Love of the Land: From shelled to sheltered: Sderot's new reality

From shelled to sheltered: Sderot's new reality

Jeff Abramowitz
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Sderot Media Center
24 December 09

Sderot, Israel (DPA) - This winter, Eli Asayag has opened the windows of his cafe. A year ago they were tightly shuttered, hopeful protection against rockets that were raining down onto southern Israel and especially on Sderot, located about three kilometres from the Gaza Strip.

Sderot residents are breathing easier today, 12 months after last winter's war between Israel and Gaza militants. Israel had launched the campaign after years of rocket fire from Gaza on its southern towns and villages.

However, even though rocket fire is no longer a feature of daily life in Sderot and other towns and villages close to the Gaza Strip, it is not yet a distant memory. Rockets are still launched from the salient, but in far, far fewer numbers.

"This last year was one of the calmest in the last 10, possibly even 20 years. Only 284 missiles were launched at southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, compared to 3,200 in 2008," says Noam Bedein, who heads an NGO in Sderot.

"We feel the conflict has not ended 100 per cent, but we do feel a difference," notes Sderot supermarket owner Yakov Dahan.

"At last our children can go out onto the streets, to join in outdoor activities," he says.

Yet for all the palpable sense of relief residents say they feel after Israel's offensive, the trauma of the past decade, when a total of 12,000 rockets were launched at southern Israel, remains.

(TY to :"Israel Patriot" for Youtube suggestion)


Residents still remember the fear that the constant threat of rocket attacks used to bring.

(Continue article)

Love of the Land: From shelled to sheltered: Sderot's new reality

Love of the Land: Palestinian Arab op-ed slams Hamas for Gaza war

Palestinian Arab op-ed slams Hamas for Gaza war

Elder of Ziyon
28 December 09

Palestine Press Agency has an Arabic op-ed that pulls no punches in blaming Hamas for Gaza suffering. Excerpts:

All this happened a year ago and still Hamas is reopening the wounds of the Gaza Strip. It continues to dance on wounds because Hamas appeared to have become addicted to dancing on the blood and body parts of the victims.

A year ago and is still Hamas is singing of victory, drawing a surreal picture that violates all logic and facts, Hamas still celebrating the victory!!! What kind of victory is this?? We would be the happiest people if there is a real victory against Israel, but when you follow the facts of what happened we find that Hamas was planning the disaster from the beginning. It scrapped the truce and threw a barrage of rockets and ignored all the warnings and incurred this hell and destruction and the huge number of martyrs and wounded of our people, who were left alone by Hamas to face the Israeli military machine. Afterwards Hamas emerged from the shadows to celebrate what it called the victory and danced on the remains of the martyrs and the blood of the wounded and the ruins of houses.

(Read full post)
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Love of the Land: Palestinian Arab op-ed slams Hamas for Gaza war

Love of the Land: A Year After the Gaza War: The Forgotten Children of Sderot

A Year After the Gaza War: The Forgotten Children of Sderot

Stephanie L. Fried
PajamasMedia.com
24 December 09

It’s been a year since Operation Cast Lead, and from the media silence, one would assume that all is quiet on the Gaza/Israel front. There’s been scant reportage of projectile launches coming out of Gaza into Sderot and southern Israel. That’s probably because people aren’t dying.

But a quick call to Sderot Media Center sheds light on the situation as it truly stands. There have been 283 missiles, rockets, and mortar rounds launched into Israel since last January. And almost every time there’s a launch, air-raid sirens sound to warn residents that they have 15 seconds before touchdown to take cover in bomb shelters.

Since 2001, the city of Sderot has been hit by 10,000 missiles launched by Palestinian militants based in the Hamas-run Gaza enclave. The entire town has suffered but those most traumatized are the children, whose nightmares return every time a siren sounds.

From toddlers to teenagers, more than 80% of Sderot’s 8000 kids are living proof of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Many of them wet their beds, suffer bad dreams, suck their thumbs, experience chronic anxiety, sleep in their parents’ beds, and exhibit lingering physical and psychological manifestations that accompany life in an environment where they have had to scramble for cover in life-and-death situations.

Until now, they’ve had therapy resources available via the town’s Resilience Center Treatment Clinic. The center staff treat the kids’ symptoms and guides parents on coping with their children’s trauma. The center also serves as a safe haven.

But recently the news came that the Resilience Center Treatment Clinic, which is dependent on donations and subsidies, is in jeopardy of shutting down. There’s simply not enough money to keep it going. Rocket and missile barrages minus casualties have a funny way of turning formerly exuberant private donors into “we had to re-prioritize our spending” withholders. The Israeli government has also had to re-prioritize what comes from its coffers.

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Love of the Land: A Year After the Gaza War: The Forgotten Children of Sderot

Love of the Land: Gaza by the Numbers: One Year After Operation Cast Lead

Gaza by the Numbers: One Year After Operation Cast Lead

The Israel Project (TIP)
16 December 09

On Dec. 27, 2008, Israel Defense Forces began a defensive operation in Gaza—Operation Cast Lead—to stop Iran-backed Hamas and other terrorist groups from their years-long campaign of firing thousands of rockets, mortars and missiles at Israel.[1] [2] During Operation Cast Lead, Israel focused on dismantling Hamas’ terrorist infrastructure while minimizing civilian casualties.[3] The operation, which ended Jan. 18[4] , was made more difficult – and dangerous – because of Hamas’s widespread use of civilians as human shields.[5] The defensive operation has reduced by 90 percent the number of rocket, missile and mortar attacks on Israel from Gaza.[6]

Following are facts and figures about the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza:

Key Statistics

• 1 million: Israeli civilians under threat from Hamas rocket fire.[7]
• 15: Seconds Israelis have to get to a bomb shelter once a warning siren has sounded.[8]
• 2 million: Leaflets the Israel Air Force dropped on Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, warning civilians to stay clear of Hamas fighters.[9]
• 200,000: Phone calls made by the Israeli army to civilians in Gaza warning of an impending strike near their residences.[10]
• 8: Years Israel has endured rocket, missile and mortar fire from Gaza.[11]
• 1: Israeli left in Gaza – Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit,[12] kidnapped by Hamas from Israel on June 25, 2006.[13]
• 3,200+: Rockets and mortar fired from Gaza in 2008.[14]
• 6,500+: Rockets and mortars fired from Gaza since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.[15]
• 10,389: Rockets and mortars fired from Gaza 2001-2008.[16]
• 1,000+: People in Israel injured from rockets and mortars fired from Gaza since 2001.[17]
• 27: Number of people killed by Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks since 2001.[18]
• 270: Rockets and mortars fired from Gaza since the end of Operation Cast Lead, Jan. 18 - Nov. 31, 2009.[19]

(Full stats and footnotes)

Love of the Land: Gaza by the Numbers: One Year After Operation Cast Lead

Love of the Land: Palestinian Rockets, International Law, and the Goldstone Report

Palestinian Rockets, International Law, and the Goldstone Report

Johanna Markind
jewishpolicycenter.org
Palestinian Rocket Report
December 23, 2009

Twenty-two years ago, President Ronald Reagan cautioned that proposed extensions to "international law" would aid terrorists and endanger civilians. Today, in the aftermath of the Goldstone Report, his comments are more pertinent than ever. The Goldstone Report ignores multiple violations of international law by the Palestinian terrorist organization known as Hamas, and challenges Israel's right to defend its citizens from rocket attacks.

Hamas Violates Geneva

The Goldstone Report, a report on the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009, was released in September 2009. It alleges that Israel violated international law in the course of defending its population from Hamas rocket attacks. The report has a great many flaws – too many to list here. For the purposes of this essay, however, the problems associated with international law begin on page 82 of the report.

Buried in the report, like a needle in a haystack, is the grudging acknowledgment of Goldstone and company that directing attacks against civilian targets, as Hamas has done with homemade rockets since http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif2001, is prohibited by international law. This is, in fact, prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 (article 3).

Hamas Violates Oslo

Additionally, the Goldstone report completely fails to note that the rocket attacks violate the Oslo Accords – the peace agreement that guides relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Under the Accords (Annex I, Article II), the Palestinians are obligated to "act systematically against all expressions of violence and terror." They are further obligated to "apprehend, investigate and prosecute" terrorist incidents and to prevent incitement of terrorism.

Though Hamas does not recognize Israel or its obligations under Oslo, it is still bound by them, since the Oslo Accords were signed on behalf of all the Palestinians. At a minimum, Israel should not be accused of violating Oslo (as the Goldstone report charges) without also charging Hamas for its violations, or recognizing that Israel is reacting to Hamas' violations.

Hamas Violates 1977 Protocol

The 1977 Protocol, which the Goldstone report insists is binding as part of customary international law, bars attacks directed against civilians (Articles 2, 52). It also prohibits indiscriminate attacks that have no specific military objective, or which "employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective" (Article 4). Hamas' indiscriminate rocket attacks have numbered in the thousands since 2001.

The 1977 Protocol also forbids locating military targets – such as rocket launchers – within civilian populations (Article 58). The Protocol weakens the duty of armed forces to distinguish themselves from civilians, but it does require them to do so while they are on the attack (Article 44). It also forbids feigning civilian status to kill or injure the enemy (Article 37). Moreover, both the Geneva Convention (Article 28) and the Protocol (Article 7) recognize that parties may not render military targets immune from attack by locating them within civilian populations.

(Full article)

Love of the Land: Palestinian Rockets, International Law, and the Goldstone Report

Love of the Land: BBC: Downplaying Sderot's Suffering

BBC: Downplaying Sderot's Suffering

Honestreporting.com
Media Critiques
14 October 09

Katya Adler's report pays lip service to the plight of Israeli schoolchildren.

As part of its Hunger to Learn series, the BBC's Katya Adler "meets children in Gaza whose schooling has been repeatedly interrupted by conflict." Undoubtedly, Palestinian children have suffered as a result of difficult conditions in Gaza. However, Adler's report demonstrates typical BBC bias:

• The report implies that Israel deliberately bombed a primary school during the recent Gaza conflict. Israel's motivations for taking military action are subtly questioned: "Israel says this is in response to rocket and mortar fire by Gaza militants, aimed at Israeli citizens." Does the BBC believe it possible that Israel took military action in Gaza simply for the sake of it?

Indeed, while Israel does not deliberately target schoolchildren, the same cannot be said of Palestinian terrorists who have deliberately launched rocket attacks at specific times when Israeli children are travelling to their schools, considering it an achievement if a rocket lands (as they have done on numerous occasions) on schools or kindergartens.

• Adler discusses the mental scars of Gazan children due to Operation Cast Lead, referring to psychological and social problems and difficulty concentrating. While this may be the result of Israel's three-week operation, the same descriptions could be equally applied to the Israeli children of Sderot who have suffered from 8 years of rocket attacks from Gaza.

According to a 2008 NATAL study (Center for Victims of Terror and War), between 70% to 94% of Sderot children suffer from symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder while 28% of children are diagnosed with PTSD. About 30% of Sderot adults are also diagnosed with PTSD.

In addition, over 5,500 patient files have been opened in the Sderot Mental Health Center in light of continuous rocket fire. In the year 2007 alone, 1,117 trauma victim files were opened. Anxiety symptoms among children often include sleeping difficulties, nightmares, sweating, development regressions, wetting beds, and fear of the outside.

• Despite this, nowhere in the online text is any reference to the suffering and trauma of Israeli children whose education and daily lives have also been affected by conflict. However, perhaps in a poor attempt to claim a semblance of balance, Adler interviews two Israeli pupils from Sderot in the second of two short video segments.

Deliberately downplaying the situation in Sderot, Adler says to them:"When you talk to schoolchildren in Gaza they say look at us, so many of us are killed in wars with Israel, whereas in Sderot not many children die, not many are injured, not many rockets are actually fired." Would Adler consider questioning Gazan pupils about their views on rockets fired at their Israeli counterparts?

In fact, some 12,000 rockets and mortars have been fired from the Gaza Strip since 2001 while over 1,000 people have been wounded as a result.

• Indeed, the attitude and presentation between the two videos is striking. Israeli pupils are interviewed in a sterile and quiet school playground environment, pictured talking directly to Adler. In stark contrast, the segment in Gaza is interspersed with dramatic scenes of conflict and destruction to accompany the interviews with Palestinian children. There are plenty of images and footage available of rocket attacks on Sderot but the BBC evidently chose not to use them thus downplaying their effects.

Katya Adler's lip service to balance is yet another example of the BBC's anti-Israel bias.

Perhaps more disturbing is an almost identical video clip adapted from Adler's report for Children's BBC Newsround, aimed specifically at British schoolchildren. Complete with images of the Gaza conflict, there is no attempt to provide context to the military operation other than to say that a school had been bombed by Israel "to protect its own soldiers from attack."

There is no mention of Sderot, Hamas, Palestinian terror or any other details, even in a simple form that might aid a child's understanding of the situation. Instead, young minds will invariably perceive Israel as the bad guy in the story. Yet more pernicious reporting from the BBC - poisoning children against Israel.

You can send your comments to the BBC Complaints website -http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints (for detailed instructions on how to navigate the BBC Complaints website, click here).

Love of the Land: BBC: Downplaying Sderot's Suffering

Love of the Land: The Moral Inversion of Richard Goldstone

The Moral Inversion of Richard Goldstone

Melanie Phillips

The Spectator

16 September 09

So now we can see how Richard Goldstone thinks he has preserved his judicial reputation while perpetrating a blood libel against Israel. He has produced a report which, as anticipated, finds that Israel committed all the ‘war crimes’ during Operation Cast Lead of which his Mission members had decided it was guilty before even starting their deliberations, along with the NGOs whose unremitting hostility and malice towards Israel and history of peddling Palestinian propaganda as fact did not deter the Mission from uncritically accepting their evidence as the truth, thus finding Hamas guilty of no crimes at all -- except one. That was, by an amazing coincidence, the one set of crimes it committed which the world was forced to acknowledge actually happened – the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel with the sole intention of killing Israeli civilians. By referring to this en passant, devoting minimal attention to it in the course of his 570- page report the vast majority of which is devoted to allegations against Israel, he engineered the ‘even-handed’ headline he needed to maintain his credibility:

There is evidence that both Israeli and Palestinian forces committed war crimes in the recent Gaza conflict, the official UN report says.

It is, however, only Israel which is required to conduct investigations into such claims -- and thus only Israel which Goldstone recommends should be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court if those investigations aren’t carried out to the satisfaction of the UN. So much for even-handedness.

With this cynical veneer, Goldstone does worse even than establish a moral equivalence between the instigators of genocidal violence and those who were attempting to defend themselves against it. He presents Israel, the victims of such aggression, as war criminals and the Palestinians, the actual instigators of terror, as its victims. This is not moral equivalence but moral inversion.

He acknowledges no such crimes by Hamas within Gaza itself -- not least against other Palestinians -- such as turning the entire population of Gaza into hostages by siting its rockets and terrorist infrastructure amongst that population and additionally using them as human shields. Even worse, he presents the Palestinian aggressors as victims of Israel, requiring Israel to make reparation to those from whose houses and streets it was being attacked. No reparations to Israel are required from any Palestinians, even though Goldstone accepts that Hamas committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by firing thousands of missiles at its civilians.

To cover himself completely against the fact that the degraded aim of the mission he headed was to delegitimise Israel, his report claims at the start that his mandate from the President of the UN Council on Human Rights was:

... to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.

Now this is curious, since UN Resolution S-9/1 which established the mandate for the Goldstone commission said the Human Rights Council

Decides to dispatch an urgent, independent international fact-finding mission, to be appointed by the President of the Council, to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying Power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression, and calls upon Israel not to obstruct the process of investigation and to fully cooperate with the mission.

So the UNHRC mandate explicitly limited Goldstone to investigating solely Israel, which it deemed guilty of human rights violations during Cast Lead -- a mandate whose terms as set out in the UNHRC resolution cannot be changed; while Goldstone’s report cites a mandate which is quite different from that resolution, which is ascribed not to the Council but to the President, and which encompasses all such violations during Cast Lead. Goldstone himself said he had changed the terms of the mandate in ‘informal discussions’. It looks therefore as if he and the UNHRC President unilaterally tore up both the Council’s mandate and UN regulations to provide Goldstone with the fig-leaf to disguise the moral bankruptcy of the entire process.

Of the countless distortions, errors and absurdities in this travesty of a report, the following jumped out at me from an initial reading.

1) The first error is in the title itself: HUMAN RIGHTS IN PALESTINE AND OTHEROCCUPIED ARAB TERRITORIES: Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict

But Gaza is not occupied by Israel, as is quite clear from even a cursory look at the Hague Convention which lays down the criteria for occupation. For Goldstone to say that Gaza is still occupied demonstrates either an ignorance of international law quite remarkable for a professor of international law, or that he is signed up to the ideology which deliberately uses such mis-statements to delegitimise Israel.

(Full Article)

Love of the Land: The Moral Inversion of Richard Goldstone

Love of the Land: Sderot: The World Turns its Back

Sderot: The World Turns its Back

Jacob Shrybman

israelnationalnews.org

15 September 09

It doesn't seem that there will be any quiet.

Yesterday alone, over 89 trucks of international aid and gasoline were poured into the Gaza Strip. Since September 1, 2009, over 700 truckloads of international aid, including over 1,760,000 liters of gasoline have been given to the Gaza Strip. Since the end of Operation Cast Lead on January 18 of this year, over 2,000 truckloads of far more than 37,000 tons of humanitarian aid has been delivered to the Gaza Strip.

Staging ground for international aid trucks in front of the Gaza Strip
Jacob Shrybman

As the international community continues its uproar over the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, a spokesman for the Israeli Civil Administration, which manages the Palestinian Authority requests for aid, goods and gasoline, says that these are in fact decreased amounts.

"Over the past two to three months we have seen a definitive decrease in the requests from the Palestinian Authority, because they have goods, foods and medicines that still have not been used," Guy Inbar says. He continues by explaining the situation inside the Gaza Strip: "As we have said before, there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza."

While sitting for hours watching truck after truck drive in and out of the Gaza Strip, I spoke over the phone with Dr. Adriana Katz, director of three of the five mental health and trauma centers in Sderot. She told me that there has been no change in the lack of budgets for the centers. The area's trauma centers, which are constantly treating the victims of largely psychological terrorism, are being forced to close their doors. The Emergency Center in Sderot, which is the first aid clinic that treats victims immediately after an attack, was shut down this past July; the director of the Sderot Trauma Center, Dalia Yosef, has been let go; and the area's four remaining centers are all set to be closed by December 1.

How can a world that prides itself on slogans and political jargon regarding "both sides of the conflict" and "two states for two peoples" completely turn its back on Sderot?

After a letter from the Sderot Media Center to the European Union, calling for international aid for the victims of rocket fire in southern Israel, British Ambassador Tom Phillips visited the trauma centers in Sderot with the Center on June 4. Ambassador Phillips met with both Dr. Adriana Katz and Dalia Yosef regarding the situation of the trauma centers; yet, the centers still have not seen any allocation of aid.

On August 5, five top Australian parliamentarians visited the closed Emergency Center in Sderot, but the centers still have not seen any allocation of aid.

On August 11, Texas Governor Rick Perry and ranking Republican member of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen visited the closed Emergency Center in Sderot, but the centers still have not seen any allocation of aid.

With now more than 240 aerial attacks from the Gaza Strip since the end of Operation Cast Lead, and eight in the past week, Dr. Adriana Katz commented "It doesn't seem that there will be any quiet, even though I am only slated to work until December 1."

International aid trucks entering the Gaza Strip
Jacob Shrybman

An average of 80 truckloads a day of international aid and gasoline, all materials frequently used to produce the fuel for the Kassam rockets, will continue to pour into the Gaza Strip with no end date in sight. And the world turns its back on the thousands and thousands of Israeli victims of the past decade of rocket attacks.

Jacob Shrybman is an activist and writer with the Sderot Media Center.

Love of the Land: Sderot: The World Turns its Back