Israel’s Decision To Cut Power In Gaza Is Illegal, says UN
The UN’s top official in Gaza will tell British ministers today that Israel’s cuts in fuel and power to the Palestinians violate international law, while the isolation of Hamas has strengthened extremism and started to drive non-affiliated moderates who can leave Gaza to do so.
“We keep saying people in Gaza are at rock bottom but they keep digging into the rock,” Karen Koning- Abu Zayd, head of the UN refugee agency UNRWA, said of Israel’s decision to start power cuts and reduce fuel supplies to Gaza in response to continued Qassam rocket attacks. Israel began cutting supplies on Sunday. The Supreme Court has given the state five days to answer a petition by human rights groups against the move, which follows the cabinet’s declaration of Gaza as a “hostile entity” last month. An Israeli soldier and two Palestinian militants were killed yesterday in Gaza as the Israeli military continued operations designed to curb the Qassam attacks.
The UNRWA chief, who will meet Douglas Alexander, Secretary of State for International Development and other ministers in London today, said: “I can understand why from the Israeli point of view people may think we need a stronger reaction to the Qassams [and] nothing has worked so far. But I don’t see how you can want to punish people, all of them in Gaza, which means most of them who are not behind these activities, in the way you are doing now.” In an interview, Ms Koning-Abu Zayd said: “Most people, even in some of the refugee camps, live in high-rise apartments in Gaza and if you don’t have electricity, you don’t have water, you probably don’t have food and if you’re older or sick in any way you probably can’t climb up and down all those stairs.” A cut in fuel would have a “very serious” effect on civilian movement.
Ms Koning-Abu Zayd cast doubt on the idea that the Israeli squeeze on Gaza, including phased cuts in power - starting with 15 minutes per hour in towns such as Beit Hanoun, from which rockets have been frequently launched - would trigger an effective revolt against militants.
“I don’t think it’s working myself,” she said, adding she did not think surveys showing a fall in support for Hamas were “very significant”. She said: “The ones that do support them support them even more strongly and because things are getting worse the ones that were talking about compromise and moderation and working together are discredited so you know many people become more extreme.”
The Israeli cabinet minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer suggested yesterday that the cuts were the only alternative to moving “four divisions” into Gaza. But Ms Koning-Abu Zayd said: “When we first heard these things I kept saying they won’t do this because it’s against international law.”
Ms Koning-Abu Zayd, the longest serving UN official in Gaza, also made some of the strongest criticisms yet by a UN official of the Israeli and international community’s boycott of Hamas since March 2006, which she said had strengthened hardline extremists in the faction.
She hoped that the planned Annapolis conference would renew a peace process and said UNRWA had a “very simple message” that refugees should be on the agenda. But it was a “big negative” that Hamas would not be taking part, and that “at some moment” they would have to be brought into the process.
Since Hamas won the elections two months earlier, “We were saying … you had to deal with whoever is elected democratically, fairly, justly and that if you didn’t, and history seemed to us to prove this, you drive people into becoming more extreme.”
© 2007 The Independent
Cutting off all normality ‘illegal’ eh? Think the country with the fifth largest nuke arsenal on the planet, never admitted to (and mostly provided by the US who has bulldozed the history and homes of an ancient peoples, displaced 7 million, gives a toss? The UN bleats and countries get decimated .. Oh yes, and who shoot and arrest children.
Sadly, j
What is so difficult about realizing that if you attack Isreal, they are going to attack you back, and that if you hide as a civilian you turn the civilians into combatants?
** my poor friend,
the difficulty is that Israel started the attacks–continues the attacks, and then cant fathom why its victims would want to defend itself.
Who has tanks?
Who doesnt?
Who controls the borders?
Who doesnt?
The only one that would say this is good is a jewish supremacist–but for some odd reason the ONE TRUE God doesnt seem to be stopping his chosen people from getting their asses kicked lately.
‘…the cuts were the only alternative to moving “four divisions” into Gaza.’
A false set of choices. Or a pathetically limited mind.
Ah, Zionism. Quick primer on what they want and why they’ll do anything for it? Ok. Here we go.
1)If the Jews get all of the ‘holy land’ as described in scripture under Jewish ownership. This leads to…
2)The second coming of Christ. Yep, you got it, God comes back. Well since the Jews are “God’s chosen people”…
3)They are granted eternal something something and rule over the lesser beings (non-Jewish) for all eternity…
and ladies and gentlemen, they believe it. Maybe not all Jews, but the core Zionist leaders and teachers sure do.
So essentially, the Palestinians are ‘lesser beings’ that are standing between a wacko religious fundamentalist sect and their God.
Discrimination, pure and simple.
The problem is the extremists on both sides. The violence (rockets) of Palestinian militants is used by the Israeli militants. Whether it is a war or not, the violence is used to justify even blatantly illegal and amoral collective punishment.
I thought only terrorists didn’t care about innocents suffering?
This isn’t because palestinians are lesser beings… this is hardball by militants on the Israeli side who don’t want peace. Not all Palestinians want war and neither do all jews in Israel. Hard liners on both sides are determined not to listen to anyone but themselves. Hard liners dominate in Israel and Palestinian militants do in Gaza.
There is no way in Gaza to win a military war with Israel but as long as Palestinians can be written off as not wanting peace (in this case rockets which seem ineffectual anyway) then the world doesn’t listen. A few rockets are used to make the many suffer. Of course collective punishment is wrong but if as posters’ say that the UN is not believed in …then what is? That is likely someone living in america speaking… one with a new car and cable TV and saving for a house.
This is wrong and openly collective punishment …and just before peace talks. It shames the world and the UN said something about it. Yet when they do, some reject it …instead of making use of it. Nobody listens they say but when finally they did and spoke… it is rejected by some. By those who always want to continue the status quo of ‘war’…though year by year conditions worsen. Gaza seems like a giant prison city.
Why did Israel do this just now before a peace conference? The extremists intheir government had their way and yes THEY don’t want there to be peace either. So Palestinians are provoked… and so there will be no peace again.
The only thing militants in Israel actually fear is a mass peace movement. Then the world would not have the excuse of rockets or bombs to ignore Israel’s harsh treatment of innocent people for the sake of an intransient few.
The Palestinians are being provoked just before a peace conference. As usual the extremists on either side determine events. Peace would be far more effective for the Palestinians than some mostly symbolic rockets.
However this time the Palestinians do have the ear of the world …will only the extremists get to decide yet again.
Illegal is illegal, period! Israel needs to face international sanction for criminal conduct!
Israel and the USA regularly break international laws whenever it’s convenient for them.
The rule of law means nothing to them. They always cloak their wicked activities with fair words.
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“I swear by the God of my parents, I swear by my nation,
I swear by my honor that I will not allow my soul to rest,
nor my arm to relax until I have broken the chains that
oppress my people through the will of the powerful.
Free elections, free land and free men,
horror to the oligarchy.”
================
Oath used by Hugo Chavez (when he was 28) and some of his revolutionary friends.
(Page 80, !HUGO! by Bart Jones)…
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/
Israel cutting off power to Palestine? To punish a few bad apples Israel is willing to bring terrible hardship down on ALL the Palestinians?
It is heartbreaking that the Israel treats Palestine so dreadfully. I cannot inderstand why the USA, which backs Israel to the hilt, doesn’t do something to rein them in. Does the Israel Lobby have that much power? If so, it is frightening.
Anne Nicolas Kirby
imagine if ahmadinejad cut off power to a jewish neighborhood in tehran…what would the reaction be? probably a resolution from congress authorizing an immediate attack on iran…
notice the reaction, or lack of same, to this outrage, and then wonder at what form of democracy we allegedly practice here, and what nation it supports…
Art. 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the rights of civilians under military occupation, of which both Israel and the U.S. are signatories, plainly forbids collective punishment. But then another article, 39, I believe, also forbids the occupying power from moving its own citizens into the territory occupied. We have seen how well Israel has complied with that. The same article forbids the occupying power to transfer people under occupation to the territory of the occupying power. Currently, about 10,000 Palestinians, many of them being tortured, are in Israeli prisons.
“If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”
David Ben-Gurion to Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:
Support for Israel desecrates the memory of Hitler’s Jewish victims.
What international law exactly force fighting sides into selling commodities to the other side during a time of war?
Is it the 4th Geneva Convention?
Is that the UN Charter?
Why don’t the “top UN official in Gaza” specify, and provide us readers with reference to that mysterious international law?
Does Saudi Arabia break the same international law by not selling oil to Israel?
Did the USA broke that one international law when they didn’t sell oil and grain to Nazi Germany during World War II?
Since I don’t believe that the “top UN official in Gaza” is a stupid person, that double standard, and possibly false statement must be attributed to something else.
But lest you should ever forget
I must, yet again, remind thee
My God is better than your god
and I shall defend my love and adoration unto my God
ere it mean I shall snuff out thy life.
Israel and the US do reguarly break international law when it suits them. Lots of good comments, but hatred breeds hatred, and violence breeds violence, and there will be no peace until the extremists are taken out of control, or are sent packing.
Everything Irael does is illegal.
This last move is just upping the dosage.
Israel is the West’s amorality playground.
Israeli’s give Jews a BAD Name.
Can anyone quantify these Qassam attacks and their damage? What is their range, quantity and damage?
The article just keeps referring to them, but does not quantify, which makes me
suspicious that it is some sort of media trick to justify Israel’s actions.
How real is the threat to Israel?
How about every time cuts fuel and electricity to Gaza, we cut aid to Israel? Seems perfectly fair to me.
Sorry, that should read:
How about every time Israel cuts fuel and electricity to Gaza, we cut aid to Israel?
George Bush is not going to do anything about Israel. The man would have to have a few moral’s to see what’s wrong with what they are doing! Bush the man has none and has never had any! He isn’t any better than they are. I am like a lot of other American’s. Israel has brought us nothing but a lot of misery. It’s time to unload this parasite who is sucking the life out of us. I could care less if they imagine themselves as being ‘God’s chosen people’! I see them as the reason for all of our current problems in the middle east. They can learn to defend themselves by themselves or go the way many a nation has went. These people are no better than a bunch of terrorist’s themselves. What else can you call it when you cut off people’s power because they won’t conform to your way of thinking? The Israeli’s claim to be a democracy but apparently do not believe in the basic principle’s of democracy. Hamas was duly elected by the people of that region so is a legitimate entity. But, Israel has shown it’s wrath ever since they elected whom they wanted.
As from November 30st - This article is no longer relevant.
The Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz yesterday prohibited the state from cutting off electricity to parts of the Gaza Strip, as the defense minister has threatened to do.
The decision followed a petition submitted by 10 human rights organizations, asking the High Court of Justice not to allow punitive measures against the Gaza Strip’s population.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/918258.html
Holocaust, Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,
Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,
Holocaust,Holocaust…………Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,
Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,
Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,Holocaust,…..etc.
Now, land grabbers (jews) do you feel better? The jews have used WW2 to justify any and all crimes against humanity (something they should know a few things about) committed against the Palestinian people.
They use their spare country (United States) to do their bidding, and to protect them against U.N. sanctions and resolutions. Saddam was overthrown and eventually lynched by the uber rat bastard Nazi, george moron bush, for violating U.N. resolutions.
When, I say, when- will Russia, China and North Korea do the same to those bastard thieves in occupied Palestine, and bring the genocide
that the jews a perpetrating against the Palestinians to an end?