"Is Israel The World's Foremost Terror State? Israeli General's Son Thinks So"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/07/is-israel-worlds-foremost-terror-state.html***
"Israel Is Acting As If It Is Free From Moral Responsibilities"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/07/israel-is-acting-as-if-it-is-free-from.html
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"Why Hamas Is Winning The War"
Toronto's Globe and Mail
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The people of Nazaz street in Gaza City returned home during the 12 hour ceasefire in hostilities not to resume their lives but to bury their dead and pick over the remains of their possessions.
The homes that once lined this street in the eastern suburb of Shejaiya have been pulverised beyond recognition.
Where once there were crowded apartment blocks, three or four storeys high, now there are fetid heaps of rubble. Shops and businesses have been replaced by craters, filth and debris.
A 12-hour ceasefire in Gaza, called first by Israel and then Hamas, the radical Islamist movement, revealed the scale of the destruction wrought by this 19-day conflict.
The Gaza health ministry said that over 100 corpses had been recovered in this period, bringing the total Palestinian death toll since the onset of Israel’s offensive to more than 1,000.
Meanwhile the Israel Defence Forces announced that another four soldiers had been killed, taking total military losses to 40.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians seized the opportunity afforded by the respite to return to the most dangerous areas and check on their abandoned homes.
In many cases that amounted to salvaging whatever could be recovered from the wreckage.
Shejaiya endured the heaviest bombardment of the campaign last Sunday when the area was pounded by Israeli artillery and air strikes, claiming at least 70 lives.
Afterwards, most of the population fled, including Nazmi Khamees Al-Khalez, 58. He came back yesterday and discovered that his home was severely damaged. Then he walked around the corner to the food warehouse where he has worked for 38 years, only to find this building was also in ruins.
The roof was partially collapsed, the fridges destroyed and scorched plastic milk bottles littered the floor.
“My house has been damaged, my brother’s house has been ruined - and here the company where I have worked has been destroyed too,” said Mr Khalez. “Sure, we have all lost our jobs now. Everything is destroyed.” Mr Khalez’s only consolation is that his four sons and four daughters, aged between 28 and 20, are alive and unharmed. “Thanks be to God, I evacuated them all on the day the ground invasion began,” he said.
“They are all safe. What I have lost can be replaced.” Many others have not been so fortunate. Nearby, an ambulance crew passed by on foot. Mounds of rubble blocking the road had compelled them to abandon their vehicle. Their duty was to recover perhaps 11 bodies - all believed to be relatives - from a ruined building nearby.
The cloying smell of death hung over much of the rubble and, throughout the ceasefire, bodies were found. In many cases, they had lain for days beneath the debris, undiscovered and decomposing.
Elsewhere, it was not simply homes and businesses that had been pulverised. In the northern town of Beit Hanoun, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting, the local hospital had come under attack.About 80 staff and patients were inside the small hospital at the outset of the attack. Fortunately, none suffered anything worse than minor injuries and all were evacuated to Gaza City. The bullet-scarred hospital now lies empty and abandoned.
A gaping hole had been blown through the whitewashed wall of the paediatric unit, exposing the blue curtain that once shielded a bed and the shattered remains of a bathroom. Bullet-holes and shrapnel scars riddled the brickwork and two vehicles parked outside, one a police car, had also been reduced to wrecks.
Ibrahim Al-Dour, a 37-year-old paramedic, said that an Israeli tank fired a shell at hospital at 11am on Friday. “I was at the reception near the corridor with the X-Ray department,” he said. “A shell hit the wall and glass from the windows fell onto me.” Virtually all of Beit Hanoun’s 50,000 people have fled their homes, which lie dangerously close to the border with Israel.
In the town centre, one building after another had been flattened.
Columns of people filed along rubble-strewn streets, laden with whatever they had managed to salvage. Small boys carried mattresses on their heads, women struggled with bundles of clothing and blankets, heavy electric fans and antiquated televisions.
Some families hired donkey carts for their salvage operation and many of these conveyances were soon piled high with furniture.
In the capricious way of explosions, ordinary possessions had been mixed up with debris, so that a bathtub stood perched on a heap of concrete; a new TV lay amid a pile of bricks, apparently undamaged.
Sufian Hamad, the mayor of Beit Hanoun, sat outside the ruins of his own home, resting upon the three mattresses which were all that he had been able to recover. This large house, where the families of his four sons also lived, was destroyed by an Israeli air strike at 2.30am on Saturday.
Mr Hamad had already fled. “I came back to find my house like this,” he said, pointing at the wreckage. “I saved for 30 years to build this house and just in a moment it was destroyed.”
Israel says that it gives telephone warnings to people whose homes are about to be targeted. But Mr Hamad, 57, said that he received no such call. Perhaps the Israeli forces knew that he had already left and the building was empty. In any event, it was instantly pulverised.
When he returned on Saturday, Mr Hamad managed one gesture of defiance. He planted the flag of Palestine - with its colours of red, green, black and white - on top of the ruin. “I put this flag here to show that we are willing to die for our land,” he said.
Mr Hamad was appalled by the scale of the destruction visited upon his town. “It is like an earthquake,” he said.
The 12-hour truce was a conciliatory gesture by Israel after the cabinet unanimously rejected a ceasefire plan proposed by John Kerry, the US secretary of state, on Friday night. Hamas also turned down this idea.
An Israeli military statement announced that a “humanitarian window” would be offered from 8am until 8pm on Saturday.
More than 160,000 Palestinians have fled their homes in Gaza, often in accordance with instructions given by Israel. The statement warned them not to return, saying: “Gaza civilians who have been requested to vacate from their residence are to refrain from returning.” Hamas also endorsed the ceasefire and, for a few hours, Gaza was free of the thunder-claps of bombardment. Shops and banks reopened and streets bustled with traffic.
After the failure of his earlier efforts, Mr Kerry tried to secure an extension of the lull. He met Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, in Paris on Saturday, along with their counterparts from France, Germany, Qatar and Turkey.
Afterwards, Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said: “All of us call on the parties to extend the military ceasefire that is currently underway. All of us want to obtain, as quickly as possible, a durable, negotiated ceasefire that responds both to Israeli needs in terms of security and to Palestinian needs in terms of the social-economic development of Gaza.”
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