Israel's Sanctions are Denying a Generation of Palestinian Children Proper Education and Nutrition
The War on Gaza’s Children | by Saree Makdisi / September 24th, 2007

Israel's Sanctions are Denying a Generation of Palestinian Children Proper Education and Nutrition

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.”

An increasing number of Palestinian families in Gaza are unable to offer their children more than one meager meal a day, often little more than rice and boiled lentils. Fresh fruit and vegetables are beyond the reach of many families. Meat and chicken are impossibly expensive. Gaza faces the rich waters of the Mediterranean, but fish is unavailable in its markets because the Israeli navy has curtailed the movements of Gaza’s fishermen. ...
- posted by Editor @ 6:11 PM

Israel has added dozens of new roadblocks in West Bank
Friday, September 21, 2007 | UNITED NATIONS REVEALS THAT ISRAEL HAS BEEN LYING

UN: Israel has added dozens of new roadblocks in West Bank | By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondent
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Defense Minister Ehud Barak promised U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this week to remove 24 roadblocks and consider additional alleviations of movement restrictions on the Palestinians. This followed a similar promise to alleviate movement restrictions that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

However, the number of roadblocks has now reached 572, an increase of 52 percent compared to 376 in August 2005, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). In the past two months alone, Israel put up 40 new roadblocks, OCHA said.

Israel did remove a small fence along Road 317, in the Southern Mount Hebron region, doing away with 29 barricades. But OCHA found that 48 new roadblocks, mostly embankments preventing access to various roads, were put up.

Altogether, there are 476 unmanned roadblocks in the West Bank, consisting of concrete cubes, earthen embankments and other barricades blocking roads and exits from villages and towns.

The number of manned roadblocks has also increased, from 86 in July to 96 today, the UN found. Most of them are manned by soldiers round the clock, but some are manned only a few hours a day. ...
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5 Comments:

At 9:15 PM, September 21, 2007, Anonymous said...

Israel has broken every commandment in the bible under the assumption that they, and America christians are chosen over all. These ego ridden and highly blasphemous self-divine imps now assume anything they do is not subject to Gods rules.
Thou shalt not kill
Thou shalt not bare false witness
God warned that the rules apply to all men and will not spare those who take his holy name in vain. Espeacially for those who believe they are above Gods laws.
The bible warned that near the end-times many false prophets and false christians would arise. America is the birthplace and keepers of such.
- posted by Editor @ 6:50 AM

Those who truly seek justice and peace in the Middle East must dare to speak openly and honestly of the "Zionism problem"... Democracy ...
Palestine: democracy not Zionism | By John V. Whitbeck Fri Sep 14, 4:00 AM ET
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Those who truly seek justice and peace in the Middle East must dare to speak openly and honestly of the "Zionism problem" – and then to draw the moral, ethical, and practical conclusions that follow.

When South Africa was under a racial-supremacist, settler-colonial regime, the world recognized that the problem was the ideology and political system of the state. Anyone outside the country who referred to the "black problem" or the "native problem" (or, for that matter, to the "white problem") would instantly have been branded a racist.

The world also recognized that the solution to that problem could not be found either in "separation" (apartheid in Afrikaans) and scattered native reservations (called "independent states" by the South African regime and Bantustans by the rest of the world) or in driving the settler-colonial group in power into the sea. Rather, the solution had to be found – and to almost universal satisfaction was found – in democracy, in white South Africans growing out of their racial-supremacist ideology and political system and accepting that their interests and their children's futures would be best served in a democratic, non-racist state with equal rights for all who live there.

The solution for the land which, until it was literally wiped off the map in 1948, was called Palestine is the same. It can only be democracy. ...
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The obstacle to such a simple – and morally unimpeachable – solution is, of course, intellectual and psychological. Traumatized by the Holocaust and perceived insecurity as a Jewish island in an Arab sea, Israelis have immense psychological problems in coming to grips with the practical impossibility of sustaining forever what most of mankind views as a racial-supremacist, settler-colonial regime founded upon the ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population.

Indeed, Israelis have placed themselves in a virtually impossible situation. To taste its bitter essence, Americans might try to imagine what life in their country would be like if the European settlers had not virtually exterminated the indigenous population and if almost half of today's American population were Indians, without basic human rights, impoverished, smoldering with resentment, and visible every day as the inescapable living evidence of the injustice inflicted on their ancestors. ...
- posted by Editor @ 8:52 PM

it's just the dump where their rubbish ends up. To many Palestinians, it's the key to their families' survival.
Living off scraps: The West Bank's bitter harvest | Published: 14 September 2007

To Israeli settlers on the West Bank, it's just the dump where their rubbish ends up. To many Palestinians, it's the key to their families' survival. Donald Macintyre reports from Ad Deirat
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The stench from the refuse dumped by the trucks arriving every four or five minutes is pervasive, yet the men and boys sifting methodically through the rubbish hardly even notice the acrid smell any more. They are too busy looking through the discarded water bottles, bags soggy with food remains and near-empty family-sized hummus cartons. For along with discarded clothing it's the tin, steel and aluminium – cans mostly, but also, when their luck is in, the odd rusting car axle or broken toy bicycle – that earns the dozens of scavengers from the southern West Bank town of Yatta what little living can be made here by finding scrap saleable to dealers: often no more than 15 shekels (or just under £2) but on the best days up to 30. ...
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The dump, providing the sole income for most who work at it, is far from unique. From the Philippines to Latin America, the urban poor have long foraged at similar tips. But it has become a potent symbol of West Bank poverty and unemployment – over 30 percent for adults – in a Palestinian economy close to collapse. Not least because Yatta, where the scavengers come from, is only a few kilometres from the border with Israel whose thriving first-world economy – despite its own pockets of real poverty – affords the highest per capita income in the Middle East. ...
- posted by Editor @ 8:47 PM

what happens when an Israeli journalist says the same thing [Isreal and apartheid] at an International Conference? denied the right to speak
CONSEQUENCES OF CALLING APARTHEID BY ITS NAME | A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE~~ EXCEPT IN ISRAEL

What happens when a former US President refers to Israel as an Apartheid state?
He gets called an antisemite! Simple and to the point...

What happens when a Jewish Professor at a Catholic University says the same thing?
He is denied tenure.

Now, what happens when an Israeli journalist says the same thing at an International Conference?
He is denied the right to speak.

Just how far are the supporters of zion willing to go to hide the truth? Every attempt they have made recently has made headline news.... there is no way they can continue denying the FACT that Israel is an apartheid state...
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Andrew Balcombe, Chairman of the ZF, said: "Criticism of Israeli policy is acceptable. However, by using the word 'apartheid' in a UN conference held at the European Parliament, Danny Rubinstein encourages the demonisation of Israel and the Jewish people. I believe he was naïve to attend the UN conference."
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- posted by Editor @ 8:05 PM