Gaza is Dying
"Gaza is a jail. Nobody is allowed to leave. We are all starving now."

Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq. A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets. Many people are being killed by Israeli incursions that occur every day by land and air. A total of 262 people have been killed and 1,200 wounded, of whom 60 had arms or legs amputated, since 25 June, says Dr Juma al-Saqa, the director of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which is fast running out of medicine. Of these, 64 were children and 26 women. This bloody conflict in Gaza has so far received only a fraction of the attention given by the international media to the war in Lebanon.

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Palestine: casualties and open thread
by Helena Cobban

Here is the weekly summary that the Palestinian Center for Human Rights produced for the period 17-23 August, 2006, cataloguing major rights abuses inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israeli Occupation Forces in (and around) Gaza and the West Bank. During the week, as PCHR reports, 30 Palestinians, including 3 children, a mentally disabled young man and a woman, were killed by IOF. The 30 included two who died during the week from wounds previously inflicted by the IOF. The report added: the number of Palestinians killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip since 25 June 2006 has increased to 217, including 46 children and 12 women. In addition, 755 others, mostly civilians, including 203 children, 28 women, 4 paramedics and 6 journalists, have been wounded. Figures available from the "Statistics" page on B'tselem's website (click through the links in that first table there, and look down the right sidebar on the pages that up) tell us that from January1 through July 31, 2006, a total of 15 Israeli civilians and 3 Israeli security forces personnel were killed by Palestinians... while the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces in the OPTs and in Israel in the same period was 346.

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Murder on Rucarb Street
The Worst Kind of Terror

It is only now that the gun-fire saluting the killed young man has become sporadic and no longer constant, and that the verses of the Koran, chanted in farewell to him, has ceased. But the streets are full; and full too are the hearts of all who had to witness an attack that should only have been imaginable in the darkest back alleys of some underworld city. At 9 pm, the 28th, undercover Israeli Special Forces walked down the main street of Ramallah. They wore civilian clothes and Palestinian police-caps. They carried M-16s as all the police force does. No one looked at them twice. They walked straight past us where we stood at Al-Minara discussing work with a third colleague. They walked straight passed the Palestinian Police Force as well who is always stationed there. They continued walking straight down Rucarb Street until they were opposite the famous Rucarb Ice-cream shop where families gather every evening in the summertime. Then they opened fire.

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