Israel kills 34 civilians in strikes

By Laila Bassam July 15th, 2006

BEIRUT (Reuters) -



Israel killed at least 34 civilians on Saturday, including 15 children, in air strikes meant to punish Lebanon for letting Hizbollah guerrillas menace the Jewish state's northern border.

Israel's bombing of Lebanese roads, bridges, ports and airports, as well as Hizbollah targets, is its most destructive onslaught since a 1982 invasion to expel Palestinian forces. For the first time, ports in Christian areas were bombarded and a helicopter missile hit a lighthouse on Beirut's seafront. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora demanded an immediate U.N.-backed ceasefire, denouncing Israel for turning his country into a "disaster zone." He appealed for foreign aid.

An Israeli missile incinerated a van in southern Lebanon, killing 20 people, among them 15 children, in the deadliest single attack of the campaign launched by Israel after Hizbollah captured two of its soldiers and killed eight on Wednesday. Police said the van was carrying two families fleeing the village of Marwaheen after Israeli loudspeaker warnings to leave their homes. Many of the bodies were charred and broken.

Other raids on north, east and south Lebanon killed 14 people and wounded 37, security sources said.

At least 103 people, all but four of them civilians, have been killed in Israel's four-day-old assault, which has choked Lebanon's economy and prompted tourists and foreigners to flee.

Civilians killed by the Israeli airstrike are lined up roadside by U.N. peacekeepers, who collected the bodies.

An innocent civilian "accidently" blown away while following the orders of the invading Israeli army

Roasting alive fleeing civilians will really teach those "terrorists" a lesson they will not soon forget.

An innocent man, burned alive and blasted to bits.

A man? Perhaps a woman? Maybe a child? Who can tell. Shredded by "democratic" missiles - it's all for a good cause, right?

This is why we must stop funding their terror.

Racism is "the belief that one 'racial group' is inferior to another and the practices of the dominant group to maintain the inferior position of the dominated group. Often defined as a combination of power, prejudice and discrimination."

This is how the British Library defines racism on its Web site. The above definition hardly deviates from the essence of almost all definitions of the ominous concept. And, indeed, the concept is being fully utilized with Israel's onslaught against the Palestinians, and the international community and media's mild, if not accommodating response to the onslaught.

The capture of Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit is an act of self-defense. According to international law and the Geneva Conventions, he can be considered a prisoner of war, but not according to CNN, Fox News and the increasingly spineless BBC, which presents the soldier as a victim, who was "kidnapped" by Palestinian "militants" who are "affiliated" with the Hamas government.

By not challenging the Israeli narrative in any meaningful way, the uncritical media has become a tool in the hands of Israel's war strategists and their eternal concoctions.

Consider this example. An Israeli military commander tells a BBC correspondent dispatched to the border area between Israel and Gaza, that Israel intends on opening the border for "as long as it takes" to offset the humanitarian crisis developing in Gaza. The Israeli Army representative in a barefaced lie declares that the border has always been open, despite the perpetual Palestinian threat on the state of Israel. The BBC correspondent thanks him and signs off.

Is it possible that the BBC is unaware of the fact that Gaza has been under a strict military siege since Hamas' democratic advent to power through the January 2006 elections? Could it be that the Western media has missed the dozens of shocking reports that have warned that the Israeli siege -- which began months before the capture of Shalit -- was soon to create chaos and panic among the already malnourished Palestinians in Gaza? Did they all miss statements by top Israeli officials vowing to carry on with the siege until the outset of Hamas?

Some reporters misrepresent facts out of ignorance, not by design. But if that indeed was the case, then how can one excuse the fact that the same media that coined the term "kidnapping" to describe the action of the Palestinian fighters who captured Shalit refused to use the same association to describe the kidnapping of most of the elected Palestinian Cabinet, mostly academics with no connection to any militant wing?

More

http://counterpunch.com/baroud07142006.html

International Action Center statement:

STOP THE U.S.--ISRAELI WAR AGAINST LEBANON AND PALESTINE!

July 13, 2006

The blood in Gaza and Lebanon is on George Bush's hands. The bombs,

shells and missiles now pounding Lebanese and Palestinian cities and

villages, wiping out entire families and leaving hundreds of thousands

without power or water, are made in the U.S. So are the planes and

cannons that launch them.

The Israeli attack on Gaza and the sovereign state of Lebanon is part

of Bush's war against Iraq--part of a decades-long war against the Arab

people and the people of the Middle East.

The Bush regime pays the bills for the Israeli war machine and has

given it a green light to go to war. And it is using the

Israeli-created crisis as a pretext for attacks on Syria and Iran.

Israel has launched a terror bombing against the people of Gaza and

Lebanon, allegedly in response to the capture of Israeli soldiers by

Palestinian and Lebanese freedom fighters. This excuse is a lie.

Israeli artillery murdered a dozen civilians in Gaza, including a

family resting on the beach, the week before Corporal Shalit was

captured.

Israel's invasion of Gaza and kidnapping of Palestinian ministers were

planned six months ago. What Israel seeks is the overthrow of

Palestine's democratically elected government. And the Bush regime

seeks complete control over the Middle East for the greater profit of

Big Oil and the military-industrial complex.

The three captured Israeli soldiers are not hostages, as Israeli Prime

Minister Ehud Olmert claims. They are volunteers in the brutal, racist

Israeli military. They are prisoners of war. The real hostages are the

9,000 Palestinian political prisoners, including hundreds of women and

children, held in Israeli concentration camps. They are illegally

imprisoned, and many have been tortured. If the Israeli state cared

about its soldiers' welfare, it would agree to a prisoner exchange.

The three POWs are the latest of many pretenses used by Israel to

justify decades of war and terror against the people of Palestine,

Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Jordan. Since the Palestinian people were

forced from their homes by force and massacre in 1948, hundreds of

thousands of Arab women, men and children have been murdered and maimed

by Israeli bombs and missiles. And the U.S. government has spent

hundreds of billions to make this possible. The U.S. poured arms and

aid to Israel while the people of New Orleans drowned, while Katrina

evacuees are being evicted onto the street, while tens of millions in

this country lack health care.

The International Action Center calls on justice-loving people in the

U.S. and the world over to stand in solidarity with the people of

Palestine and Lebanon. They have a right to defend themselves. They

have a right to fight for land and freedom. They have a right to seek

freedom for their unjustly imprisoned compatriots.

The Lebanese and Palestinian combatants--be they in Hezbollah, Hamas or

the Popular Resistance Committees--are not terrorists. They are freedom

fighters, like the Spear of the Nation in South Africa, like the Jewish

resisters of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Israelis, with their mass

collective punishment of civilians, are emulating the Nazis.

We salute the stand of the Congress of South African Trade Unions

(COSATU), which fought so long against a white minority regime backed

by Israel and the United States. COSATU has denounced Israeli apartheid

as worse than that in South Africa, and called for international

sanctions against the racist Israeli settler state. The South African

Council of Churches has also adopted this call.

Peace in the Middle East is possible. It requires an end to occupation

from Iraq to Palestine, the freedom of Lebanese and Palestinian

prisoners and the right of displaced Palestinians to return to their

homes. It requires the U.S. to withdraw from the region and stop

financing the brutal Israeli war machine.

U.S.-Israel, Hands Off Gaza and Lebanon!

Free All Lebanese and Palestinian Political Prisoners!

U.S. Out of the Middle East!

Stop Aid to Israel!

International Action Center

http://www.iacenter.org

212-633-6646



http://www.iacenter.org