"Scorched Earth": How Israel Converted 40% Of Gaza Into A Wasteland Of Rubble

[Galraedia]

Moments ago, after weeks of relentless humiliation for John Kerry, Israel and Hamas agreed to yet another 72 hour ceasefire - one which if the previous "ceasefires" are any indication, will be broken within hours if not minutes. Regardless, Kerry, who cobbled this agreement after much "hard work" alongside the UN's Ban Ki-moon, was ecstatic: "We urge all parties to act with restraint until this humanitarian ceasefire begins, and to fully abide by their commitments during the ceasefire," Kerry and Ban said. "This ceasefire is critical to giving innocent civilians a much-needed reprieve from violence."

What Kerry did not say is that the ceasefire is merely an extended occupation by the IDF: as Reuters reported, the ceasefire statement said "forces on the ground will remain in place" during the truce, implying that Israeli ground forces will not withdraw. Which also assures that it is only a matter of time before yet another stray rocket is launched into Israeli fields, before the IDF retaliates by blowing up another school or hospital allegedly housing Hamas rockets, and so on.

However, while this too ceasefire will come and go, something far more insidious is taking place in Gaza : as the Daily Beast reports, "The Israeli military, relentlessly and methodically, is driving people out of the 3-kilometer (1.8 mile) buffer zone it says it needs to protect against Hamas rockets and tunnels. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the buffer zone eats up about 44 percent of Gaza’s territory."




To be sure, Israel has been quite clear about its intentions and has given Gazans plenty of advance notice:

What that means on the ground is scenes of extraordinary devastation in places like the Al Shajaya district approaching Gaza’s eastern frontier, and Beit Hanoun in the north. These were crowded neighborhoods less than three weeks ago. Now they have been literally depopulated, the residents joining more than 160,000 internally displaced people in refuges and makeshift shelters. Apartment blocks are fields of rubble, and as I move through this hostile landscape the phrase that keeps ringing in my head is “scorched earth.”

Read more: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-31/scorched-earth-how-israel-converted-40-gaza-wasteland-rubble

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. "They make a desert and call it peace." Tacitus

[JDPriestly]

7. I will post this again. I wondered why in the world Israel would do this.

And here is what I found.

2000s

List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2001
List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2002–2006
List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2007
List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2008
List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2009

2010s

List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2010
List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2011
List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2012
List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2013
List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2014

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel

and for 2014

This is a detailed list of Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks on Israel in 2014. All of the attacks originated in the Gaza Strip, unless stated otherwise. For information pertaining to the wider conflict, see Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This list does not include reports of deaths and injuries caused by Hamas rocket and mortar attacks that fell within Gaza.

On 5 March, the Israeli Navy intercepted a ship containing dozens of long-range rockets being smuggled from Iran to the Gaza Strip.

On 10 March, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, unveiled a monument to its rocket attacks on Israeli cities and towns, a life-sized model of an M-75 rocket in Gaza City. The group declared that the attacks "managed to take the battle to the heart of the Zionist entity (Israel)".

On 23 April, Fatah and Hamas signed a reconciliation deal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel,_2014

3,055 rocket attacks in 2014 alone.

Israel built a wall and refused entry to Palestinians (one of the reasons they are accused of Apartheid) to protect against suicide bombers.

Here is the Al-Jazeera story on the wall:

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/12/visual-activism-activestillsphotographsthebarrierwall.html

That tells it from the Palestinian point of view.

Here is the Israeli view on the wall:



Before the construction of the fence, and in many places where it has not yet been completed, a terrorist need only walk across an invisible line to cross from the West Bank into Israel. No barriers of any kind exist, so it is easy to see how a barrier, no matter how imperfect, won't at least make the terrorists' job more difficult. Approximately 75 percent ofthe suicide bombers who attacked targets inside Israel came from across the border where the first phase of the fence was built.

This diagram shows why a wall is being built in a few specific places where Palestinian snipers have terrorized motorists.

During the 34 months from the beginning of the violence in September 2000 until the construction of the first continuous segment of the security fence at the end of July 2003, Samaria-based terrorists carried out 73 attacks in which 293 Israelis were killed and 1950 wounded. In the 11 months between the erection of the first segment at the beginning of August 2003 and the end of June 2004, only three attacks were successful, and all three occurred in the first half of 2003.

Since construction of the fence began, the number of attacks has declined by more than 90%. The number of Israelis murdered and wounded has decreased by more than 70% and 85%, respectively, after erection of the fence.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/fence.html

But then the Palestinians shot rockets into Israel over the wall, so Israel built a shield to protect its citizens from the rockets.

Here is the story on the shield.

As soon as US President Barack Obama disembarked from Air Force One on his first visit to Israel last month, an Iron Dome battery was ready for his inspection at Ben Gurion airport.

There could have been few clearer signs of the importance attached to the missile batteries that are the pride of the nation’s defences. If one product has come to define the high-tech military apparatus of Israel Inc, it is the Iron Dome.

The anti-missile defence system shielded the country from a barrage of Qassam and Grad rockets fired from Gaza by Hamas during the eight-day Operation Pillar of Defence in November. Israel’s defence ministry says Iron Dome had a success rate of more than 80 per cent during the operation, in which about 170 Gazan Palestinians and six Israelis died.

Designed to intercept short-range rockets, Iron Dome is the smallest and best-known component of a multilayer anti-missile defence system Israel is building to shoot down ordnance fired from as far away as Iran.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6b120a1e-9883-11e2-867f-00144feabdc0.html

The article is about Obama's 2013 visit to Israel and is dated March 2013.

Here is what set off Israel's current attacks on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. You don't read about this on DU because it doesn't confirm the DU party line on Palestine and Israel. I probably would not be permitted to post this as an OP because people would read it as pro-Israel when in fact I am trying to be fair.

SUFA, Israel — Israel’s decision to invade Gaza has its roots just outside of this small kibbutz in southern Israel where open fields and citrus orchards offer a pastoral scene that residents say has long been deceptive.

At dawn on Thursday, 13 Hamas gunmen from Gaza emerged from the mouth of an underground tunnel about a mile away, inside Israel territory. The air force thwarted the attack, but the government said that the attempted incursion was the final straw and that the ground invasion would commence.

By Friday, the Israeli military said it had already uncovered 10 tunnels with 22 exit points and that there were dozens more “terror tunnels” spread around Gaza. In a statement, it described tunnels crossing the border from Gaza to Israel as “complex and advanced,” and said they were “intended to carry out attacks such as abductions of Israeli civilians and soldiers alike; infiltrations into Israeli communities, mass murders and hostage-taking scenarios.”

Gadi Shamni, a former commander of the Israeli Army’s Gaza division and of its central command, said that destroying the tunnels posed a technological and operational challenge and that each of them had offshoots going in different directions, making it difficult to track and disable the whole route.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/middleeast/hamas-gaza-strip-tunnels-led-to-israels-invasion.html?_r=0

That New York Times article on the tunnel invasion was dated July 28, 2014 and was the last straw I guess for Israel. That is why they started bombing and invaded Gaza.

You'd never guess that from DU.

I am rather ashamed of the group-think on DU on this issue. The fact is that the Israelis invested millions of dollars, enormous effort and thought to try to avoid killing innocent Palestinians, and Hamas or the Palestinian terrorists managed to find a way to destroy the fragile peace anyway.

Both sides need to negotiate for peace. Wise people on both sides have tried to do it over and over, and every time, extremists on the Palestinian side, extremists that Palestinians cannot control, destroy the peace.

The Palestinian extremists are the worst enemies not just of Israel but of the Palestinians themselves. Do Palestinians need aid and a good settlement? Yes. But the Israelis need to be free from the constant harassment and criminal activity of the Palestinian extremists -- the terrorists.

That's the only fair view in my opinion.

I think that half of DU has me on ignore by now because I have tried to research this issue and find out what happened and then decided my point of view based on my research. But that's the way the cookie crumbles. I am trying to be fair to both sides when I express my opinion. The Palestinians have to control their extremists if they are to form a prosperous, safe nation.

How would you have responded if, after all the measures you took to prevent terrorists from reaching your population through land (the wall) and air (the missile defense shield) they popped out of tunnels with weapons including things they could use to kidnap your citizens and use them as hostages?

And if you say that Israelis should leave Israel, I have two questions:

1) Where should they go?

and,
2) Should only the Jewish refugees from WWII and centuries of persecution be sent back to "where they came from" or should all WWII refugees and other refugees, say refugees from Armenia or Egypt or Iran, or Poland or Hungary or all the countries in former Eastern Europe also be told to go back to where they came from because their immigration caused people to have to scooch over and make room?

I admire Kerry's courage and strength. He is not giving in. This is a nearly intractable situation. If Kerry succeeds, I hope the Pope names him as a saint. (Kerry is Catholic.)

I know that the Palestinians need help and feel wronged. But would you send back all the refugees who were displaced and moved after WWII? Or just the Jews?

[countryjake]

10. Are you ashamed of this fellow, too? Is he not a man of Peace?

Israel has broken my heart: I’m a rabbi in mourning for a Judaism being murdered by Israel
by Michael Lerner

I've always been proud of Israel, but the brutal Gaza assault requires Jews worldwide to be honest, not nationalist

http://www.salon.com/2014/08/04/israel_has_broken_my_heart_i%E2%80%99m_a_rabbi_in_mourning_for_a_judaism_being_murdered_by_israel/


No wonder, then, that I mourn for the Judaism of love and kindness, peace and generosity that Israel worshipers dismiss as utopian fantasy. To my fellow Jews, I issue the following invitation: use Tisha B’av (the traditional fast-day mourning the destruction of Jewish life in the past, and starting Monday night Aug. 4 till dark Aug. 5) to mourn for the Judaism of love and generosity that is being murdered by Israel and its worshipers around the world, the same kind of idol-worshipers who, pretending to be Jewish but actually assimilated into the world of power, helped destroy our previous two Jewish commonwealths and our temples of the past. We may have to renew our Judaism by creating a Liberatory, Emancipatory, Transformative Love-Oriented Judaism outside the synagogues and traditional institutions, because inside the existing Jewish community the best we can do is repeat what the Jewish exiles in Babylonia said in Psalm 137, “How can we sing the songs of the Transformative Power YHVH in a strange land?” And let us this year turn Yom Kippur into a time of repentance for the sins of our people who have given Israel a blank check and full permission to be brutal in the name of Judaism and the Jewish people (even as we celebrate those Jews with the courage to publicly critique Israel in a loving but stern way).

For our non-Jewish allies, the following plea: Do not let the organized Jewish community intimidate you with charges that any criticism of Israel’s brutality toward the Palestinian people proves that you are anti-Semites. Stop allowing your very justified guilt at the history of oppression your ancestors enacted on Jews to be the reason you fail to speak out vigorously against the current immoral policies of the State of Israel. The way to become real friends of the Jewish people is to side with those Jews who are trying to get Israel back on track toward its highest values, knowing full well that there is no future for a Jewish state surrounded by a billion Muslims except through friendship and cooperation. The temporary alliance of brutal dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and various Arab emirates that give Israel support against Hamas will ultimately collapse, but the memory of humiliation at the hands of the State of Israel will not, and Israel’s current policies will endanger Jews both in the Middle East and around the world for many decades after the people of Israel have regained their senses. Real friends don’t let their friends pursue a self-destructive path, so it’s time for you too to speak up and to support those of us in the Jewish world who are champions of peace and justice, and who will not be silent in the face of the destruction of Judaism.

[JDPriestly]

11. There are two sides. I repeat that when I did my research, I found

that Israel had tried to protect itself from Hamas' attacks with a wall and a shield and that the Palestinians had built the tunnels into Israel.

Both sides need to negotiate. There are no saints here. But DU sees things from a rather one-sided view and I don't think that is accurate.

There are two sides. It's like a divorce. Both parties are very often though not always responsible for the destruction of the family.

This will not end well unless both sides take responsibility for their wrongs.

If Israel had been beaten it would be natural to blame and chastise the Palestinians.

What they need to do is agree to peace.

The Palestinians are not using non-violent methods to protest and correct the wrongs that are done to them. That is what they need to do.

[G_j]

2. your tax dollars at work...nt

[Duppers]

3. +100 nt

[cantbeserious]

5. My Tax Dollars Are Tired And So Am I

eom

[TBF]

4. “There are causes worth dying for -

but none worth killing for.” ― Albert Camus

[nomorenomore08]

8. Certainly none worth killing innocent noncombatants for...

[Fred Sanders]

6. Three controlled exits from the Prison of Gaza.

Thank you, very important information cable news and the MSM does not want Americans to see.

[countryjake]

9. Yes, scorched earth.

1-minute time lapse of an entire neighborhood being reduced to rubble.

From the article you've linked:

For Israel, there is a perverse strategy in leveling everything in their path: the practice of systematically flattening neighborhoods is focused on saving the lives of Israeli soldiers, who might otherwise be more exposed to hit-and-run attacks. "Israel is more sensitive than any other country in the West to the death of its soldiers," says Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi "The death of Palestinian civilians is a moral crisis but is without political impact."

Precisely. And yet the ordinary Palestinian civilians, those who have never fired a gun in their lives, lives which sadly have zero "political impact" this is a tragedy beyond words:


When Rania Haels got within 60 feet of the debris that was once her family home in Al Shajaya on Saturday, a machine-gun on top of a nearby Israeli Merkava tank started firing. Probably these were warning shots pumped in her direction, but the 42-year-old mother of seven ran for her life. Now she stays with her family in an overcrowded parking garage in Gaza City and spends her days sitting in a public park full of refugees displaced by the Israeli push.

“We lost our homes and so now we live in the streets,” said Haels, holding a toddler in her arms who clings to her pastel-patterned hejab. “This war has destroyed me.” She says at least she knew where her home was. Some of her neighbors could not find their homes as they walked down streets made unrecognizable by the wreckage and horrifying by the presence of death.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-31/scorched-earth-how-israel-converted-40-gaza-wasteland-rubble