Becuase Everything Else Sucks

Ethnic Cleansing: Gazans Prepare for Power Shutdown

By Manila Ryce
Published Sunday, January 20th, 2008, 6:42 pm
Filed under: Human Rights, Videos: Political, World: Asia, Videos: News, Genocide, War, Society/Culture, World Issues, Terrorism, Videos

WPvideo 1.10

Occupied Gaza’s only power plant has been shut down due to a fuel shortage on the third day of the Israeli blockade. The worst affected will be the health sector, where hospitals will be unable to provide services due to a lack of electricity. Power outages have become commonplace in recent months, ever since the pro-Israeli Fatah Party was expelled from Gaza and Israel declared the entire territory a “hostile entity” to which international law no longer applied. A lack of fuel could also mean no water, since much of Gaza’s water relies on generators to pump it.

The UN has said Israel should not collectively punish Gaza’s population while responding to security threats.

The organisation has criticised Israel’s decision to close border crossings into Gaza, preventing aid deliveries to the 1.5 million people living in the territory, saying on Saturday that the move could provoke a humanitarian crisis.

The Israeli foreign ministry blamed their use of collective punishment entirely on Hamas, saying the fuel blockade was “wholly a Hamas decision”. The ministry also played down Israel’s disregard for human rights and the Geneva Conventions by saying, “The Hamas claim of humanitarian crisis in Gaza is also greatly exaggerated.” Israel believes that any punishment inflicted upon millions of innocent Palestinians is justified if it has the slightest chance of weakening Hamas. Christopher Gunness, the spokesman for UNRWA, said the logic of Israel’s blockade “defies basic humanitarian standards.”

Dr Medhat Abbas, head of the crisis management unit at the health ministry in Gaza, said, “These patients and these children are facing their destiny and they will die soon.” He continued, “They escaped from their poor houses were they have very cold weather … The families brought them here to be saved in the incubator. Now the incubator and the nursery will be out of electricity. What sort of humanitarian law is this?” Cancer and intensive care patients will be deprived of their treatment, and stored blood and vaccines will spoil.

source

Related Posts

8 Responses to “Ethnic Cleansing: Gazans Prepare for Power Shutdown”

  1. you know, maybe if you stop launching rockets at your neighbor every day, especially when they stood up to their own religious wackos and withdrew from the land, you might be able to convince them to let you keep the lights on.

    if you want to act with a 14th century mentality, you shouldn’t get 21th century amenities…

    ohh and nice objective title. why don’t you just go for broke and GodWin the discussion by comparing them to Nazis while you are at it. Aren’t you supposed to at least attempted to be objective when writing stores about world events? Way to not even bother mentioning the thousands of rockets the Palestinians have launched indiscriminately into israeli. nice bit of reporting there, Lou.

    stevo
    01/21/08 at 9:24 am

  2. As Jew, I have to say that I’m horrified by what the likudniks are doing in the name my people . We’ve become the most savage, hateful, and hated group on the planet because we’re casually murdering civilians:

    And to the apologiests who defend this: Please, stop helping. All you’re doing is convincing the world that we’re all insane.

    Geneva Convention:

    ‘ Article 33. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

    Pillage is prohibited.

    Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.

    Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions collective punishments are a war crime. Article 33 states: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed,” and “collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

    By collective punishment, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions had in mind the reprisal killings of World Wars I and II. In the First World War, Germans executed Belgian villagers in mass retribution for resistance activity. In World War II, Nazis carried out a form of collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. The conventions, to counter this, reiterated the principle of individual responsibility. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to “intimidatory measures to terrorize the population” in hopes of preventing hostile acts, but such practices “strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice.”

    Additional Protocol II of 1977 explicitly forbids collective punishment. . . ‘

    PaulInPhily
    01/21/08 at 9:38 am

  3. I guess bulldozing houses at 4am is a 21st century mentality. Amenities…. ha, civilians are going to die with that power shut off, but I’m not so sure you care about that. Sure, some Palestinians launch rockets and I’m not sure that needed mentioning. They also throw stones at Israeli military. They don’t however, send an Apache or a tank in. They don’t cut Israeli power and they don’t send their planes in to bomb. They don’t control the movement of Israelis and again, they don’t cut off their power.

    So, while David may have beaten Goliath… Goliath has established an apartheid presently.

    Deadpan
    01/21/08 at 10:56 am

  4. Israel provides 75% of Gaza’s electricity. Not sure how a loss of 25% of electricity is shutting down the enitre area? Wondering also how many power plants generally have only a day or so worth of backup fuel available?

    Calfacon
    01/21/08 at 11:53 am

  5. Deadpan
    “Sure, some Palestinians launch rockets and I’m not sure that needed mentioning.”

    Sorry, but your obtuseness is showing. How the hell can you NOT meantion the primary reason why the power is being cut off in an article about the Isreali’s cutting off power?

    Way to downplay all the responsibilities of the Palestinians. Way to portray the Israeli’s as being completely responsible for the current problems.

    you are a blind fool.

    stevo
    01/21/08 at 1:46 pm

  6. Stevo, Stevo, Stevo…your obtuseness is showing…

    Group of whackos fire rockets into population centers: criminal.

    A state, as a matter of policy, does not distinguish between combatants and civilians: …

    Go ahead, we can wait for you to get out your book of excuses and BS. But at the end of the day, anyone with a first grade logical skills can tell you that there is a MASSIVE difference between criminals and state policy. Of course, I am having this same argument with my own state, so I am not pointing fingers anywhere and I can not even fathom the environment the Isrealis live in…I am just trying to point out the infantile simplicities of imbeciles like Stevo whose black-n-white assininity has no place in real world discourse.

    gh0st
    01/21/08 at 2:34 pm

  7. Babies dying in incubators != criminals. But can’t we just hear a justification bubbling up for that one?
    After all, in all seriousness, how many Japanese babies in incubators did the US kill when devastating nearly every major city in Japan?
    As for the US, I wonder if a baby has ever died in its incubator from a foreign act of war.
    I don’t pretend to understand an area so locked in conflict, and when I attempt to project my affinity for fair and just societies upon them, it only makes glaringly obvious the inability of my own government to manage the complex, emerging global interdependency without murdering huge numbers of people or systematically abrogating human rights. All moving toward what is the historical norm: no human rights except what your pointy stick can get you.

    Matthew
    01/21/08 at 3:57 pm

  8. @stevo

    “you know, maybe if you stop launching rockets at your neighbor every day…”

    You mean like what happened after Hamas was democratically elected into power? They offered Israel a 10 year truce, stopped suicide bombings, and rocket attacks dropped off. Qassam attacks only skyrocketed (no pun intended) after Israel started making incursions into Gaza and kidnapping Hamas officials. Look at any graph of attack frequency and they follow Israeli military action. They don’t proceed it.

    “ohh and nice objective title…”

    Thanks, but “ethnic cleansing” isn’t my phrase. It’s been used by UN special human rights envoys for quite a while to describe the situation in Gaza. Just because you don’t like the term doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate.

    “How the hell can you NOT meantion the primary reason why the power is being cut off in an article about the Isreali’s cutting off power?”

    Ethnic cleansing.

    Manila Ryce
    01/21/08 at 4:08 pm

Leave a Reply

Tired of filing this information out everytime you leave a comment at the Largest Minority? Why not register as a user? You also get full access to our forum!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>