John Kerry visited Gaza recently, and he had something to say to the survivors of Israel's assault on the Strip;
Talking to a Palestinian lawyer amid the dust and rubble, Kerry defended Israel for responding to almost daily rocket attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups.
"Your political leadership needs to understand that any nation that has rockets coming into it over many years, threatening its citizens, is going to respond," Kerry told Shar Habeel al-Zaim.
"We feel very deeply that no one should have to live under this threat," he said after he and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni inspected rockets fired by Gaza militants that are exhibited in Sderot police station.
Palestinians walk past buildings that were heavily damaged by Israeli attacks in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah. (Hatem Omar, Maan Images)
Now, I will give Congressmen Baird and Ellison some credit for opening their eyes slightly to the destruction around them;
His visit coincided with a similar trip by Democratic US representatives Brian Baird and Keith Ellison, who expressed dismay at the plight of the overpopulated coastal strip.
"The amount of physical destruction and the depth of human suffering here is staggering," Baird said in a statement issued jointly with Ellison.
Ellison, a representative from Minnesota, harshly criticised restrictions on the delivery of desperately needed goods into Gaza, which has been under a crippling Israeli blockade imposed after the 2007 Hamas takeover.
"People, innocent children, women and non-combatants, are going without water, food and sanitation, while the things they so desperately need are sitting in trucks at the border, being denied permission to go in," he said.
So, I wonder if Kerry has read his Bible much, like good old George Bush did; who knows, maybe he's even heard of Noam Chomsky;
"When George Bush tells us that he is the most devoted Christian since the Apostles, we should believe him, take him at his word and we should therefore conclude that he certainly has memorized, over and over again, in his Bible reading classes and in church, the famous definition of 'hypocrite' that's given in the gospels. Namely, the hypocrite is the person who applies to others standards that he refuses to apply to himself. So if you are not a hypocrite you assume that if something is right for us then it's right for them and if it is wrong when they do it, it is wrong when we do it." (Noam Chomsky, From Distorted Morality: America's War on Terror?, Feb 2002)
So John Kerry, I can certainly agree that no one should live under the threat of violence; but does this 'no one' include Palestinians as well?
Here's some background on their recent suffering, do think about it...
'My mother, my wife, and my three daughters all held white flags,'
Janet Zimmerman and Sameh A. Habeeb, IMEU
"My mother, my wife, and my three daughters all held white flags when they tried to leave the house. We saw two of the soldiers get out of their tank, and we told them how we wanted to leave. We waited and waited for their response but were given no answer. Then, to our own surprise, a third soldier emerged and he opened fire on the children with insanity.
"Souad was only seven years old, Summer was three, and Amal was of only two years. My mother was shot as well, and I watched all that I loved fall to the ground. I screamed for them to stop! I ran into the house to call civil defense, ambulances, anyone who could help.
"For one hour the injured were bleeding, and two of my daughters were killed despite the so called ceasefire. No help was able to come to us in time. One of the ambulances tried, but the Israeli soldiers stopped the paramedic and forced him to remove his clothing. They then bombed the ambulance and it was buried in rubble. The paramedic fled naked while their fire surrounded him.
Homeless Palestinians squeeze into tents in Gaza
Thousands of Palestinians are living in tented camps after Israel's three-week assault on the Gaza Strip, hoping for a swift end to Israel's blockade so they can rebuild their homes.
Aid workers said on Thursday at least 16,000 people have found temporary accommodation in 10 camps set up in districts laid to waste in a war that local medical officials said left around 1,300 Palestinians dead and more than 5,000 wounded.
But conditions are cramped, with several thousands of tents held up at border crossings from Israel into the Gaza Strip.
Thousands of Palestinians remain homeless after Israel's Gaza war,
IRIN
Thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip remain homeless after their houses were badly damaged or destroyed during Israel's recent military offensive there.
The Israeli army began with aerial bombardments of the enclave on December 27 and added a ground assault from January 3. Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire on January 18 while Hamas, the de facto ruling authority in the Strip, declared its own ceasefire later that day.
According to a February 16 report by Save the Children Alliance "at least 100,000 people, including 56,000 children, remain displaced with many continuing to take shelter in tents or crowding into remaining homes with other families, one month since the Gaza ceasefire was declared."
The war on Gaza's children,
Saree Makdisi
An entire generation of Palestinians in Gaza is growing up stunted: physically and nutritionally stunted because they are not getting enough to eat; emotionally stunted because of the pressures of living in a virtual prison and facing the constant threat of destruction and displacement; intellectually and academically stunted because they cannot concentrate - or, even if they can, because they are trying to study and learn in circumstances that no child should have to endure.
Even before Israel this week declared Gaza "hostile territory" - apparently in preparation for cutting off the last remaining supplies of fuel and electricity to 1.5 million men, women and children - the situation was dire.
As a result of Israel's blockade on most imports and exports and other policies designed to punish the populace, about 70% of Gaza's workforce is now unemployed or without pay, according to the United Nations, and about 80% of its residents live in grinding poverty. About 1.2 million of them are now dependent for their day-to-day survival on food handouts from U.N. or international agencies, without which, as the World Food Program's Kirstie Campbell put it, "they are liable to starve."
Israeli soccer fans cheer deaths of Palestinian children
Yigal Bronner and Neve Gordon, The Guardian
Israeli soccer matches were suspended during the assault on Gaza. When the games resumed last week, the fans had come up with a new chant: "Why have the schools in Gaza been shut down?" sang the crowd. "Because all the children were gunned down!" came the answer.
Aside from its sheer barbarism, this chant reflects the widespread belief among Israeli Jews that Israel scored an impressive victory in Gaza - a victory measured, not least, by the death toll.
Israeli pilots and tank commanders could not really discriminate between the adults and the children who hid in their homes or huddled in the UNRWA shelters, and yet they chose to press the trigger. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the lethal onslaught left 1,314 Palestinians dead, of which 412 - or nearly one third of all of the casualties - were children.
Israel accused of targeting Gaza children
Al Jazeera English TV
Israel war leaves crude graffiti in Gazan homes
"Thank God we were only made homeless," he says, surveying the damage to the three-storey building. "They said in Arabic 'What are you doing here?' I said 'I'm sleeping in my house!'" Food cans, cigarette butts and cartridges are strewn over the floor beside sniper holes and sandbags. A few feathers and a powerful smell in the air are all that remain of 50,000 noisy chickens that once inhabited large pens in the yard. But most striking is the mural art.
There is a picture of a pig with "oink-oink" scribbled in Russian next to it, numerous Stars of David and a fire engulfing a veiled woman whom a man is holding on a leash. The written messages are no less stark. "Leave or die" in Hebrew, "Fuck Gaza" and "Fuck Hamas" in English. Soldiers have have signed what appears to be the name of their army unit.
"They want a land without a people. They want us to go to Rafah, or Sinai," says Sawafiri, pondering the possible broader meaning behind the words. Rafah is a town on the border of the Gaza Strip and Egypt's Sinai desert.
Israeli soldiers recall Gaza attack orders
"Fire on anything that moves in Zeitoun" – that was the order handed down to Israeli troops in the Givati Shaked battalion, who reduced the eastern Gaza City suburb to little more than rubble in a matter of days.
According to Israeli soldiers who took part in the three-week offensive, the destruction of the area, a known Hamas stronghold, was designed to send a wider message to Gazans. "We pounded Zeitoun into the ground," an Israeli soldier who was deployed in the area, told The Times.
The stories that have emerged from Zeitoun have been some of the most shocking of the war. The Samuni family said they lost 29 members after soldiers forced them all into one building that subsequently came under fire. Survivors said that the initial shelling killed 22 people, while others slowly bled to death after being denied medical care for nearly three days.
Gaza civilians left with extensive burns
Al Jazeera English TV
You Have Moved on, But the Injured and Burned Children of Gaza Have Not; Call for Cyberspace Aid Convoy
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
The United Nations Security Council again demanded that Israel let in food, medicine and fuel unimpeded. Since Israel is still technically the occupying authority in Gaza, insofar as it controls its borders and airspace, for it to engage in collective punishment on the Gazan population is a war crime forbidden by the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949, which was enacted to prevent Nazi tactics from being deployed against occupied populatoins. UN relief workers, have been impeded from getting into Gaza by Israeli authorities. Those who managed to get through found between 14,000 and 21,000 homes destroyed and 240 of 400 schools badly damaged. The value of the destruction is estimated at $2 billion, and the essential infrastructure of the Strip has been deeply degraded, with potentially severe human health consequences. Much rubble has yet to be cleared away, so there could yet be more dead bodies found, and bomb clearing has not been completed, so people may yet be killed by accidentally setting off unexploded ordnance.
It is often forgotten that about half of Gazans are children, because of the ongoing population explosion, caused by insecurity, which has brought the Strip's population to nearly a million and a half. When Israel made a total war on the Gaza population, it was inevitably targeting large numbers of innocent children.
I don't think the big significance of the Gaza War, however, was political. It changed nothing politically. Netanyahu and the far right were ahead in the Israeli elections. They won. Hamas was in control of Gaza. It still is, and is now more popular in the West Bank and the Arab street, too. What has changed? The rockets still get fired at Israeli towns. Israel still occasionally bombs Gaza. The big significance was humanitarian. So as to avoid negotiating with Hamas, the Olmert government made total war on Gazans, which is to say, on Palestinian children.