Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Preparing for the next invasion

By Amira Hass
Haaretz

"The hospital learned other lessons as well. The refrigerator in its morgue had room for three bodies. Another refrigerator has been added, with room for six additional corpses. The hospital will also purchase an underground diesel fuel tank. The western part of the hospital was hit during last week's invasion, a precedent whose lesson is that in the future, flammable materials must be kept out of the range of IDF bullets. The hospital also asked for a budget for ambulances with front-wheel drive, since the current ones could not easily navigate the streets torn up by the tank treads.

The assumption is that the Israeli army will continue to invade, destroy and damage infrastructure - either intentionally, or because that is the nature of tanks - impeding water and electricity supplies and shooting at civilian institutions. The army will not change, and no one will restrain it. Therefore, appropriate preparations must be made.

The sterile, deceptive expression "IDF operation" commonly used in the Israeli media, conceals thousands of details of killing, destruction and terror carried out by the Israeli war machine and the commanders and soldiers that operate it - in Beit Hanun last week and in other assaults and invasions over the past six years that were termed "operations."

The lack of desire by the Israeli public to know is reinforced and completed by the "lack of space" in the media and the hierarchy of editing that deletes critical information about the Israeli army and, in effect, about Israeli society - a society that is constantly manufacturing destructive capabilities, and sending its twenty something-year-olds to destroy lives, cities and futures."

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