AP reporter watches Israeli strike destroy own home on YouTube

[Hatalles]

Source: Associated Press

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – I live alone in my office. My wife and two young children moved in with her father after our apartment was shattered. The neighborhood mosque, where I have prayed since I was a child, had its roof blown off. All the government buildings on my beat have been obliterated.

After days of Israeli shelling, the city and life I have known no longer exist.

Gaza City, with some 400,000 people, stopped supplying water when the fuel ran out for the power station driving the pumps. We listen to battery-run radios for news, even though the outside world watches what's happening to us on television. The Hadi grocery where we once shopped is closed. Food is scarce all over town.

Three days after Israel began its airstrikes against Hamas militants on Dec. 27, my apartment building was shaken by bombs aimed at a nearby Hamas-run government compound.

My brother took a picture of the room where my boys, 2-year-old Hikmet and 6-month-old Ahmed, once slept. Their toys were broken, shrapnel had punched through the closet and the bedroom wall had collapsed. I don't know if we will ever go back.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090107/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_g...

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Edited to add Yahoo frontpage headline.

[stillcool]

1. Sounds like it's working..

make the place uninhabitable, and you've got yourself some property!

[Name removed]

10. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[leftchick]

2. this is just devastating

killing a whole culture.

<snip>

All the landmark buildings I covered as a reporter have vanished.

The colonial-era Seraya was the main security compound for the succession of Gaza's rulers — the British, Egyptians, Israelis, the Palestinian Authority and then the rival Palestinians of Hamas.

We used to fear the Seraya, where the central jail was. Now it's rubble.

The Al Shuhada mosque on the eastern corner of the compound, where I prayed every day, was one of the few in Gaza with good air conditioning. A local philanthropist who liked Moroccan architecture redecorated the interior with intricate wooden arabesques and Quranic verses etched on the roof. The roof caved in when the Israelis bombed the jail next door.

Of the presidential office overlooking the sea, only a few walls remain. For many Gazans it was a symbol of our statehood, even though President Mahmoud Abbas, who also heads the Fatah movement, hasn't been there since Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007.

Someone planted a Palestinian flag on the building's remains. The huge gate at the western entrance still stands, giving an illusion of something big behind it.

[ananda]

3. This all just so tragic.

Sigh

[subsuelo]

11. And approved by Senate Democrats and their Republican buddies

[rvablue]

8. I was in the region in the same capacity at a point and I share your tears. n/t

[balantz]

4. Since our government is to a great degree responsible

we should make room here for refugees.

[1monster]

5. I don't understand the frigid hate... I don't understand the twisted mind set that

pusues death and destruction with no conscience, no sense of proportion, no empathy.

Too many sociopaths are in charge of too many governments and to many armies.

The human race's violence is a fatal flaw and that flaw has doomed us all.

I weep for the peaceful people and the innocents. I weep for all of us.


No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

on edit: poem is NO MAN IS AN ISLAND by John Donne

[ConcernedCanuk]

6. Too many sociopaths are in charge - that's IT

.
.
.

But sociopaths are clever, and we don't recognize them until it is too late.

We need to educate ourselves to protect us from sociopaths

Sociopaths just use people for their own gain, they have no respect for human life.

[IndianaGreen]

7. Report: Rockets hit Northern Israel (from Lebanon)

Get ready for the second front!

Last update - 08:05 08/01/2009

Report: Rockets hit Northern Israel

By Jack Khoury, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service

At least three Katyusha rockets, fired from south Lebanon, landed in northern Israel early Thursday morning.

A medical official said several people were lightly wounded. Channel 10 reported that five people were lightly wounded or suffered shock.

The rockets marked the first time Katyushas have landed in Israel since Israel began its offensive against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on December 27.

Residents of the western Galilee on Wednesday reported that three rockets hit their communities, with one falling near Nahariya.

Channel 1 reported that several northern residents have opened their bomb shelters.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Wednesday warned that should Israel attack Lebanon, it would suffer an even greater defeat than the one he claimed it suffered in 2006.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053800.html

[no limit]

9. "after Israel began its airstrikes against Hamas militants" should read:

after Israel began its airstrikes against Palestinian civilians.

[subsuelo]

12. No, then people might start figuring out the truth. n/t