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Throughout the assault on Lebanon, there was no let up
on Israeli attacks in Gaza. And in the Israeli military’s shooting
gallery, there has been no ceasefire.
On Aug. 25, Israeli planes fired missiles
at two buildings wounding nine Palestinians. The first strike was on the
home of Salim Thabet, an activist of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in the
northern Gaza town of Jabalya. Relatives of the targeted fighter said
that the Israeli army told him to evacuate his home about 15 minutes
before the strike.
In the second house, about four people
were wounded. The Israeli military claimed that the two homes were being
used to store weapons. In addition, five people in a third house were
moderately wounded from shrapnel.
The day before, Israeli forces killed
Youssef Abu Daqqa, the brother of Younis Abu Daqqa, prominent leader of
the Islamist Hamas, who was arrested in the operation and detained.
Through the last week of August, the Israeli army kept
killing Palestinians. On Aug. 28, according to Haaretz of Aug. 29, it
killed three men, only one of whom it claimed was a fighter. At the same
time, it wounded three children.
On Aug. 29, Israel killed eight
Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy. On Sept. 5 and 6, another
seven were killed, some shot by the Israeli army, others hit by missiles.
In the two months since the start of the
present Israeli campaign, which was supposedly launched in response to
the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by the resistance, 200 Palestinians
have been killed. Despite massive collective punishment operations, the
Israelis have not recovered their captive soldier.
The Zionist rulers have tried to justify
attacks by claiming that they were trying to prevent resistance fighters
from moving the captive Israeli soldier. But there is no way that this
argument can be stretched far enough to explain their destruction of
Gaza’s electric power generating station. The shattered facility provided
60 percent of the enclave’s electricity. The other 40 percent comes from
the Israeli electricity company.
Haaretz described the effects in its Aug.
21 issue: “It's hot, very hot, in the Gaza Strip. But over the last two
months, ever since Israel bombed the new power station in the center of
the Strip, the heat has become unbearable. The bombing has disrupted the
supply of electricity to some 1.5 million residents; food in
refrigerators goes bad, the patients in the hospitals groan, industry and
work are paralyzed, traffic is gridlocked and there is a severe water
shortage.”
The Israeli newspaper said outright that
the electric plant was bombed to put pressure on the Palestinians. But
the Zionist authorities deny that; if true, it would amount to a
violation of the Geneva Convention’s ban on collective punishments.
The Israeli military campaign against
Gaza comes on top of the cutoff of funds to the Palestinian Authority,
which has removed the major source of incomes in the territories. The
PA’s 160,000 employees have remained largely or essentially unpaid since
March.
The Beirut daily L’Orient Le Jour pointed
out Aug. 21 that the financial squeeze was coming to a head with the
approach of the new scholastic year, with parents being unable to pay the
school expenses for their children. A teacher, Hamam al-Faqawi, said,
“This threatens to push parents into not sending their children to
school.” It quoted a parent, Mohammad Abou Mour, as saying: “I am afraid
for my children and those of others. I am afraid they will end up in the
streets.”
The situation became more complicated at
the beginning of September as teachers went out on strike in protest over
not being paid.
Even before the recent Israeli military campaign
and financial squeeze, Israeli officials estimated that most Palestinians
in Gaza lived on about $2 a day, the equivalent of one falafel sandwich.
The Zionist rulers have now made any normal life impossible for the
people of this overcrowded desert enclave.
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