AN OPEN LETTER FROM GAZA - Dennis Cormier, Human Rights Activist at Gaza

I have sent the following letter to United States congresswoman Michelle Lujan Grisham from New Mexico. The letter has been sent by Facebook messaging to her office, and will be hand delivered to her office by my friend, Lora Lucero . I wanted to share this open letter with you -

September 22, 2014

Representative Michelle Lujan Grisham

Albuquerque District Office

505 Marquette Avenue, NW

Suite 1605

Albuquerque, NM 87102

Dear Representative Grisham:

We need your support in Gaza.

My name is Denny Cormier. I am 68 and am currently retired.

I have lived in Santa Fe for the last 15 years but I am currently volunteering in Gaza as a human rights activist and a citizen journalist reporting on what I am discovering here.

I have been living here in Gaza City for six months now (since March 2014), and I also traveled here in June of 2013 as a citizen journalist.

What I knew about Gaza and the Palestinian issue before coming here was limited to reports that I received from the Western media, and the distance between Santa Fe and Gaza might as well have been a million miles.

But based on many conversations with young Palestinians and university students in Gaza over 2 years, I decided to travel to Gaza myself in 2013 and to investigate personally the differences between my own discoveries and what I read (or saw) in the media. My personal discoveries and the media narrative were so totally different – in fact, they were totally at odds. And I had to know.

Frankly, my first visit to Gaza was an eye-opener. In fact, it was a life changing experience to put it mildly.

I was immediately welcomed as a United States citizen… the people in Gaza love Americans… they welcome me warmly wherever I have traveled in Gaza. People greet you in the streets with the warmest of welcomes – when they discover I am an American, it immediately brings smiles to the faces of adults and children alike. The immediate reaction is – We Love You. I have made many lasting and strong friendships in Gaza. And I fell in love with the Palestinians and with Gaza. I received a similar welcome from university students and business owners and from people who welcomed me on behalf of the government.

This was not a place of terrorists. This was a place of a warm, friendly people – people of great faith – people of generosity that is unparalleled in my experience.

I could not wait to return to Gaza, and did so earlier this year in March.

And I am glad that I did.

This recent 6 month visit has increased my understanding of the issues here, and I have seen how the issues of siege and of economic devastation have brought great suffering to these people, many of whom I know personally.

Although I had the opportunity to leave Gaza before Operation Protective Edge with the assistance of the U.S. State Department and the government here in Gaza, I chose to stay on during the 51 day attack and to be a witness.

What I saw and experienced can only be characterized as horrific. The attacks on the border cities of Gaza were particularly barbaric. I reported to representatives of the U.S. State Department that I was a witness to war crimes, and the effects of the war crimes continue even if the attacks have stopped.

Although I live in an area of Gaza where other internationals live and in a place that is normally considered a safe haven for them, I began to feel strongly that my life was in serious danger – that there was no safe place in Gaza during those 51 days.

Gratefully I survived the bombings in my own neighborhood, but not so others in Gaza City and in cities throughout the Gaza Strip. Many hundreds died in these attacks… many thousands more were seriously injured… thousands of homes have been flattened by the weaponry that Israel used during the attacks and are now sitting in piles of rubble.

I have visited and documented the destruction in three Gaza cities – in Khuzaa, in Shujaya and in Beit Hanoun (and of course, in Gaza City). If you had been able to accompany me on these visits after the war, you would have wept… I did.

What I saw was nothing short of total devastation of civilian homes. I would be happy to send you photographic documentation if you wish…. But what I saw and witnessed would make you shudder…

I have heard hundreds of stories of people of all ages who ran from their homes in the middle of the night as shells fell on their homes without warning….others were given just a few minutes to evacuate their homes before rockets or bombs wiped them out…. My dearest friends ran from their homes in bare feet and lost everything they owned and treasured.

Some homes were bombed while the families were sleeping. They received no warning from Israel. Entire families were wiped out

Children shuddered in their homes and it has been reported that 90% of the children in Gaza now suffer from PTSD.

Children were particularly targeted in these attacks.

Four young boys from the Bakr family were killed by shells from Israeli gunboats just off shore…. They were killed on the beach when they were playing football very close to my home… I met the only survivor of the attack on the same Bakr family home just days later.

I spent most of two months during the war acting as a human shield at Al Shifa Hospital, the major health facility in Gaza. There I met hundreds of refugees and interviewed the injured. I saw the dead being brought to the hospital, many of them children… what I saw is the stuff of nightmares. On one of the days there, hundreds of ambulances arrived over several hours delivering the dead and the injured….. The doctors I spoke to have told me that the injuries to their patients were worse than any war injuries that they have witnessed here and in other war zones.

I have seen many destroyed or severely damaged civilian facilities, including schools, mosques, hospitals, police stations – in some cases entire cities.

Before the war I was also witness to the devastation to the economy and to the infrastructure of Gaza – and the destruction of the human spirit during this too long siege. I learned to live with 8 hours of electricity a day (now 6 hours a day)… I learned to live with the water that comes from the taps that cannot be used for anything safely… I learned to live with miles of beaches that have been destroyed because of the need to dump raw sewage into the sea. I learned to live with stories of suffering that are caused by a huge unemployment situation in Gaza…

I cannot tell you all that I have discovered first hand during this current visit to Gaza, but it could fill books, and one day it probably will.

I can tell you that what I witnessed are gross breaches of international law and gross breaches of agreements relating to collective punishment of a civilian population.

I can tell you that I will encourage the Palestinians to bring charges against Israel to the International Criminal Court.

I can tell you that it is my honest opinion that the suffering of the people of Gaza are a direct result of an illegal siege and blockade and a de facto Occupation…. The Israelis left Gaza some years ago but they have an immense and negative impact on the lives of ordinary citizens in Gaza long after they left this area and surrounded it with fencing and military outposts.

I can tell you that I was personally shot at when visiting the city of Shujaya. As I explored the damage and was hundreds of meters from the Israeli border and the buffer zone that they have set up, bullets were fired above me and on both sides of me by the Israelis….. Warning shots perhaps…. But I was nowhere near the area where people are regularly killed and injured along the Israeli border…. My only weapon was a digital camera. I had to back up several hundred more feet before the shooting stopped. Children who were in the same area were also fired at as was my guide.

I can tell you many things based on first hand witness and observation, but I must please ask you to reconsider anything you ever learned from the media or from the State Department or White House regarding Gaza – in fact, question everything you have been told.

What you have been told… what we Americans have been told…. Is a lie.

I would be happy to meet with you when I return to the United States, but I must warn you now that the ongoing support of the State of Israel in its attacks on the Palestinians, especially on those living in Gaza is a great shame on the American people. The financial support offered to Israel without proper concern and restrictions based on human rights is a great shame for the American people.

As a representative of the good people of the United States, I urge you to look very closely at the good people of Gaza and to reconsider what we have done to them in the name of Israeli security.

In fact, I would be pleased to personally be your guide should you elect to visit the Gaza Strip and should the Israeli government allow you entry for a firsthand experience of what I have witnessed and experienced.

The people of Gaza need your support.

Respectfully,

Dennis Cormier
Santa Fe, New Mexico
(currently Gaza City in the Gaza Strip)

Source: 

https://www.facebook.com/denny.cormier?fref=nf

HUNDREDS OF GAZA CHILDREN PERMANENTLY DISABLED BY THIS SUMMER’S CONFLICT

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — After being declared dead earlier this summer, 9-year-old Louay is fortunate to be back home with his father and older brother, Odai, 13. But with their friends back in school this month, both boys are confined to the small, dark apartment where they live in al-Zaitun, a suburb of Gaza City, dealing with permanent disabilities from their recent injuries.

This summer’s 51 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas took a heavy toll on Gaza children, killing 501, according to U.N. figures. It injured an additional 3,374, and though the bombs have stopped, hundreds of those children, just like Louay and Odai, face an uncertain future as disabled.

Their story is one of two young lives changed in an instant. On July 21, Louay and Odai were at their aunt’s house preparing for iftar, the evening meal for breaking the fast during the holy month of Ramadan. Rockets suddenly hit the house, killing their mother, grandmother and aunt, who was pregnant, as well as her six daughters.

“The first rocket knocked me out, but when a second hit, I woke up, and when the third hit, I was running downstairs,” said Odai. “I saw that my little brother, Louay, was alive. I took him, and we ran together, but a canister of gas exploded and burned him.”

Their father, Zakarya Siyam, said he was preparing to go to the house when he heard on the radio that the home of his brother-in-law had been hit.

“I rushed to the house but didn’t find anyone. At the hospital I found them in pieces. Six children in small pieces of meat — also my wife and mother,” Siyam said with a blank expression in his eyes. The doctors were preparing to remove Odai’s leg because of shrapnel stuck in his knee and thigh.

“My father yelled at the doctors, ‘Don’t cut off my son’s leg,’” Odai recalled.

Although Siyam said Louay had been declared dead, he insisted he could feel a pulse. He put Louay in cold water and resuscitated him. After a week in intensive care, Louay opened his eyes. He sustained severe burns on most of his body and — more serious — pieces of shrapnel in his stomach and near his heart that doctors were unable to remove. Doctors have warned Louay against running or playing because of the risk of the shrapnel cutting his heart.

Odai, meanwhile, is in constant pain. Shrapnel crushed several bones in his leg, and he may never walk again.

Doctors told Siyam that both his sons need surgery abroad. But because Israel and Egypt have sealed all exits from Gaza, his only hope is that international organizations will facilitate and sponsor the needed treatment.

“They have already lost the most precious thing they had, their mother. I want to give them anything they ask for, but in Gaza there are no opportunities for treatment for my children. I’m an ordinary and poor man. In Gaza such people are neglected,” he said with exasperation.

Even if we have the resources to pay for services for children who need them, the place they would go for rehabilitation doesn’t exist anymore.

Steve Sosebee

president, Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund

Ismail Nasser is the chief pediatric surgeon at Al-Shifa, Gaza’s main hospital for trauma victims. Sitting in his office, he said most of the children he operated on during the war suffered severe injuries from shrapnel or from being trapped in collapsing houses.

According to numbers from Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, 1,064 residential houses were targeted by the Israeli army, and 17,000 were damaged or destroyed since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on July 7. As a result, multiple family members were often killed or injured in attacks, and more than half the fatalities occurred in or near their homes.

Like Louay and Odai, many children who sustained serious permanent injuries also lost one or both parents, Nasser said. Losing a primary caretaker, he explained, will greatly affect their futures, not only because of the psychological trauma but also because they now require extra physical care.

“If, for example, you remove the spleen of a 5-year-old, he will suffer from low immunity and it is not easy to deal with,” Nasser said. “Or a patient who has lost a lower limb, for example, will need extra help.”

Many children, like the Siyam brothers, have witnessed six military operations in Gaza in eight years, which injured more than 5,000 children and has left a disproportionately high number of disabled among Gaza’s youngest generation.

“There is a huge number of children with special needs for rehabilitation, prosthetics, surgery and medical care,” said Steve Sosebee, president of the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF). The Israeli military’s destruction of Gaza’s only rehabilitation clinic, Al-Wafa hospital, has made the situation that much more critical, he added.

“Even if we have the resources to pay for services for children who need them, the place they would go for rehabilitation doesn’t exist anymore,” he said.

The PCRF takes medical teams to Gaza, arranges treatment abroad for children and supplies children with disability aids. The organization is waiting for a shipment of about 400 wheelchairs, but Sosebee said its efforts are far outmatched by the needs.

Many disabled children will face difficulties carrying out daily activities as they return to neighborhoods where houses are severely damaged and cut off from electricity and water and roads are blocked by rubble.

In 2011 a survey by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics showed that more than half of Gaza’s disabled said they had difficulty performing duties outside their homes or just crossing the road. It concluded that 2 in 5 disabled people age 15 or older had never enrolled in school, leaving more than half of them illiterate and 90 percent unemployed.

Khalil Amer Jadily, who lost both his legs during an Israeli airstrike on his family’s home in the Bureij refugee camp during Operation Cast Lead in 2009, is trying to defy those statistics.

“When I woke up at the hospital, I saw my legs lying over my chest, and a person told me to pray to God for recovery,” recalled Jadily, who’s now 22. “I thought I would die. And even in this war I thought I would die.”

With help from the PCRF, he traveled to Dubai in 2010 to get prostheses. A year ago he started studying business administration at the Islamic University of Gaza and said he likes to swim whenever possible.

Though Jadily survived the bombs raining on Gaza this summer, his prosthetic legs didn’t. He left them and his wheelchair behind when he and his family were evacuated before the Israeli land invasion. When he returned, most of his neighborhood had been razed. He now uses an old, rusty wheelchair held together with blue tape.

He sympathizes with the many children whose lives were changed forever this summer.

“I feel sad when I think of the young children who got disabled,” Jadily said. “They will feel like they have died, but though they will never have a normal life, they will hopefully learn to live with it.”

Source : http://falastinews.com/2014/09/23/hundreds-gaza-children-permanently-disabled-summers-conflict/

Russell Tribunal finds evidence of incitement to genocide, crimes against humanity in Gaza

The jury of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine's Emergency Session on Israel's Operation Protective Edge which included Michael Mansfield QC, John Dugard, Vandana Shiva, Christiane Hessel, Richard Falk, Ahdaf Soueif, Ken Loach, Paul Laverty, Roger Waters, Ronnie Kasrils, Radhia Nasraoui and Miguel Angel Estrella. (Photo: Russell Tribunal on Palestine)

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine’s Emergency Session on Israel’s Operation Protective Edge held yesterday in Brussels has found evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of murder, extermination and persecution and also incitement to genocide.

The Jury reported: ‘The cumulative effect of the long-standing regime of collective punishment in Gaza appears to inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the incremental destruction of the Palestinians as a group in Gaza.’

‘The Tribunal emphasises the potential for a regime of persecution to become genocidal in effect, In light of the clear escalation in the physical and rhetorical violence deployed in respect of Gaza in the summer of 2014, the Tribunal emphasises the obligation of all state parties to the 1948 Genocide Convention ‘to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.’

The Jury heard evidence from eyewitnesses to Israeli attacks during the Gaza war 2014 including journalists Mohammed Omer, Max Blumenthal, David Sheen, Martin Lejeune, Eran Efrati and Paul Mason, as well as surgeons Mads Gilbert, Mohammed Abou Arab, Genocide Expert Paul Behrens, Col Desmond Travers and Ivan Karakashian, Head of Advocacy and Defence for Children International.

In terms of the crime of incitement to genocide, the tribunal received evidence ‘demonstrating a vitriolic upswing in racist rhetoric and incitement’ during the summer of 2014. ‘The evidence shows that such incitement manifested across many levels of Israeli society, on both social and traditional media, from football fans, police officers, media commentators, religious leaders, legislators, and government ministers.’

The Tribunal also found evidence of the following war crimes:

o    Willful killing

o    Extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity

o    Intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population and civilian objects

o    Disproportionate use of force

o    Attacks against buildings dedicated to religion and education

o    The use of Palestinians as human shields

o    Employing weapons, projectiles, and material and methods of warfare which are of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering which are inherently indiscriminate

o    The use of violence to spread terror among the civilian population

The Tribunal further stated: ‘It is recognised that in a situation where patterns of crimes against humanity are perpetrated with impunity, and where direct and public incitement to genocide is manifest throughout society, it is very conceivable that individuals or the state may choose to exploit the conditions in order to perpetrate the crime of genocide.

It further noted: ‘We have have a genuine fear that in an environment of impunity and an absence of sanction for serious and repeated criminality, the lessons from Rwanda and other mass atrocities may once again go unheeded’.

The Tribunal calls on Israel to fulfill its’ obligations under international law and for the state of Palestine to accede without further delay to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, fully cooperate with the human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry and fully engage the mechanisms of international justice.

The Tribunal also reminds all states to cooperate to bring to an end the illegal situation arising from Israel’s occupation, siege and crimes in the Gaza Strip. In light of the obligation not to render aid or assistance, all states must consider appropriate measures to exert sufficient pressure on Israel, including the imposition of sanctions, the severing of diplomatic relations collectively through international organisations, or in the absence of consensus, individually by breaking bilateral relations with Israel.

It calls upon All states to fulfill their duty ‘to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide’.

The Full and detailed findings and recommendations of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine can be found at the Russell Tribunal website: www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com

The Tribunal will present its’ findings to the European Parliament today.

Source : http://mondoweiss.net/2014/09/incitement-genocide-humanity

Read more : http://stateofblood.blogspot.com/

Palestinian problem is central to region but Israelis control U.S. policy — Brahimi

Lakhdar Brahimi

In The Nation, Barbara Crossette interviews Lakhdar Brahimi, 80, the Algerian who served as a leading diplomat for the United Nations over a couple of decades, including as the lead Syrian negotiator. Brahimi makes it clear that the U.S. Palestinian policy is at the heart of our problems in the Middle East. He refers to the Israel lobby as a “formidable machine” that will overcome U.S. efforts to be fair; he watched it foil Obama and Kerry’s efforts. Obama was supposed to be the world’s president, but Israel controls U.S. policy re Palestinians.

To add to the skepticism, despair and alienation across the region, Brahimi says, is the corrosive, unconditional American support of Israel despite its unending land grabs and military assaults on Palestinians, most recently in the attacks on Gaza this summer. It was outrageous that the reaction in Congress and from President Obama to the most recent carnage and death was prefaced with the time-worn expression “Israel has the right to defend itself,” Brahimi said, adding that the lack of sensitivity to the hugely imbalanced casualty figures—more than 2,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza compared with sixty-eight Israelis, almost all of them soldiers, according to United Nations figures—seemed to imply that “Gazans are not human.”

“I generally don’t like to speak about countries,” said Brahimi, usually a consummate diplomat who was Algeria’s foreign minister from 1991–93, “but [Obama] is not the president of the United States only. He’s a kind of president of the world. I still remember his Cairo speech in 2009. That was an inspired and inspiring speech. So looking back at that speech, definitely we are disappointed.”

Brahimi, now 80, speaking in an interview from his home in Paris, said that, like it or not, “the Palestinian issue is still important for all of us in this region. This is a very, very big part of the story. Anything on the Palestinian issue is decided by the Israelis. It is a mistake to go to the Americans: Please come and help us with this problem. They cannot. They are not allowed to. We need Americans. They have a huge role to play. But they cannot be an honest broker.” Not that there have never been laudable American efforts to find solutions, he said.

“I had an opportunity to hear [Secretary of State] John Kerry speak of what he was trying to do to help solve that [Palestinian] problem,” Brahimi said. “That was just over one year ago. I was profoundly impressed at how much work he had put into the exercise, how he was genuinely trying to be fair and impartial. But I had no illusions: the present Israeli Government and the formidable machine supporting them in the US. shall not allow him to succeed. That is why I say the US cannot be an honest broker.” He recalls the day when Condoleezza Rice, as secretary of state, was forced to veto a resolution on the Middle East that she had personally negotiated in the Security Council after Washington got a call from Israel opposing the measure.

Condoleezza Rice told the story about that come-down in her memoir, No Higher Honor. It was an abstention, not a veto, of  a resolution she had written. Elliott Abrams writes in his memoir that he found Rice’s resolution “shameful,” and Abrams carried the day at the White House even as Rice railed. “What’s wrong with this language, she asked; she did not see what [Ehud] Olmert was screaming about.” So an Israeli P.M. had more power than our secretary of state.

This piece is a challenge to David Remnick, who joked years ago that if only the I/P situation were fixed, Osama bin Laden would go back into the family construction business. Why not try and fix it and see what good would flow?

Thanks to James North, who writes about petroleum dictatorships for The Nation this week.

Source : http://mondoweiss.net/2014/09/palestinian-israelis-control

Read more : http://stateofblood.blogspot.com/