BY ROHAN PEARCE
On July 23, a US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplane dropped a 1000-kilogram bomb on an apartment block in Gaza City. The bomb killed 15 civilians, including nine children along with Hamas leader Saleh Shehade. Eleven of those killed were in neighbouring buildings. More than 140 Palestinians were injured.
The bombing was hailed by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a "great success". Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres did his best to provide "dove" cover for the Israeli government. "What happened is really regrettable. It wasn't done intentionally", he told the BBC. Peres didn't elaborate on how dropping a one-tonne bomb on one of the most densely populated areas in the world "wasn't done intentionally".
According to a July 25 report in the British Guardian, Sharon and his defence minister, Binyamin Ben Eliezer, were briefed before the attack on the effect exploding a bomb of such size would have on a crowded area of Gaza City.
The motivation behind the latest act of Israeli state terror appears to have been derailing a peace plan which would have halted attacks within Israel by Palestinian resistance organisations. On July 25, the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Weekly reported: "By Tuesday just 90 minutes before the bomb slammed through the roof of Shehada's apartment an agreement was on the verge of being signed.
"According to Palestinian and diplomatic sources the new truce would initially involve militias linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement such as the Al-Aqsa Brigades declaring a moratorium on suicide attacks inside Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad would publicly support the declaration.
"Hamas, at least, had been preparing the ground. On Sunday, and again on Tuesday, Hamas political leaders Aziz Rantisi and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin said their movement would stop killing Israeli civilians if Israel were to withdraw from the occupied West Bank cities, lift the sieges on the Palestinian areas, free recently detained Palestinian prisoners and end the assassinations of Palestinian political and military leaders."
On July 24 mainstream Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth printed the text of the declaration by Palestinian resistance groups, which was supposed to have been published on July 25: "From this moment on we will cease all attacks on innocent men, women and children who are non-combatants. We call on all the political organisations and Palestinian movements to cease these attacks immediately, without hesitation or conditions."
What was the response from the "anti-terrorist" crusaders in the White House to Sharon's latest deliberate act of state terrorism? "The president has said repeatedly that Israel needs to be mindful of the consequences of its actions in order to preserve peace in the Middle East", Ari Fleischer, press secretary for the US president, told journalists on July 23.
"There's no question of our support for Israel's security. There's no question of our support for Israel's right to defend itself" said US State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher on July 25. "[But] when we see things we don't think are advisable we point that out."
By contrast with the mild rebuke which Israel's Gaza City massacre received from the White House, on August 1 President George Bush told reporters he was "furious that innocent life was lost" a day after a Hamas bombing at a Jerusalem university cafeteria killed seven people, including five Americans.
According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), as of June 26, 1678 Palestinians had been killed and 19,958 injured since the beginning of the current uprising in September 2000. This was almost three times more than the 576 Israelis, many of them soldiers or settlers, who died from September 2000 to July 17, according to the Israeli foreign ministry.
The actual difference between Palestinian and Israeli deathtolls is probably bigger, given that a recent UN report found that between March 1 and the beginning of May, 497 Palestinians were killed during Israel's Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank, but that this figure was almost double the death toll of 262 reported by the PRCS in the Palestinian territories for the same period.
One particular facet of Israel's assault on Palestinian civilians is documented in a PRCS report released in June. The report documents the denial of emergency medical service access for Palestinians, particularly during Israel's Operation Defensive Shield, March 29-May 10.
During the second intifada, the West Bank response time for ambulances has increased from eight minutes to 30 minutes or more. In the Gaza Strip, the situation is even more dire: "[I]n southern Gaza, an emergency response to a cardiac case can take up to one hour to transport a patient to [a] hospital with the necessary medical equipment. During the March-May invasion, response times were up to 13 hours in some areas. As a result, since September 2000 there have been at least 36 cases of women giving birth at Israeli military checkpoints. Three of them have died, along with four newly delivered babies."
During Operation Defensive Shield, there was a complete shutdown of emergency services provided to the majority of the population in the West Bank. According to the PRCS, "the major urban centres/towns were completely cut off from rural areas, thereby denying 75% of the population access to medical services. Curfews imposed by the Israeli army during this period affected about 1 million people who were denied access to medical services. (They were also denied access to food, water, electricity, work and education.)"
During the intifada there have been 188 Israeli army attacks on ambulances and 209 attacks on emergency medical technicians (EMTs). Ninety-one percent of the PRCS' West Bank fleet of ambulances has been destroyed. Three EMTs have been killed and 171 injured. Sixty-four EMTs have been detained, of these a total of 49 were beaten, 15 were tortured, six were used as human shields and six required hospitalisation.
On April 2, Nader Abed, a Ramallah emergency medical service (EMS) volunteer was stripped, handcuffed, blindfolded and beaten. Israeli soldiers forced him to crawl on the ground, and he was kept in the rain for four hours. Zohdi Mustafa from the Ramallah EMS was part of an ambulance crew used as human shields for over an hour on April 7.
From Green Left Weekly, August 7, 2002.
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