Maine Owl

International law inoperative, body count over 200

After a two-month long Israeli noose strangled Gaza nearly to the point of starvation, Israel has attacked with F-16s in a devastating volley leading what may become a "prolonged Gaza op," according to the BBC.

The news barely registers here in the U.S. What we do see goes pretty much like the NECN report out of Boston I just watched on the Portland cable system:



Basically Israel, regrettably, has to attack because rockets are fired at Israeli civilians just outside the Gaza border. The Hamas-led Palestinians of Gaza are the ones intentionally targeting civilians, but the Israelis are not. Israeli General Council to New England Nadav Tamir puts it this way: "The problem is they use the population as human shields."

The Israeli claim of concern for civilian life is undermined by the little-reported blockade affecting the entire Gaza population of 1-1/2 million people. Quantities of flour, cooking gas, and chickens--all essential elements of the food supply have been squeezed to starvation levels by the blockade.

The Fourth Geneva Convention provides unequivocal law that certainly would seem to prohibit the blockade against the entire population, and certainly should open a serious investigation of the Israeli claim that only "militants" are targeted by the F-16s:

Article 33. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.

But international law is inoperative in this situation because the U.N. Security Council refuses to hold Israel to account in any way.

Furthermore, from the example of NECN above, it's clear that U.S. media will hold no responsibility to report anything other than a version of events adequately friendly to the Israeli interpretation that it had no other choice but to "protect itself."

But... The "militant" police officers killed by Israel turn out to be traffic cops while on-the-scene photography shows the dead bodies of children, many of whom were in the streets at the end of a school day.

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 27 December 2008

Reports said that many of the dead were Palestinian police officers. Among those Israel labels "terrorists" were more than a dozen traffic police officers undergoing training. An as yet unknown number of civilians were killed and injured; Al Jazeera showed images of several dead children, and the Israeli attacks came at the time thousands of Palestinian children were in the streets on their way home from school.

I'm sorry that I have to be one of the few in the U.S. who is concerned about these events and the suspect way they are reported to us. I'm not sanguine about the incoming Obama administration either. President-elect Obama has declared the bond between the U.S. and Israel "unbreakable today, unbreakable tomorrow, unbreakable forever."