine how the population of New York state would react if Canada invaded, seized their homes and land and herded them all into Buffalo, subjecting them and their children to military occupation, near starvation and continuous armed attacks. Chiming in his agreement, the resolution’s co-sponsor, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, added, “The Israelis … are responding exactly the same way we would.” Indeed, it is no accident that the Israeli media have described the military onslaught against Gaza as “shock and awe.” Under conditions in which masses of people all over the world are expressing shock and revulsion over the one-sided slaughter that the Zionist military machine has unleashed against the virtually defenseless population of Gaza, this resolution is an obscenity. It is another telling piece of evidence that the Democratic Party and its elected officials represent not the sentiments or wishes of the American people, but rather those of a narrow ruling elite that is committed to advancing its aims through militarism and is utterly indifferent to the fate of the working class, the poor and the oppressed in Palestine, the US or any other country. While president-elect Barack Obama has maintained a discreet silence on Washington’s policy toward the bloodbath in Gaza since it began nearly two weeks ago, the resolution backed by his former Democratic colleagues in the US Senate speaks eloquently for him. There is no question that an Obama administration will maintain US imperialism’s backing for Israeli aggression and repression of the Palestinian people and will continue funneling the over $3 billion in annual military aid that provides the Israeli Defense Forces with the weaponry now being used to massacre innocent civilians. In another indication that in this crucial foreign policy arena the former candidate of “change” will carry out a policy of essential continuity with that of his predecessor, it was announced Thursday that former US diplomat Dennis Ross has been tapped to serve as the Obama administration’s “ambassador at large” and chief adviser on the Middle East. The announcement came first from Ross’s present employer, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israeli think tank that he joined after leaving the State Department in 2001. WINEP was founded by Martin Indyk, a research director for the American Israeli Political Action Committee who was later appointed US ambassador to Israel. Ross also became a foreign affairs analyst for Fox News and a supporter of the Project for the New American Century’s campaign for a US war against Iraq in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He later joined the steering committee of the I. Lewis Libby Defense Fund, organized to support the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted in connection with the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name in retaliation for her husband’s exposure of the Bush administration’s phony case for the Iraq war. While Ross was a leading figure in US-brokered talks between Israel and the Palestinians, all of the so-called peace initiatives that he helped push through quickly failed. According to one Arab negotiator quoted in a book on these negotiations, “The perception always was that Dennis started from the Israeli bottom line, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to the Arabs… He was never looked at … as a trusted world figure or as an honest broker.” Ross’s role was essentially that of Israel’s attorney, justifying its every violation of previous agreements while demonizing Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat as wholly responsible for the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations. Speaking at a synagogue in Maryland earlier this week, Ross took the same line as the Bush administration on the ongoing war against Gaza, declaring that the US should support a cease-fire only if it guarantees that Hamas “can’t rebuild.” The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a New York-based news agency which reported the speech, wrote that Ross added that “Israel left Lebanon and Gaza, and in both instances, ‘things got a whole lot worse’—which doesn’t provide much confidence about a withdrawal from the West Bank.” Assured of continued backing from both the current and the incoming US administrations, the Israeli government is intensifying its criminal war against the people of Gaza. The United Nations agency responsible for providing food and other basic necessities to the vast bulk of Gaza’s population announced Thursday that it is suspending operations in the Israeli-occupied territory because of what it described as the “deliberate targeting” of its aid workers, which made it impossible to guarantee their lives and safety. The action, which threatens to deepen what is already a humanitarian catastrophe, came after Israeli tanks shelled a UN convoy, killing two Palestinian forklift drivers and wounding two other aid workers. They were in trucks headed to the Erez crossing with Israel to pick up food and other humanitarian supplies during what the Israelis had claimed was a three-hour suspension of firing meant to facilitate such distributions. “They were coordinating their movements with the Israelis, as they always do, only to find themselves being fired at from the ground troops,” John Ging, the head of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, told the news agency Al Jazeera. In another incident, a UNRWA driver was shot to death by Israeli troops near the Kerem Shalom border crossing at the northern end of the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces also fired on a convoy of three UN vehicles during a Thursday mission to recover the body of another aid worker killed in a previous attack. UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said that the series of deaths made it impossible to resume operations until “the Israeli army can guarantee the safety and security of UN personnel. Gunness charged Israel with “deliberately targeting” aid workers, stressing that all of the locations of UN facilities and movements by its personnel are communicated to the Israeli military. This development follows the IDF’s shelling Tuesday of the UN’s school in the Jabalya refugee camp, which killed 45 people in one of the worst atrocities since the Israeli attacks began. UN officials have stressed that Israel’s so-called “humanitarian corridor,” opened three hours a day between relentless bombardments and killings, is wholly inadequate to distribute food to any significant portion of Gaza’s population. The attacks on UN personnel represent only one manifestation of a criminal policy of “total war” against Gaza’s population. One unintentional byproduct of the three-hour suspensions of Israeli bombardments is that they have served to further expose the atrocities perpetrated in the two-week operation as bodies are dug from the rubble and wounded survivors are retrieved from their homes. In one of the most appalling incidents, the International Red Cross in Geneva reported that on Wednesday its aid workers discovered four starving children lying next to their dead mothers in a house in the Zaytuon neighborhood south of Gaza City. The Red Cross had been trying since Saturday to send ambulances into the area, but only received permission from the Israeli military on Wednesday. The delay was a death sentence for many wounded civilians in the area. Medical crews from the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent reported finding 12 corpses lying on mattresses in the house together with the children and their murdered mothers. The children were so weak from hunger that they were unable to stand. The medical teams were compelled to evacuate surviving wounded on donkey carts because the Israeli military would not allow ambulances into the area. The Israeli troops threatened to fire on the ambulance teams if they did not leave, but the medical workers refused to stop their work until they were actually shot at. The Red Cross issued a rare denunciation of Israeli actions, calling them unacceptable and charging the Israeli government with having “failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.” In other words, it accused the Israeli regime of having carried out a war crime. “This is a shocking incident,” said Pierre Wettach, the Red Cross’s head of delegation for Israel and the Palestinian territories. “The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded.” The Geneva Conventions specify that warring parties must ensure “all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick” and stipulates that the wounded “shall not willfully be left without medical assistance and care.” Meanwhile, according to press reports, the Israeli cabinet has already voted to move ahead with a “third phase” of the operation, sending Israeli troops into the densely populated streets and alleys of Gaza City and other urban areas. “The next phase is inevitable,” one senior Israeli official told Time magazine.
Senate Democrats endorse Israeli war crimes
Go to Original
By Bill Van Auken
As evidence of Israeli war crimes mounted and amid signs that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are launching a new and even bloodier phase of the two-week war against the embattled people of Gaza, the Democratic leadership of the US Senate Thursday led the passage of a bipartisan resolution endorsing Israel’s actions. The resolution passed by a unanimous voice vote.
The resolution begins by “recognizing the right of Israel to defend itself against attacks from Gaza and reaffirming the United States’ strong support for Israel in its battle with Hamas.”
The preamble of the document contains 12 paragraphs vilifying Hamas as a “terrorist” organization and blaming it entirely for the ongoing war in Gaza. It includes one brief mention of the “humanitarian situation in Gaza,” but quickly adds that Israel has “facilitated humanitarian aid.”
It goes on to declare “vigorous support and unwavering commitment to the welfare, security and survival of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with secure borders” and to recognize Israel’s “right to act in self-defense to protect its citizens against acts of terrorism.”
It then demands that Hamas halt all rocket attacks, renounce violence, recognize Israel and accept all previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements.
That Israel should curtail its blitzkrieg against the people of Gaza, which has claimed the lives of nearly 800 men, women and children and left over 3,200 others wounded, is not even remotely suggested by the Senate resolution.
Speaking before the vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat from Nevada) declared, “When we pass this resolution, the United States Senate will strengthen our historic bond with the state of Israel, by reaffirming Israel’s inalienable right to defend against attacks from Gaza.”
Reid invited his Senate colleagues to “imagine that happening here in the United States. Rockets and mortars coming from Toronto in Canada into Buffalo, New York. How would we as a country react?”
While the absurd analogy must have proved unsettling for Canadians, one might just as well imagine how the population of New York state would react if Canada invaded, seized their homes and land and herded them all into Buffalo, subjecting them and their children to military occupation, near starvation and continuous armed attacks.
Chiming in his agreement, the resolution’s co-sponsor, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, added, “The Israelis … are responding exactly the same way we would.” Indeed, it is no accident that the Israeli media have described the military onslaught against Gaza as “shock and awe.”
Under conditions in which masses of people all over the world are expressing shock and revulsion over the one-sided slaughter that the Zionist military machine has unleashed against the virtually defenseless population of Gaza, this resolution is an obscenity.
It is another telling piece of evidence that the Democratic Party and its elected officials represent not the sentiments or wishes of the American people, but rather those of a narrow ruling elite that is committed to advancing its aims through militarism and is utterly indifferent to the fate of the working class, the poor and the oppressed in Palestine, the US or any other country.
While president-elect Barack Obama has maintained a discreet silence on Washington’s policy toward the bloodbath in Gaza since it began nearly two weeks ago, the resolution backed by his former Democratic colleagues in the US Senate speaks eloquently for him.
There is no question that an Obama administration will maintain US imperialism’s backing for Israeli aggression and repression of the Palestinian people and will continue funneling the over $3 billion in annual military aid that provides the Israeli Defense Forces with the weaponry now being used to massacre innocent civilians.
In another indication that in this crucial foreign policy arena the former candidate of “change” will carry out a policy of essential continuity with that of his predecessor, it was announced Thursday that former US diplomat Dennis Ross has been tapped to serve as the Obama administration’s “ambassador at large” and chief adviser on the Middle East.
The announcement came first from Ross’s present employer, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israeli think tank that he joined after leaving the State Department in 2001. WINEP was founded by Martin Indyk, a research director for the American Israeli Political Action Committee who was later appointed US ambassador to Israel.
Ross also became a foreign affairs analyst for Fox News and a supporter of the Project for the New American Century’s campaign for a US war against Iraq in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He later joined the steering committee of the I. Lewis Libby Defense Fund, organized to support the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted in connection with the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name in retaliation for her husband’s exposure of the Bush administration’s phony case for the Iraq war.
While Ross was a leading figure in US-brokered talks between Israel and the Palestinians, all of the so-called peace initiatives that he helped push through quickly failed. According to one Arab negotiator quoted in a book on these negotiations, “The perception always was that Dennis started from the Israeli bottom line, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to the Arabs… He was never looked at … as a trusted world figure or as an honest broker.”
Ross’s role was essentially that of Israel’s attorney, justifying its every violation of previous agreements while demonizing Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat as wholly responsible for the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations.
Speaking at a synagogue in Maryland earlier this week, Ross took the same line as the Bush administration on the ongoing war against Gaza, declaring that the US should support a cease-fire only if it guarantees that Hamas “can’t rebuild.” The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a New York-based news agency which reported the speech, wrote that Ross added that “Israel left Lebanon and Gaza, and in both instances, ‘things got a whole lot worse’—which doesn’t provide much confidence about a withdrawal from the West Bank.”
Assured of continued backing from both the current and the incoming US administrations, the Israeli government is intensifying its criminal war against the people of Gaza.
The United Nations agency responsible for providing food and other basic necessities to the vast bulk of Gaza’s population announced Thursday that it is suspending operations in the Israeli-occupied territory because of what it described as the “deliberate targeting” of its aid workers, which made it impossible to guarantee their lives and safety.
The action, which threatens to deepen what is already a humanitarian catastrophe, came after Israeli tanks shelled a UN convoy, killing two Palestinian forklift drivers and wounding two other aid workers. They were in trucks headed to the Erez crossing with Israel to pick up food and other humanitarian supplies during what the Israelis had claimed was a three-hour suspension of firing meant to facilitate such distributions.
“They were coordinating their movements with the Israelis, as they always do, only to find themselves being fired at from the ground troops,” John Ging, the head of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, told the news agency Al Jazeera.
In another incident, a UNRWA driver was shot to death by Israeli troops near the Kerem Shalom border crossing at the northern end of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli forces also fired on a convoy of three UN vehicles during a Thursday mission to recover the body of another aid worker killed in a previous attack.
UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said that the series of deaths made it impossible to resume operations until “the Israeli army can guarantee the safety and security of UN personnel. Gunness charged Israel with “deliberately targeting” aid workers, stressing that all of the locations of UN facilities and movements by its personnel are communicated to the Israeli military.
This development follows the IDF’s shelling Tuesday of the UN’s school in the Jabalya refugee camp, which killed 45 people in one of the worst atrocities since the Israeli attacks began.
UN officials have stressed that Israel’s so-called “humanitarian corridor,” opened three hours a day between relentless bombardments and killings, is wholly inadequate to distribute food to any significant portion of Gaza’s population.
The attacks on UN personnel represent only one manifestation of a criminal policy of “total war” against Gaza’s population.
One unintentional byproduct of the three-hour suspensions of Israeli bombardments is that they have served to further expose the atrocities perpetrated in the two-week operation as bodies are dug from the rubble and wounded survivors are retrieved from their homes.
In one of the most appalling incidents, the International Red Cross in Geneva reported that on Wednesday its aid workers discovered four starving children lying next to their dead mothers in a house in the Zaytuon neighborhood south of Gaza City. The Red Cross had been trying since Saturday to send ambulances into the area, but only received permission from the Israeli military on Wednesday. The delay was a death sentence for many wounded civilians in the area.
Medical crews from the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent reported finding 12 corpses lying on mattresses in the house together with the children and their murdered mothers. The children were so weak from hunger that they were unable to stand.
The medical teams were compelled to evacuate surviving wounded on donkey carts because the Israeli military would not allow ambulances into the area. The Israeli troops threatened to fire on the ambulance teams if they did not leave, but the medical workers refused to stop their work until they were actually shot at.
The Red Cross issued a rare denunciation of Israeli actions, calling them unacceptable and charging the Israeli government with having “failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.” In other words, it accused the Israeli regime of having carried out a war crime.
“This is a shocking incident,” said Pierre Wettach, the Red Cross’s head of delegation for Israel and the Palestinian territories. “The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded.”
The Geneva Conventions specify that warring parties must ensure “all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick” and stipulates that the wounded “shall not willfully be left without medical assistance and care.”
Meanwhile, according to press reports, the Israeli cabinet has already voted to move ahead with a “third phase” of the operation, sending Israeli troops into the densely populated streets and alleys of Gaza City and other urban areas. “The next phase is inevitable,” one senior Israeli official told Time magazine.
By Bill Van Auken
As evidence of Israeli war crimes mounted and amid signs that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are launching a new and even bloodier phase of the two-week war against the embattled people of Gaza, the Democratic leadership of the US Senate Thursday led the passage of a bipartisan resolution endorsing Israel’s actions. The resolution passed by a unanimous voice vote.
The resolution begins by “recognizing the right of Israel to defend itself against attacks from Gaza and reaffirming the United States’ strong support for Israel in its battle with Hamas.”
The preamble of the document contains 12 paragraphs vilifying Hamas as a “terrorist” organization and blaming it entirely for the ongoing war in Gaza. It includes one brief mention of the “humanitarian situation in Gaza,” but quickly adds that Israel has “facilitated humanitarian aid.”
It goes on to declare “vigorous support and unwavering commitment to the welfare, security and survival of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with secure borders” and to recognize Israel’s “right to act in self-defense to protect its citizens against acts of terrorism.”
It then demands that Hamas halt all rocket attacks, renounce violence, recognize Israel and accept all previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements.
That Israel should curtail its blitzkrieg against the people of Gaza, which has claimed the lives of nearly 800 men, women and children and left over 3,200 others wounded, is not even remotely suggested by the Senate resolution.
Speaking before the vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat from Nevada) declared, “When we pass this resolution, the United States Senate will strengthen our historic bond with the state of Israel, by reaffirming Israel’s inalienable right to defend against attacks from Gaza.”
Reid invited his Senate colleagues to “imagine that happening here in the United States. Rockets and mortars coming from Toronto in Canada into Buffalo, New York. How would we as a country react?”
While the absurd analogy must have proved unsettling for Canadians, one might just as well imagine how the population of New York state would react if Canada invaded, seized their homes and land and herded them all into Buffalo, subjecting them and their children to military occupation, near starvation and continuous armed attacks.
Chiming in his agreement, the resolution’s co-sponsor, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, added, “The Israelis … are responding exactly the same way we would.” Indeed, it is no accident that the Israeli media have described the military onslaught against Gaza as “shock and awe.”
Under conditions in which masses of people all over the world are expressing shock and revulsion over the one-sided slaughter that the Zionist military machine has unleashed against the virtually defenseless population of Gaza, this resolution is an obscenity.
It is another telling piece of evidence that the Democratic Party and its elected officials represent not the sentiments or wishes of the American people, but rather those of a narrow ruling elite that is committed to advancing its aims through militarism and is utterly indifferent to the fate of the working class, the poor and the oppressed in Palestine, the US or any other country.
While president-elect Barack Obama has maintained a discreet silence on Washington’s policy toward the bloodbath in Gaza since it began nearly two weeks ago, the resolution backed by his former Democratic colleagues in the US Senate speaks eloquently for him.
There is no question that an Obama administration will maintain US imperialism’s backing for Israeli aggression and repression of the Palestinian people and will continue funneling the over $3 billion in annual military aid that provides the Israeli Defense Forces with the weaponry now being used to massacre innocent civilians.
In another indication that in this crucial foreign policy arena the former candidate of “change” will carry out a policy of essential continuity with that of his predecessor, it was announced Thursday that former US diplomat Dennis Ross has been tapped to serve as the Obama administration’s “ambassador at large” and chief adviser on the Middle East.
The announcement came first from Ross’s present employer, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israeli think tank that he joined after leaving the State Department in 2001. WINEP was founded by Martin Indyk, a research director for the American Israeli Political Action Committee who was later appointed US ambassador to Israel.
Ross also became a foreign affairs analyst for Fox News and a supporter of the Project for the New American Century’s campaign for a US war against Iraq in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He later joined the steering committee of the I. Lewis Libby Defense Fund, organized to support the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted in connection with the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name in retaliation for her husband’s exposure of the Bush administration’s phony case for the Iraq war.
While Ross was a leading figure in US-brokered talks between Israel and the Palestinians, all of the so-called peace initiatives that he helped push through quickly failed. According to one Arab negotiator quoted in a book on these negotiations, “The perception always was that Dennis started from the Israeli bottom line, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to the Arabs… He was never looked at … as a trusted world figure or as an honest broker.”
Ross’s role was essentially that of Israel’s attorney, justifying its every violation of previous agreements while demonizing Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat as wholly responsible for the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations.
Speaking at a synagogue in Maryland earlier this week, Ross took the same line as the Bush administration on the ongoing war against Gaza, declaring that the US should support a cease-fire only if it guarantees that Hamas “can’t rebuild.” The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a New York-based news agency which reported the speech, wrote that Ross added that “Israel left Lebanon and Gaza, and in both instances, ‘things got a whole lot worse’—which doesn’t provide much confidence about a withdrawal from the West Bank.”
Assured of continued backing from both the current and the incoming US administrations, the Israeli government is intensifying its criminal war against the people of Gaza.
The United Nations agency responsible for providing food and other basic necessities to the vast bulk of Gaza’s population announced Thursday that it is suspending operations in the Israeli-occupied territory because of what it described as the “deliberate targeting” of its aid workers, which made it impossible to guarantee their lives and safety.
The action, which threatens to deepen what is already a humanitarian catastrophe, came after Israeli tanks shelled a UN convoy, killing two Palestinian forklift drivers and wounding two other aid workers. They were in trucks headed to the Erez crossing with Israel to pick up food and other humanitarian supplies during what the Israelis had claimed was a three-hour suspension of firing meant to facilitate such distributions.
“They were coordinating their movements with the Israelis, as they always do, only to find themselves being fired at from the ground troops,” John Ging, the head of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, told the news agency Al Jazeera.
In another incident, a UNRWA driver was shot to death by Israeli troops near the Kerem Shalom border crossing at the northern end of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli forces also fired on a convoy of three UN vehicles during a Thursday mission to recover the body of another aid worker killed in a previous attack.
UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said that the series of deaths made it impossible to resume operations until “the Israeli army can guarantee the safety and security of UN personnel. Gunness charged Israel with “deliberately targeting” aid workers, stressing that all of the locations of UN facilities and movements by its personnel are communicated to the Israeli military.
This development follows the IDF’s shelling Tuesday of the UN’s school in the Jabalya refugee camp, which killed 45 people in one of the worst atrocities since the Israeli attacks began.
UN officials have stressed that Israel’s so-called “humanitarian corridor,” opened three hours a day between relentless bombardments and killings, is wholly inadequate to distribute food to any significant portion of Gaza’s population.
The attacks on UN personnel represent only one manifestation of a criminal policy of “total war” against Gaza’s population.
One unintentional byproduct of the three-hour suspensions of Israeli bombardments is that they have served to further expose the atrocities perpetrated in the two-week operation as bodies are dug from the rubble and wounded survivors are retrieved from their homes.
In one of the most appalling incidents, the International Red Cross in Geneva reported that on Wednesday its aid workers discovered four starving children lying next to their dead mothers in a house in the Zaytuon neighborhood south of Gaza City. The Red Cross had been trying since Saturday to send ambulances into the area, but only received permission from the Israeli military on Wednesday. The delay was a death sentence for many wounded civilians in the area.
Medical crews from the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent reported finding 12 corpses lying on mattresses in the house together with the children and their murdered mothers. The children were so weak from hunger that they were unable to stand.
The medical teams were compelled to evacuate surviving wounded on donkey carts because the Israeli military would not allow ambulances into the area. The Israeli troops threatened to fire on the ambulance teams if they did not leave, but the medical workers refused to stop their work until they were actually shot at.
The Red Cross issued a rare denunciation of Israeli actions, calling them unacceptable and charging the Israeli government with having “failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.” In other words, it accused the Israeli regime of having carried out a war crime.
“This is a shocking incident,” said Pierre Wettach, the Red Cross’s head of delegation for Israel and the Palestinian territories. “The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded.”
The Geneva Conventions specify that warring parties must ensure “all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick” and stipulates that the wounded “shall not willfully be left without medical assistance and care.”
Meanwhile, according to press reports, the Israeli cabinet has already voted to move ahead with a “third phase” of the operation, sending Israeli troops into the densely populated streets and alleys of Gaza City and other urban areas. “The next phase is inevitable,” one senior Israeli official told Time magazine.
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