USING the release of the Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit as pretext, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert unleashed his occupation forces to reoccupy the Gaza Strip.
The job given to the occupation forces was to terrorize Palestinian civilians with sonic booms, thin them to starvation, disrupt traffic, electricity supply, and access to water, bomb soccer fields, schools, TV stations, cultural centres and charities, vandalize hospitals, and kidnap cabinet ministers, mayors and parliamentarians, revoke Palestinian residency in Jerusalem, and bomb the offices of prime and interior ministers.
Olmert told his Cabinet on Sunday: ‘I take personal responsibility for what is happening in Gaza. I want no one to sleep at night in Gaza.’
Israel kidnapped on 28th June about 100 members of Hamas, including eight cabinet ministers, legislators and senior officials, the government of Israel acknowledged in a statement on Thursday.
Deputy Prime Minister & Minister of Education and Higher Education, Dr Nasseruddin Al-Shae’r, was not among those kidnapped as was initially reported on Thursday.
Al-Shaer said Wednesday the Israeli invasion of Gaza could not have been launched without a US green light.
Israel’s deputy Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, said on Sunday his country would prosecute the kidnapped Palestinian government officials. ‘They will be put to trial,’ he said.
The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) pushed their tanks and troops backed by warplanes into northern Gaza Strip overnight Monday in the second stage of ‘Operation Summer Rains’, which began at midnight last Tuesday, and shootouts were reported with Palestinian defenders.
Christer Nordahl, the deputy director UNRWA said on Sunday: ‘We estimate that 25,000 people could be forced to flee Beit Hanoun if Israel attacks in the north’ of Gaza Strip.
The IOF shot dead four Palestinians in the Gaza Strip Monday, including two in the vicinity of the Israeli-reoccupied Gaza airport. Another Palestinian wounded in an Israeli air strike died of his wounds in Gaza early in the day. Israeli warplane the same day targeted a car in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah, killing one Palestinian.
Israeli air and artillery attacks began shortly after Cpl Gilad Shalit, 19, was captured in a daring Palestinian attack on an IOF military base on June 25.
Israel’s General Security Service (Shin Bet) head, Yuval Diskin, told the cabinet meeting on Sunday that the Israeli operations in Gaza ‘could take weeks or even months.’
Israeli aircraft sent missiles tearing through the office of Palestinian Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, on Sunday. Israeli warplanes bombed a building of the Palestinian Ministry of Interior at dawn Sunday, killing a night guard in the northern Gaza Strip town of Jabaliya.
Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas accompanied by Haniya inspected the rubble of the premiership building on Monday.
Abbas on Wednesday condemned the Israeli invasion of Gaza as a ‘crime against humanity’ and a ‘collective punishment’ against the Palestinian people.
IOF sealed off and banned entry to and exit from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, besieging Abbas, Haniya and top officials of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) as leading anti-occupation activists went underground.
Abbas, however, told reporters that he had no intention to leave Gaza until the Israeli invasion stops.
Palestinians in Gaza Strip are preparing for what they feared could be a long Israeli invasion, and tried despite their meagre resources amid an exacerbating food and humanitarian crisis to stock up on food, candles and batteries for radios.
Closure of the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt for the 6th consecutive day is stranding more than 4,000 Palestinians in two Egyptian towns.
UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) called on Israel on Friday to allow urgent medical and food supplies into Gaza Strip.
Israel on Friday revoked the Jerusalem residency of four Palestinian lawmakers, including a Cabinet minister, Israel’s Interior Ministry said.
The Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) was scheduled to convene in an emergency session in Ramallah and Gaza on Monday to debate the deteriorating situation in the West Bank, including eastern Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in 1967.
‘Israel is now openly engaged in infrastructure warfare, the wanton destruction of the basic platforms of human survival,’ Mike Whitney wrote on Monday.
IOF warplanes bombed the soccer field of the Islamic University in Gaza late Wednesday after destroying the only power plant in the strip early in the day, plunging Gaza Strip into darkness and depriving about one million Palestinians from electricity for months to come, hitting very hard not only households but also hospitals and schools.
Water supplies were also cut early Wednesday by bombing water pipelines, after destroying three bridges linking the south and north of the Gaza Strip.
Al-Arqam school, a cultural centre and a charity in Gaza city were bombed to rubble by the IOF warplanes.
The IOF also damaged the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children’s facilities in Gaza City. When IOF warplanes caused massive sonic booms and nearby explosions in air strikes, the Palestinian NGO’s building windows shattered. As a result, several deaf vocational trainees were injured from the shattered glass.
According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights six power transformers were destroyed, which provide an estimated 45 per cent of the electricity in Gaza for approximately half the population.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Gaza Electrical Distribution Company estimates it will take nine months to procure replacement transformers.
The Coastal Municipalities Water Utility manages the 132 water wells in Gaza, which is powered by GEDCO. Since back-up generators are needed to keep water flowing, there is concern about the financial and physical stability of using back-up generators because the IOF closed off the energy pipeline into Gaza.
Israeli tanks and bulldozers crossed the Gaza Strip and began razing farmland east of Khan Younis.
When the tanks withdrew from a spot of a farm land in A’basan in the southern Gaza Strip, they left a trail of destruction in their wake.
Palestinian families, uprooted from their homes during Saturday’s day-long operation, returned after dawn to ransacked homes. Israeli tanks and bulldozers had destroyed storehouses, knocked down bedroom walls and uprooted olive trees.
Soldiers battered down doors and upturned furniture in what an IOF spokeswoman said was an attempt to locate a tunnel Palestinians were reportedly digging towards Israeli positions along the Gaza border east of the city of Khan Younis.
Israel is deploying a terrifying new tactic against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip by letting loose deafening ‘sound bombs’ that cause widespread fear, induce miscarriages and traumatise children.
The Palestinian health ministry says the sonic booms have led to miscarriages and heart problems. The United Nations has demanded an end to the tactic, saying it causes panic attacks in children. The shockwaves have also damaged buildings by cracking walls and smashing thousands of windows.
‘I have never heard such a loud explosion. I thought it was right over the top of my building,’ said the owner, Tareq Dayyeh. ‘Sometimes you hear the rockets the Israelis fire but this was different. I felt like I was in the middle of a bomb. When I ran out the door I thought I might find the rest of the street was gone.’
Sonic booms are caused by aircraft when they fly beyond the sound barrier. When a warplane flies at low altitudes above civilian populations, the terrorising sound as the aircraft ‘wakes’ traumatises children (Donald Macintyre, November 2005) and causes infrastructure damage.
Last year the petition filed by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme reported an increase in miscarriages from sonic booms as well.
Meanwhile the IOF were raiding, confiscating and sealing off several institutions and humanitarian services charities in several West Bank cities, towns and refugee camps, in Jenin and Bethlehem on Sunday and in Jericho on Monday.
The IOF troops were also vandalising media outlets and hospitals.
On Monday they raided a local newspaper in Ramallah and the Nablus local TV station.
Separately, according to Ynet, the IOF soldiers caused a great deal of damage to the Nablus hospital property while searching for a suspect whom they failed to detain.
Palestinian sources in the hospital told Ynet that soldiers destroyed equipment and caused severe damages during the search. Activists from Physicians for Human Rights said that during the search, soldiers made all the hospital employees assemble on one floor and interrupted their work.
The Israeli Physicians for Human Rights organisation condemned the soldiers’ conduct in the hospital.
The organisation stated that, ‘Hospitals and hospital staff must be excluded from all military operations.’
