We All Fall Down
Joe QuinnSigns of the Times
Thu, 01 Mar 2007 10:34 EST
An innocent blindfolded Palestinian woman sits detained inside an Israeli army jeep in the West Bank city of al-Khalil (Hebron)Few people in our technologically developed, yet morally bankrupt Western world possess even a basic understanding of just how horrible life in the Israeli occupied Palestinian territories is. Gaza is a small strip of land about 7 miles wide by 30 miles long. It is completely fenced in by the Israeli military, with the vast majority of its 1.5 million Palestinian inhabitants (making it one of the most densely populated areas in the world) denied the right to leave. Ever.
It is not surprising then that the Gaza strip has been compared to a giant open-air prison, because that is exactly what it is. In fact, there is a more exact phrase to describe urban areas like Gaza that have been turned into prisons for the inhabitants, it is a phrase that was made famous during the Second World War - 'Concentration Camp'.
Similar to the concentration camps in WWII, the inmates of the Gaza strip are often summarily shot in cold blood, by the Israeli camp guards, for no reason other than to "maintain order" in a pre-emptive way. Sometimes entire families are massacred and Palestinian houses are regularly demolished by Israeli tanks for the same reason. Gaza fishermen, desperate to make a little money risk coming under fire from bored Israeli gunboat captains by putting out to sea. Curfews are imposed as Israeli tanks rumble along the tattered streets of the Gaza strip, firing indiscriminately at nothing and everything, sometimes they kill something, sometimes not. Soon after every such incursion, news wires dutifully disseminate the Israeli military's version of events, you may have heard them before:
"during an operation to root out members of (insert name of Palestinian resistance group) in the Gaza strip, the Israeli military returned fire when they were shot at by Palestinian terrorists".
read more...
Labels: Israeli +occupied+ Palestinian+ Gaza
posted by ... @ 8:40 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home