The Palestine thread

[Ball DeBeaver]

Who, exactly, is blockading Gaza?




Hamas closes Gaza crossing


Published today (updated) 04/03/2013 16:58






GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- The Hamas government in Gaza closed the Kerem Shalom crossing on Monday, despite the fact Israel had agreed to reopen it after a one week closure.

Israel closed the commercial crossing last Tuesday after a rocket was fired from Gaza toward Ashkelon in southern Israel, but agreed to reopen it Monday.

However, the border remained closed on the Palestinian side.

Officials in Gaza, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the issue, said the Hamas government in Gaza has fired the company that operates the terminal after a dispute over the collection of customs revenue.

The officials told Ma'an that Hamas wants to keep the taxes, which are usually paid to the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Hamas has decided to appoint a new company to run the terminal, they said.

Truck drivers at Kerem Shalom told Ma'an that rivalries over control of the crossing were impeding their work, adding that they hoped the terminal would reopen soon.

Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Eitan Dangot has told PA officials that Israel considers Hamas' appointment of a new company to run Kerem Shalom a security risk, the Israeli news site Ynet reported Monday.

Israel cooperated with the previous contractor because he operated the crossing on behalf of the PA, Ynet reported, noting that Israel will not coordinate with Hamas.

Ynet said that Hamas was demanding a tax of 170 shekels (around $46) for each truck that enters Gaza, to make up for lost profits from tunnel revenue after Cairo cracked down on smuggling under the Egyptian border.

Erez crossing

Meanwhile, Hamas is imposing new restrictions at the Erez crossing, the only passenger terminal on the Israeli border.

The government in Gaza announced Wednesday that residents must seek permission from the Ministry of Interior to enter Israel via the Erez crossing.

Palestinians already needed a permit from Israel to cross Erez.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights criticized Hamas' decision.

"Freedom of movement is already severely restricted by Israel; travelers have to wait many hours before being allowed to pass through the crossing and they are subjected to humiliating treatment," PCHR said in a statement.

The Gaza-based group noted that Israeli authorities usually only granted Palestinians permits a few hours prior to their departure, and often the permits are only valid for one day.

"This makes it impossible for them to refer to the Ministry of Interior to obtain prior approval for their travel," PCHR said.


http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=571269


Disgusting. How are the poor wee palestinians supposed to get their gold plated Porches, iphone 5s and plasma screens now?



END THE SEIGE OF GAZA......NOW 

[seafoid]

Who, exactly, is blockading Gaza?

END THE SEIGE OF GAZA......NOW 

Israel runs the siege

It takes a very long time to turn a regular area where people live regular lives into a centre of disease. It took Israel over 40 years. The first thing you need to do is shut down all threatening economic activity. anything that can help people improve their lives has to be destroyed.   

The Gaza Strip: A Case of Economic De-Development
Sara Roy
Journal of Palestine Studies,

http://www.palestine-studies.org/files/pdf/jps/1069.pdf

Great results


http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/un-report-gaza-won-t-be-liveable-by-2020-if-urgent-action-not-taken-1.461031

Gaza will no longer be "liveable" by 2020 unless urgent action is taken to improve water supply, power, health, and schooling, the United Nations' most comprehensive report on the Palestinian enclave said on Monday.
"Action needs to be taken now if Gaza is to be a liveable place in 2020 and it is already difficult now," UN humanitarian coordinator Maxwell Gaylard told journalists when the report was released on Monday.

[Ball DeBeaver]

Who is flooding the tunnels with raw sewage?                           Not Israel.
Who guards the Philadelphi corridor?                                        Not Israel.
Who is losing a fortune, with the tunnels closed?                       Not Israel.
Who is starving their own people?                                            Not Israel.
Who is ultimately responsible for Gaza's plight?                         Not Israel.

[seafoid]

Who is flooding the tunnels with raw sewage?                           Not Israel.
Who guards the Philadelphi corridor?                                        Not Israel.
Who is losing a fortune, with the tunnels closed?                       Not Israel.
Who is starving their own people?                                            Not Israel.
Who is ultimately responsible for Gaza's plight?                         Not Israel.

israel controls the air over gaza, the sea to the west of gaza, the radio spectrum above gaza, the population registry, the calorific intake of Gazans and who lives and who dies in Gaza. Gaza is Israel's baby. Gaza is Judaism 2013.

[Ball DeBeaver]

Who is flooding the tunnels with raw sewage?                           Not Israel.
Who guards the Philadelphi corridor?                                        Not Israel.
Who is losing a fortune, with the tunnels closed?                       Not Israel.
Who is starving their own people?                                            Not Israel.
Who is ultimately responsible for Gaza's plight?                         Not Israel.

israel controls the air over gaza, the sea to the west of gaza, the radio spectrum above gaza, the population registry, the calorific intake of Gazans and who lives and who dies in Gaza. Gaza is Israel's baby. Gaza is Judaism 2013.

I think you'll find you're talking out of your bangle there pal. If Gazans are so malnourished, then why are the tunnels used for consumer goods, and not food? Hamas are responsible for more premature deaths in Gaza than Israel.

[give her dixie]

[give her dixie]

On the bus to Israeli apartheid

In 1896 the United States Supreme Court handed down one of its most shameful decisions in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, rejecting the argument that the segregation between whites and blacks on trains in the state of Louisiana violated the principle of equality.

"We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument," the court wrote in words that today are considered to be one of the most embarrassing moments in U.S. judicial history, "to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it."

The U.S. Supreme Court did not reject the notion that "separate but equal" can indeed be equal until more than half a century later. In the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, it ruled that racial segregation in public schools violated the principle of equality before the law.

It took another two years before the change came to public transportation in the United States. On December 1, 1955 a black woman named Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat in the "colored" section of a crowded public bus in Montgomery, Alabama to a white passenger. The incident was the catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a formative event of the U.S. civil rights movement. It led to the Supreme Court's 1956 decision extending the prohibition of segregation to public transportation and thereby reversing its 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson.

In Israel, in contrast, we have returned through the time tunnel to 1896: Palestinians are being directed off public buses in the West Bank, and on Monday, the Transportation Ministry introduced separate bus lines for Palestinians, to keep Palestinians who are traveling to work in Israel from riding the same bus lines as Jews.

The ministry, in a statement reminiscent of the U.S. Supreme Court circa 1896, says the lines are aimed at relieving the distress of the Palestinian workers.

In 2009 the High Court of Justice struck down a prohibition barring Palestinians from Route 443, a main artery of transportation between Jerusalem and central Israel, and restricting its use to Jewish settlers.

In its decision the High Court said that had this been the road's purpose, the Israel Defense Forces would not have been allowed to build it: International law forbids the army of an occupying power from planning and building road networks intended for its own citizens and not the inhabitants of the occupied territory.

Differing circumstances aside, the policy reversed by the High Court in the case of Route 443 is similar to the Transportation Ministry's new policy regarding certain bus lines, insofar as both involve the development of a means of transportation for the citizens of the occupying state and its separation from the local population. This violates the rules of international law whereby occupation is a temporary situation only, and the occupying power must administer the territory for the benefit of the local population.

In this sense the bus issue is only one more component of Israel's de facto annexation of the territories, an annexation accompanied by the creation of a regime of segregation – which is of course unequal – between Jews and Palestinians.

In her ruling on Route 443, then-Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch commented that the petitioners' equation of the use of separate roads with South Africa's former apartheid policy was inappropriate.

But even if there are differences between the situation in the territories and the legal definition of apartheid, the bus segregation is another characteristic of a regime based on the separation of residence, movement and laws in accordance with the origin of the populations, and as such it brings Israel one step closer to apartheid.

In 2011 the High Court of Justice ruled on the so-called mehadrin buses, serving the ultra-Orthodox community, in which women were required to sit at the back of the bus.

"As I now read over these lines emphasizing this," wrote Justice Elyakim Rubinstein in reference to a Transportation Ministry directive prohibiting such segregation, "I am astounded that there was even a need to write them in the year 2010. Have the days of Rosa Parks, the African American woman who collapsed the racist segregation on an Alabama bus in 1955 returned?"

Today, despite the differences between the segregation on the mehadrin buses and the segregation in the territories, the answer to Rubinstein's question is yes, those days have returned. We have gone back to 1955 and in effect to 1896

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/on-the-bus-to-israeli-apartheid.premium-1.507171

[seafoid]

Who is flooding the tunnels with raw sewage?                           Not Israel.
Who guards the Philadelphi corridor?                                        Not Israel.
Who is losing a fortune, with the tunnels closed?                       Not Israel.
Who is starving their own people?                                            Not Israel.
Who is ultimately responsible for Gaza's plight?                         Not Israel.

israel controls the air over gaza, the sea to the west of gaza, the radio spectrum above gaza, the population registry, the calorific intake of Gazans and who lives and who dies in Gaza. Gaza is Israel's baby. Gaza is Judaism 2013.

I think you'll find you're talking out of your bangle there pal. If Gazans are so malnourished, then why are the tunnels used for consumer goods, and not food? Hamas are responsible for more premature deaths in Gaza than Israel.

44% of women in Gaza are anemic.

"If Gazans are so malnourished, then why are the tunnels used for consumer goods". There is a shopping centre in Gaza so there can be no malnutrition. Someone in Gaza bought an iphone so there is no malnutrition.
Zionism sickens me.  There were Nazis who would have been the Ball deBeavers of the 1940s talking about Jews the way you talk about Palestinians.  "There are grocery shops in the Warsaw ghetto. Nobody is hungry"/.

Maybe you are a Hamasnik. Maybe you want to show up Israel for what it is.   

[Ball DeBeaver]

I think you'll find that the new buses put on are for palestinians only, with them able to use the regular services also. They pay a lower fare than previous, with a more regular service.  It is the Israelis that have a lesser service.

The Israeli Transport Ministry said the two new lines would "improve public transport services for Palestinian workers entering Israel" and replace pirate buses charging them "exorbitant prices".

"The Ministry of Transport has not issued any instruction or prohibition that prevents Palestinian workers from traveling on public transport in Israel nor in Judea and Samaria," it said, referring to the West Bank.

"Furthermore, the Ministry of Transport is not authorized to prevent any passenger from using public transport services."

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=571300

[Ball DeBeaver]

Who is flooding the tunnels with raw sewage?                           Not Israel.
Who guards the Philadelphi corridor?                                        Not Israel.
Who is losing a fortune, with the tunnels closed?                       Not Israel.
Who is starving their own people?                                            Not Israel.
Who is ultimately responsible for Gaza's plight?                         Not Israel.

israel controls the air over gaza, the sea to the west of gaza, the radio spectrum above gaza, the population registry, the calorific intake of Gazans and who lives and who dies in Gaza. Gaza is Israel's baby. Gaza is Judaism 2013.

I think you'll find you're talking out of your bangle there pal. If Gazans are so malnourished, then why are the tunnels used for consumer goods, and not food? Hamas are responsible for more premature deaths in Gaza than Israel.

44% of women in Gaza are anemic.

"If Gazans are so malnourished, then why are the tunnels used for consumer goods". There is a shopping centre in Gaza so there can be no malnutrition. Someone in Gaza bought an iphone so there is no malnutrition.
Zionism sickens me.  There were Nazis who would have been the Ball deBeavers of the 1940s talking about Jews the way you talk about Palestinians.  "There are grocery shops in the Warsaw ghetto. Nobody is hungry"/.

Maybe you are a Hamasnik. Maybe you want to show up Israel for what it is.

You have peddled that lie before. You know nothing.


Nutrition in the Ghettos

From the moment that the Jews were isolated from the Polish society and were surrounded by a fence, their food distribution was entirely controlled by the Germans. A strict food rationing was in effect. A working person was given food rationing that was sufficient barely for one person. In order to feed the sick and the old, they were put on the list of the producing people and their relatives had to cover for them by working even longer hours and producing a larger quota. The quantity of allocated food was insufficient and many basic food items were non existent in the ghetto. "The official ration in the ghetto probably amounted to about 800 calories a day per person. This was half the ration for non-Jewish Poles and a third the ration for Germans in Poland. As the Nazis knew, people cannot survive for very long on 800 calories a day (One peanut butter sandwich on white bread contains over 350 calories) (Feldman 149). A report on the food status of the Warsaw ghetto

http://cghs.dadeschools.net/ib_holocaust2001/Ghettoes/diet/diet.htm



800 calories eh. Thats a third of what Israel was accused of feeding Gazans, until it was shown to be a lie. Maybe they should have got themselves a new tv or dishwasher. 

[seafoid]

800 calories eh. Thats a third of what Israel was accused of feeding Gazans, until it was shown to be a lie. Maybe they should have got themselves a new tv or dishwasher. 
[/quote]


http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/2-279-calories-per-person-how-israel-made-sure-gaza-didn-t-starve.premium-1.470419


Israel court order forces state to reveal dry figures behind Gaza blockade
Israel's 'red lines' document for food consumption in the coastal Strip determined that 2,279 calories per person would keep Gazans from starving; official: state has right to determine who it assists.
By Amira Hass | Oct.17, 2012 | 8:00 AM
      

After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle waged by the Gisha human rights organization, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories has finally released a 2008 document that detailed its "red lines" for "food consumption in the Gaza Strip."
The document calculates the minimum number of calories necessary, in COGAT's view, to keep Gaza residents from malnutrition at a time when Israel was tightening its restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the Strip,
including food products and raw materials. "


http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/gazans-are-eating-too-well/

"Even after the writing of this document, Israel continued to brazenly claim that the occupation of Gaza had ended. The very fact that such a document was composed, whether it was used or not, points to a satanic way of thinking. But the reason that army didn't want this document made public had nothing to do with its diabolical content. Nor did it fear a public storm, which it knew wasn't likely to happen in a country afflicted with blindness. The reason the Israel Defense Forces was reluctant to publicize this document was because it would make Israel look even worse in world opinion than it already does. It's a matter of image, you know; the goyim shouldn't find out. It's not nice for the goyim to know how low Israeli racism could sink. The document details the "model formulated by the Health Ministry - according to average Israeli consumption," and the IDF plan for the Palestinians, whose figures were "adjusted to culture and experience" in Gaza. The IDF, the new "Israel food association," knows how to distinguish between what types of foods enlightened types need, and what the savages and natives need. More fruits and vegetables for the enlightened, more sugar and oil for the savages. Since they are so humane, they took into account "'sampling' by toddlers under the age of 2," by adding another 34 tons of food a day as charity that would save them from death. Though the people at the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories made mathematical calculations, from time to time their resolve weakened: At the end of 2008 they approved the entry of shampoo into Gaza, but not conditioner; hummus, but not pine nuts. Imagine that.
Now that the document has been released, it's time to attach names to it. The government headed by Ehud Olmert was the one that in 2007 decided to restrict the entry of goods into Gaza even further."


And you say that Gaza is not occupied. FFS

[seafoid]

http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2012-10-24/israels-formula-for-a-starvation-diet/

Who can doubt – given the experiences of Gaza over the past few years – that there exist in the Israeli military's archives other, still-classified documents setting out similar experiments in social engineering? Will future historians reveal that Israeli officials also pondered the fewest hours of electricity Gazans needed to survive, or the minimum amount of water, or the smallest living space per family, or the highest feasible levels of unemployment?
Such formulas presumably lay behind:

* the decision to bomb Gaza's only power station in 2006 and subsequently to block its proper repair;
* the refusal to approve a desalination plant, the only way to prevent overdrilling contaminating the Strip's underground water supply;
* the declaration of large swaths of farmland no-go areas, forcing the rural population into the already overcrowded cities and refugee camps;
* and the continuing blockade on exports, decimating Gaza's business community and ensuring the population remains dependent on aid.
It is precisely these policies by Israel that led the United Nations to warn in August that Gaza would be "uninhabitable" by 2020.

In fact, the rationale for the Red Lines document and these other measures can be found in a military strategy that found its apotheosis in Operation Cast Lead, the savage attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09.
The Dahiya doctrine was Israel's attempt to update its traditional military deterrence principle to cope with a changing Middle East, one in which the main challenge it faced was from asymmetrical warfare. The name Dahiya derives from a neighbourhood of Beirut Israel levelled in its 2006 attack on Lebanon.

This "security concept", as the Israeli army termed it, involves the wholesale destruction of a community's infrastructure to immerse it so deeply in the problems of survival and reconstruction that other concerns, including fighting back or resisting occupation, are no longer practicable.

[stew]

It shows that things are so bad that they have the ready cash to splash on iphones. But they claim to be starving.

How many calories are in an iphone?

They might have bought them second hand!

Maybe the people in Gaza should exist only to eat, maybe they do't deserve to know that the world's government, the UN Nato and their fellow members of their faith have failed them, God forbid they get the opportunity to know what's going on in the world!

[Ball DeBeaver]

It shows that things are so bad that they have the ready cash to splash on iphones. But they claim to be starving.

How many calories are in an iphone?

They might have bought them second hand!

Maybe the people in Gaza should exist only to eat, maybe they do't deserve to know that the world's government, the UN Nato and their fellow members of their faith have failed them, God forbid they get the opportunity to know what's going on in the world!

If you had read the thread you would have remembered that the phones were being bought before their official release date (at an obviously increased price) and not at some car boot sale. When are those of you that support the palestinian cause going to realise that you are being lied to? Have you not seen the pictures fron independent sources that show brand new shopping complexes, 5* hotels, bars, restaurants and amusement parks springing up all over Gaza? How can any human being complain about being forcibly starved, and yet have enough to by luxuries? Trying to to compare their right to know what's going on in the world to their "starvation", is bizzare in the extreme.

[Ball DeBeaver]

UN Cancels Gaza Marathon Over Discriminatory Women Policy

Gaza's third international marathon has been cancelled after Hamas refused to allow women to participate.


AAFont Size
By Rachel Hirshfeld
First Publish: 3/5/2013, 4:32 PM




2011 marathon in Gaza

AFP file


Gaza's third international marathon has been cancelled after Hamas refused to allow women to run, the UN agency for "Palestinian" refugees said on Tuesday.

UNRWA officials said more than 800 people, nearly half of them women, had signed up to participate in this year's race, which runs the entire length of the coastal territory and was to have taken place on April 10.

"UNRWA regrets to announce that it has had to cancel the third UNRWA marathon which was to be held on 10 April," a statement said, according to the AFP news agency.

"This disappointing decision follows discussions with the authorities in Gaza who have insisted that no women should participate."

While Israel faces ongoing accusations of "apartheid" and allegations of implementing discriminatory polices, the real perpetrators of such crimes are the Arab regimes and terrorist organizations like Hamas.

In fact, the PLO last week called for runners and sponsors of the 2013 Jerusalem Marathon to boycott the race, claiming support implies acceptance of Israel's "illegal annexation" of eastern Jerusalem.

UNRWA officials said 807 people had entered this year's race -- 551 locals and 256 international runners. Of that number, 385 are female -- 266 from Gaza and 119 from overseas.

Another 1,600 schoolchildren, girls and boys, were also to have joined the race.

UNRWA spokesman Adnan Abu Hasna told AFP that the decision to cancel was taken after the ruling Islamist movement refused to back down over the issue of women and men running together.

"Hamas refused to let women participate in this very important marathon. They told us about this condition several days ago and we went into long negotiations but we failed," he said.

"They pushed us to cancel the marathon and I'm very sorry because it is a very important event for Palestinian refugees."

Two international women runners participated in the first Gaza marathon in 2011, alongside hundreds of women and schoolgirls who joined the relay race or walked part of it, with more joining last year.

"Hamas claims that women have never been allowed to run, which is not true, then they decided that only local women could run. Then they decided not to let any women participate," a diplomatic source in Gaza told AFP.

A senior Hamas official confirmed the ban on women runners but expressed regret that UNRWA had cancelled the entire event.

"We regret this decision to cancel the marathon but we don't want men and women running together," said Abdessalam Siyyam, cabinet secretary of the Hamas government.

"We did not tell UNRWA to cancel the marathon and we haven't prevented it, but we laid down some conditions: We don't want women and men mixing in the same place," he told the news agency, citing Islamic law and traditions.

"We don't want any women running uncovered," he added, indicating the ban was only in place for female runners aged 16 and over.

UNRWA said it was working on an alternative program of events for those who had signed up for the race, which would have seen entrants running either the full 42-kilometre (26-mile) marathon, the half marathon or a 10-kilometre dash.

"UNRWA sincerely regrets the inconvenience this causes those who planned to participate in the marathon," the agency said.


http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/165900