Fuel Shortage Forces UN to Halt Food Handouts in Gaza
The UN is to halt food handouts for up to 800,000 Palestinians from today because of a severe fuel shortage in Gaza brought on by an Israeli economic blockade.
John Ging, the director of operations in Gaza for the UN Relief and Works Agency, which supports Palestinian refugees, said there had been a “totally inadequate” supply of fuel from Israel to Gaza for 10 months until it was finally halted two weeks ago. “The devastating humanitarian impact is entirely predictable,” he said.
A shortage of diesel and petrol means UN food assistance to 650,000 Palestinian refugees will stop today, and aid from the World Food Programme for another 127,000 Palestinians due in the coming days will also be halted. “The collective punishment of the population of Gaza, which has been instituted for months now, has failed,” said Robert Serry, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East. Last year, after Hamas seized full control of Gaza, Israel imposed an economic blockade, preventing exports and allowing in only limited supplies of food, fuel and aid. It halted supplies of fuel for transport two weeks ago after militants attacked a fuel crossing and killed two Israeli workers. Thirteen Israeli soldiers were injured in an attack on Saturday at a crossing used to deliver food and aid. The attacks have been condemned by the UN.
Hours before Gaza’s sole power plant was to shut down, Israel pumped in 1m litres of industrial diesel, enough to last around three days. Gaza’s streets have largely been emptied of cars. On Tuesday, its central pharmacy ran out of fuel to refrigerate vaccines during power cuts. The main laundry at Shifa hospital, which washes sheets and uniforms for six hospitals and all government clinics, has less than a day’s fuel.
Around three-quarters of the 4,000 agricultural wells in Gaza depend on fuel-powered pumps. Fuel shortages have already drastically increased food prices. A kilogram of tomatoes has risen from one shekel to six shekels in Gaza City.
“We remain committed to not allowing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert. “But you cannot talk about the difficulties in delivering fuel to the Gaza Strip without stating and restating the fact that terrorists under the auspices of Hamas have deliberately targeted the fuel supply depot. It’s almost as if their agenda is nihilistic.”
© 2008 The Guardian
Support candidates who are willing to say “NO” to the Israel lobby. We keep supporting their genocide of palestinians. Learn more about the tragic history. The 2007 book “The Israel Lobby & American Foreign Policy” is a superb book on this subject.
Blaming Hamas for their genocidal practices is ridiculous; one can be against the worst excesses of Hamas without falling for the Israel line.
“Civilization” seems to be little more than barbarism dressed up in shiny technology and even shinier language, so perhaps nihilism has its place.
So… should I criticise Israel for inflicting collective punishment? Or praise them for reducing carbon emissions?
Before you laugh or cry, think about it. This is the sort of situation we all face in the future, if we want to stop runawat global warming. We’ll HAVE to stop using fossil fuels except for the most dire needs. Hospitals, pharmacies- yes, they definitely qualify. But I noted that agricultural wells were also listed as diesel powered. Heck, here’s an excellent chance to move to wind power. It was done for centuries, using less of a tech base than the Palestinians have.
And as for food transport- the problem seems to be distributing it within the Gaza Strip, not getting it there. The Strip is only 25 miles long, and there are 1.4 million people in there, and if memory serves, unemployment runs at greater than 50%. Heck, with that many people, they can carry and cart the stuff where it needs to go. Who needs trucks for that?
If Palestinians turn in on themselves and become largely self-sufficient in energy/transport, the Israeli blockade will lose a great deal of its sting. Better, they will become experts in low tech replacements for our current unsustainable world, expertise which will become more and more valuable near future. They could place themselves near the forefront of a Green revolution. As things stand now, they have much to gain and little to lose by going this course.
AAAANNNNDD before anyone criticises me for not condemning Israel, or not suggesting the rest of the world do as I recommend for Gaza, I do both. But getting people to change their habits is difficult. THe Palestinians in Gaza simply have more incentive to do it right now than we do. The rest of the world will slowly gain the same incentive. If the Palestinians meet that challenge now, their knowlege and talent will be in high demand in the coming years.
collective punishment is Illegal!!! no matter how much Israelis love it - any one getting the picture here? - any excuse to torture innocents - especially women and children - no wonder that our American miscreants love Israel so much - a country created and maintained by theft, murder and extreme damage to all their Neighbors - Poor Israeli victims - God’s chosen - unlikely
You present some very solid arguments mannie Davis. I would also think that Hamas really has no orgnized control of those it counts as its followers in Gaza and of mindless elements who would attack a fuel supply line
It seems arrogant to tell people who are captive in an area with little food, fuel, medical supplies, daily security or autonomous government that it is time to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and construct some idealized economy that exists nowhere but in the mind.
Yes Richsmith2,
How can a war lasting this long do anything but make everyone crazy.
I agree with Palestine and their goals of independence but the tactics of some are just as self defeating as the USA’s. If they went to a nonviolent struggle and acknowledge that their rocket launches and this kind of crap is just a waste of life and hopeless for a proud people who deserve better for their struggle, they would turn the tide.
They could show some leadership to inspire the World looking for answers.
Mannie Davis makes a great suggestion and I am glad some here are thinking rationally instead of the usual mantra hate of Israel.
Most of us Hate the policy but cheering on insanity is no help to anyone.
And the Pope says, keep those babies coming!
“LIBYA’S deputy UN ambassador insisted overnight that the situation in the Gaza Strip is actually “worse” than what happened in Nazi concentration camps, a day after similar remarks sparked a walkout of Western envoys in the Security Council.”
So now the civilians starve to death, first the ill and elderly and infants then the women and children and finally the strongest men, still launching their rage at their oppressors. All this with the odd bombings and assassinations just for the ’sport’ of protecting Zionville. When such a carnival of horrors was inflicted ON the Jews it was called Holocaust but when it is inflicted BY the Jews it is called Gaza. This is what that ChristoCorporate Catastrophy called Congress is spending our taxes on. It’s time for another Great Flood.
“I agree with Palestine and their goals of independence but the tactics of some are just as self defeating as the USA’s. If they went to a nonviolent struggle and acknowledge that their rocket launches and this kind of crap is just a waste of life and hopeless for a proud people who deserve better for their struggle, they would turn the tide.”
The Palestinians have engaged in nonviolent struggle for decades, but these activities are not covered by the Israeli or western press because they don’t fit the character of the Palestinians that both Israel and the west wish to promulgate. It’s as if during the Civil Rights movement in the states, none of the ongoing nonviolent struggle had been publicized, but only the Watts rebellion, or the very few violent responses to racism. Also, to control the argument, Israel and its captive US and western supporters, including the press, must focus on the occasional attack by a people they have subjugated for decades, rather than allow the world to know of their own policies of torture, imprisonment, house demolition, bombing, tank attacks, outright killing, etc. Please do some reading.
And to echo Rich Smith’s comment, where are the Palestinians supposed to get the materials for solar or wind power, let along water power, when they haven’t enough food or shelter.
It should be fairly obvious by now that the Zionist Israeli government doesn’t want peace, but wants Palestine/Gaza!
I feel sorry for the Palestinians and Israelis that yearn for a peacefull life.
ezeflyer, ridiculous isn’t it. It should be “keep the birth control/condoms coming” instead. How people expect to feed another mouth in poor countries is beyond me. Maybe they’re so poor they can’t afford birth control.
We can send 5 people to the space station every few months but we can’t fly some food over Gaza and kick it out the back door of a jet plane.
This is a blatant violation of human rights.
This is a microcosm of whats about to happen world wide, all planned buy Neo Cons, the World Bank, The Chosen ones and more.
there are so many infractions of international law that it’s hard to even know where to begin…….
What it all boils down to is that Israel is maintaining a state of Jewish supremacy, which ultimately translates into the severe oppression of the Palestinians. Not only is this occupation illegal, but it closely resembles the Nazi regime as well as the KKK.
what we need to do (as the US) is stop FUNDING ISRAEL!! Stop the $7 million a day going to Israel!!!!
White supremacy in the US ended when the costs of maintaining it became too high—the same can happen in Israel with regards to Jewish supremacists! We, the American people have the power to make this happen…(if we as a society impeach Bush and Cheney & prevent Hillary from taking office)
Remember that dimwit Senator that wanted to cut school lunch funding in Berkeley (federal funding) because they were boycotting the Marines. I think it is wrong to subsidize Israel when they are starving innocent families of basic necessities of life.
Great! More misery in Gaza; the world’s largest concentration camp! Has Israel no conscience of any kind? Where is the international community, here?
Why is Israel not standing trial for acts of genocide? Why is Israel always given a “free-pass?” Why?
The “Zionists” ~ Central Bankers
greatbear…
And why aren’t Bush and Cheney on trial for war crimes?
Same reason Israel isn’t….
They do it because they can…and no one will stop them.
As Cheney said…We will keep going until someone stops us…
Who is there to stop them…a cowardly Pelosi and Dem Congress? We have seen how helpful and compassionate they are, haven’t we.
Can protesting these outrages stop it? Nope. They just put you on the terrorist list to watch.
It is called fascism and tyranical take-over…and no one lifts a finger….
http://carolynbaker.net/site/content/view/135/
The End of America
Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
Naomi Wolf
In a stunning indictment of the Bush administration and Congress, best-selling author Naomi Wolf lays out her case for saving American democracy. In authoritative research and documentation Wolf explains how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century’s worst dictatorships such as Germany, Russia, China, and Chile.
The book cuts across political parties and ideologies and speaks directly to those among us who are concerned about the ever-tightening noose being placed around our liberties.
In this timely call to arms, Naomi Wolf compels us to face the way our free America is under assault. She warns us–with the straight-to-fellow-citizens urgency of one of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlets–that we have little time to lose if our children are to live in real freedom.
“Recent history has profound lessons for us in the U.S. today about how fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders seize and maintain power, especially in what were once democracies. The secret is that these leaders all tend to take very similar, parallel steps. The Founders of this nation were so deeply familiar with tyranny and the habits and practices of tyrants that they set up our checks and balances precisely out of fear of what is unfolding today. We are seeing these same kinds of tactics now closing down freedoms in America, turning our nation into something that in the near future could be quite other than the open society in which we grew up and learned to love liberty,” states Wolf.
Look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it.
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency).
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution.
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens’ groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 “suspicious incidents”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government - after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.
“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.
“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”
“That’ll do it,” the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night … Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
Sections of: Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
This is why no one stops Israel..or us for that matter…
The take over is underway and moving quickly.
Now…why don’t WE stop Israel?
This plan has been underway for sometime:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/apr/20/israelandthepalestinians.oil
US intelligence sources confirmed to The Observer that the project has been discussed. One former senior CIA official said: ‘It has long been a dream of a powerful section of the people now driving this administration [of President George W. Bush] and the war in Iraq to safeguard Israel’s energy supply as well as that of the United States.
Go look at the pipeline maps and where our bases are in relation to that pipeline. Palestine and Syria aren’t exactly located well to avoid conflict with this goal of a pipeline…
Ask yourself where the water is primarily located?
This is about control of region and its resources.
Why should they care about people, when they can get rid of the ones they don’t want around and satisfy themselves (neocons and corporations).
Do you ever notice that a story that has some teeth is always from Europe or Canada and never a US base story. Looks like point #8 control the press is working to well. That is why in Canada we worry about Harper as he has said he will shut down the CBC. That is the only real source of the truth in Canada. The rest are neo based.