UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights: World needs to see the victims & carnage in Gaza

[Turborama]

Richard Falk is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories and professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University.

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Dec. 29, 2008

Bring light - and censure - to brutal Israeli attacks

We are witnessing one of Israel's most brutal attacks on Gaza in memory. On Saturday, Israeli warplanes screamed across the sea in seemingly endless waves, setting fire to buildings and wreaking devastation in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. By the end of the first day, more than 200 people had been killed and 700 wounded, many of them civilians. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Frantic parents searched for their children after they fled school when a bomb struck the building next door. Morgues overflowed with bodies, many of them still bleeding.

On Monday morning, Israeli planes bombed a mosque. The house next to the mosque collapsed and inside, five sisters aged 2 to 10 years old were killed.

Two weeks prior to this carnage, I arrived at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel in my capacity as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories. I planned to visit Gaza, meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and tour the West Bank. Israeli officials had been given an advance itinerary for my trip.

I was, however, taken from the passport line by Israeli authorities. I was driven a mile from the airport, placed in a filthy detention facility, which smelled of urine, for 20 hours and deported.

Was my expulsion from Israel part of a calculated move designed to remove as many Western observers as possible from the carnage that was to come? Was it a result of my past condemnations of the Israeli siege of Gaza?

Either way, it is an example of Israel's systematic attempts to hide what is happening in Gaza from outside view and to intimidate those of us who condemn Israeli crimes.

The residents of Gaza, half of whom depend on U.N. food donations to survive, have been living in what can only be described as a vast, open-air prison. They are denied entry and exit by Israel. Since Nov. 4, when Israel violated a six-month truce and triggered crude rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas and Islamic jihad, the Palestinians in Gaza have suffered from a heightened Israeli blockade and massive collective punishment that is a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. I have called on the International Criminal Court to investigate this violation and determine whether the Israeli leaders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.

The deadly attacks and the blockade of Gaza are defended by Israeli authorities as retaliation for the rockets that have been fired across the border into Israel. The firing of such rockets is also a violation of international law. It too targets innocent civilians and is a crime. I condemn these attacks.

The current spate of rocket attacks, which has caused one Israeli death, however, does not give Israel the moral or legal license to punish the entire population of Gaza, including the sick, children, the elderly and the majority of Palestinians who have no involvement whatsoever.

Article continues http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6186137.html">here

[EFerrari]

1. The Israelis want to keep the press out but there's no reason the press

has to comply with that.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

2. Its a hard place to get to if Israel does not want you there and your average media type sucks

at infiltration.


<joke>Could get Gunga Dan to go?</joke> (Use Google if you don't get the joke)