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THE HIGH COURT OF ZIONIST ISRAEL’S APARTHEID REGIME “LEGALIZES” SLOW MOTION GENOCIDE IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE
by Benjamin Merhav
Following are 2 email messages which reached me today. The first is a press release by Al Mezan, Gaza, Palestine. The second is a forwarded article/report by Felicity Arbuthnot, a writer in the UK, on the crisis in Gaza. Both messages are warnings against the deliberate slow motion genocide perpetrated by the zionist rulers against the Arab people of Palestine, particularly in the Gaza Strip.
This genocide is fully backed (and paid for) by the USA rulers. It is therefore one more item in the war crimes/crimes against humanity indictment against them.
DISBAND NOW THE ZIONIST APARTHEID REGIME OF ISRAEL !
Al Mezan Center for Human Rights
Palestine, Gaza
Telefax 2820447,2820442
Reference: 148/2007
http://www.mezan.org/
Date: 3 December 2007
The Israeli High Court Permits Collective Punishment Measures against Civilians in Gaza On Friday 30 November 2007
The Israeli High Court declined to intervene in the Israeli government’s decision to reduce fuel supplies to Gaza; thus rendering such reduction legal.
Four days after the Court’s ruling, the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip has worsened and became at the verge of an outrageous disaster.
The Court’s interim decision prohibited the government from executing intended reduction of electricity supply to Gaza for at least two weeks; during which the Court will consider clarifications that should satisfy it as to the way in which the reduction of electricity will not harm civilians.
The ruling comes in response to a petition submitted by ten human rights organizations; including Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. The petitioners requested the Court to issue an injunction prohibiting the government from cutting off fuel and electricity on the grounds that such measures represent collective punishment of civilians.
The Israeli military informed the Court and petitioners that it would start the electricity cuts on 2 December 2007 and, at the same time, gradually increase the cutting of fuel supply. The Court considered the petition on Thursday, 29 November 2007. It permitted the fuel cuts but prevented electricity cuts until further clarifications are provided by the military.
This decision has affected civilian life in Gaza Strip almost immediately. It jeopardizes civilians’ life; especially if accompanied with reducing electricity supply that will disturb the working of facilities that are indispensable for their life and wellbeing. The reduction of fuel supply has already impacted Gazans’ movement within Gaza. On Monday 3 December 2007 Al Mezan Center monitored the start of a transportation crisis in Gaza’s streets. People face difficulty reaching their workplaces, schools, universities and hospitals because of the lack of diesel and benzene.
The reduction of fuel did not take into account the needs of public and private transportation, which the Israeli army does not qualify as a minimum humanitarian need. Therefore, thousands of workers in transportation sector have lost their work. At the same time, they are not able to transport medical, education and other personnel to their work, which threatens the working of the medical and other essential facilities. According to Al Mezan’s documentation, Israel started reducing fuel supply into Gaza Strip gradually in the beginning of October 2007. At first, it reduced the fuel amount by more than half.
Israel then announced its intention to further reduce the amount by 20% in comparison with the average supply after June 2006, which reached 450,000 liters of diesel per day. Prior to June 2006, Gaza used to purchase 700,000 liters of diesel for daily consumption. On the two days after the Court’s ruling, the amount has been reduced to 90,000 liters on 29 and 30 December 2007; representing about 14% of average levels of diesel supply. Diesel is particularly essential for the transportation sector and power generators, which are heavily used, particularly at hospitals and clinics, to compensate the shortage of electricity.
AL Mezan Center for Human Rights is gravely concerned by the Court’s ruling, which breaches International Humanitarian Law (IHL), particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Convention prohibits collective punishment of civilians and all conducts that target or disrupt the functioning of facilities indispensable for their life and wellbeing. Israel is under an obligation to facilitate the proper working of institutions devoted for caring for the population’s wellbeing.
While the Court’s ruling disregards binding rules of IHL, AL Mezan views that it provides a legal cover for collective punishment of civilians, which served only to exacerbate the suffering of civilians and the deterioration of their humanitarian conditions in Gaza Strip. AL Mezan Center expresses its strong condemnation of Israel’s cuts of fuel. It also deplores the Court ruling that allowed such illegal conduct. The Center expresses its deep concern about the possibility that the Court will permit electricity cuts in the soon future, which may also allow for further reductions of food and medicines supply.
Al Mezan therefore calls upon the international community to uphold its legal and moral obligations vis-à-vis the civilian population in Gaza and intervene to lift the illegal siege, and prevent the punishment measures imposed by Israel on Gaza. These measures have brought about grave consequences on civilians life and their humanitarian conditions and must stop.
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APPEAL FROM MINISTRY OF HEALTH – GAZA
“As Christmas approaches, the land of Christ’s birth – where, for believers, he walked, preached, encouraged his followers to be ‘fishers of men’, for goodness and justice and where he died at the hands of the greedy and corrupt – is under siege.
The residents of Gaza are being collectively punished for supporting a democratically elected government (a process so beloved by the freedom-and-democracy-spreaders-by-slaughter in Washington and Whitehall, but clearly the wrong kind of democracy.They did not elect a corrupt quisling puppet.)
The greedy and corrupt have been exiling and silently crucifying the Palestinian people for sixty years, in defiance of over forty UN resolutions. Aided, abbeted, armed with allegedly illegal weapons and weapons of mass destruction, by the bigest bully on the global block: the ‘land of the free’.
Whilst people are jailed for holocaust denial, as the West witch hunts the very old under the banner of hunting Nazi war criminals, this silent sixty year holocaust, displacement, ghettoisation, home demolishing, infanticide, child killing, arrest without trial, disappearances, the dying of the sick at road blocks, the theft and erosion of ancient lands, olives and citrus groves, themdestruction of education, civil society continues unabated as the world watches on.
Palestinians and Christians alike are spat at by those from illegal settlements – and spat out by an international community which stands by as all that is essential to life support for sick and civlian alike, is denied.
The ‘only democratic country in the Middle East’, flouting international law with impunity, stealing and squatting on the lands of others, is getting away with mass murder aided by its ‘Christian’ partners in crime on Capitol Hill and in Whitehall. Not even the fox is in charge of the henhouse – that would be a positive improvement.
As these ‘Christians’, go the church at Christmas and sing ‘Away in a manger ..’ and ‘Oh little town of Bethlehem ..’ will they reflect that the ‘little town’ and Manger Square’ is walled off, and as most of Palestine, ghettoised, families divided, tenderly tended agricutural lands, sustenance of generations of families, destroyed or unreachable? The olive leaves and olive branches, that potent, biblical symbol of peace and the receding of the great flood, lie broken,smashed, bulldozed, trampled.
A metaphor for successive Israeli government’s morals. An eminent physician once told me that a handful of olives a day have every nutrient needed to sustain a life. Like Palestinian lives, they are trampled and meaningless to the occupiers, the modern day equivalent of the evil and corruption of the money lenders in the Temple, whose tables Christ overturned. Reflect what less than five years of American/Israeli occupation (oh yes it is) has done to Iraq. Consider what sixty years have done to Palestine.
Give your biggest present to the people of Gaza this Christmas, remember them in your prayers, but praying is not enough. Organise, protest, marshall the media, contact your representatives and make your only New Year resolution to never rest until this illegal occupation and overt and covert carnage in the Holy Land ceases.
The details of where all can start, tangibly and right now, are below: Appeal – Appeal – Appeal We have a very series shortage of diesel in the ministry of Health. The majority of the 11 hospitals of MOH do suffer from a shortage of fuel, the same is for the 52 primary health care clinics and vehicles. I am not speaking now about the consequences but they are catastrophic and include the transportation defect which will not enable the employees of the Ministry to go to their hospitals.
Please. We urge you to help us by applying any sort of pressure that could let the Israelis change their mind about this fatal action that would threaten the lives of thousands of civilians in the already under siege Gaza.
Dr Medhat Abbas General Director of Crisis Management Unit
Ministry of Health, Gaza.
Contact: mabbas@gov.ps
