LATEST STRIKE ON HOSPITAL AND AMBULANCES WREAKS HAVOC ON AN ALREADY STRETCHED MEDICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

How much longer will Israel's latest invasion of Gaza last? Does it enhance Israel's security? Can Israel and Palestine live in peace or is it a war without end? CrossTalking with Nora Lester Murad, Flynt Leverett and Martin van Creveld. (Martin Van Creveld is an Israeli military historian at Hebrew University.)

On July 11th, 2am local time, Israeli warships fired on the Palestinian/International boat, Gaza’s Ark, which burst into flames and was completely destroyed. We had been working on this project for over two years, buying on old fishing boat, the largest one we could find in Gaza, and converting it into a cargo vessel. It was due to sail out of Gaza in September, carrying goods from the occupied West Bank and Gaza to trade with the outside world, in an attempt to break the illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Building this boat continued the movement to sail boats to and from Gaza and was also part of the much larger movement of nonviolent resistance to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.

So the question posed is, why was Israel so afraid of our little boat, carrying Palestinian embroidery and boxes of dates, a boat that posed no threat whatsoever to Israeli security? Why did the Israeli Occupation Forces feel it was necessary to destroy it?

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post

As bombs rain down upon Gaza and Israeli troops march forward with tanks and bulldozers, a recent radio interview conducted on Israeli radio is drawing some criticism from across the world as well as in Israel.

Although the interview was conducted nearly three weeks ago, shortly after the bodies of three Israeli teens were found after being kidnapped and murdered, Dr. Mordechai Kedar stated that the only way to force “terrorists” to think twice about their actions is the threat of the rape of their sisters and mothers...

The shadowy hacker collective known as Anonymous has announced it will launch a round of cyber-attacks this Friday against the Israeli government, in retaliation for Israel’s ongoing military intervention in Gaza.

Of all the ways to frame America's role in the latest war between Israelis and Palestinians, the most bizarre might be the Bloomberg headline "Will the U.S. Get Involved in Israel-Gaza Conflict?" What do you mean will, folks? The U.S. has been deeply involved with this war from the beginning, because the U.S. is underwriting it.

Stuart Littlewood debunks the weasel-worded excuses dished out by UK Prime Minister David Cameron and his newly-appointed foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, in defence of Israel’s blitzkrieg in the Gaza Strip.

A reporter for Al Jazeera news channel broke into tears halfway through a television broadcast while relaying the horrific scenes and destruction he witnessed following over two weeks of Israeli shelling in Gaza.

Israel has murdered over 600 people in a few days time but I am not hearing the U.S., EU or anyone else calling for sanctions against them.

Remember Syria? The lies of a chemical attack last year? Remember how the U.S. and the world were outraged? BUT Israel can get away with $%^&*# murdering everyone they want... and #$%^&*@ Silence from every government!

Israel is not the chosen country of the world in God's eyes. The Jews are not the chosen people of the world in Gods eyes. We All are chosen people, including the Palestinians! They have the right to live their lives in Freedom and liberty without being massacred by Israel!

Enough is enough! If Russia was doing to East Ukraine what Israel is doing to Gaza we would be in WW3 with the U.S. and EU bombing Russia. Yet Israel can do as they please and murder who ever they please.

The video emerged on Monday. It appears to show a man searching for his family amid the rubble of Gaza, apparently during a ceasefire. He is shot by a sniper. For a while he lies there, moving awkwardly. Then he is shot again.

Yet Suliman said that these warnings are disingenuous, and in Gaza — a cramped home to nearly 2 million people — there’s a cruel irony in this advice to evacuate: there’s hardly anywhere safe to go.

“This is a tactic to tell the world that the IDF cares about civilian lives so that when they kill civilians they can say, ‘We warned people, they didn’t leave, Hamas is using them as shields.’ This is completely ridiculous,” Suliman said. “They are saying, ‘We want the residents of the northern Gaza districts to leave their houses,’ but 250,000 people live in the northern Gaza districts. They are telling a quarter of a million people to leave their houses.”

“That’s laughable. Where are they going to go?”

Thousands of Gazans attempt to find shelter as the UN estimates that more than 100,000 are displaced

A United Nations school sheltering displaced Palestinians in central Gaza came under Israeli fire on Tuesday as a team was inspecting damage from a day earlier, a UN official said.

The official said a team, with Israeli clearance, was at the school run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA in Al-Maghazi when Israeli tank shelling resumed, hitting the building on Tuesday afternoon.

Live Blog | Day 16 | WARNING - POSSIBLE GRAPHIC CONTENT #Gaza: #Israel launches massive offensive Operation #ProtectiveEdge | #GazaUnderAttack | #Palestine. http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=24728

24/7 Online live stream from Gaza Strip. http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=24600

About six years ago, as part of his Bar Mitzvah, my son Jed did a project on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, producing his own graphic novel about the undergound fighters who used courage, creativity and the city's sewer system to, in some small way, offer resistance to the murderous program of the Nazis to exterminate Poland's Jews.

The response in Israel to the attacks on Gaza has exposed a society consumed by the violence implicit in the Zionist enterprise.

As the famous Israeli novelist David Grossman put it, Israel’s “huge use of violence” causes a “depth of internal poison”.

Israel continued to pound Gaza overnight, including hitting 100 targets in Shujai'iya, the scene of the most intense fighting of the conflict, as the Israeli military confirmed that one of its soldiers was missing.

Hamas claimed on Sunday that it had captured an Israeli soldier during the intense battle in Shujai'iya.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) named the missing soldier as Sergeant Oron Shaul, 21, a combat soldier of the Golani brigade.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad reportedly agreed to a five-hour pause in the fighting. However, Haaretz quoted senior Israeli officials as saying a humanitarian ceasefire was "not on our agenda right now".

The death toll from Israeli violence in Gaza approached 600 Palestinians as of Tuesday morning local time, according to reports from hospitals and emergency care workers in the beleaguered territory. The United Nations estimated that three quarters of the dead were civilians, including more than 100 children of all ages.

This is the harrowing moment a young Palestinian man was allegedly shot by an Israeli sniper in front of a camera crew helping him search for his family before being fatally shot again as he struggled to get up.

Israel kept up attacks on Gaza on Tuesday, killing three Palestinians and hitting over 70 targets, including five mosques, a sports stadium and the home of the deceased Hamas military chief.

The latest casualties in the fortnight-long violence have brought the Palestinian death toll to 570, according to AP. Almost 100 of them are children and many others are civilians.

Additionally, nearly 500 homes have been destroyed in the Israeli bombardments and 100,000 people have been displaced, said Jens Laerke, spokesman of the UN Office for Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA) at a Geneva news briefing.

On Monday, a hospital was hit in Gaza, with four people killed and scores of others wounded in the attack. Thirty of the wounded were medics, according to Sky News.

One officer, a veteran of Gaza operations, who left the fighting area for a few hours, told Haaretz: “I’ve been to Shujaiyeh before, but I’ve never seen it – or Hamas – like this before. Their equipment and tactics are just like Hezbollah. Missile traps and IEDs everywhere – and they stay and fight instead of melting away like in the past.”

They stay and fight because, unlike Israel, Palestinians in Gaza have no choice, no alternative, no option to go back to a slow death under a crippling siege.

More IDF public relations . . . .

Amnesty International has called for urgent international action to protect civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip, which has been under deadly Israeli attacks for more than two weeks.

More than 100 Palestinians have been killed over the past day since escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian enclave, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reported Monday.

Always the victims and never the aggressors.

I mean, would a British government be mad enough to illegally occupy its next door neighbours for nearly 50 years, trash their heritage, steal their resources, move settlers into choice locations, cage the natives within the sealed remnants then bomb them all to hell and back for firing garden-shed rockets? Wellyes, I guess a Cameron government might do exactly that if told to… and call it self defence just like their Israeli buddies.

Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams has called on the Government to expel Israeli ambassador Boaz Modai from Ireland in protest at the ongoing crisis in Gaza.

Mr Adams' call follows a meeting yesterday between Mr Bodai and Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan, during which Minister Flanagan reiterated the Government’s deep concerns regarding the current situation in Gaza and Israel.

Some 500 people on Monday staged a silent protest in Tokyo against the bloodshed in Gaza, the biggest such gathering in the Japanese capital since the violence began early this month, organizers said.

As night fell demonstrators holding candles formed huge letters spelling "Gaza" in a city park, and offered a one-minute prayer for victims of the violence in the Palestinian territory.

Some waved Palestinian flags while others carried signs reading: "Stop the killing in Gaza. Japan cares."

Israel prefers Egyptian mediation to accomplish the truce in Gaza Strip since the Egyptian government shares Israelis with hostility toward Hamas, but Palestinian resistance --including Hamas-- rejected the proposed Israeli-Egyptian truce because it completely adopts Israeli demands . Meanwhile, Qatari and Turkish governments have suggested another truce's draft carries some of Palestinian demands. The Qatari-Turkish suggestion triggers anger of Egyptian government which keeps the 'coldest' relations with Qatar after ousting former Egyptian president Mohammad Morsi, and the diplomatic Egyptian-Turkish relation has been frozen, because the Turkish government did not recognize the new Egyptian regime and considered it 'military coup'.

Monday’s edition of MSNBC’s Ronan Farrow Daily featured criticism of the network’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza by one of its own paid contributors, Newsweek’s Rula Jebreal.

RULA JEBREAL: “We are biased when it comes to this issue. Look how many (sic) air time Netanyahu and his folks have on air on a daily basis — Andrea Mitchell and others. I never see one Palestinian being interviewed on these same issues..

RONAN FARROW: “I’m going to push back a little on that. We’ve had Palestinian voices on our air.”

JEBREAL: “Maybe for 30 seconds, and then you have 25 minutes for Bibi Netanyahu.”

Even today, when rockets are exploding above the city I love most in the world, even when we rush into our apartment building’s stairwell and march downstairs along with the neighbors to the bicycle room that has been turned into a makeshift bomb shelter. Even now, I oppose this military operation wholeheartedly. The sight of the Israeli air force’s attack helicopters crossing the sky, going south along the Tel Aviv coastline does not fill me with pride or gratitude—it horrifies and depresses me.

The Israeli military has been accused of using flechette shells during its offensive in Gaza, which can cause widespread harm and death to civilians. The weapons, though legal in Israel and internationally, have been slammed as inhumane by rights groups.

The munitions are normally fired by tanks and contain thousands of small darts, which are released when the shell explodes in midair. The flechette shells are only four centimeters in length.

They hid at the El-Wafa hospital.

They hid at the Al-Aqsa hospital.

They hid at the beach, where children played football.

They hid at the yard of 75-year-old Muhammad Hamad.

They hid among the residential quarters of Shujaya.

They hid in the neighbourhoods of Zaytoun and Toffah.

They hid in Rafah and Khan Younis.

They hid in the home of the Qassan family.

They hid in the home of the poet, Othman Hussein.

They hid in the village of Khuzaa.

They hid in the thousands of houses damaged or destroyed.

They hid in 84 schools and 23 medical facilities.

They hid in a cafe, where Gazans were watching the World Cup.

They hid in the ambulances trying to retrieve the injured.

They hid themselves in 24 corpses, buried under rubble.

They hid themselves in a young woman in pink household slippers, sprawled on the pavement, taken down while fleeing.

They hid themselves in two brothers, eight and four, lying in the intensive burn care unit in Al-Shifa.

The Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas hailed on Friday the Ecuadorian decision to withdraw his country's ambassador to Tel-Aviv in protest against Israeli aggression on Gaza.

After three banned pro-Palestinian protests ended in full scale riots, the French government must now decide whether to allow another demo to go ahead on Saturday. The head of the French League of Human Rights tells The Local it would be major mistake to ban it.

An American political commentator believes that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu benefits from the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger plane because he can continue his atrocities in Gaza.

Professor Mads Gilbert, who is tending the wounded in Gaza, has written to Channel 4 News with an account of the effects of the Israeli shelling on Saturday night.

Palestinians across the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip celebrated late Sunday following an announcement by Hamas' military wing that it had captured an Israeli soldier.

Sumud Nasser Siyam, 26, Muhammad Mahrous Salam Siyam, 25, Badir Nabil Mahrous Siyam, 25, Ahmad Ayman Mahrous Siyam, 17, Mustafa Nabil Mahrous Siyam, 12, Ghayda Nabil Mahrous Siyam, 8, Sherin Muhammad Salam Siyam, 32, Dalal Nabil Mahrous Siyam, 8 months, and Kamal Mahrous Salamah Siyam, 27, were pulled from the rubble.

Israeli forces fired a tank shell at a hospital in Gaza on Monday, killing at least four people and injuring 40 others, health officials said.

24/7 Online live stream from Gaza Strip. Watch here --> http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=24600

Occupied Palestinian Territory: Gaza Emergency Situation Report as of 19 & 20 July 2014, 1500 hrs. Continue reading --> http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=24715

Live Blog | Day 15 | WARNING - POSSIBLE GRAPHIC CONTENT #Gaza: #Israel launches massive offensive Operation #ProtectiveEdge | #GazaUnderAttack | #Palestine | Continue reading --> http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=24719

An emotionally wrought Hanan Ashrawi calls on the world to act immediately in defense of defenseless Palestinian civilians being deliberately massacred in Gaza by Israeli military.

“Look there, there is no human being who cannot be affected by this. Unless you lose the last vestiges of humanity, you cannot allow this to go on. It has to stop,” Ashrawi said of the latest violence in Gaza.

“This morning, it’s nothing short of a massacre, a deliberate massacre. War crimes committed daily. But now there is a deliberate shelling and bombing and destruction of whole areas, of residential areas,” Ashrawi said on “This Week.”

Last week Canada’s Conservative government strongly endorsed the bloody war launched by Israel against the people of Gaza, while seizing upon the crash of a Malaysian Airlines in the Ukraine to ratchet up its support for the Western imperialist powers’ drive to isolate, bully and threaten Russia.

A video has emerged of the targeting and killing by a sniper of a Palestinian civilian in Gaza City’s Shujaiya neighborhood where Israeli shelling killed dozens of civilians and caused massive destruction early on Sunday morning.

The last night was extreme. The "ground invasion" of Gaza resulted in scores and carloads with maimed, torn apart, bleeding, shivering, dying - all sorts of injured Palestinians, all ages, all civilians, all innocent.

The heroes in the ambulances and in all of Gaza's hospitals are working 12-24 hour shifts, grey from fatigue and inhuman workloads (without payment all in Shifa for the last 4 months), they care, triage, try to understand the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS!

Now, once more treated like animals by "the most moral army in the world" (sic!).

It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause – even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions” and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves … This international backing must stop.”

PALESTINE Solidarity activists in London occupied a UK government building yesterday to demand an immediate end to arms sales to Israel.

“By allowing arms exports to Israel to flourish, the UK government is providing material and political support for Israel’s violent oppression and collective punishment of Palestinians, including the current massacre in Gaza.”

“UK companies that export arms to Israel such as BAE Systems and Boeing are profiting directly from Israel’s on-going attacks on Palestinian civilians on Gaza,” the group member said.

“Rather than seeking to whitewash Israeli atrocities,” the campaigner added,”the UK government should listen to the appeals made by Palestinian civil society groups and Amnesty International and impose a military embargo on Israel. How many more people in Gaza have to die before the government will stop arming Israel?”

Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has signalled that the offensive against Gaza will intensify still further. "The operation will be expanded until the goal is achieved," he said after a meeting of his security cabinet.

The UN Security Council has expressed concern at the escalation of violence in Gaza and called for an immediate ceasefire. "The members of the Security Council expressed serious concern about the growing number of casualties. The members of the Security Council called for an immediate cessation of hostilities," Rwandan UN Ambassador Eugene Gasana told reporters after an emergency meeting of the 15-member council. The UN's human rights council is due to discuss the crisis on Wednesday after a request from Egypt.

A photo of a desperate young Palestinian boy, badly wounded and screaming for his father as he clutches at the shirt of a paramedic in a hospital, has captured the tragic and bloody tension of the conflict in Gaza.

Shirtless and with cuts to his face, torso, arms and legs, the child clings to the hospital worker who is attempting to lay him flat on a bed.

The Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian publication, reports the photo, taken at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City last Thursday, was captioned with the boy's desperate cry: 'I want my father, bring me my father', reported Fairfax.

A riveting letter is making its rounds from Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor volunteering in Palestine. In it, Dr. Gilbert describes his first-hand account of Israel’s boots on the ground in Gaza – the sounds of F16s, drones and Apache helicopters, “So much made and paid in and by US,” blended with the screams, the smells, the sight of shivers and blood. He pleads, “Mr. Obama – do you have a heart?

US tax dollars at work

The Israeli military is using flechette shells, which spray thousands of tiny and potentially lethal metal darts, in its military operation in Gaza. Six flechette shells were fired towards the village of Khuzaa, east of Khan Younis, on 17 July, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

An estimated 100,000 demonstrators took to the streets of London on Saturday to protest Israel’s invasion of the Gaza strip in the Palestinian occupied territories.

The march was one of a number that took place across the UK. In Glasgow and Aberdeen, Scotland several thousand demonstrated despite heavy rain. Other demonstrations were held in Belfast, Northern Ireland and Dublin, Ireland.

Over the weekend, the New York Times sent out a clear signal: the mass slaughter of civilians is acceptable when the Israeli military is doing the killing.

Under the headline “Israel’s War in Gaza,” the most powerful newspaper in the United States editorialized that such carnage is necessary. The lead editorial in the July 19 edition flashed a bright green light -- reassuring the U.S. and Israeli governments that the horrors being inflicted in Gaza were not too horrible.

Since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip, the majority of the dead and wounded in Gaza are civilians and medical workers are also coming under fire, the international medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said today.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu announced a “significant expansion” of the ground invasion of Gaza “for as long as necessary”, his security forces, police and extremist right-wing forces are also intervening to break up the as yet small anti-war protests, intimidate Israel’s Palestinian citizens and suppress the Palestinians in the West Bank.

Al-Beltaji Street, off the main road in Shujai'iya, is a scene of utter devastation – the site of Israel's bloodiest assault in almost two weeks of fighting in the coastal strip.

An ambulance sat on shot-out tyres, shrapnel punched through its sides. A charred car lay flattened as if by a giant hand. Smoke rose from one end of the street in a dark billowing curtain.

Fallen trees, tangled electricity cables and drifts of rubble covered the road, smashed, chopped and torn apart by Israeli shells and bombs that slammed into this Gaza City district at a rate of one every five seconds on Saturday night and the early hours of Sunday.

An Israeli soldier has sparked outrage by posting a photograph appearing to show the back of a Palestinian boy's head in the crosshairs of his sniper rifle on a social networking site.

The context of the picture, posted on the personal Instagram site of Mor Ostrovski, 20, could not be verified but the aggressive message is clear. The minarets and Arabic architecture of the village captured in the background suggest the boy and the town are Palestinian. Ostrovski is an Israeli soldier in a sniper unit.

US President Barack Obama has called for an "immediate ceasefire" between Israel and Hamas as the death toll among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip reached 508.

Israeli continued its assault on the neighbourhood of Shujai'iya on Monday, where bombardment and fierce fighting on the ground between Israeli troops and Hamas militants on Sunday left shattered streets littered with bodies after Israeli forces subjected it to an intense bombardment.

Over 350 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's ongoing operation to root out Hamas fighters. Tens of thousands march across the glove to protest the victims of the invasion.

Just days after her husband went on Indian television to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, former secretary of state and presumed presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton took to the airwaves in the United States to voice criticism of Hamas and express support for the Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip.

Following an Israeli forces’ shelling of a Gaza City district which killed at least 70 civilians, including children, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has called for an emergency session of the UN Security Council over the “massacre in Shejaia.”

Over 100 British teens have been signed up to fight “shoulder to shoulder” with Israeli forces in brutal attacks on the Gaza Strip, a human rights group warns.

The last night was extreme. The “ground invasion” of Gaza resulted in scores and carloads with maimed, torn apart, bleeding, shivering, dying – all sorts of injured Palestinians, all ages, all civilians, all innocent.

The heroes in the ambulances and in all of Gaza’s hospitals are working 12-24 hour shifts, grey from fatigue and inhuman workloads (without payment all in Shifa for the last 4 months), they care, triage, try to understand the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS!

Back at the end of 2008 when the Israeli government launched its war against Hamas-controlled Gaza, it insisted that it had no choice: Hamas had not maintained the cease-fire with Israel and the IDF had no choice but to respond. But a WikiLeak cable released indicates the cease-fire was working well, perhaps too well from the point of view of Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Many of the children were killed in their own homes.

On the 13th day of the ongoing military offensive against the Gaza Strip, residents say invading Israeli forces committed “a new massacre” in the Shujaiyya neighborhood of Gaza City. At least 66 people have been killed and hundreds have been injured in the eastern neighborhood, medics said Sunday.

Two of the 13 Israeli soldiers killed Sunday were dual U.S.-Israel nationals, the Times of Israel reported. The deaths bring the total number of Israeli military casualties to 18.

Scores of Palestinians and Israeli soldiers have been killed on Sunday as hostilities continue in the Gaza strip. Both sides earlier agreed to a brief ceasefire to allow medics to reach those wounded by Israeli shells.

China's special envoy on Middle East Affairs Wu Sike on Sunday called on Israel to immediately stop the military operations against the Gaza Strip and put an end to the blockage it imposes on the coastal enclave.

Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz says the Tel Aviv regime has no plan to stop the ongoing aerial and ground military operations in besieged Gaza Strip.

GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING

This video shows bodies of all ages littering the streets of the Shujayea (Al-Shajaiyah) in Gaza, killed by Israeli terrorist bombardment. It was taken today. We must warn you this contains distressing images of death.

Continue reading --> http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=24690

Day 14 | WARNING - GRAPHIC CONTENT #Gaza: #Israel launches massive offensive Operation #ProtectiveEdge #GazaUnderAttack #Palestine . Continue reading --> http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=24704

Much of Hamas’ confidence comes from the Palestinian public, who see it standing up bravely for the national cause while Mahmoud Abbas plays the diplomatic supplicant. Continue reading --> http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=24683

Day 13 | WARNING - POSSIBLE GRAPHIC CONTENT #Gaza: #Israel launches massive offensive Operation #ProtectiveEdge #GazaUnderAttack #Palestine --> http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=24673

Jeff Halper says that the Israeli public does not generally put the cycles of violence with Gaza and the West Bank in the context of decades-long military occupation, and that this leads to support for further domination of the Palestinians. Continue reading --> http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=24662

(*I just dug this one up for usage in my perpetual e mail pissing contest . Good ordinance for anyone else dealing with a constant nagging pro Israel-er .)

A Dublin councillor has defended pulling down an Israeli flag at an international children’s sailing event.

The Israeli military is using flechette shells, which spray out thousands of tiny and potentially lethal metal darts, in its military operation in Gaza.

Six flechette shells were fired towards the village of Khuzaa, east of Khan Younis, on 17 July, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. Nahla Khalil Najjar, 37, suffered injuries to her chest, it said. PCHR provided a picture of flechettes taken by a fieldworker last week.

The Israeli military deployed artillery shells containing white phosphorous in densely populated areas of Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009, causing scores of deaths and extensive burns. It initially issued a categorical denial of reports of the use of white phosphorous, but later admitted it, saying the weapon was only used to create smokescreens.

The fiercest fighting of the 13-day war in Gaza erupted on Sunday as Israel dramatically widened its ground offensive, sending tanks and troops into urban areas and causing thousands of panicked civilians to flee.

The Palestinian government has described the attack on Gaza's Shejaiya neighbourhood, in which at least 60 people were killed, as a "war crime" which required immediate international intervention.

America must soon shift our role from giving tacit consent to an invasion to becoming an active partner in a new, honest search for peace in the Middle East.

What is the end game? To cast Gazans to the sea, where they will be met by the Israeli Navy? To push Gazans into Egypt? To eject all Palestinians to… where? This is a question relevant not only to Israelis and Palestinians, but to the entire world.

Videos - Heavy Attacks On Gaza - occupiedair

Thousands of protesters gathered in London today to call for an end to Israeli military action in Gaza and 'justice and freedom' for Palestine.

Up to 15,000 people marched through the capital from Downing Street to the Israeli embassy in Kensington.

Respect MP George Galloway addressed the crowd. He said: 'They want to end the Palestinian people, but the Palestinians will never surrender.

'We are here to stay. As long as one Palestinian remains alive we will be with them.'