http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/ ... index.html



Fucking scumbags, i wonder how many of the killed were actually "terrorists" and how many were civilians?

Heres a set of images from the bombings : http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/111497,21,25,pokaz.html

Either way, Israel fucked up big time and better get ready for their civilians to get blown to shit by some suicide bombers

Which came first, though? Is Israel responding to these terrorists? According to the article you posted: "The strikes followed several days of rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel." What was Israel supposed to do? Let Hamas continue to attack them?

Hey, can you give me a link to the post where you criticized America for attacking a country that didn't harbor terrorists and killed innocent civilians? Just want to make sure you're consistent here...

Israel's response to Gaza rocket strikes is comparable to...

Slaughtering all of your neighbors because one of them punched you in the arm.

"What, was I just supposed to let them keep hitting me?"

Israel's just putting the finishing touches on it's Palestinian genocide, before Obama goes and brings peace to the Middle East...

?

Well i suppose starving and blockading Gaza for a couple months came first, AND it may have frustrated the palastinians some, Groucho. Maybe they got angry 'coz they were hungry, Groucho.

It's sickening.

Neither side is innocent, but it's really sad to see how much Israel is able to get away with.

"The Israeli airstrikes have killed about 225 people in Gaza and wounded more than 400 since they began Saturday morning, Palestinian medical sources said early Sunday."

Yes, Palestinian militants are by and large nutjobs, but killing civilians won't solve a damn thing.

Without checkpoints and blockades the Isreali's would have alot more rockets and civilian deaths coming their way, if this occured would you have been outraged Bodrul? The Israel response is disproportionate but to paint this as an army of devils attacking angels is to be at best naive and at worse outright lies. Also the Israeli's never starved the Gaza strip in this instance and to say so is erroneous.

The main political force in Gaza and the Palestinian territories is Hamas an Organization who's very own self proclaimed goal is the eradication of a State and Genocide of its people. One day the Isreali people will face up and apologize for the actions they supported, but by the same token the Palestinians have been offered a chance for peace many times since the Oslo accords and instead they voted in murderers like Hamas and corrupt fools like Arafat, they are victims of their own choices.

Actually on a tangent here the main reason Arafat caved in and signed the Oslo accords and finally tried to do something right for his people was directly due to the collapse in Arab military and financial support after the Gulf War (due to Arafat's support for Iraq). The violence and chaos only began again when the relations thawed and the arms and money once again began to flow from Syria and into Gaza from the Sinai. So who is the real villain here? I didn't see the big bad Israeli's shelling Gaza and the West Bank in the mid to late 90s on a regular basis.

Well, let me see.

We have a democracy in the middle east surrounded by a bunch of countries, most of which are dictatorships and the ones that are democracies elected terrorists. ALL of these neighboring countries have policies that basically call for the extinction of that democracy.

You think they weren't warned? You think the people in Gaza didn't know that this was a possibility if they kept tossing bombs toward innocent Israelis? Have you not seen the news concerning the suicide bombers who come into Israel all the time?

There was a cease fire for a while and things looked better, and as soon as the deadline ended, Hamas started tossing missiles back at Israel again. A week later, Israel defended itself.

If terrorists were blowing themselves up in America and sending missiles into our cities, would you really be sitting there saying "Ah, well, I guess we deserve it" or would you be calling for a retaliation for what is an obvious declaration of war?

Heh.

This is a goddamn dejavu (the crisis AND the thread on the forum).

Well....another thing that will keep Obama busy.

You know, the United States should stop funding that sad little strip of desert and do a Joker-ferry thing. Give detonators to lunatic Zionists and Palestinians and say that they will wipe out the other side's holiest monuments and places...except it ends up blowing up their own instead.

Egyptians opening fire on Palestinians... This is such a mess.

Robert Fisk put it quite excellently :



By the way, it was Hamas who had honored the cease fire agreement until November 5th 2008. While everyone was distracted by the Obama election, Israel launched an unprovoked attack into Gaza killing six members of the Hamas government. after that, hamas announced that the cease fire was (obviously) no longer in effect. Israel's PR campaign continues to insist ( supported by the US) that Hamas is to blame for the escalation of violence....But let`s not get the facts in the way of a good massacre.!! Even during this time, how many more illegal settlers are being pumped into the west bank? Does Israel keep growing and growing and taking over more and more Palestinian land or are they keeping certain borders? School me on the border situation gulli. .
There isn't a rocket fired at Israel via the West Bank, and yet Israel's attacks, killings, land theft settler pogroms and kidnappings never cease, not for a single moment. It hasn't spared a single Palestinian their sovereignty or property or livelihood from Israel's relentless, racist and violent colonization.

Regarding "peace" . . theres a good reason why a few deals were turned down by the palastinians mainly because they were bullshit. Before anyone tries to bring some bull like "they were offered 98% of the land they wanted!!" it should be noted they would not get east jerusalem. And if i remember correctly, he didnt even turn it down, he took the proposal to each muslim capital to see what was thought of it, then by the time he met up back with Clinton again to discuss the Israeli's had aborted the proposal. So yeh, thats why. The ol' Oslo accords ehh?? What happened there? Didnt the Israeli leader who signed it get gunned down by some fanatical zionist terrorist? Then didnt the Israelis back out of it? lol peace my arse.

And to say Israel arent starving the Gazans? Are you serious? Blowing up their power stations, gas stations, blockading food trucks, not allowing them medical supplies and reducing some to eat . . . grass. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 338014.ece

By the way, Everyone acting like Hamas are terrorists. . then why did the Israelis HEAVILY fund them through the 80's?

theres some good info here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e10456.htm

Peace right?!


ill try and reply to the rest later

Well Bodrul on the first point the Fisk Quote their is one big difference between the IRA Border situation and the current Gaza one and thats the Irish government of the time never supported the IRA's actions and worked to curtail them (bar the actions of the a few FF ministers which lead to the arms trials), in contrast the Palestinian Authorities are making no effort to curtail Hamas actions, its a de facto war between two nations in effect. I will concede that even if they wanted to they probably could not stop Hamas but that is the end result of years of neglecting its people, I mean with corrupt idiots like Fatah I'm not surprised the average Palestinian is driven into the waiting arms of Hamas.

On the point of Israel breaching the ceasefire agreement first I will have to disagree based on the official reports. Its not PR that Hamas are driving the initial escalation its a rather depressing fact, for months they have been channeling arms through the tunnels from the Sinai and engaging in this low intensity war which is completely illogically and will never get them what they want and at the end of the day they will have to learn like the IRA did to accept that and just take the best deal on offer. You mention the East Jerusalem situation, in an ideal world it would be made a free city But reality is wanker so to ever expect the Isreali's to give it up is wishful thinking, its one of those cities where nobody will be happy with the end result today, like Trieste after WW2 or Vipuri after the Continuation war.

The point of the Israeli's starving the Strip again I disagree, if food and supplies need to get in they can get in, the border lockdown is 100% the fault of Hamas, to expect the Israeli's to leave the border open is insanity, to quote a British General in Gulf War 1 talking about the RAF pulling out of a certain attack



If the Israeli government left the border open they would be failing their own civilians and would be rightly removed.

You bring up the Isreali's back out of the Oslo accords, I'd say to that the Oslo accords where like the Good Friday agreement, it was a basis to build from and if people ebbed and flowed from it it would not matter if they all threated it as the central goal, both sides had opposition to it but I would say the Palestinian opposition is what scuppered it

Would I be wrong if I said you would consider the ideal end result would be the Isreali's upping sticks and leaving and returning the Territories to the 1947 state? I'll wait till you reply to this before I debate it further. My own ideal situation would be for Hamas to disarm the Palestinians to receive retroactive compensation for the forced relocation and all the Settlers in the West Bank to be removed, but getting that to happen is the tough question. The villains for me are the Arab governments who have abused the Palestinian situation and its people for years, with all the money washing around the Gulf the fact they utterly failed to help is cynical sadness.

The people in the Gaza strip today are like the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. A friend of mine sent me an amazing article about but it's quite long and I've no link at the moment.

Thats utterly ridiculous.

The moment Hamas stops installing rocket launchers in schools and hospitals, or stops recruiting kids with Down syndrome to use them as human bombs the casualties will surely go down.

Also, in the meantime more than 400 civilians were killed on Christmas day in Congo by the Ugandese (Ugandan?) LRA rebels, but I guess no one cares about them. Everyone's too busy blaming Israel.

Ugandan. Yes, I've been keeping track of the evens in the Congo, which I'm personally more interested in than in the events in the Levant (of course not at the exclusion of it, though). I think more people have been killed in the Congo in the last ten years than in all the other conflicts worldwide combined during the same time frame.

But it's bullshit to compare these events. Congo matters less to the world than Israel/Palestine because fewer people have a stake in it. It does not make anyone a bad or ignorant person if they are more interested in the events in Gaza than they are in the events in the Congo.


Anyway, this is a tired cycle by now. Israel, given the strictures it has placed on itself and that were imposed upon it by Hamas, had to respond. A lot of it has to do with the upcoming elections, especially as regards Ehud Barak, and some of it has to do with compensating for the failure of the Lebanon '06 mission. The most likely course of events is that Hamas has to give way temporarily. Everybody knows this won't do anything to undercut Hamas significantly in the long term. Gaza is so heavily populated that any attack on it will lead to a significant loss of civilian life. The place, at any rate, is unlivable.

I am not so update on that conflict......

What actually happend to the idea to create a Palestine in the region of the West Jordan Land?

Isn't it odd that the media hasn't been reporting the number of Israeli's killed in this current heroic effort of the Palestinian freedom fighters?

But for anyone following this current massacre, the score is Israel 400, Palestine 4.

Yep, that's right - - four Israeli's killed.

But the ratio of 1 to 100 dead is about par for the course in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in their own land...

It's time for the world to take action against Israel and remove them from their bloody occupation of Palestine.

Heh, it's almost as if you're pissed that not more Israelis have died, Bradley.

Death always disturbs me, but this is nothing new to history. You could argue that the U.S and Britain committed genocide in WW II with the bombing of Dresden. Evils like this happen in war, I honestly don't know an easy way out of this situation.

No, just noting the disparate media coverage...