Palestinian Pundit

"GAZA, (PIC)-- The Shifa hospital in Gaza city, the biggest in the Gaza Strip, has appealed to the concerned international parties to supply the hospital with morgue fridge units after all its units were crammed with the growing number of bodies.

The hospital administration explained in a statement on Tuesday that the big number of martyrs whose relatives could not bury them due to the Israeli occupation forces' aggression and ensuing conditions.

Dr. Hussein Ashur, the director of the Shifa medical complex, said that there was no more space in those units and that the bodies were strewn on the floor in the rooms of those units. He warned that the bodies might decompose if they continued in this state for longer periods outside the refrigerating units.

Dr. Ashur called on concerned international institutions to expedite supplying his hospital with those units before a "humanitarian disaster" occurs.

He noted that 40 martyrs were rushed to the hospital morgues in Monday alone while 100 wounded mostly women and children were admitted into the hospital by noon."

Democracy Now!
With Amy Goodman

"In the deadliest attack since Israel launched its assault on Gaza twelve days ago, up to forty-two Palestinians died on Tuesday after Israel fired mortars at a United Nations school that was sheltering Palestinians who had been forced to flee their homes. Fifty-five Palestinians were also wounded in the attack. Doctors said all of the victims were civilians, including many children. We speak with Christopher Gunness of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency....."

By Robert Scheer

"Why is it that there is such widespread acceptance, beginning with the apologetic arguments of President Bush, that whatever Israel does is always justified as necessary to the survival of the Jewish state? It is not...."

Saree Makdisi, The Electronic Intifada, 6 January 2009
(Saree Makdisi is professor of English literature at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation.")

"Israel's disregard for Palestinian life in Gaza today is, in short, a direct extension of its disregard for Palestinian life since 1948, and what is happening in Gaza today is the continuation of what happened six decades ago. Eighty percent of the people crammed into Gaza's hovels and shanties are refugees or the descendants of refugees that armed Zionist gangs, which eventually coalesced into the infant Israeli army, terrorized from their homes elsewhere in southwestern Palestine in 1948.....

Meticulously and clinically thought through even before the first rocket from Gaza claimed a life inside Israel, the slaughter in Gaza today has nothing to do with rockets or with Hamas. As Sofer himself explains, it is the purest and most distilled expression of Zionist ideology. "Unilateral separation doesn't guarantee 'peace,'" Sofer says in that same interview; "it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews."

And that -- taken right from the horse's mouth -- is what the slaughter of innocents in Gaza is fundamentally about: the people being killed today are the ones for whom there is no room in the Zionist vision of the state. They are regarded as an excess population. Not even Malthus thought that a redundant population should just be lined up and shot, or bombed into the ground. But, clearly, times have changed since 1798.

This inhuman madness will end only with the end of the violent ideology that spawned it -- when those who are committed to the project of creating and maintaining a religiously and ethnically exclusivist state in what has always been a culturally and religiously heterogeneous land finally relent and accept the inevitable: that they have failed."

By Mel Frykberg

"RAMALLAH, Jan 6 (IPS) - At least 42 Palestinians sheltering in a UN school in the Jabaliya refugee camp near Gaza city were killed Tuesday afternoon after two Israeli tank shells exploded outside the school.

Hundreds of terrified Palestinians, desperately trying to escape the bombing, had sought shelter there assuming that a clearly marked school would not be targeted. Palestinian sources reported that the school was one of 26 residential buildings hit Tuesday......

Meanwhile the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has declared a "full-blown humanitarian crisis" in Gaza, said it is investigating reports that a Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC) ambulance station in Jabaliya refugee camp was targeted Monday night.

In an earlier attack last Friday, the ICRC reported that two clearly marked ambulance medics from the PRC, evacuating the dead and wounded from an earlier Israeli attack, were targeted by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) fire.

The paramedics were wearing fluorescent jackets and their ambulances had flashing lights visible from a considerable distance. "I have no doubt that one missile was aimed at us. I do not know for certain whether it was meant to kill us or warn us to keep away, but it was definitely aimed in our direction," said Palestinian ambulance driver Khaled Abu Saada......."

By Robert Fisk

"So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?

Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?

What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. "Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.

What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror". The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.

I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.

The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.

Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.

And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.

Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer."

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem and Hazem Balousha in Gaza City
The Guardian, Wednesday 7 January 2009

"Israel's assault on Gaza has exacted the bloodiest toll of civilian lives yet, when the bombing of UN schools being used as refugee centres and of housing killed more than 50 people, including an entire family of seven young children.

The UN protested at a "complete absence of accountability" for the escalating number of civilian deaths in Gaza, saying "the rule of the gun" had taken over.....

The UN was particularly incensed over targeting of the schools, because Israeli forces knew they were packed with families as they had ordered them to get out of their homes with leaflet drops and loudspeakers. It said it had identified the schools as refugee centres to the Israeli military and provided GPS coordinates......."

Desperate civilians find shelter wherever they can but even the humanitarian agency's buildings are not safe

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
The Guardian, Wednesday 7 January 2009

"More than 15,000 Gazans are sheltering in UN schools because they have been forced to flee their homes in the face of the Israeli air and ground offensive, or even ordered out by Israeli troops. The UN has opened 27 of its schools as shelters, most in the northern town of Jabaliya, where food, blankets and counselling are being provided.

It is the UN that has stepped in to help because it is by far the largest humanitarian resource in Gaza, particularly the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), which supports Palestinian refugees across the Arab world. More than 1 million Gazans are refugees: either they or their families were forced from their homes or fled in the 1948 war that brought the creation of Israel.....

Yesterday, presented with reports of the heavy civilian death toll after the Israeli bombing of two UN schools serving as shelters in Gaza, some Israeli officials were quick to argue that militants had used UN property from which to launch rockets in the past.

But the UN underlined the fact that it had passed on the coordinates of the schools to the Israeli military to prevent these kind of killings, and called for an inquiry. "These tragic incidents need to be investigated and if international humanitarian law has been contravened those responsible must be held accountable," said Max Gaylard, the UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinians.

While Israel says that its war in Gaza is "unavoidable", it also argues there is no humanitarian crisis and it is allowing in sufficient aid. Unrwa has been critical of Israel's blockade of Gaza in recent years, presenting evidence of a mounting humanitarian crisis, particularly in the last 11 days of conflict. John Ging, Unrwa's director of operation in Gaza, yesterday described Israel's war as a "completely unjustified and unnecessary conflict".

It is not the first time the UN has found itself in the Israeli line of fire. During the Lebanon war two years ago four unarmed UN military observers were killed when their clearly marked UN position was bombed by the Israeli military in Khiyam, in southern Lebanon. Israel apologised and later said the building, which had been on the same spot since 1972, had been wrongly identified as a Hezbollah target.

A decade earlier, in 1996, the Israeli military fired artillery shells into another UN site, at Qana in southern Lebanon, killing more than 100 Lebanese civilians who were among 800 sheltering from heavy fighting.....

More often their disagreements have a strong political dimension. Last month Israel refused entry to, and then deported, Richard Falk, a Jewish American academic who is the UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories. Israel said he was being denied entry because in 2007 he described the Israeli blockade of Gaza as a "holocaust in the making"......"

أكد رفض حماس أي حل لا يوقف العدوان وينهي الحصار

"أكد رئيس المكتب السياسي لحركة المقاومة الإسلامية (حماس) أن خسائر المقاومة في قطاع غزة "قليلة جدا" وأن العدو "بفضل الله لم يتمكن من تدمير ولو منصة صواريخ واحدة منذ بدء العدوان على غزة". وأعلن خالد مشعل في الوقت ذاته أن الحركة لن تقبل أي صيغة للحل ما لم تتضمن وقف العدوان وإنهاء الحصار.

وقال مشعل أثناء استقباله وفدا شعبيا أردنيا مساء الثلاثاء بالعاصمة السورية دمشق إن 21 جنديا إسرائيليا قتلوا منذ بدء العدوان من بينهم نائب قائد لواء غولاني، و79 جريحا من بينهم قائد لواء غولاني نفسه.
.....
تحولات كبرى
واعتبر مشعل أن "التحولات الكبرى تحتاج لمعارك كبرى" مشددا على أن نتائج "العدوان على غزة" ستفرض تحولات كبرى على مستوى المنطقة.

واتهم قائد حماس السياسي أطرافا عربية بأنها كانت تعلم بالعدوان الإسرائيلي على قطاع غزة، وقال "هناك أطراف أوروبية أبلغتنا بأن أميركا ودولا عربية كانت على علم بالحرب على غزة".

وتابع "إسرائيل قررت أن تؤدب حماس بعد فشل تطويع الحركة بغطاء أميركي وشبه عربي وفلسطيني عبر السلطة". وتابع أن مواقف قيادات السلطة الفلسطينية في رام الله حملت حماس مسؤولية العدوان الإسرائيلي في الأيام الأولى للعدوان "لكنهم بدؤوا يغيرون لغتهم بعد أن تبين أن ميزان المعركة تغير".
وفي مقابل إشادته بالموقف التركي الذي حمل إسرائيل مسؤولية إنهاء التهدئة،
.....
واعتبر أن أي اتفاق يوافق عليه رئيس السلطة الفلسطينية محمود عباس أثناء مباحثاته في نيويورك "غير ملزم للحركة" مشيرا إلى أن حماس وبقية فصائل المقاومة ترفض أي نشر لقوات دولية في قطاع غزة.

وأكد أن حماس ستنظر في أي مشروع لوقف العدوان في قطاع غزة إذا حقق وقفا فوريا للعدوان ورفع الحصار عبر فتح كافة المعابر بما فيها معبر رفح، وغير ذلك فإن حماس لن توافق على أي صيغة للحل.
....."

Al-Manar

"......Sayyed Nasrallah lashed out at some Arab leaders who are still having normal ties with Israel at a time more than 680 people killed in Gaza and advised them to follow the path of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who expelled the Israeli Ambassador in protest at the Israeli aggression on Gaza.

“In front of the Zionist entity that is based on spilling the blood of the innocent and committing massacres, the least thing to do is not to give legitimacy to this entity regardless of the sacrifices. The guardians of the Zionist entity want us to give Israel legitimacy, but the vast majority rejects this. What is taking place today in Gaza, should be a strong motive to reject giving legitimacy to this entity. Not acknowledging Israel, rejecting normalization with it is the least than can be done. Yesterday Chavez expelled the Israeli Ambassador and he set an example for all those who are still receiving Israeli Ambassadors. Some Arab leaders are requested to learn how to reject normalization with this entity. I assure you that the peoples of our nation will punish those leaders for their crimes. They ought to help the resistance instead of pressuring it.”

His eminence criticized the Egyptian regime for keeping the Rafah crossing closed in the face of the dying people of Gaza. “Yesterday, an Egyptian official asked: does the UN need 600 martyrs and 1500 injured people to take action? Today I ask him, do you need that much victims to open the Rafah crossing?”......

The Hezbollah chief addressed the “real US scheme” that was reflected by former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. “The real scheme is to separate Gaza from the West Bank. The rhetoric about two states is mere illusion. They want to give Egypt mandate on Gaza and Jordan mandate on the West Bank.” His eminence added that “this necessitates a renewal to our call for all Palestinian factions to unite because the aim is to liquidate their cause, all of their cause, not just Hamas or Fatah.” "

Viva Chavez! No Arab "Leader" Dares to Do the Same! Because They Are Cowards and USraeli Puppets.

"Venezuela has expelled the Israeli ambassador to the Latin American country in protest at the ongoing onslaught in the Gaza Strip.

In a statement, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry said that Caracas had expelled the Israeli envoy to protest the Israeli invasion of Gaza which had killed at least 500 Palestinians. "

Egypt keeps doctors from entering Gaza

"Egypt bars local and foreign doctors from crossing into the Gaza Strip to help the rising number of civilians wounded in Israeli assaults.

Anesthesiologist Dimitrios Mognie from Greece told the Associated Press that he had been idling his time for the past four days near the Gaza-Egypt border, unable to access the people he came to rescue. "This is a shame…That in 2009 they have people in need of help from a doctor and we can go to help and they won't let us; this is crazy," said Mognie.

Every day Mognie and a colleague, both part of the Greek organization Doctors for Peace, go to the Egyptian border with instruments and medical supplies, only to get turned away.

Mognie said he had managed to survive conflict zones such as Iraq, Angola and Somalia, adding he understood security concerns but was was willing to take the risk.

Another physician at Rafah, obstetrician Jemilah Mahmood from Mercy Malaysia, a group working with the Egyptian Red Crescent, expressed her exasperation at fact that only equipment had eventually gotten through. "Can you imagine how many women are hurt and how few women doctors there are?" she asked, adding, "All of us are sitting at the border."

Egypt is yet to reply to an Iranian request for establishing a desert hospital on Egyptian territory. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hasan Qashqavi said Monday that Tehran submitted a formal request to Cairo to set up the triage center to receive wounded Gazans......."

The Free Gaza Movement

"There is a time when silence is complicity and inaction is unacceptable. The ongoing Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have lead to the death of over 550 Palestinians, including children and women, and the injury of thousands, with the death and injury toll rapidly rising. Massive violations of international humanitarian law are being committed by Israel, both with regard to its obligations as an Occupying Power and in its conduct of hostilities.

The community of states has thusfar failed to comply with their duty to ensure Israel's respect for the Fourth Geneva Convention and protect the Palestinian civilian population from Israel's serious and persistent violations in accordance with the Convention. Consequently, we, concerned citizens from Belgium, Columbia, France, Great Britain, Greece, Ireland, Jordan, Kuwait, Scotland, Spain, and the United States feel that it is our moral duty to do what we can to provide some measure of protection. We are willing to put our bodies on the line to get in the way of Israel's unlawful violence against innocent Palestinian civilians.

In the early hours of Tuesday, December 30, the Israeli Navy violently attacked our motor vessel DIGNITY, which was loaded with medical supplies and carried amongst others, doctors headed to Gaza to assist with the humanitarian crisis there. Neither the ship, nor its passengers and crew constituted any kind of danger to the Israeli Naval Forces. Yet our boat was rammed again and again, in an apparent attempt to disable the vessel, and in a manner that jeopardized the lives of the 16 civilians on board.

We will not be deterred by the violence of the Israeli military. We will set out again for Gaza. We are doctors, journalists, members of parliament, and human rights observers trying to reach the people of Gaza to deliver much needed aid and witness the atrocities being committed again the Palestinians there.

Israel is hereby put on notice that we are coming. We will announce our exact departure date, time and route, traveling from Cypriot waters, into international waters, directly into Gaza territorial waters, never nearing Israeli waters. The Israeli Navy, Ministry of Defense, and Foreign Ministry will all receive a copy of this notice. Any attack on our vessel will be premeditated and any harm inflicted on the 30 civilians on board will be the result of a deliberate attack on unarmed civilians."

Per Bjoerklund, The Electronic Intifada, 5 January 2009

"Thousands of Egyptians have taken to the streets to protest the continuing Israeli aggression against Gaza and the participation of the Egyptian regime in the isolation of its population. Last Wednesday, the state responded with a major crackdown in which tens of protestors and journalists were assaulted and arrested.

Around the Arab world, the Egyptian regime has been a target of severe criticism for its continuing role in the ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip and its silence in the face of intense Israeli bombardment of the enclave. Last Tuesday, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak responded to the criticism by announcing in a televised speech that the Rafah border crossing will remain closed until the Palestinian Authority led by president Mahmoud Abbas regains control of the Gaza strip -- a statement that only strengthened the impression that Mubarak approves of the Israeli military action against Hamas, perceived by the regime as a natural ally of the internal islamic opposition in Egypt......"

Yosefa Loshitzky, The Electronic Intifada, 5 January 2009
(Cartoon by Naser Jafari)

"I am not sure that most people understand the meaning of the name "Operation Cast Lead" chosen by Israel for its murderous and criminal attack on Gaza. The name is borrowed from a Hebrew nursery rhyme which was (and may still be) very popular among Israeli children in the 1950s. In this song, a father promises to his child a special Hannukah gift: "a cast lead sevivon." Sevivon, in Hebrew (A dreidel in Yiddish) is a four-sided spinning top, played with during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Somebody, in the Israeli army, who apparently feels nostalgic about his childhood, decided that if Israeli kids would enjoy a sevivon cast from lead there is no reason why Palestinian children would not appreciate it too. After all Operation Cast Lead is not the first (and unfortunately, will not be the last) of Israel's cruel war games.......

Israel's cruelty -- manifested through its use (or rather abuse) of language, and creative "strategy" of "re-branding" its continuous assaults on the Palestinians as a war of defense, using their tautological logic to justify the extermination of an "entity" which they designate as "hostile" -- should be interpreted in the spirit of Giorgio Agamben. The influential Italian philosopher argued in relation to the Nazi death camps that the "correct question to pose concerning the horrors committed in the camps is, therefore, not the hypocritical one of how crimes of such atrocity could be committed against human beings" but what were "the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime."

We may well ask the same question today when listening to Israel's blonde bombshells explain the bombs tearing apart the people of Gaza."

Safa Joudeh writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 5 January 2009

(Safa Joudeh is a master's candidate in public policy at Stony Brook University in the US. She returned to Gaza in September 2007 where she currently works as a freelance journalist)

".....At the moment, and in the midst of the aggression, it is hard to make sense of the current situation or make future predictions. It's hard to come to grips with the numbers and the extent of our losses. It's hard even to remember a time when basic necessities such as food, water, warmth and daylight weren't a luxury. At this point, bare human instinct is at work -- the need to protect your loved ones, the need to ensure shelter and the instinct of fight or flight. We have fled for too long, Gaza is our last refuge and our home after we were displaced from what is now called Israel. All this happened 60 years ago. What more could they want? We have nowhere left to go. They have disregarded every single international law there is. Now is the time to defend ourselves, now is the time for resistance."

Al-Manar

"06/01/2009 Once again, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak insists on holding Hamas responsible for the Israeli aggression against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In a closed conversation Monday, he told a delegation of European foreign ministers that Hamas must not be allowed to win the war with the Israeli army, Haaretz said.....

The Egyptian cease-fire proposal would require Israel to end its military offensive and withdraw from Gaza, while Hamas would have to end rocket fire into the occupied territories. The crossings into Gaza would reopen, but PA officials would be stationed at the Rafah crossing with Egypt. In addition, Egypt is demanding that Hamas resume reconciliation talks with Fatah.

Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy head of Hamas' political wing, said that Hamas was open to a truce, but said that any proposal must guarantee an Israeli withdrawal and an end to the blockade of Gaza. "

Al-Manar

"06/01/2009 Palestinian resistance fighters continued to launch rockets at Israeli settlements Tuesday despite a four-day old ground offensive against Gaza. A Grad rocket attack targeted the Gedera settlement north of Kiryat Malachi, 30 kilometers from Tel Aviv. Resistance fighters also fired at least four other rockets into the western Negev.

Over 40 Qassam and Grad rockets were fired Monday from Gaza at southern Israeli settlements striking Ashkelon, Ashdod, Sderot, Kiryat Malakhi, near Ofakim, Netivot and Be'er Sheva.....

Israeli occupation army officials estimate that the rocket fire emanating from Gaza will not end anytime soon despite the ground incursion into the territory.

The Israeli Maariv daily quoted an intelligence report as saying on Tuesday that Hamas “has the capacity to fire rockets and mortars at Israel for weeks.”
"Hamas has enough rockets and mortar shells to continue firing deep into Israeli territory for weeks," said the report presented to parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee by General Yossi Beidatz, head of the research department for military intelligence, according to the daily.
Beidatz said that Hamas "has not raised the white flag in the past and wants to remain in power.""

Al-Manar

"06/01/2009 …It’s the eleventh day of the Israeli offensive on Gaza and the fourth day of the ground operation. 11 days have passed and Israel has so failed to achieve any clear objective; a reason to dump all calls for ceasefire. On the ninth of January, PA chief Mahmoud Abbas’s term ends and on the twentieth of January US President Barack Obama takes the oath. Time is not in Israel’s favor as elections are a few weeks ahead. The political confusion has been reflected recently on the battleground in Gaza. Israeli elite soldiers are getting killed, at least 3 on Monday night alone and settlers are still haunted by Palestinian resistance rockets. Practically, nothing has changed in Gaza for Israel to save face. The stigma of Israel’s blood thirst in Gaza, however, adds another paragraph to the books of Israel’s reference to massacres.

At least 23 Palestinians were killed in shelling up and down the Gaza strip early on Tuesday. Israeli strikes hit two separate schools run by the United Nations in the Gaza Strip, killing at least five Palestinians, medics and UN officials said. Two people were killed in a strike on a school in the southern of Khan Yunis and three people were killed in an air strike on a school in Gaza City, they said. Both schools are run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.......

The death toll in Gaza rose to at least 575 martyrs and more than 2,780. Among Monday's 33 civilian victims were 13 members of a Palestinian family killed in an Israeli strike on their home in a refugee camp, Palestinian medical officials said.

Meanwhile, four Israeli soldiers from the elite Golani Brigade have been killed in Gaza Monday night according to Israeli media, bringing the number of Israeli soldiers killed in the ground offensive according to Israeli media sources to 5. 24 other soldiers were injured including the Golani Brigade commander Col. Avi Peled, whose injuries were described as serious, according to Israeli media. The Israeli story was that the soldiers came under friendly fire......

However the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, confirmed that at least ten soldiers have been killed and more than 30 others were injured in an ambush for resistance fighters. Qassam Brigades source said resistance fighters have brought gradually an elite unite of the Golani Brigade to a booby-trapped house in northern Gaza. The source added that when soldiers rammed into the house, it was blown up and resistance fighters then rained the trapped soldiers with bullets and grenades. Israeli helicopters evacuated the trapped soldiers under the cover of heavy fire and bombardment. The Qassam Brigades said it will unveil the details of this “special operation” later.......

Defense Minister Ehud Barak told lawmakers that Hamas had been dealt a heavy blow: "But we cannot say that its fighting capabilities have been harmed," he said. "Difficult moments lie ahead in this operation and the main test could still be ahead.""

by Khalid Mish'al
(Head of the Hamas political bureau)
The Guardian, Tuesday 6 January 2009

"For 18 months my people in Gaza have been under siege, incarcerated inside the world's biggest prison, sealed off from land, air and sea, caged and starved, denied even medication for our sick. After the slow death policy came the bombardment. In this most densely populated of places, nothing has been spared Israel's warplanes, from government buildings to homes, mosques, hospitals, schools and markets. More than 540 have been killed and thousands permanently maimed. A third are women and children. Whole families have been massacred, some while they slept.

This river of blood is being shed under lies and false pretexts. For six months we in Hamas observed the ceasefire. Israel broke it repeatedly from the start. Israel was required to open crossings to Gaza, and extend the truce to the West Bank. It proceeded to tighten its deadly siege of Gaza, repeatedly cutting electricity and water supplies. The collective punishment did not halt, but accelerated - as did the assassinations and killings. Thirty Gazans were killed by Israeli fire and hundreds of patients died as a direct effect of the siege during the so-called ceasefire. Israel enjoyed a period of calm. Our people did not.

When this broken truce neared its end, we expressed our readiness for a new comprehensive truce in return for lifting the blockade and opening all Gaza border crossings, including Rafah. Our calls fell on deaf ears. Yet still we would be willing to begin a new truce on these terms following the complete withdrawal of the invading forces from Gaza.

No rockets have ever been fired from the West Bank. But 50 died and hundreds more were injured there last year at Israel's hands, while its expansionism proceeded relentlessly. We are meant to be content with shrinking scraps of territory, a handful of cantons at Israel's mercy, enclosed by it from all sides.The truth is Israel seeks a one-sided ceasefire, observed by my people alone, in return for siege, starvation, bombardment, assassinations, incursions and colonial settlement. What Israel wants is a gratuitous ceasefire.

The logic of those who demand that we stop our resistance is absurd. They absolve the aggressor and occupier - armed with the deadliest weapons of death and destruction - of responsibility, while blaming the victim, prisoner and occupied. Our modest, home-made rockets are our cry of protest to the world. Israel and its American and European sponsors want us to be killed in silence. But die in silence we will not.

What is being visited on Gaza today was visited on Yasser Arafat before. When he refused to bow to Israel's dictates, he was imprisoned in his Ramallah headquarters, surrounded by tanks for two years. When this failed to break his resolve, he was murdered by poisoning.

Gaza enters 2009 just as it did 2008: under Israeli fire. Between January and February of last year 140 Gazans died in air strikes. And just before it embarked on its failed military assault on Lebanon in July 2006, Israel rained thousands of shells on Gaza, killing 240. From Deir Yassin in 1948 to Gaza today, the list of Israel's crimes is long. The justifications change, but the reality is the same: colonial occupation, oppression, and never-ending injustice. If this is the "free world" whose "values" Israel is defending, as its foreign minister Tzipi Livni alleges, then we want nothing to do with it.

Israel's leaders remain in the grip of confusion, unable to set clear goals for the attacks - from ousting the legitimately elected Hamas government and destroying its infrastructure, to stopping the rockets. As they fail to break Gaza's resistance the benchmark has been lowered. Now they speak of weakening Hamas and limiting the resistance. But they will achieve neither. Gaza's people are more united than ever, determined not to be terrorised into submission. Our fighters, armed with the justice of their cause, have already caused many casualties among the occupation army and will fight on to defend their land and people. Nothing can defeat our will to be free.

Once again, Washington and Europe have opted to aid and abet the jailer, occupier and aggressor, and to condemn its victims. We hoped Barack Obama would break with George Bush's disastrous legacy but his start is not encouraging. While he swiftly moved to denounce the Mumbai attacks, he remains tongue-tied after 10 days of slaughter in Gaza. But my people are not alone. Millions of freedom-loving men and women stand by its struggle for justice and liberation - witness daily protests against Israeli aggression, not only in the Arab and Islamic region, but worldwide.

Israel will no doubt wreak untold destruction, death and suffering in Gaza. But it will meet the same fate in Gaza as it did in Lebanon. We will not be broken by siege and bombardment, and will never surrender to occupation."

Al-Manar

"05/01/2009 Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah renewed on Monday calls to support the Palestinian Resistance against the Zionist criminality witnessed in the Gaza Strip. His eminence stressed that the Resistance's steadfastness was in itself a miracle and a legend. Sayyed Nasrallah was speaking through a large screen as he marked the ninth night of Ashoura at the Sayyed Shouhadaa complex in Beirut's southern suburb (Dahiyeh).

His eminence emphasized that supporting and backing the Resistance in Palestine was a duty for all of us. His eminence praised the Palestinian Resistance's steadfastness, noting that rockets were still launched at the same level and that ground resistance was still strong and firm. "The only achievement made by the Israelis is the same they did in Lebanon which is killing women and children," Sayyed Nasrallah noted.

The Resistance leader recalled how some Arabs portrayed Hezbollah fighters and heroes as "adventurous" during the Israeli July 2006 war against Lebanon and undermined their capabilities saying that Hezbollah cannot be compared to Israel or even to the Arab armies that were defeated by Israel at the level of military strengths. "Now, the same people are criticizing the Palestinian Resistance, saying that it cannot be compared to Hezbollah," Sayyed Nasrallah pointed out. "They have to perceive that the amount of capabilities is not the whole issue," his eminence concluded, calling to pray for the Resistance to achieve victory against the Zionists......."