GAZA CITY — An Israeli bomb pummeled a home deep into the ground here Sunday afternoon, killing 11 people, including nine in three generations of a single family, in the deadliest single strike since the cross-border conflict between Israel and the militant faction Hamas escalated on Wednesday.
In Gaza City, the body of a young boy was recovered after a blast on Sunday. The attack further indicated that Israel was striking a wider range of targets.
The airstrike, along with several others that killed civilians across this coastal territory and hit two media offices here — one of them used by Western TV networks — further indicated that Israel was striking a wider range of targets.
Gaza health officials reported that the number of people injured here had nearly doubled to 600 by day’s end; the Palestinian death toll climbed to 70, including 20 children. Three Israelis have been killed and at least 79 wounded by continued rocket fire into southern Israel and as far north as Tel Aviv, as Israeli cities were paralyzed by an onslaught of relentless rocket fire out of Gaza for the fifth straight day.
In the Israeli strike on Sunday morning, it took emergency workers and a Caterpillar digger more than an hour to reveal the extent of the devastation under the two-story home of Jamal Dalu, a shop owner. Mr. Dalu was at a neighbor’s when the blast wiped out nearly his entire family: His sister, wife, two daughters, daughter-in-law and four grandchildren ages 2 to 6 all perished under the rubble, along with two neighbors, an 18-year-old and his grandmother.
“We were asleep and then there was a terrific blast,” said Abdul-Latif Dahman, who lives nearby and was among more than 100 who stood vigil as the bodies were dug out. “There are no words to describe what happened later, only smoke and dust and heavy silence because the sound shut our ears.”
The smell of bomb residue and the roars of bulldozers filled the air as people clambered over shattered glass and bent iron bars to get a closer look. When two tiny bodies were finally found, rescuers and residents erupted in cries of “God is great!” One worker rushed the girl to an ambulance, while a neighbor grabbed the boy and just ran.
Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister of the militant Hamas faction that rules Gaza, condemned the attack as a “massacre” that “exceeded all expectations.”
Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, chief spokesman for the Israeli military, said it was “examining the event.”
“The wanted target in this case was responsible for firing dozens of rockets into Israel,” he added. “I do not know what happened to him, but I do know that we are committed to the safety of the citizens of Israel.”
Momentarily lulled by a quiet night, Israelis awoke Sunday to a new blitz of Palestinian rockets that totaled nearly 100 by nightfall, including two that soared toward the population center of Tel Aviv but were knocked out of the sky by the so-called Iron Dome missile defense system.
One rocket crashed through the roof of an apartment building in Ashkelon, a few miles up the coast from Gaza, where residents escaped serious injury because they had heeded the warning siren and run to lower floors. Four people were injured, two of them seriously, when a rocket exploded near their car in Ofakim, and a firefighter in Nachal Oz was seriously hurt by shrapnel.
A barrage of 10 missiles rained on Ashdod; nine were intercepted and the 10th hit an eight-story building but did not explode, heightening fears as residents were told to remain inside.
The whole region was paralyzed as people huddled in bomb shelters, where many have been spending the night. Malls were closed; few walked in the street.
“I am the kind of person that always checks where the bathrooms and the exits are,” said Carol Erdheim, a psychologist who lives in Ashdod and works in Ashkelon. “Now you look for where the safe room is. You just know what to do. It is a way of living.”
In Beersheba, an Israeli city of about 200,000 east of Gaza, Tal Rotem, a musician and father of three, said his family had not been leaving the house, “not even to shop.” A reservist in the Army’s southern command, Mr. Rotem is one of those on standby.
“My 5-year-old, Ori, said he did not want me to go because I could die,” Mr. Rotem said.
Sharon Galili, a lawyer who has 3-year-old twins and a 5-year-old, drove to his office in Ashdod but after 90 minutes and four or five rocket alerts sent his staff home and returned to his family in the village of Aseret.
“The children are terrified,” he said. “Every noise they hear — a truck or motorcycle — they ask if there is an alert. You feel their fear. We are not right-wing or left-wing; we just want quiet. The situation is surrealistic, but that is the reality we live in.”
There are no warning sirens here in the Gaza Strip, where the wee hours of Sunday were punctuated by airstrikes as well as by a series of missiles fired from Israeli Navy vessels off the coast.
Later in the morning, Mutassim Essifan, 5, and his 1-year-old sister, Jumana, were killed in the Jabiliya Refugee Camp near the northern border, followed by another baby in the Al Buraj Refugee Camp mid-strip and, by lunchtime, a 52-year-old woman in the eastern part of Gaza City. Ahmed Al-Nahal, 24, a member of Hamas’s military wing, and his relative Tasnim, 8, were killed before lunchtime in the Beach Refugee Camp, where Prime Minister Haniyeh lives.
Among the buildings Israel hit overnight were two containing the offices of local media outlets, in what the military described as an attempt to derail Hamas communications. The Israeli Air Force also briefly took control of Hamas’s radio network Sunday, broadcasting a message to Gaza residents. “Hamas is playing with fire and risking you,” it warned. “We recommend that you stay away from the places of terrorists and the infrastructure of Hamas.”
Ayman Amar, a spokesman for Al Quds television, said seven camera operators and editors were resting on couches in their 11th-floor offices in the Shawa and Hossari building in downtown Gaza City when a missile from an Israeli helicopter ripped through the roof at 1:30 a.m. All seven were injured, one losing a leg below the knee, Mr. Amar said, but they escaped before three more bombs dropped 10 minutes later.
“This will not deter us from showing the truth to the world,” he declared, as colleagues cleared the rubble. “We will not stop. It is our duty toward our cause to support the Palestinian people.”
Salama Marouf of the Hamas media office called the attack “an immoral massacre against the media,” and the Jerusalem chapter of the Foreign Press Association lodged a protest; several international outlets, including Fox News, Sky News, CBS and Germany’s ARD television, used production studios in the two targeted media buildings.
Israel’s vice prime minister, Moshe Ya’alon, who is in charge of strategic affairs, told reporters that the strike “didn’t intend to target journalists,” and that he had asked the military to investigate. “The attack helicopters were to hit Hamas military antenna — that was the target, not journalists.”

PALESTINE…

IMAGINE…

QUE LA TERREUR S’INSTALLE

CHEZ TOI…
- INNOCENT VICTIMS: CHILDREN AMONG DOZENS KILLED BY ISRAELI AIRSTRIKES
A Palestinian rescue worker carries the body of a child from the al-Dallu family into the hospital in Gaza City.(AFP Photo / Mohammed Abed)
Israeli airstrikes killed seven children and wounded many others in Gaza on Sunday. At least 13 children have been killed since Operation Pillar of Defense began. That number could potentially rise if Israel launches a ground operation on Gaza.
An Israeli missile flattened a three-story house in Gaza City, killing at least 9 civilians – including four children.
Eighteen-month-old Iyyad Abu Khusa was killed in a strike east of the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. His brothers, aged four and five, were seriously wounded in the raid, Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra told AFP.
Hours earlier, two toddlers were killed by strikes in the towns of Beit Hanun and Beit Lahiya. The children were identified as three-year-old Tamer Abu Saeyfan and his one-year-old sister, Jumana Abu Saeyfan.
-
A Palestinian relative of four sibling children of the al-Dalo family, who were killed in an Israeli air strike, reacts as he stands next their bodies at a hospital in Gaza City November 18, 2012. (Reuters / Mohammed Salem)
Thirteen-year-old Tasneem Nahal was also among the children killed. She died of massive shrapnel wounds to the head after an Israeli strike hit a refugee camp in Gaza City.
Several women could be heard screaming and weeping after she was killed, AFP reported.
The tragic deaths of Gazan children killed in Israeli air strikes have angered the Arab and Islamic world.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that sooner or later, Israel would be held accountable for the “massacre.”
The child death toll is expected to rise unless the two sides enter negotiations soon.
“The Israeli military is prepared to significantly expand the operation. The soldiers are ready for any activity that could take place…the Israel Defense Forces have attacked more than 1,000 terror targets in the Gaza Strip and it continues its operation in this very moment,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a weekly cabinet meeting.
-

PALESTINE…

IMAGINE…

QUE LA TERREUR S’INSTALLE

CHEZ TOI…
Palestinians carry the body of Jumana Abu Sefan (L), 18 months, and her brother Tamer, three and a half years old, during their funeral in the village of Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip.(AFP Photo / Mohammed Abed)
- On Friday, Israel called up 75,000 army reservists to prepare for a possible ground operation against Gaza.
“We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages, destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water,” Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai said, as quoted by Yeshiva World News.
The chief of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has ordered the increase of sorties against militants in Gaza.
However, many world leaders believe a ceasefire could be foreseeable in the near future.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius is set to hold talks with Israeli authorities and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas during a one-day trip to the region.
He is expected “to call on all the parties to stop the escalation and offer France’s help to reach an immediate ceasefire,” his ministry said in a statement.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle is expected to arrive in Israel on Monday, to attempt to advance a ceasefire.
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi is pushing for a truce, too.
“There are some indications that there could be a ceasefire soon…but there are no guarantees,” he said in a statement.
An Israeli envoy held talks with Egyptian officials in Cairo earlier Sunday.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will meet with Morsi and other officials in Egypt on Monday, according to the Egyptian Foreign Ministry.
The Arab League has called an emergency meeting on the conflict in Cairo. Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in Cairo is in Egypt for the talks, which aren’t expected to take place before Monday.
-
Palestinian mourners bid farewell to the body of Tasneem al-Nahal, 13, during her funeral in Gaza City.(AFP Photo / Mohammed Abed)
Palestinian mourners pray over the body of 18-month-old Eyad Abu Khosa, killed in the latest Israeli airstrikes, during his funeral in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza Strip.(AFP Photo / Mahmud Hams)

PALESTINE…

IMAGINE…

QUE LA TERREUR S’INSTALLE

CHEZ TOI…
The body of Tasneem al-Nahal, 13, lies in the morgue of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City after she was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Shati refugee camp.(AFP Photo / Marco Longari)
Palestinian relatives of Samaher Gdeeh mourn next to her body during her funeral in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.(Reuters / Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

PALESTINE…

IMAGINE…

QUE LA TERREUR S’INSTALLE

CHEZ TOI…

PRESSTV
World has put up with Zionist apartheid for too long

PALESTINE…

IMAGINE…

QUE LA TERREUR S’INSTALLE

CHEZ TOI…

The body of 18-month-old Palestinian boy Eyad Abu Khosa, killed in the latest Israeli airstrikes, lays on the floor during his funeral in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza Strip on November 18, 2012.
By Finian Cunningham
The massacre of civilians in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine could be stopped right now with one phone call from US President Barack Obama. One phone call telling the Israeli criminals-in-office that the USD 3 billion annual lifeline of economic and military aid from American tax-payers is being terminated would bring this killing machine to a halt.”
Related Interviews:
Israel’s holocaust of innocents in Gaza has not sated the blood lust of its Zionist rulers, with the death toll rising to over 110 and the injured numbering more than a thousand – less than six days after the latest murderous offensive began.
Preparations for a ground offensive involving up to 75,000 troops threaten a repeat of the slaughter carried out by Israel four years ago in Gaza when more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed during a three-week killing orgy.
Then as now, most of the victims are children, their bloodied bodies pulled out from rubble, piled up in morgues; their innocent eyes in a frozen stare at the moment of horror visited on them in their homes.
How can the world tolerate such barbarity? Well, the majority of the world is not tolerating it. Humanity is horrified and aggrieved by these atrocities. All across the world, civic society and a good many governments are mobilizing, condemning Israel’s crimes against humanity.
But the seeming helplessness of the world to put an abrupt end to the holocaust is down to one simple, irrefutable fact. The perpetrators of such evil are supported by the government and ruling class in Washington. In a secondary support role to mass murder are the despicable governments in London, Paris and Berlin. But the ultimate author of this barbarity is Washington.
The massacre of civilians in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine could be stopped right now with one phone call from US President Barack Obama. One phone call telling the Israeli criminals-in-office that the USD 3 billion annual lifeline of economic and military aid from American tax-payers is being terminated would bring this killing machine to a halt.
But there will be no such phone call. Because the Israeli killing machine is an integral part of Washington’s criminal hegemony in the Middle East and beyond. Washington’s imperialist exploitation of other nations’ resources is predicated on its terrorist foreign policy that is embodied by the Zionist regime.
The latter criminal entity cannot be dismantled without first and foremost dismantling the terrorism of Washington, which in turn mandates the overthrow of the American empire of global capitalism.
The blood being spilled, splattered in Gaza is a crime of indelible proportions. It is also a sickening sacrifice that bears important truths about our world.
For a start this criminal entity of Israel is exposed once and for all as an abomination of international law and humanitarian justice. Its continual Holocaust invocation as a carte blanche to commit any atrocity at will and with impunity against Palestinian people and many others is a veil of deception that should now be torn asunder. How dare the terrorists in Tel Aviv forge such a badge of impunity.
This criminal, hypocritical regime of Israel has lost all its claims for legitimacy to exist. For too long, the world has tolerated Zionist apartheid under the cynical cover of “peace process” while Palestinians are robbed off their homeland and their basic material means of existence. This latest onslaught is but the final step over a red line to oblivion; a final step in a long march of atrocities and violations.
To hell with Israel. Through its relentless crimes, Israel has forfeited any right to exist. Those who want to live in peace should do so in the historic land of Palestine. A two-state solution is an affront to international norms and justice. The artificial illegal borders of Israel bequeathed by colonialists and expanded by colonizers should be henceforth rejected and, yes, wiped off the map.
The Western government sponsors of this criminal war machine that is the entity of Israel are exposed in the latest holocaust in Gaza. As condemnations ring out around the world in support of the Palestinians, Washington and its Western allies sit idly, shamelessly, on the UN Security Council.
Both Washington and London cannot bring themselves to utter a word of condemnation against the killing of children and civilians in Gaza. Both pointedly uphold the “right to self-defense” by an Israeli regime that is crushing millions of people under a five-year genocidal siege and which has wiped Palestine off the map for more than six decades.
The United States this week blocked a UN Security Council statement condemning Israel’s violence. US ambassador Susan Rice – who is tipped to become the new foreign secretary replacing Hillary Clinton – used the most twisted logic to say no resolution would be permitted which undermines a ceasefire. However, this nauseating display of hypocrisy is a good thing, for it exposes the cynical, corrupt nature of US government and its Western lackeys.
For months, the US and its Western allies have been denouncing Russia and China for blocking a UN Security Council resolution to sanction the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. Moscow and China have been lambasted for turning a blind eye to violations in Syria – even though much of the violations in that country have been committed by Western-backed mercenaries. All the while, the Western governments have been trumpeting their concern for human rights and international law.
Yet when a clear case of mass murder and human rights violations is now being witnessed in the concentration camp that is Gaza, those same Western governments are silent on the atrocities and the victims. Indeed, they show themselves as the vocal apologists and material supporters of the killers – consistent with what they are actually doing in Syria, despite their fraudulent claims.
Ironically, some commentators claim that the re-election of America’s terrorist-commander-in-chief Barack Obama was a huge snub to Israel’s storm-trooper commandant Benjamin Netanyahu. The claim that the White House and Pentagon global terrorist complex is somehow beholden to Tel Aviv against its better, moral judgment is a dangerous delusion that is now, thankfully, laid bare by the horror unfolding in Gaza and the American government support of that.
To claim that Washington’s nefarious foreign policy is all down to the machinations of Zionist lobbyists and bankers is to fundamentally fail to understand the root cause of violence as a function of the capitalist imperialist system for which the US is the executive power.
The holocaust in Gaza and the sacrifice of innocents spotlights more Western corruption. The Western-dominated United Nations and its puppet general secretary Ban Ki-Moon – also refusing to condemn Israel or to even visit the suffering victims of Gaza – is an organization that is clearly way past is expiry date. This institution under Western control is a disgrace to the vision of a democratic, mutual world.
Its inability to reflect the majority concerns of the world – from the recent overwhelming call by members to put an end to the illegal US six-decade trade embargo on Cuba, to the latest genocide in Gaza – demonstrates beyond any doubt that this world body in its present form must be abolished and replaced with a forum more closely resembling the Non-Aligned Movement.
The holocaust in Gaza also exposes the moral cowardice and bankruptcy of Western mainstream media. These institutions through their sanitizing banalities and affectations of balance are complicit in covering up crimes against humanity, and by doing so prolonging the genocide committed by Western governments and their Israeli war machine.
Voice of America reports how “Israel and Hamas are slugging it out”. The BBC decries how “civilians in Israel and Gaza need a ceasefire”. Reuters reports: “Israel bombed dozens of suspected militant sites in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip… as Palestinians kept up their cross-border rocket fire.” While the New York Times lamented: “Israel and Hamas brushed aside international calls for restraint and escalated their lethal conflict over Gaza.”
Finally, what the Gaza holocaust highlights is the corruption and illegitimacy of Arab leaders. Hezbollah’s secretary general Sayed Hassan Nasrallah has rightly called on the oil-rich Arab rulers to use the world’s number-one commodity as a weapon to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians and to protest Western-backed Israeli aggression.
But as with so many previous occasions of crimes against humanity on the Palestinians and other Arab people, the venal, corrupt dictators of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Persian Gulf remain shamefully indolent and silent. They are congenitally on the side of the oppressors. These despots are too busy supplying weapons and funding to mercenaries to kill other Arabs in Syria. So is it any wonder that they are indifferent to the murder of Arab women and children in Gaza?
There will be a day of reckoning for the crimes in Gaza. That day is soon arriving.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream news media, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring. He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme.
Hello there I am so grateful I found your
web site, I really found you by error, while I was searching on Yahoo
for something else, Regardless I am here now and would
just like to say thanks a lot for a tremendous post and a all
round thrilling blog (I also love the theme/design), I don’t have time to browse it all at the minute but I have saved it
and also included your RSS feeds, so when I have time I will be back to read much more,
Please do keep up the superb work.