Gaza

NOVANEWS Egyptian-international coalition to enter Gaza Strip via Rafah Border Crossing with ten tons of building materials   by Adam Morrow     CAIRO (March 22, 2011) – The Egyptian-International Coalition for Lifting the Siege and Rebuilding Gaza, an informal grouping of concerned Egyptian citizens and foreign nationals, has announced plans to deliver several tons of building supplies and raw materials to the neighboring Gaza Strip via Egypt’s Rafah Border Crossing on March 24, 2011. The move comes following the successful outcome of the coalition’s earlier March 6 campaign, when it passed into the strip through the Rafah crossing with a single, symbolic 50kg bag of cement. “Thanks largely to the warm cooperation and support we received from the Egyptian Armed Forces a...

NOVANEWS   by crescentandcross     Vilna’i says “only a matter of time until we clash with Hamas again”; IDF strikes Grad launcher; ’5 Gazan terrorists killed overnight.’ Vice Premier Silvan Shalom on Wednesday said the situation in Gaza was reminiscent of the run-upOperation Cast Lead in 2009. Three Grad rockets, several Kassam rockets and dozens of mortar shells have been fired into Israeli territory in recent days. “We may have to consider a return to that operation,” Shalom told Israel Radio. “I say this despite the fact that I know such a thing would, of course, bring the region to a far more combustible situation.” Mid-morning on Wednesday, the IDF struck a rocket launching cell in the northern Gaza Strip that it said was responsible for a Grad attack on Ashdod ...

NOVANEWS   by crescentandcross     Palestinians mourn in Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, after Zio-Nazi tank fire struck a home March 22, 2011. At least five Palestinians, including four children, have been killed and 20 wounded after an Zio-Nazi tank fired shots at a home in the Gaza Strip, medics reported. Adham Abu Selmiya an emergency services spokesman said the deaths occurred when Israel “opened fire on young people who were playing football in Shejaiya on the eastern outskirts of Gaza City. Israel regularly carries out attacks on Gaza, killing and injuring Palestinians. Tel Aviv launched a deadly war on the strip at the turn of 2009. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed during the three-week Zio-Nazi land, sea and air offensive in the impoverished coas...

NOVANEWS   I am sorry that I have not mentioned yet that my brave friends in Palestine are erupting. The virus of revolt has spread to Gaza City. And thank god. Apparently on Tuesday the 15 there was a Day of Rage – thousands of young Palestinians spilled out into the street, mobilizing in Omar al-Mokhtar Street in Gaza City and then moving on to Al-Kitaaba Square. There, by most accounts, there was almost no showing of the Fateh yellow, but Hamas security forces responded the way Hamas security forces have been responding to internal social mobilization for some time now – with the bludgeon. I heard that one friend – a 21-year-old girl – was beaten. There were doubtless scores if not hundreds of beatings that I did not hear about. I have heard rumors that another man was beaten so...

by Joe Fallisi Editor’s note–my dear friend Joe in Italy has asked me to post this open letter to another dear friend, Ken O’Keefe. Dear Ken, my friend, my brother. We met last time at Shawa Theatre in Gaza, before my third concert there, two months ago. You know how much I love the cause of a free (and happy) Palestine and how just in the Strip of Martyrs I have my best friends, even my true family. Till the last breath of my life I’ll go on in this fight for truth and justice. You know also how much I admired you not only for your behavior during our common adventure, last year, on the Freedom Flotilla, but also, and even more, for how you were able to defend the truth about what really happened during the murderous assault by Zionist predators – I remember, for instance, your grea...

NOVANEWS   By Richard Lightbown Richard Lightbown argues that Israel’s use of depleted uranium, white phosphorus and other toxic metals in its war on the people of the Gaza Strip has put the whole of the Strip’s population and its environment – air, soil, groundwater and possibly seawater – at risk of serious long-term injury and contamination. Press TV on 4 March 2011 reported that cancer cases in Gaza had increased by 30 per cent, and that there was a link between the occurrence of the disease and residence in areas that had been badly hit by Israeli bombing. Zekra Ajour from the Al-Dameer Association for Human Rights told the channel that Gaza had been a testing ground for illegal weapons. Birth defects   On 20 December 2009 Al-Dameer had published another paper in Arabic on...

NOVANEWS How to lift the closure of Gaza in three easy steps More Recent Articles Search The Only Democracy?   From Gisha’s Gaza Gateway, what it would actually take to end just the closure of Gaza, although not the entire Occupation.   Image from Gisha's photo report one year ago   Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister said last week that the continued smuggling of weapons into the Gaza Strip threatens further implementation of the “easing” of the closure. Israel of course has the right to prevent the passage of arms shipments (as it did this week at sea). But why weapons smuggling should prevent easing the closure is not entirely clear, as we (and 1.5 million residents of Gaza!) are asking that civilians and civilian goods b...

Something I frequently reflect on from my time living in Gaza were a couple conversations I had with left-wing friends. When discussing armed resistance, they’d say that they abhorred any attacks on civilians, even though Israel freely massacres Palestinian civilians. What they were saying was that they had no desire to sink to the abyss in which their oppressors resided. There is something about those remarks that moves me and humbles me: their piquancy, perhaps, their nobility, a feeling that manifested in a different way when I read about children in Nil’in studying the shoah. Those recollections came to my mind as I read Dimi Reider’s short polemic, “The entire activist Left must condemn the murder of the settler family.” He recounts a recent incident in which a “Palestinian” “milit...

NOVANEWS By: Eman Motawi   “She just falls near me and a big whole of bleed surrounds her “, me, I couldn’t even shout and I didn’t imagine that one day I will just lose my mama. We get out of our home as the Israeli soldiers ordered us and we used our white clothes as a flag. we were just a group of women, old men, daughters and children but as we are walking together step by step and me, the daughter of 17 years old, I staked to my mama, the only close person I have in the world ….she was looking to me in eyes as usual, using just her own way to say ‘’don’t worry every thing will be just all right’, but Israeli invaded solders didn’t let our moment to continue.. A bullet in a head end the life of my precious mother and me I was prevented even to huge her hand..to close her eyes ..to...

NOVANEWS Gilad Atzmon     “Even the Israelis in Gaza, when they moved into the Gaza Strip, they moved in with tanks to fight such extremists. It’s the same thing here” Muammar Gaddafi (France 24) In the last few days the UN have paved the way for a no-fly zone in Libya. David Cameron and Barack Obama have also agreed to draw up “the full spectrum” of military responses to the crisis in Libya. British PM David Cameron outlined his conversation with Obama, saying “We have got to prepare for what we might have to do if he [Gaddafi] goes on brutalising his own people…” I find myself overwhelmed by Cameron’s humanist stand – it seems he really cares about the Libyan people. And yet, I am left puzzled, for I have never observed Cameron, Obama or the UN being so touched in the sam...