The following report deals with the human consequences of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) bombing of Gaza, which as of GMT 2300, 27 December 2008, has resulted in the deaths of at least 225 people and more than 700 injured. These figures are expected to rise. JAO-Sydney unequivocally condemns the IDF attack has wholly without justification.
Relatives wail as the mangled bodies of loved ones are brought into Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital on Saturday following Israeli air strikes that killed at least 225 people in the Palestinian enclave.
Ambulances and private cars rush those wounded or killed in the punishing raids to the hospital, where staff use sheets as makeshift stretchers.
In some cases, a single stretcher is used to carry several bodies. Torn limbs fall to the blood-soiled floor.
There is no space left in the morgue and bodies are piled up in the emergency room and in the corridors, while many of the severely wounded scream in pain.
If reporting is, as I suspect, a record of mankind’s folly, then the end of 2008 is proving my point.
Let’s kick off with the man who is not going to change the Middle East, Barack Obama, who last week, with infinite predictability, became Time’s “person of the year”. But buried in a long and immensely tedious interview inside the magazine, Obama devotes just one sentence to the Arab-Israeli conflict: “And seeing if we can build on some of the progress, at least in conversation, that’s been made around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be a priority.”
What is this man talking about? “Building on progress?” What progress? On the verge of another civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, with Benjamin Netanyahu a contender for Israeli prime minister, with Israel’s monstrous wall and its Jewish colonies still taking more Arab land, and Palestinians still firing rockets at Sderot, and Obama thinks there’s “progress” to build on?
Americans support conscientious objectors to IDF military service by sending 20,000 letters to Barak
By Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz, 18 December 2008
WASHINGTON – Conscientious objectors who refused to serve in the Israel Defense Forces received an unprecedented shot in the arm from North American Jewry yesterday, when demonstrators protested against their detention by presenting 20,000 letters from Diaspora Jews demanding their release.
