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Salwa El Tibi, Save the Children UK’s Gaza programme manager, is in the Gaza Strip with her four children aged seven, 14, 15 and 19. She writes:
The situation is terrible. We haven’t been out of our home since the bombing started on Saturday. We hear the F16s coming in and the bombs fall. The Apache helicopters are precise but the F16 fighters cause widespread damage to buildings around their targets. It goes on day and night.
We are all scared. My youngest daughter is panicked, talking in an agitated voice and has started to wet the bed. None of us are sleeping properly.
We have to keep all the doors and the windows of our home open otherwise they could get blown in by the bombs. That means it is very cold. We have long periods without electricity. The children are complaining.
I stocked up on food because we expected an attack and have enough for another three days or so. After that I don’t know. I might be able to get to the market but many bakeries have stopped producing bread because there is a severe shortage of flour. We are living from day to day.
There is no milk available for children. Shortages of essential drugs for children also mean that they are not getting the health care they need.
The television is full of stories about children being killed and families destroyed. It is really very sad. They are all traumatised.
There is no escape for them or for their families. The air strikes began just as children were leaving school, exposing them to horrific scenes of violence. They just want to be like children in other countries.
Save the Children has lots of food parcels for families in desperate need, but we cannot distribute them until the bombing stops.
I don’t know how we got into this situation but my message to the Israeli government is to stop what is going on. Negotiation is the best way. I request world leaders stop what is going on. Killing people will not help.
Cross-posted at JustPeaceNow
7 Comments
At least some press is getting in!
I believe it’s more that Palestinian writers are getting word OUT.
Another first-hand report: found at Al Jazeera.
And, from McClatchy’s Dion Nissenbaum, another viewpoint.
More power games from the Patriarchal right. I hear that Livni needs to “show that she’s willing to use force”. They’re all competing to see who can be top baboon in the troop.
First render them (the Palestinians) helpless and then, bomb the crap out them. Real strong there, Livni. Congrats, you’ve just turned into a MAN!!!
Receiving direct reports from a dear friend Art Gish (his upteenth time being there with the Palestinians) who is in the Gaza. When I get direct permission to share his reports will do so. Can tell you sounds like a Brutal situation, serious injuries, lack of food, water, medicines, physicians working round the clock. Many dead under rubble not accounted for, war planes in the sky, pilot less jets, war ships from the sea attacking Palestinian civilians, Israel blocking television signals. Many destroyed buildings with dead underneath.
Israel trying to do their best to shut down all reports from inside Gaza. Trying to keep the world from seeing what they are doing. We know for the last 50 years the U.S. MSM has been complicit hiding what has been going on. Few break outs in the so called progressive blogosphere..Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman (as always on it). I know from direct conversations with Chris Matthews that if he could he would shine the light on this situation.
Will print Art Gish’s direct reports when I get his direct permission.
Muzzlewatch doing it’s best to get direct stories from the Gaza
Gaza and the US Corporate Media
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/200…..ate-media/
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/12/30-10
Lights Out in Gaza, News Blackout in US
by Deena Guzder
Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have decried Israel’s continued aerial bombing campaign as unlawful and denounced the killing of more than 300 Palestinians since 27 December, including scores of unarmed civilians not taking part in the hostilities. Israel’s attacks on the densely populated Gaza Strip also elicited condemnation from numerous world politicians and sparked protests in global cities.
Despite international outcry over escalating violence, the U.S. mainstream media continues to privilege a prepackaged narrative in which Israel’s actions are never disproportionate, never counterproductive and certainly never gratuitous. According to the mainstream media, the U.S. must continue uncompromisingly supporting Israel because the allegedly beleaguered democracy is held hostage by monomaniacal Islamofascists who are inherently evil. Promoting a paradigm in which Israel is always David up against Goliath, the U.S. media presents suffering Palestinians as expendable for the greater cause of Israel winning its epic struggle. To justify U.S.’s carte blanche to Israel, the mainstream media restricts American readers to an echo chamber in which the following claims are repeated ad nausem until they are mistaken for fact
Electronic Intifada always the place to go for information on the middle east. The MSM and most of the progressive blogosphere shut down to really reporting about what has is and continues to be abuse in the Israeli Palestinian conflict
http://electronicintifada.net/
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051317.html
In four days they killed 375 people. They did not, and could not, distinguish between a Hamas official and his children, between a traffic cop and a Qassam launch operator, between a weapons cache and a health clinic, between the first and second floors of a densely populated apartment building with dozens of children inside. According to reports, about half of the people killed were innocent civilians. We’re not complaining about the pilots’ accuracy, it cannot be otherwise when the weapon is a plane and the objective is a tiny, crowded strip of land. Our excellent pilots are effectively bullies now. As in training flights, they bomb undisturbed, facing neither an air force nor defense system.
THE U.S’S CONTINUED COMPLIANCE HAS ONLY SERVED TO FUEL THE VIOLENCE IN THIS CONFLICT