Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, August 14, 2014:
“If you add together all the people who gathered over the past weekend to demand justice in Israel and Palestine – in Cape Town, Washington, D.C., New York, New Delhi, London, Dublin, Sydney, and all the other cities – this was arguably the largest active outcry by citizens around a single cause ever in the history of the world.”
Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta: “All the areas around the hospital were being bombed all the time. We then got a call to the emergency room and we were told that the administration and the out patients building had been hit – a lot of families had taken refuge in that area – so we had to go and help.”
Al-Shifa Hospital, July 2014.
During each of Israel’s three major assaults on Gaza, Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta has volunteered as a surgeon at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. A Palestinian reconstructive surgeon, he lives in Lebanon.
This interview with him was conducted by journalist Yazan al-Saadi, and published in the English edition of Al-Akhbar, a Lebanese newspaper.
As of August 18, 2014, the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli assault on Gaza has risen to 2,016, including 541 children, 250 women and 95 elderly men. Wounded: 10,196. The death toll keeps rising as more people die from catastrophic injuries.
Gaza City, July 27, 2014. Photo: Oxfam International.
“For the last eight years, Israel and the U.S. had repeated opportunities to opt for a diplomatic solution in Gaza. Each time, they have chosen war, with devastating consequences for the families of Gaza.”
Why?
The answer is here, in a well-documented account by Sandy Tolan, author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, and an associate professor at the University of Southern California.
The only practical response that does not depend on goodwill or common sense from the Israeli or American authorities: the growing international grassroots movement for BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions.
As the Israeli attack on Gaza and the suffocating military occupation of the West Bank grind on, and resistance continues on both sides of the apartheid wall, Canadian publisher Between the Lines is featuring Witness, a chapter from Our Way to Fight: peace-work under siege in Israel-Palestine, on the front page of their website.
According to mainstream media, the terms of a ‘cease-fire’ are currently in negotiation between the elected government of Gaza and the elected government of Israel.
In a tweet posted August 5, a spokesman for the Israeli military wrote: “Mission accomplished.”
“Mission accomplished”
What the latest Israeli mission accomplished:
1,938 Palestinians killed, 1,626 of them civilians, including 460 children and 246 women
7,920 wounded, mostly civilians, including 2,111 children and 1,415 women;
800 houses destroyed and thousands of others severely damaged
Many thousands of Palestinian civilians forcibly displaced
The impact of Israel’s intentional destruction of health and education facilities, and water, sewage and electric infrastructure is beyond imagining.
August 5, the same day Israel declared “Mission accomplished,” US President Obama signed a $225 million cheque, approved by Congress, to resupply Israel with missiles.
What next?
In a searing cry for elemental justice, Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, writes from inside the “cage” that is Gaza: “A ceasefire is not enough. It will not end the suffering. It will only move us from the horror of death by bombardment to the horror of death by slow strangulation. We cannot go back to being prisoners in a cage that Israel rattles when it chooses with brutal destructive offensives.”
Gaza rally, London, July 2014
Michael Riordon 