by Damozel | Now that Israel has "met its war aims" and the two sides have agreed to a one-week ceasefire, the BBC has a video and an update on the post-war humanitarian crisis.
UN official John Ging said half a million people had been without water since the conflict began, and huge numbers of people were without power.
Four thousand homes are ruined and tens of thousands of people are homeless....At least 1,300 Palestinians, according to Palestinian sources, and 13 Israelis have been killed since Israel launched its offensive on 27 December. Palestinian medical sources say at least 95 bodies have been pulled from the rubble since Israel halted its assault.(BBC 1-19-2008; memeorandum)
Ging --- who is director of operations for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa)---says the biggest problem right now is getting basic supplies into Gaza.
The New York Times adds:
One BBC reporter, reporting some of the individual horror stories, comments:
Many simply turned round and returned to the UN-run schools they fled to amid the fighting. (BBC News 1-18-2008)
A relief work in southern Gaza city told the BBC:
"The conditions here are catastrophic. People can go back to their homes, but so many of them are destroyed. And we're back to the old issue of shortages caused by the Israeli siege of Gaza.
"I went to the Shifa hospital yesterday. I saw so many bodies and injured people.
"One doctor told me how he had had to amputate a child's leg in a hospital corridor because all the operation rooms were full. Hundreds of people: men, women and children have lost limbs."(BBC Gaza Voices)
Israeli spokesman Mark Regev stoutly declared that Israel is even now preparing to open the borders for humanitarian aid.
"We are going to see a massive volume of aid entering the Gaza Strip," he told the BBC...."Medicines, foodstuffs, energy, all will be reaching the Gaza Strip in the volume that is required and in an expeditious manner.".(BBC 1-19-2008)
Israel also vows that it intends to pull out its troops as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he wanted troops to leave as quickly as possible, and some have already left.
The BBC's Christian Fraser, on the road from Rafah in the south to Gaza City in the north, says the troops are pulling out fast.(BBC 1-19-2008)
The BBC piece provides the following (current) tally:
A BBC article gives a harrowing account of the experiences of one 15 year old girl, Amira al-Girim, who --- unlike her father and her brother --- survived shelling by the Israelis:
She was found alone, bleeding in a house, about four days after she saw her father killed by an Israeli tank shell in front of her.
Her brother and sister died - she thinks in an air strike - as they ran to get help.
Her remaining family thought she too had died, and had already buried the scraps of flesh they thought were her remains in a box.
Tears run down her face, as she describes in a weak voice punctuated with sobs, waiting stranded after an Israeli tank shell killed her father and his friend.
"I looked outside, I found my father's car crushed, and his legs cut off. The floor was covered with blood from my leg."
By the time she was found - she is not sure if it was three or four days later - she hardly knew her own name. But she remembers details.
"I got a glass of water, I wanted to fill it with water from the tap, but it fell down on the floor, and then there was blood all over the glass so I couldn't use it. I waited a bit and then I drank directly from the tap.
She says she wanted to leave, but her father was lying across the door.
"I didn't want to step on him in case I hurt him."
She says she slept in the street for two days, but then found her way into another house.
She had struggled some 500m with a badly broken, bleeding leg, in search of shelter as fighting raged nearby.
ABC producer Sami Ziyara, who found Amira with his colleague Imad, said doctors told him she had only a few hours left to live at the point they found her in Imad's house...."Amira is traumatised. She will need treatment forever. Even if they do everything for her, she will never ever be like she was before," he said. (BBC News 1-18-2008)
So what did Israel gain from all this? Is Hamas weakened? According to the BBC, Hamas fighters are still strutting confidently among the wreckage with rifles slung on their shoulders. Well, they're strutting confidently now. Prior to the ceasefire, they pursued a different strategy.The New York Times says:
Israeli officials themselves said Sunday in briefings to the cabinet that even though Hamas institutions had been badly damaged, its militants might well keep shooting rockets just to prove otherwise. The chief of military intelligence, Amos Yadlin, asserted that even Hamas had to figure out how badly it had been harmed.
[T]he actual damage to Hamas appears to have been limited partly because it acted so cautiously. There is irony in this, that Israel, the state with the well-trained army, wildly pressed the attack, while Hamas, the Islamist militia that supposedly embraces death, shied from the fight.
The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: “baal habayit hishtageya,” or “the boss has lost it.” It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.
“This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser...
“The regime will be under pressure to stop the violence and will be careful not to repeat this experience again,” he said. “Due to the terrible devastation on the ground, there will be a lot of political pressure.”It certainly seems that Amira al-Girim and her mom got the message. Jeremy Bowen, the
The BBC's Middle East editor, doesn't think that any gain to Israel will outweigh the ultimate consequences of the damage it has inflicted:
Israel says that its troops can stop because they have broken the Hamas military wing and sent a message to all the country's enemies that they should be scared, very scared, about what the Israeli army could do to them.
But at what cost? At least 1600 people, displaced from their homes, were sheltering in a UN school in Gaza this morning when it took a direct hit from an Israel shell. Two young brothers, aged five and seven, were killed.
John Ging, who runs UN refugee operations in Gaza was there soon after the attack, demanding an investigation into whether Israel had broken the laws of war. He said the two boys were indisputably innocent.
After inflicting so much pain and death, Israel still says that Gaza's civilians are not its enemy. That is something that Gazans - and millions of others in this part of the world - do not believe.
Meanwhile, Hamas's strategy seems to have preserved a substantial number of its adherents:Those who know Hamas in Gaza say this was carefully calculated.
“In previous times, the fighters would confront and throw themselves at Israeli attacks,” said one man close to Hamas who declined to be identified further. “It was a kind of suicide. It was love of martyrdom. You go and confront the tanks and many were killed, 80 in a few days.”
Even some Israeli military officials were impressed.
Students of human nature might question Israel's theory about how these attacks would make the Gazans blame Hamas instead of, you know, Israel. Hamas is banking on that. And even its rival, Fatah, is skeptical that the outcome will be rage at Hamas rather than Israel.
When Hamas’s prime minister, Ismail Haniya, appeared on Hamas television from his hiding spot last Monday, he picked up on the Israeli archetype, referring in Arabic to the battle under way as “el harb el majnouna,” the mad or crazy war.
For most, of course, feeling abused like this has created deep rage at Israel.
“If you want to make peace with the Palestinians, they are tired of bombs, drones and planes,” said Mohammad Abu Muhaisin, a 35-year-old resident of the southern city of Rafah who is affiliated with Fatah, the rival to Hamas that rules in the West Bank and was ejected from Gaza in June 2007. “But a guy whose child has just been killed doesn’t want peace. He wants war.” (NYT)
Certainly some Palestinians are directing all their outrage at Israel. In southern Gaza city, relief worker Amjad Shawa told the BBC:There is no victory here. The main losers are the Palestinian civilians. A victory for me would be to get the Israeli criminals to court.
The issue is not Hamas. This military operation was against the Palestinian people. Today Hamas said that just 48 of them have been killed.
I don't need to believe Hamas, I can see facts with my own eyes in the hospitals.(BBC Gaza Voices)
Halima Dardouna, 37, from the northern city of Jabaliya, whose house was destroyed by an Israeli shell, said both Fatah and Hamas were to blame because of their rivalry, “and we are the victims.”
She added, “I will never vote for Hamas. They are not able to protect the people, and if they are going to bring this on us, why should they be in power? If I thought they could liberate Jerusalem, I would be patient. But instead they bring this.” (NYT)
Three Palestinians spoke to the BBC about current attitudes of Gazans toward both Hamas and Israel.Ahmed, speaking from a refugee camp said:
What's the point of making enemies with Israel? Israeli people can be good, we can live with them. But the amount of hatred here in Gaza, both for Israel and for Hamas... yes, hatred for both. You can feel it.
My family is divided over who to blame for this. My mother blames Israel for responding so harshly. The other members of my family blame Hamas for all this. But these views are for indoors only, no one must hear them outside.
When someone speaks out, Hamas are afraid, so they shut him up using force...A couple of days ago they shot someone in the legs here in Nuseirat camp, after he made jokes about the Hamas interior minister, Said Siyam being killed in a strike. Fatah people especially hated him.
Hamas has its spies who overheard him and they told the head of the intelligence services!
After they shot his legs, the man was shouting 'God bless Hamas!', so they wouldn't kill him. They left him bleeding in the street in the dark, and people only rescued him after the gunmen had gone (BBC Gaza Voices)
Relief worker Amjad Shawa would beg to differ:
I'm not afraid to talk about Hamas. Last year we [the non-governmental organisation] took a position criticising Hamas for violating human rights. We oppose any violation, whether it's from Hamas or anyone else, we do not keep silent...
I am not a Hamas supporter, I didn't vote for them. I am completely independent. I support what gives us unity and what serves the people as a whole. We need unity. Hamas alone in Gaza and Fatah alone in the West Bank - is not going to work. (BBC Gaza Voices).
Muhammed, in Central Gaza city, also blames Israel rather than Hamas:Of course I don't blame Hamas, because what was happening to all of us was also happening to them. They were among us, they did not hide.
Hamas did their best to defend the Gaza Strip. If I could thank them, I would. They were fighting face-to-face with the Israeli army. They put themselves in danger.
No, I don't think Hamas put us in danger. Israel was attacking us and killing us, even when all we were doing was throwing stones. They don't want us to defend ourselves.(BBC Gaza Voices)
You can read contrasting media statements about the war here.
It seems unlikely based on what we're hearing now that this is the end of the strife in Gaza.Shlomo Brom, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University and a retired brigadier general, said it was wrong to consider Hamas a group of irrational fanatics.
“I have always said that Hamas is a very rational political movement,” he said. “When they use suicide bombings, for example, it is done very consciously, based on calculations of the effectiveness of these means. You see, both sides understand the value of calculated madness. That is one reason I don’t see an early end to this ongoing war.” (NYT)
And in fact, Hamas says it intends to go on fighting. (Jeremy Bowen)More commentary at Memeorandum....
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Calculated Greenhouse Madness? As important as the Israeli Army's September,2005 withdrawal was to Israel itself, that disengagement from Gaza also presented both an opportunity and a test for the long-fledgling Palestinian Authority to prove itself a viable, responsible governing body. On this measure it has failed miserably.
Evidence of this failure has been apparent from the start, and is at the root of a multitude of mini-crises that have plagued the Palestinian polity since the withdrawal. To name but one is the fate of the greenhouses in Gaza. In an effort to provide the moribund Palestinian economy some vitality, a group of American philanthropists - mostly Jews - bought the greenhouses from the departing settlers for $14-million. They then donated the greenhouses and the 790 acres of sand dunes the settlers had turned into fertile farmland to the 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.
The promise of this national rehabilitation project have been dashed by widespread looting, attacks from Palestinians militant groups seeking to claim the territory and, of course, the on-going, rocket-firing attempts to re-provoke war with Israel.
Posted by: flowerplough | January 21, 2009 at 11:52 AM