Breaking news: Israel plans to invade gaza officialy now

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Another update on the situation in Gaza. From British perspective.

BBC intensifies its whitewashing of Israeli crimes against Palestinians in Gaza

Between 2000 and 2007, 69 Palestinian women endured labor and childbirth at Israeli checkpoints, resulting in 35 infant deaths and five maternal deaths.



This week, Israel’s PR machine staged a masterclass in how to manipulate a willing media into whitewashing its stained reputation.

The easy puppets whose strings were being pulled were, of course, the reporters, editors and producers of the BBC.

On Monday 25 November, they ran an item on Radio 4’s Today program about an Israeli hospital treating 177 Syrian patients “in the northern Israeli city of Tzfat.” Introducing the broadcast, presenter Sarah Montague, described this as “one of the more surprising sub-plots of the civil war in Syria”.

Correspondent Kevin Connolly then launched into a five minute piece which, even to the average listener, can only have come across as pro-Israel propaganda. At best, if not viewed as propaganda, it was amateurish journalism from a program which the BBC promotes as being its “flagship” for news and current affairs.

In the context of the vast scale of the Syrian conflict, which has created more than two million refugees, most of whom have fled to the neighbouring countries of Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Turkey, the question has to be asked: how does a mere 177 being treated in Israel warrant a story?

Who are these patients? In an accompanying online article, Connolly muses that they may be “jihadist rebels who in other circumstances would attack Israeli targets if they could.”

His message is loud and clear: look how good and kindly Israel is, helping those hostile Arabs and Muslims even though, given half a chance, they would attack their humanitarian neighbor.

BBC duplicity

The theme of Israel’s humanity runs through the radio piece and contrasts with Connolly’s depiction of the Syrians. He says he cannot name those he interviews at the hospital as this would place them “in danger” when they return to Syria, or “make them objects of suspicion at the very least.”

Syrians, the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs program is telling us, are hostile and suspicious towards Israel. What the Today broadcast completely fails to inform its audience is that Israel occupies Syrian land and has done so, in contravention of international law, since 1967. Syrians living in the Golan Heights live under Israeli occupation. Moreover, Israel has attacked Syria at least five times this year.

Listening to Connolly’s whitewashing (the phenomenon of Israel playing up humanitarian aid to burnish its image, as it did recently in the Philippines, has also been called “bluewashing”) of Israel, however, one would come to the conclusion that the Syrians have an unfounded animosity towards a country which behaves only in a beneficent manner towards them.

The duplicity of Connolly’s reporting reaches an apex when he hands the propaganda microphone to Oscar Embon, the hospital’s director, so he can say this: “There are beautiful relationships starting between the staff of the hospital and the people that we treat.”

“Most of them, they express their gratitude and their wish for peace between the two countries. Of course I don’t expect them to become lovers of Israel and ambassadors of what we do, but in their interior, I expect they will reflect on what is their experience here and they will think differently about what the regime is telling them about Israel and Syria being enemies.”

This is accepted uncritically by Connolly, who appears to have swallowed the Israeli PR handbook whole. There is not even enough analysis in this disingenuous piece to consider the fact that Israel is the only country bordering Syria which has refused to take any refugees from the conflict.

Among the millions displaced, 235,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria — more than half of the total living there — have been displaced since the war began, according to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees. Many face a desperate plight, fleeing to Lebanon, or escaping to Egypt where they face even more persecution. Hundreds have drowned at sea. Yet none has been accorded her right by Israeli authorities to return home to Palestine.

Selective reporting

Also being whitewashed, of course, are Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians and the occupation of their land. Connolly’s brush paints Israel as a benign country, as he describes the “extraordinary humanitarian chain” at the “Tzfat” hospital (The BBC’s exclusive use of the Hebrew pronunciation “Tzfat” rather than the standard English-language and Arabic name “Safad” for this city whose overwhelming Palestinian majority was forced out in 1948 is another kind of whitewashing).

His piece begins with the story of a Syrian woman in labor who is brought to this “brightly painted, breezily efficient place of safety” to give birth. Missing are the details of the Palestinian women forced to give birth in the dirt at checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, watched by despairing husbands and the inhumane Israeli soldiers who have refused them passage to hospital.

The medical journal, The Lancet, reports that between 2000 and 2007, 69 Palestinian women endured labor and childbirth at Israeli checkpoints, resulting in 35 infant deaths (more than half of the babies born) and five maternal deaths.

Nor was there any mention of how Israeli occupation prevents Palestinians receiving other kinds of life-saving medical treatment. This week, Nour Mohammad Afaneh, aged 14, died when the ambulance carrying her to a hospital in Bethlehem was not allowed through an Israeli military checkpoint, her father told Ma’an News Agency. Attempts to find an alternative route were futile, and the girl, who was in critical condition died.

This is the reality of Israel, and it is this reality – brutal, cruel and ugly – that the Today progam in particular and the BBC in general chooses to ignore over and over again.

An outstanding feature of the BBC’s selective reporting on Israel is its constant failure to report on the killing of Palestinian children and civilians by the Israeli army during the course of any year, while steadfastly running reports on every Israeli killed by a Palestinian rocket fired from Gaza.

When Palestine Solidarity Campaign has written to Today to question the discriminatory nature of such reporting, it invariably receives this response from the assistant editor, Dominic Groves: “Even in the space of a three-hour program it is not always possible to cover every development in a story — especially one as long running and complex as the one in the Middle East.”

And yet, despite these alleged time constraints in their three hour program, Groves and his team managed find the time to broadcast what is essentially a pro-Israeli puff piece about a token 177 Syrians being treated in an Israeli hospital.

In another unusual move, the BBC has put a shortened, filmed version of Connolly’s report onto its website, meaning that it will be permanently available, unlike the radio version, which is only available for seven days after broadcast on the BBC’s online iPlayer.

Israel’s job well done

The use of BBC airtime to laud Israel for its charity towards a handful of Syrians comes in a week when the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Palestine told the world that the “situation in Gaza is at a point of near catastrophe“ and as Palestinians and internationals prepare for a “day of rage” on 30 November over the Prawer Plan.

Neither of these stories has merited even a mention on Today or across the BBC. In Gaza, Israel’s occupation and seven year siege has reached a point where it is causing unprecedented suffering.

A shortage of industrial fuel means that Gaza’s power plant can only provide people with six hours of electricity a day. As the UN’s Special Rapporteur, Richard Falk, has pointed out, this is “severely disrupting the provision of basic services, including health, water and sanitation.”

In eastern Gaza City the lack of fuel has resulted in the stoppage of Gaza’s largest waste water treatment plant. Raw sewage has flooded the streets forcing children to wade through it to get to school. Silence from the BBC’s news programs.

The Prawer Plan, currently going through the Israeli Parliament, will forcibly remove up to 70,000 Palestinian Bedouin from their ancestral lands in the Naqab (Negev Desert) and warehouse them in small, fixed towns. Israel will then take their land to build Jewish-only settlements. The Bedouin have neither been consulted about this plan, nor have they consented to it. It is being done to them

http://stopwar.org.uk/news/bbc-intensifies-its-whitewashing-of-israeli-crimes-against-palestinians#.UpzAyeLhEw8

BBC News has always been propaganda to serve the British government. The British government is Zionist so of course they are pro Israel and anti Islam.

Salaam

Another update

The Plot Thickens: Gaza is Flooded with Sewage and Conspiracies

The latest punishment of Gaza may seem like another familiar plot to humiliate the strip to the satisfaction of Israel, Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, and the military-controlled Egyptian government. But something far more sinister is brewing.

This time, the collective punishment of Gaza arrives in the form of raw sewage that is flooding many neighborhoods across the impoverished and energy-chocked region of 360 km2 (139 sq mi) and 1.8 million inhabitants. Even before the latest crisis resulting from a severe shortage of electricity and diesel fuel that is usually smuggled through Egypt, Gaza was rendered gradually uninhabitable. A comprehensive UN report last year said that if no urgent action were taken, Gaza would be ‘unlivable’ by 2020. Since the report was issued in August 2012, the situation has grown much worse.

Over the years, especially since the tightening by Israel of the Gaza siege in 2007, the world has become accustomed to two realities: the ongoing multiparty scheme to weaken and defeat Hamas in Gaza, and Gaza’s astonishing ability to withstand the inhumane punishment of an ongoing siege, blockade and war.

Two infamous wars illustrate this idea: The first is Israel’s 22-day war of 2008-9 (killing over 1,400 Palestinians and wounding over 5,500 more) and the second is its more recent war of Nov 2012 - eight days of fighting that killed 167 Palestinians and six Israelis. In the second war, Egypt’s first democratically-elected president Mohammed Morsi was still in power. For the first time in many years, Egypt sided with Palestinians. Because of this and stiff Palestinian resistance in Gaza, the strip miraculously prevailed. Gaza celebrated its victory, and Israel remained somewhat at bay – while of course, mostly failing to honor its side of the Cairo-brokered agreement of easing Gaza’s economic hardship.

In relative terms, things seemed to be looking up for Gaza. The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt was largely opened, and both Egypt and the Hamas governments were in constant discussions regarding finding a sustainable economic solution to Gaza’s many woes. But the ousting by General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi of President Morsi on July 3 changed all of that. The Egyptian military cracked down with vengeance by shutting down the border crossing and destroying 90-95 percent of all tunnels, which served as Gaza’s main lifeline and allowed it to withstand the Israeli siege.

Hopes were shattered quickly, and Gaza’s situation worsened like never before. Naturally, Cairo found in Ramallah a willing ally who never ceased colluding with Israel in order to ensure that their Hamas rivals were punished, along with the population of the strip.

Citing Gaza officials, the New York Times reported on Nov 21 that 13 sewerage stations in the Gaza Strip have either overflowed or are close to overflowing, and 3.5 million cubic feet of raw sewage find their way to the Mediterranean Sea on a daily basis. “The sanitation department may soon no longer be able to pump drinking water to Gaza homes,” it reported.

Farid Ashour, the Director of sanitation at the Gaza Coastal Municipalities Water Utilities, told the times that the situation is ‘disastrous’. “We haven’t faced a situation as dangerous as this time,” he said. But the situation doesn’t have to be as dangerous or disastrous as it currently is. It has in fact been engineered to be that way.

Gaza’s only power plant has been a top priority target for Israeli warplanes for years. In 2006 it was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike, to be opened a year later, only to be destroyed again. And although it was barely at full capacity when it operated last, it continued to supply Gaza with 30 percent of its electricity needs of 400 megawatts. 120 megawatts came through Israel, and nearly 30 megawatts came through Egypt. The total fell short from Gaza’s basic needs, but somehow Gaza subsisted. Following the ousting of Morsi and the Egyptian military crackdown, the shortage now stands at 65 percent of the total.

In an interview with the UN humanitarian news agency, IRIN, James W. Rawley, the humanitarian coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, depicted a disturbing scene in which the impact of the crisis has reached “all essential services, including hospitals, clinics, sewage and water pumping stations.”

Israelis on the other hand, have been doing just fine since the last military encounter with Hamas. “The past year was a great one,” the Economist quoted the commander of Israel’s division that ‘watches’ Gaza, Brigadier Michael Edelstein. Due to the massive drop in the number of rockets fired from Gaza in retaliation to Israeli attacks and continued siege (50 rockets this year, compared to 1500 last year), “children in Israel’s border towns can sleep in their beds, not in shelters, and no longer go to school in armored buses,” according to the Economist on Nov 16.

“But Israel’s reciprocal promise to help revive Gaza’s economy has not been kept,” it reported. Israel has done everything it its power to keep Gaza in a crisis mode, from denying the strip solar panels so that they may generate their own electricity to blocking Gaza exports. “In the meantime, Gaza is rotting away.”

Desperate to find immediate remedies, Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh issued new calls to Mahmoud Abbas for a unity government. “Let's have one government, one parliament and one president," Haniyeh said in a recent speech, as quoted by Reuters. A Fatah spokesman, Ahmed Assaf, dismissed the call for it “included nothing new.” Meanwhile, the PA decided to end its subsidy on any fuel shipped to Gaza via Israel, increasing the price to $1.62 per liter from 79 cents. According to Ihab Bessisso of the PA, the decision to rescind Gaza’s tax exemption on fuel was taken because sending cheap fuel to Gaza “was unfair to West Bank residents,” according to the times.

But fairness has little to with it. Reports by the Economist, Al Monitor and other media speak of Egyptian efforts to reintroduce Gaza’s former security chief and Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan to speed-up the anticipated collapse of the Hamas government. Al Monitor reported on Nov 21 that Dahlan, a notorious Fatah commander who was defeated by Hamas in 2007 because of, among other reasons, his close ties with Israeli intelligence, had met with General al-Sisi in Cairo. Evidently, the purpose is to oust Hamas out in the Gaza Strip. But the question is how? Some “suggest that a Palestinian brigade mustered in al-Arish could march on Gaza and, with Egyptian support, defeat the broad array of Hamas forces created in the last decade.”

With Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood out of the picture, at least for now, Gaza is more vulnerable than ever. Some of Abbas’s supporters and certainly Dahlan’s may believe that the moment to defeat their brethren in Gaza is now.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is a media consultant, an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is: My Father was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press).


http://www.zcommunications.org/the-plot-thickens-gaza-is-flooded-with-sewage-and-conspiracies-by-ramzy-baroud.html

Looks like the Zionists are trying to wipe out the Palestinians. I believe the fight is futile. If the Palestinians want to survive they must give up the fight for now and let Israel have all the land, as possession of land is only temporary. Forget about a Palestinian state for now. Palestinians can just infiltrate Israel and wait. Grow stronger and larger in numbers. Jimmy Carter appealed to the Israelis to make peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs because in time they will out number Jews in Israel.
So why bother throwing stones from the outside at Israel, be Israel and in time you will rule Israel. Palestinian aggression unites the Israelis against you. Stop fighting them and they will fight amongst themselves and become weaker. They are secularists and all sorts of back biting Jews and they will be at each others throats without a common enemy.

format_quote Originally Posted by sister herb

^^ So you advice Palestinians to surrender? Let them destroy also Al-Aqsa? You don´t care? Why bother to fight for they rights? I think your idea doesn´t work at all. Think again.

Advice is quite similar like if you would give it to people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan: "Why bother to fight back? Let inviders destroy our country and steal all our natural resources. Let them kill our children by drone attacks. Let them make us as they slaves. Why bother to do anything?"

Man named Nelson Mandela just died. What kind of country South Africa might be today if he would though like you?

Mandela was a Marxist so he had a lot of support globally. The UN is Marxist and it supports Israel. Look how far the blacks got in the USA. Once were slaves now they are in power, even though they are subordinate to Rockefeller and Co. Violence is not always the answer especially when you are out numbered and out gunned. Palestinian violence is playing into the hands of Israel, they will counter attack until their enemies are all dead. Maybe passive resistance would be a better way. Jesus (PBUH) preached non violence against the Romans because he knew they would just slay and crucify all the Jews that tried it on, as Romans loved an excuse to slay and crucify. Even the Germanic barbarians were crushed and the surviving slaves had to shave their beards off as a sign of submission. But they pulled through and later crushed Rome. And look at Germany now the strongest nation in Western Europe even though they are subordinate to Rockefeller and Co.

format_quote Originally Posted by sister herb

And don´t worry, brother Karl, zionists will find more new enemies also without those Palestinians. They still have Hizballah and all those they neighbor countries whose might like to prevent them to rule all the Middle East and its oil and water resources.

Oh boy, it takes centuries to wait that they enemies will end and they start to fight together...

Who knows what is around the corner. The world powers are capitalists now and capitalism needs war and imperialism to thrive. They will be picking fights which could lead to a nuke war. Humans are predators by nature so war is inevitable.