The carnage at the beach:Terrorism Zionist style [Archives:2006/956/Opinion]
Hassan Al-Haifi
The video shots of the young girl at the Gaza beach after Israeli naval shelling on Friday, June 9, 2006, has annihilated all her family, as she was running from corpse to corpse of her brutally murdered kin defies explanation and only goes to confirm that the Zionist agenda in the Holy Land has no room for crying children or picnicking innocents trying to escape the starvation diets they have been put on by the their occupier with the blessing of the international community. There you have it, seven members of one family by a barrage of 155 mm shells lobbed by the very vessels that could plainly see that there were no fortifications or armed groups mulling around the beach. No, this was no accident and anyone who believes that must be gullible to the Zionist logic that the only good Palestinian is a dead one! In Palestine, death comes in many ways and the Zionist state will take every opportunity to make any reduction it can to the Palestinian population and will use any pretext to unleash its deadly arsenal of death against the helpless Palestinians. There is the pilot-less drones that drop their deadly missiles on the crowded streets, supposedly targeting what the Israelis call suspected “terrorists”, there are the tanks, the caterpillars, the snipers and all sorts of killing tools, not to mention the dehumanizing slow death of economic disruption and decay of sanitation and health services.
It is really phenomenal that in Palestine, victims of a systematic terror campaign that has been ongoing since the First Half of the Last Century, are the “terrorists” and the plunderers who have removed them from their indigenous homeland for generations, have killed thousands along the way as the Zionist dream is pursued to become an ungodly reality that no human conscience should ever be allowed to consume. What terror could come out of the Palestinians when they are homeless, armless, stateless and living on the brink of starvation, while their opponent occupies what remains of their diminishing land and controls everything needed to sustain life for the occupied? Yes, their opponent has all the tools of terror under his disposal including the terror of deprivation – the terror of slow death. What kind of terror is that one might ask. It is the terror that says that the only water you can drink is the poisonous water that your occupier will only allow you to have. It is the terror that brings trauma to 99% of the children of the West Bank and Gaza, who are under the mercy of random Israeli shellings and bombings that have taken the lives of thousands of their kin and fellow Palestinians in their sleep, in the beach, on the way to work or to school. Yes hundreds of children have been the victims of this ugly terrorism unleashed by the Zionist state and the tragic wails of the Gaza girl, seen throughout the world is only a very small part of a much larger scene of tragedy as an entire homogenous people are put to a slow and agonizing death, scientifically fine tuned and pictured as a glorious war of Jewish nationalism revived and blessed by the only nation in the world that can do something to halt this horrible modern tragedy, which is unfolding in the eyes of the world night and day.
John Pilger (http://www.newstatesman.com/200606190029) aptly describes this ugly form of state terror below:
“For the Palestinians, a war against their children is hardly new. A 2004 field study published in the British Medical Journal reported that, in the previous four years, “Two-thirds of the 621 children . . . killed [by the Israelis] at checkpoints . . . on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half the cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper's wound.” A quarter of Palestinian infants under the age of five are acutely or chronically malnourished. The Israeli wall “will isolate 97 primary health clinics and 11 hospitals from the populations they serve.”
The study described “a man in a now fenced-in village near Qalqilya [who] approached the gate with his seriously ill daughter in his arms and begged the soldiers on duty to let him pass so that he could take her to hospital. The soldiers refused.”
Gaza, now sealed like an open prison and terrorized by the sonic boom of Israeli fighter aircraft, has a population of which almost half is under 15. Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children's community health project, told me, “The statistic I personally find unbearable is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma . . . 99.2 per cent had their homes bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shooting; a third saw family members or neighbours injured or killed.”
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[archive-e:956-v:14-y:2006-d:2006-06-19-p:opinion]
