International [Arab-Israeli Conflict, v4] Israel Sets Goal of Doubling the Jewish Population on the Golan Heights

UN Human Rights Council to launch war crimes investigation in Gaza
By Samuel Osborne, Chloe Farand | May 19, 2018

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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...te-border-deaths-sniper-a8357981.html#gallery
Trump vetoed. This is a terrible move, but at this point I think Trump wants WWIII.
http://www.france24.com/en/20180515-us-blocks-call-independent-gaza-inquiry-un-diplomats

I mean:
An Israeli official claimed Palestinians are “Nazis” and the number of civilians who are killed by Israel does not matter.

While we have:
Israelis are doing to Palestinians what Nazis did to Jews during WWII – Erdogan

And:
As the Israeli military mows down unarmed Palestinian protesters, arms trade expert Andrew Feinstein explains how weapons companies use Gaza as a laboratory to test new products and rake in profits.
 
Pretty relevant details to keep in mind.

they had knives at the least and stuff to disarm the fence. The few who broke though were proof of that and the damage to fenced area was. Israel needs to wall all of gaza off at this point the northern and part of side is walled off but i would wall it all off if i was them.
It certainly sounds like these "human rights observers" genuinely believe these are "peaceful protesters" who got shot just for standing there with nothing but harmless banners and flags in their hands, despite the fiery mayhem that says otherwise everytime the mob tried to "peacefully" overrun the borders using "peaceful" burning tires and firebombs, as shown in all the photos and videos.

636618948882385673-AFP-AFP-14X2SW.jpg


What kind of "proportionate response" are they expecting when the "peaceful protesters" start "peacefully" attacking the armed soldiers guarding the Israeli borders? Should the IDF stock up a pile of burning tires of their own and "peacefully" flinging them back at the "peaceful" Hamas protesters each time they tries to bring down the border fence...?

like always this thread will just reveal people with major bias. I understand jewish hypocrisy in west and know there is ´zog´ conspiracy gets people non muslims angry and that makes nazi type ´fascist´ ´white genocide´propaganda appear interesting. But some subsection of these people are not those fascist types but genuine idiots.

What i find most interesting is the common european response it just blows my mind. We all know what would happen to the jews if the palestinian sunni arab muslims got their way. This why i think at this point the palestinian state cannot be in west bank but in gaza, egypt, and jordan. Israel should not have to give up more strategic mountainous land to people who are this radicalized and who helped try to destroy Israel before and whose fellow arabs have never built them state even when they controlled west bank for 20 years! To imagine that palestine somehow would not become like libya is just laughable.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2014/11/...stinian-arabs-support-isis-most-in-the-world/

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and this other poll shows higher than 6% for ISIS

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So many young people dead, more injured, many crippled for life. Hamas had to know this would happen.

Aside from Egypt opeing up the crossing, what was gained?

Erodogan gets to act like the Islamic Bolivar, the UN makes it's usual ineffecual noises, the US acts like WWE refferee Danny Davis before vetoing any meaningful investigation or sanction against Israel, the rest of the Islamic world shakes it's fist on twitter, more settlements get built -and the beat goes on and ...just like it happens every single year.

What was gained when they were blowing up buses?

What was gained when they did the stab-a-thon last year?

The Palestinian's very badly need new leadership and new tactics: In six to eight months I bet Arkain is gonna update this thread again with the same story about Palestinains dying for esstentially nothing.

Right you are.

If there are people who have something to gain from this, I suspect it wouldn't be the Palestinians - once again - being used as pawns. Certainly not the little children who was dragged into these "peaceful protests" by adults who should know better.


After Deadly Protests, Gazans Ask: What Was Accomplished?
By Declan Walsh and Isabel Kershner | May 18, 2018​

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The body of Jamal Affana being carried through an alleyway in Rafah, Gaza, last week after he died of a gunshot wound sustained during protests at the fence between Israel and Gaza.

GAZA — After weeks of protest at the Israeli border fence peaked this week, Gazans returned to their daily lives of struggle, many wondering what, if anything, had been accomplished.

The cost was clear: Over 100 Palestinians killed by Israeli snipers, 60 of them on Monday alone, and over 3,500 wounded since the campaign began on March 30, Gaza medical officials said.

Hamas, the Islamic militant group that governs Gaza and organized the protests, did gain a victory in international messaging, with Israel widely condemned for what critics said was disproportionate use of force against mostly unarmed protesters.

In Geneva on Friday, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted overwhelmingly to censure Israel and called for an inquiry.

But to many Gazans, the tangible benefits of so much bloodshed were hard to discern, with plenty of blame to go around — including for Hamas.

At a market near the main protest camp, Abdul Rahman, 59, a vegetable trader, called the effort a total waste. “Zero,” he said. “In fact, less than zero.”

He condemned the Israelis, the Arab allies who he said had betrayed the Palestinians, and the leadership of Gaza. “We didn’t open the fence, and the blockade has not been lifted. There was only killing.”

In his sermon at noon prayers on Friday, Ismail Haniya, the leader of Hamas, put a positive spin on the protests, called “The Great Return March,” a reference to the goal of Palestinian refugees to return to lands lost to Israel in 1948.

“We are living in the throes of victory and the beginning of the end of the humanitarian tragedy,” he proclaimed.


Mr. Haniya hailed Egypt’s rare gesture of good will toward Gaza in opening its border crossing at Rafah, on the southern edge of the territory, for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began a day earlier. The opening would ease the 11-year-old blockade of Gaza, he said, adding that the border protests would continue until the blockade was entirely lifted.

But many Gazans, having lost friends or suffered grievous wounds in the protests, feel cheated by Hamas.

Eight lean young men, some still wearing bloodstained clothes, dragged away clumps of barbed wire on Thursday that protesters had torn from the fence dividing Gaza from Israel.

Selling the wire as scrap for 70 cents a kilo, they could at least salvage something from of the protests.


“Nothing achieved,” said Mohammed Haider, 23. “People are dead. They deceived us that we would breach the fence. But that didn’t happen.”

Inside Hamas, a very different debate has erupted. The harsh response of Israeli soldiers on Monday has created “strong pressure” inside the movement for a military response, said Basem Naim, a former minister of health in Gaza who now works with the Hamas international relations office. “People say ‘If we have the capacity to resort to armed resistance, why not do it?’”

But the Hamas leadership was resisting such “emotional” calls, Mr. Haim said, in recognition of the rare public relations coup that their movement, once better known for suicide attacks and rocket strikes, had attained this week.

The strains of the blockade on Gaza, which Israel and Egypt imposed, citing security reasons, have been obscured in recent years by other crises in the Middle East. Now Hamas hopes to capitalize on the widespread outrage at images of Gazans being shot by Israeli solders to pressure Israel into making some concessions.

The effort seemed to make headway Friday with the vote by the United Nations council.

“Those responsible for violations must in the end be held accountable,” Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the head of the council, said in a statement Friday. “What do you become when you shoot to kill someone who is unarmed, and not an immediate threat to you? You are neither brave, nor a hero.”

Israel, which considers the council biased, said in a statement by the Foreign Ministry that the council “once again has proved itself to be a body made up of a built-in, anti-Israel majority, guided by hypocrisy and absurdity.”

As the Gaza protests evolved, they had a series of shifting goals in addition to casting Israel in a negative light: breaching the fence to symbolize the return to the lost lands; challenging the blockade to ease economic distress; and, ultimately, expressing Palestinian rejection of moving the United States Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

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Yehya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, center, speaking to protesters last month.

Israel said the protesters were being used as cover by militants who intended to attack its soldiers and nearby communities.

To prove that point, Israeli officials pointed to a statement by a Hamas leader this week that 50 of the 60 protesters killed on Monday were members of the group.

Mr. Naim, the Hamas official, said the 50 people described were Hamas supporters as well as militants, and that all were unarmed when killed.

The Israeli military said eight armed militants were killed in a shootout with its forces at the fence during Monday’s protest.

In any event, the “great return” did not occur, given Israel’s determination to prevent any breach of the barrier. By the end of the week, the world’s attention had moved to North Korea, the latest Trump administration scandal and Britain’s royal wedding.

And Hamas is no closer to improving the lives of increasingly restless Gazans. The group lacks money to even pay public employees’ salaries or other expenses of governing.

Its plight has been deepened by the faltering reconciliation efforts with its archrival, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority run by President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank.

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Protesters burning tires on Monday near the Gaza border with Israel.

“Overall Hamas is in the same corner it was a month or two ago,” said Nathan Thrall, director of the International Crisis Group’s Israeli-Palestinian project. “It simply doesn’t have an answer about how to get out of this predicament or even how to capitalize on these protests.”

On Friday, organizers called for people to gather at the protest sites in the late afternoon. Mr. Haniya and other Hamas leaders were there. But others showed up in relatively low numbers, seemingly another measure of the waning popular appetite for the protests, which are planned to go on until the end of Ramadan in early June.

With Gaza unemployment at 43 percent and tens of thousands of employee salaries slashed by the Palestinian Authority sanctions, Egypt is encouraging a step-by-step approach to reconciliation that would see the Western-backed authority gradually take over governance of the coastal enclave.

The United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Nickolay E. Mladenov, said the most urgent need for Gaza was to start development projects that were already approved. That would create jobs, increase access to potable water and electricity and create a more conducive atmosphere for reconciliation.

“The economy has disappeared,” he said. “Effectively, we need to revive life in Gaza.”

But after three international donor meetings in the past three months, and years of stalled projects, Mr. Mladenov said people had a right to be skeptical.

At Gaza’s main Shifa hospital, where entire floors were packed with young men recovering from gunshot wounds, many insisted they were happy to have paid such a high price. But other former protesters expressed bitter recrimination, blaming their own leaders as much as Israel.

“Our future is lost because of the Jews, and because of Hamas,” said Mahmoud Abu Omar, a 26-year-old with one arm wrapped in bandages.

He’d been shot, he said, as he aimed his slingshot across the fence. He had hoped the protests would somehow ease the frustrations of his life — his impatience to marry, to earn some money, to travel outside Gaza. They did not.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/world/middleeast/hamas-gaza-palestinians-protests.html
 
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It certainly sounds like these "human rights observers" genuinely believe these are "peaceful protesters" who got shot just for standing there with nothing but harmless banners and flags in their hands, despite the fiery mayhem that says otherwise everytime the mob tried to "peacefully" overrun the borders using "peaceful" burning tires and firebombs, as shown in all the photos and videos.

636618948882385673-AFP-AFP-14X2SW.jpg


What kind of "proportionate response" are they expecting when the "peaceful protesters" start "peacefully" attacking the armed soldiers guarding the Israeli borders? Should the IDF stock up a pile of burning tires of their own and "peacefully" flinging them back at the "peaceful" Hamas protesters each time they tries to bring down the border fence...?
Was every protestor involved in these acts? We all remember MLK fondly but let's not forget even in his marches there were bad apples who looted. Does that invalidate the entirety of the march? Justify the hoses and dogs?
 
Aside from Egypt opeing up the crossing, what was gained?
.
Isn't that a victory in and of itself? The blockade is strangling Gaza, its estimated that in 2020 it won't be inhabitable anymore. If you're going to push a people to the brink of catastrophe then don't be surprised when they take drastic measures. There's actually been a rise in suicide attempts in Gaza, the situation is getting critical over there.
 
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Was every protestor involved in these acts?

Which narrative do you think is closer to the truth:

Arabs/Palestinians: The border protest was peaceful, and unarmed Palestinian martyrs were shot and killed mercilessly by the bloodthirsty Jews, even though they didn't do anything wrong at all.

Or,

Israelis: The IDF had no choice but fire into the violent Palestinian mob as they tries to tear down the fence and overrun the Israeli border, despite repeated warnings. All those who were shot was part of that violent mob.
 
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Which narrative do you think is closer to the truth:

Palestinians: The border protest was peaceful, and unarmed Palestinian martyrs were shot and killed mercilessly by the bloodthirsty Jews, even though they didn't do anything wrong at all.

Or,

Israelis: The IDF had no choice but fire into the violent Palestinian mob as they tries to tear down the fence and overrun the Israeli border, despite repeated warnings. All those who were shot was part of that violent mob.
I don't know. Certainly I don't trust the IDF but the Palestinians also like to play up the victimhood narrative.
 
Isn't that a victory in and of itself? The blockade is strangling Gaza, its estimated that in 2020 it won't inhabitable anymore. If you're going to push a people to the brink of catastrophe then don't be surprised when they take drastic measures. There's actually been a rise in suicide attempts in Gaza, the situation is getting critical over there.

While I'm very respectful of your perspective on this subject, and generally defer to those more knowlegdeable than me on this topic, I have topolitely disagree, man.

Fifty-two dead. Two thousand four hundred injured. I know the Rafah crossing is important to tens of thousands, and people are desperate, but (imo) it's too much. It's just too much of a price to pay.

If you were a part of the Hama leadership, would these loses be acceptable to you? Wouldn't you do anything you could to save lives rather than spend them so wastefully? (I can't get over how young some of these people who have died are. Sixteen years old? WTF???)

Why haven't they mended fences with Fatah and restablished peace-talks already? When are we going to see a charismatic Ghandhi/Malala-type that the West can actually get behind instead of the usual screaming? How is this result acceptable to anybody in Gaza? How much longer would you watch your people just rot away? An entire generation just wasting away. Why not just make the friggin deal already? It doesn't have to be perfect, but if it changes the prospects of your people, why not give it a try? How worse off would be otherwise? Trump is going to be president for a while more and with the law breathing down Netanyahu's back he's going to pull even more stunts knowing that his patreon isn't going to do anything to stop him. which means the settlements are going to keep coming.

If you are starving and you say "I want the whole pizza." But a dude with a gun pistol whips you when you try to grab a slice, and each year he eats one. Why not settle for the two or three slices he's willing to give you before he eats the whole pizza?

It's probably easy for me to bitch and moan but Iclear similarities with how poorly served the Palestinians are, to the cartoonishly corrupt and inept leadership some African countries (dude, the stories I could tell you...). And it's fairly It's frusturating.

The Palestinains need to be Nelson Mandela, but they are going all in with the Winnie Mandela smashmouth activism.

It's a dead end: The Israeli's are just too strong.
 
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While I'm very respectful of your perspective on this subject, and generally defer to those more knowlegdeable than me on this topic, I have topolitely disagree, man.

Fifty-two dead. Two thousand four hundred injured. I know the Rafah crossing is important to tens of thousands, and people are desperate, but (imo) it's too much. It's just too much of a price to pay.

If you were a part of the Hama leadership, would these loses be acceptable to you? Wouldn't you do anything you could to save lives rather than spend them so wastefully? (I can't get over how young some of these people who have died are. Sixteen years old? WTF???)

Why haven't they mended fences with Fatah and restablished peace-talks already? When are we going to see a charismatic Ghandhi/Malala-type that the West can actually get behind instead of the usual screaming? How is this result acceptable to anybody in Gaza? How much longer would you watch your people just rot away? An entire generation just wasting away. Why not just make the friggin deal already? It doesn't have to be perfect, but if it changes the prospects of your people, why not give it a try? How worse off would be otherwise? Trump is going to be president for a while more and with the law breathing down Netanyahu's back he's going to pull even more stunts knowing that his patreon isn't going to do anything to stop him. which means the settlements are going to keep coming.

If you are starving and you say "I want the whole pizza." But a dude with a gun pistol whips you when you try to grab a slice, and each year he eats one. Why not settle for the two or three slices he's willing to give you before he eats the whole pizza?

It's probably easy for me to bitch and moan but I actually similarities to how poorly served the Palestinians are with the cartoonishly corrupt and inept leadership some African countries (dude, the stories I could tell you...) and it's fairly It's frusturating. The Palestinains need to be Nelson Mandela but they are going all in with the Winnie Mandela smashmouth activism. It's a dead end: The Israeli's are just too strong.
In terms of this specific protest, the deaths, and the gain of opening up the Rafah crossing I do think its worth it. Like I said Gaza is on the brink of collapse and anything that can alleviate that is incredibly valuable for the people living there. The despair is deep over there, I saw a documentary in which a protestor interviewed flat out admitted he didn't care if he got killed because he was already dead. A couple dozen lives in exchange for saving potentially many more is a gruesome calculus to make, if it was the West Bank I might agree with you but the people of Gaza seem willing to make that trade off.

But in terms of the larger point about Palestinian disunity and intractability I agree. If the Palestinians had better leadership and had made a deal already maybe they wouldn't need to be feeding dozens of their own to the IDF meat-grinder. That said I don't think the West will get behind any legitimate Palestinian leader. Look at the different reactions to Ahed Tamimi and Malala. Ahed and her family have their warts to be sure but the point is the Western media is not friendly to the kind of strong willed resistance leader that could actually lead the Palestinians, they want a docile and innocuous figure that doesn't challenge the status quo. That's always been the case with Muslims. We all love Malala but nothing about her resistance challenges the West's notions about the region while Ahed's does.

Palestinians need to focus on creating a moral split in Israel, on getting a critical mass of them to morally abandon the occupation. Unfortunately sometimes that requires spending some blood. It was the peaceful protesters who marched towards dogs and fire-hoses in the civil rights marches that helped accomplish that in the US. Its a bit different over there but the point is the same; passive resistance is easy to ignore but escalating the brutality so that Israelis face the horrors of the occupation can get some of their attention.
 
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It was always going to end like this, unless the U.S. decided to be a legitimate broker for peace. But, of course, we have no interest in that.
 
It was always going to end like this, unless the U.S. decided to be a legitimate broker for peace. But, of course, we have no interest in that.

It was always going to end like this, because no one involved actually have any interests in peace!

Bill Clinton knows all about it. He worked hard and laid out the best parameters ever for both sides that would bring lasting peace and prosperity for everyone. Instead, they threw it back in his face and he got a blood-soaked intifada for all his time and effort.

The impossible demands that led to the collapse of Clinton's Camp David summit nearly two decades ago is still the very same impossible demands that leads to a hundred Palestinians in the Gaza being shot at the Israeli border this month.

Time change, people change, but the Arabs and Jews are stuck in a tragic time-loop of their own making. Anyone from either side who are saying they want peace is flat-out lying, because the things they're actually doing every day ensures that peace is kept far out of reach.

Unfortunately, peace is the one thing you can't force people to have, not when both parties involved now value their political careers over it.
 
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I don't know. Certainly I don't trust the IDF but the Palestinians also like to play up the victimhood narrative.

I'm incline to agree with the people who think this is Hamas convincing Palestinians to commit the biggest wave of mass suicide-by-cop in history. And this time they actually have no problem dragging innocent children to their graves.

When a mob try to breech another country's borders, the soldiers tasked to defend that border have no choice but to warn/wound/kill them, in that order. That policy and the rules of engagement used here is not some kind of breaking news. It's common sense.

Hamas knows this, but they're egging Palestinians on to do it anyway.

Whether that would help the Palestinian cause at all or just bring more senseless deaths is remain to be seen.


Editorial: A moral dilemma on the Israel-Gaza border
Terry Glavin | May 16, 2018​

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Palestinian protesters burn tires during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, east of Khan Younis, Tuesday, May 15, 2018. Israel faced a growing backlash Tuesday and new charges of using excessive force, a day after Israeli troops firing from across a border fence killed dozens of Palestinians and wounded more than 2,700 at a mass protest in Gaza.


At least 60 Palestinians were killed. Another 2,700 were reportedly injured. Among the dead: a double amputee throwing stones from a wheelchair, a 14-year-old girl – her mother said she had longed for martyrdom – and an eight-month-old infant, dead from inhaling tear gas.

Among the wounded was a Canadian doctor, Tarek Loubani, shot in the legs.

What happened on Monday is as appalling and and as horrible as Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s office says it was: “Civilians, members of the media, first responders and children have been among the victims.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau settled on the same, perfectly reasonable tone: “My concern today and the thoughts of the world are on the victims of the terrible violence. Children, journalists, innocents.”

It was the bloodiest day in Gaza since 2014. It appears to be quite true that most of the dead and wounded from Monday’s protests, involving perhaps 40,000 people at 13 locations along the Gaza border, were unarmed Palestinian civilians. Hamas, the bloodthirsty terrorist group that seized Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a 2007 coup, identified 10 of the dead as members of its feared internal security unit. Another Hamas official said in a media interview that perhaps as many as 50 of the dead were among its members. Saraya al-Quds, the armed wing of the Khomeinist proxy, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, identified another three as its own militants.

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Relatives of eight-month-old Leila Anwar Ghandoor, who died in the hospital on Tuesday morning from tear gas inhalation, grieve at her home before her burial on May 15, 2018 in Gaza City, Gaza.

It appears to be true that only a small minority of the Gazans who flocked to the protests on Monday participated directly in any violent activity. Still, among those who did were hundreds of rioters, some of whom climbed the Gaza security fence at various points along its 60-kilometre course. Some threw rocks or crude explosive devices at Israeli positions. Some burned tires to create billows of black smoke in an effort to obscure efforts to breach the fence, and others flew kites containing burning fuel in order to set fire to farm fields on the Israeli side. More than 400 hectares of agricultural land have been burned in this way in recent weeks.

Around noon on Monday, an Israeli Special Forces unit caught eight men who had managed to breach the security fence. The group opened fire on two approaching Israeli Defence Forces vehicles and threw grenades in their direction. The eight were shot dead. Three more of Monday’s dead were shot and killed while they were trying to cut through the security fence. They were armed with knives and grenades. It is quite true, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, that “every nation has the right to defend its borders.”

It is also rather beside the point now.

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Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gestures as he speaks during the dedication ceremony of the Guatemala Embassy in Jerusalem, Israel, Wednesday May 16, 2018.

More than 100 Palestinians have been killed since the first major “March of Return” protest on March 30. The protests began with Ahmad Abu Artema, a 33-year-old Gazan poet and social media personality. Artema appears to have genuinely imagined some sort of wholly non-violent uprising that might lead the poor of Gaza out of their misery, and eventually, into the welcoming arms of Israelis.

That, too, is beside the point now.

With its Iron Dome technology, Israel has largely succeeded in defending itself against what had been a constant terror of Hamas rockets. With Israel’s $1.1-billion investment in a sophisticated and nearly completed “underground wall” of concrete and sensors, the enormous effort Hamas has expended in building tunnels under the Gaza fence, paid for with funds pilfered from international aid allotments, has been squandered.

What Israel is now facing is a different and far more sinister security challenge. Hamas exists for the sole purpose of doing violence to Israel and to Israelis. By its various bloodcurdling pronouncements and exhortations, Hamas had made it clear that what it failed to accomplish with its rockets and tunnels, it is now prepared to attempt with the corpses of young, desperate and deluded young Gazans, piled in heaps along the Gaza security fence.

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People cheer as Hamas leader Ismail Haniya speaks to protesters at the border fence with Israel on May 15, 2018 in Gaza City, Gaza.

Until now, the IDF’s rules of engagement in coping with intrusions along the Gaza security fence have been coldly rational, justifiable and quite straightforward. First, shoot to warn. Then shoot to wound. As a last resort, shoot to kill.

Suicidal provocations along the Gaza fence did not begin on March 30, when Ahmad Abu Artema’s starry-eyed notions of a non-violent uprising went sideways. They have been a frequent occurrence, ever since Hamas threw out its Fatah rivals more than a decade ago. Back then, Israel established a deadly security zone along the fence.

Since 2005 – until the recent encounters – more than 80 Palestinians had been killed in that zone. Last December, the IDF shot and killed eight Palestinians at a single raucous demonstration at the security fence, and over a two-week period nearly 300 Gazans were injured in encounters with the IDF along the fence. It is a messy, bloody business. Sometimes, innocents get killed.

Several weeks before the deaths of 15 Palestinians during the March 30 demonstration, Brig.- Gen. Yehuda Fox, commander of the IDF’s Gaza division, warned that if there was a breakdown in the “reconciliation” talks between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, controlled by the decrepit Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah organization in the West Bank, “they’ll say Israel is the problem. ‘Let’s go to jihad and start a war.’ ”

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In this Tuesday, May 15, 2018 file photo, Israeli soldiers guard on top of a watch tower in a community along the Israel- Gaza Strip Border.

In those talks, Hamas made it clear and plain that it had no interest in governing. It was willing to surrender almost all of its authority in Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, but it refused to relinquish its military wing or swear off terror attacks on Israel. Fatah, meanwhile, has played a callous game of brinksmanship, using the suffering of Gazans as its trump cards. By February, roughly 40,000 Hamas employees had already gone months without paycheques. In Ramallah, Abbas stopped paying Israel for the electricity it sends into Gaza by transmission line and also stopped payment for the fuel that runs Gaza’s electrical power station.

Following the attempted assassination of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and the PA’s spy chief, Majid Faraj, during their April visit to Gaza, the talks have gone nowhere. With all the Arab states except Qatar closing its doors on Hamas, Egypt’s closure of the Rafah border crossing and Hamas losing $20 million a month in revenues from the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel, Gaza’s coffers are empty, and Palestinians are at their wits’ end. Already struggling from Israel’s decade-long blockade, by March 30, the desperation of Gaza’s 1.8 million people had become unbearable, and as Fox warned, Hamas had found a new way to “go to jihad” and start a war.

That is the predicament Israel is facing. If Hamas persists in luring Palestinians to martyrdom at the Gaza fence, the IDF’s rules of engagement – first shoot to warn, then shoot to wound, then shoot to kill – become morally untenable. An abomination.

It is not right, or fair, but this is the dilemma, and it is Israel’s dilemma to resolve.

http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-a-moral-dilemma-on-the-israel-gaza-border
 
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I'm incline to agree with the people who think this is Hamas convincing Palestinians to commit the biggest wave of mass suicide-by-cop in history. And this time they actually have no problem dragging innocent children to their graves.

When people try to overrun their border, the soldiers tasked to defend it have no choice but to warn/wound/kill them, in that order. This is not some kind of breaking news.

Hamas is egging Palestinians on to do that anyway.

Whether that would help the Palestinian cause at all or just bring more senseless deaths is remain to be seen.


A moral dilemma on the Israel-Gaza border
Terry Glavin | May 16, 2018​

palestinians-israel.jpg

Palestinian protesters burn tires during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, east of Khan Younis, Tuesday, May 15, 2018. Israel faced a growing backlash Tuesday and new charges of using excessive force, a day after Israeli troops firing from across a border fence killed dozens of Palestinians and wounded more than 2,700 at a mass protest in Gaza.


At least 60 Palestinians were killed. Another 2,700 were reportedly injured. Among the dead: a double amputee throwing stones from a wheelchair, a 14-year-old girl – her mother said she had longed for martyrdom – and an eight-month-old infant, dead from inhaling tear gas.

Among the wounded was a Canadian doctor, Tarek Loubani, shot in the legs.

What happened on Monday is as appalling and and as horrible as Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s office says it was: “Civilians, members of the media, first responders and children have been among the victims.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau settled on the same, perfectly reasonable tone: “My concern today and the thoughts of the world are on the victims of the terrible violence. Children, journalists, innocents.”

It was the bloodiest day in Gaza since 2014. It appears to be quite true that most of the dead and wounded from Monday’s protests, involving perhaps 40,000 people at 13 locations along the Gaza border, were unarmed Palestinian civilians. Hamas, the bloodthirsty terrorist group that seized Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a 2007 coup, identified 10 of the dead as members of its feared internal security unit. Another Hamas official said in a media interview that perhaps as many as 50 of the dead were among its members. Saraya al-Quds, the armed wing of the Khomeinist proxy, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, identified another three as its own militants.

958881694.jpg


Relatives of eight-month-old Leila Anwar Ghandoor, who died in the hospital on Tuesday morning from tear gas inhalation, grieve at her home before her burial on May 15, 2018 in Gaza City, Gaza.

It appears to be true that only a small minority of the Gazans who flocked to the protests on Monday participated directly in any violent activity. Still, among those who did were hundreds of rioters, some of whom climbed the Gaza security fence at various points along its 60-kilometre course. Some threw rocks or crude explosive devices at Israeli positions. Some burned tires to create billows of black smoke in an effort to obscure efforts to breach the fence, and others flew kites containing burning fuel in order to set fire to farm fields on the Israeli side. More than 400 hectares of agricultural land have been burned in this way in recent weeks.

Around noon on Monday, an Israeli Special Forces unit caught eight men who had managed to breach the security fence. The group opened fire on two approaching Israeli Defence Forces vehicles and threw grenades in their direction. The eight were shot dead. Three more of Monday’s dead were shot and killed while they were trying to cut through the security fence. They were armed with knives and grenades. It is quite true, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, that “every nation has the right to defend its borders.”

It is also rather beside the point now.

israel-guatemala.jpg


Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gestures as he speaks during the dedication ceremony of the Guatemala Embassy in Jerusalem, Israel, Wednesday May 16, 2018.

More than 100 Palestinians have been killed since the first major “March of Return” protest on March 30. The protests began with Ahmad Abu Artema, a 33-year-old Gazan poet and social media personality. Artema appears to have genuinely imagined some sort of wholly non-violent uprising that might lead the poor of Gaza out of their misery, and eventually, into the welcoming arms of Israelis.

That, too, is beside the point now.

With its Iron Dome technology, Israel has largely succeeded in defending itself against what had been a constant terror of Hamas rockets. With Israel’s $1.1-billion investment in a sophisticated and nearly completed “underground wall” of concrete and sensors, the enormous effort Hamas has expended in building tunnels under the Gaza fence, paid for with funds pilfered from international aid allotments, has been squandered.

What Israel is now facing is a different and far more sinister security challenge. Hamas exists for the sole purpose of doing violence to Israel and to Israelis. By its various bloodcurdling pronouncements and exhortations, Hamas had made it clear that what it failed to accomplish with its rockets and tunnels, it is now prepared to attempt with the corpses of young, desperate and deluded young Gazans, piled in heaps along the Gaza security fence.

958876386.jpg


People cheer as Hamas leader Ismail Haniya speaks to protesters at the border fence with Israel on May 15, 2018 in Gaza City, Gaza.

Until now, the IDF’s rules of engagement in coping with intrusions along the Gaza security fence have been coldly rational, justifiable and quite straightforward. First, shoot to warn. Then shoot to wound. As a last resort, shoot to kill.

Suicidal provocations along the Gaza fence did not begin on March 30, when Ahmad Abu Artema’s starry-eyed notions of a non-violent uprising went sideways. They have been a frequent occurrence, ever since Hamas threw out its Fatah rivals more than a decade ago. Back then, Israel established a deadly security zone along the fence.

Since 2005 – until the recent encounters – more than 80 Palestinians had been killed in that zone. Last December, the IDF shot and killed eight Palestinians at a single raucous demonstration at the security fence, and over a two-week period nearly 300 Gazans were injured in encounters with the IDF along the fence. It is a messy, bloody business. Sometimes, innocents get killed.

Several weeks before the deaths of 15 Palestinians during the March 30 demonstration, Brig.- Gen. Yehuda Fox, commander of the IDF’s Gaza division, warned that if there was a breakdown in the “reconciliation” talks between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, controlled by the decrepit Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah organization in the West Bank, “they’ll say Israel is the problem. ‘Let’s go to jihad and start a war.’ ”

mideast-conected-regional-conflicts.jpg

In this Tuesday, May 15, 2018 file photo, Israeli soldiers guard on top of a watch tower in a community along the Israel- Gaza Strip Border.

In those talks, Hamas made it clear and plain that it had no interest in governing. It was willing to surrender almost all of its authority in Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, but it refused to relinquish its military wing or swear off terror attacks on Israel. Fatah, meanwhile, has played a callous game of brinksmanship, using the suffering of Gazans as its trump cards. By February, roughly 40,000 Hamas employees had already gone months without paycheques. In Ramallah, Abbas stopped paying Israel for the electricity it sends into Gaza by transmission line and also stopped payment for the fuel that runs Gaza’s electrical power station.

Following the attempted assassination of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and the PA’s spy chief, Majid Faraj, during their April visit to Gaza, the talks have gone nowhere. With all the Arab states except Qatar closing its doors on Hamas, Egypt’s closure of the Rafah border crossing and Hamas losing $20 million a month in revenues from the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel, Gaza’s coffers are empty, and Palestinians are at their wits’ end. Already struggling from Israel’s decade-long blockade, by March 30, the desperation of Gaza’s 1.8 million people had become unbearable, and as Fox warned, Hamas had found a new way to “go to jihad” and start a war.

That is the predicament Israel is facing. If Hamas persists in luring Palestinians to martyrdom at the Gaza fence, the IDF’s rules of engagement – first shoot to warn, then shoot to wound, then shoot to kill – become morally untenable. An abomination.

It is not right, or fair, but this is the dilemma, and it is Israel’s dilemma to resolve.

http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-a-moral-dilemma-on-the-israel-gaza-border
I don't think you even know what Hamas is. You just parrot a narrative.

Latuff%2Bmost%2Bmoral%2Barmy%2Bkill%2Bkids%2Bjournalists.jpg


Let's be clear. This is not a war or a conflict; it is a nonstop war crime.

Zero Israelis were killed during the massacre. No Israelis were even injured.
No Israeli civilians were even threatened.
This was not a “clash”, this was psychopaths shooting fish in a barrel.


The Israelis fired at the Protestors indiscriminately but deliberately targeted innocents using high powered rifles with sniper scopes. The people who were shot, were shot quite deliberately.

They shot people peacefully waving flags hundreds of yards way from the border.

The Israeli snipers shot several Paramedics and doctors treating the wounded, killing one.
This is an undoubted War Crime and against the Geneva Convention and all rules of Warfare.


Canadian doctor: Israeli soldiers shot me in both legs as I was treating injured protesters duringGaza Massacre

mondoweiss.net/2018/05/canadian-soldiers-protesters/

The Israelis shot several members of the Press clearly wearing Press Flak jackets, 2 of whom were murdered:-


Killing of second Palestinian journalist covering Gaza protests draws international condemnation

mondoweiss.net/2018/04/palestinian-international-condemnation/

Israel shoots an internationally-acclaimed, award-winning photographer because she was capturing Israeli brutality
www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180517-award-winning-photographer-shot-by-israel-soldier-in-the-west-bank/

Still confused? PLEASE READ:
An Israeli asks where is the outrage in Israel at the appalling Gaza massacre?
 
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Israel's use of force in Gaza draws criticism, but Hamas admits most of the dead were its own members
May 17, 2018

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A protester holds a Palestinian flag on top of tires to be burned during an ongoing protest next to Gaza’s border with Israel, east of Khan Younis, Gaza Strip

MAGHAZI, Gaza — Fourteen-year-old Wisal Sheikh Khalil had wire cutters out and was trying to break through Gaza’s boundary fence into Israel when she was shot dead by Israeli soldiers on Monday, according to her younger brother, who was with her at the time.

She was one of at least 60 Palestinians whom local health officials say were killed by Israeli troops during protests this week along the fence.

Israel’s sharpshooters, looking down from their nests on mounds of earth on the other side of the fence, have been permitted to use lethal force against those “endangering” the barrier, Israeli military officials say. These officials also say Israeli soldiers have been allowed to use live ammunition to shoot “instigators” among “rioters” on the border.

In both cases, the orders are to aim for the legs, they say, though Khalil was shot in the head.

The Israeli military declines to give much more detail about its rules of engagement, saying they are classified. But human rights groups say the few details provided by the Israeli military make clear that the orders given to soldiers are illegal. These groups accuse the Israeli military of not making enough effort to use other means of dispersing crowds.

Israeli officials say the soldiers are operating within international law against a mob led by the militant group Hamas that wants to break into Israel and carry out terrorist attacks.

For its part, Hamas admitted Wednesday that most of the protesters killed were members of the militant group.

It was unclear if the protesters senior Hamas official Salah Bardawil was referring to were militants or civilian supporters of the Islamic group, which rules Gaza and opposes Israel’s existence.

However Israel, which has faced blistering international criticism over its response, is likely to latch on to the remarks to bolster its claims that Hamas has used the weekly protests as cover to stage attacks.

But human rights groups say the identity of slain protesters, including a possible affiliation to a militant group, is irrelevant if they were unarmed and did not pose an immediate threat to the lives of soldiers when they were shot.

About 1,360 Palestinians were shot over the course of about eight hours Monday, said the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza. All the dead were shot on the Palestinian side of the fence, and the border fence, though damaged, was never breached. No Israeli soldiers were reported injured.

Israel is facing questions about why protests by mostly unarmed Palestinians have ended in such horrific bloodshed. Images and eyewitness accounts from the demonstrations appear at odds with Israel’s insistence that its military response has been precise, carefully calibrated and intended to kill only as a last resort.

“Cutting or attacking the fence is an offence,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer. “It has to be countered, but countered with reasonable force. There is no meter that I know of that would put the safety of the border fence at the same importance of the life of a 14-year-old.”

Sfard is representing human rights groups petitioning Israel’s Supreme Court to challenge the legality of the military’s live fire rules during demonstrations in Gaza earlier this month. He said the only legal justification for using live ammunition against civilians is if they are “posing an imminent danger to the lives of others.”

In the state’s response, Israeli has argued that the protests can’t be classified as civilian because they are part of the “armed conflict” between Israel and Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. “The state opposes the applying of human rights law during an armed conflict,” Israel’s response said.

The border is defended, in general, by two layers of fence topped with barbed wire, and Israeli snipers have been positioned within 100 metres of the barrier.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said soldiers wouldn’t be shooting to kill a fence-cutter like Khalil. He said it was a “hectic area with smoke and fires and lots of moving people.” He added, “The command that is issued to our troops is to shoot towards the legs.”

But multiple videos have surfaced apparently showing Israeli forces shooting unarmed protesters. A video in April showed a Palestinian running away from the border fence with a tire before being shot in the head.

Israeli military officials say they have not changed their rules of engagement over nearly seven weeks of protests and warned before they started that there were orders to use “a lot of force” and live ammunition if soldiers or infrastructure came under threat. At least 111 Palestinians have been killed during the protests, Gaza health officials say.

Israeli officials have lavished praise on the actions of its forces in protecting the border. After a meeting with security chiefs on Monday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office released a statement saying that the “determined actions” of the Israeli military had “prevented a breach of Israel’s borders.”

The Israeli military reported an attempt to plant explosives along the fence and a shooting attack by eight Hamas militants in an armoured vehicle. In such cases, Israeli forces shoot to kill, Conricus said.

Before Hamas’ admission Wednesday, Israel had said that at least 24 of the Palestinians it killed on Monday were linked to Islamic Jihad or Hamas.

In an interview with Baladna TV, a private Palestinian news outlet that broadcasts via Facebook, Hamas’ Bardawil said 50 out of the nearly 60 protesters killed Monday were Hamas members, with the others being “from the people.”

Bardawil did not elaborate on the nature of their membership in the group and his claim could not be independently verified.

Before the protest Monday, Hamas leaders had riled up demonstrators, urging them to breach the fence.

“The entire border riots are conducted under the slogan of the ‘march of return.’ What is the return? To annihilate Israel,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, a retired brigadier general in the Israeli military who also served as director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, voicing a common Israeli view. If the military didn’t prevent them from crossing, he said, “it would be a disaster for everyone.”

Human rights groups say that fear doesn’t justify the use of deadly force against unarmed protesters when they aren’t posing an immediate threat.

“Israel is using this nightmare scenario in order to justify the use of live ammunition,” said Amit Gilutz a spokesman for B’Tselem, which issued an advertising campaign urging soldiers not to shoot at unarmed protesters in Gaza. “But that’s a futuristic scenario that didn’t take place.”

He faulted the Israel military for failing to find a better way to disperse crowds. “If it placed a value on the lives of Palestinians, other means are available to a very powerful, sophisticated military,” Gilutz said.

Israel’s military says it uses live ammunition only as a last resort. But the only other method used for dispersing the Gaza protesters has been tear gas, a senior Israeli military official said during a tour of the fence last week.

He said Israeli soldiers have not shot rubber-coated bullets, which have been used elsewhere, because they lack sufficient range. Trucks that spout foul-smelling water known as “skunk” that Israel regularly uses in the West Bank have not been used, he said, again adding they lacked the range and were not armoured.

Asked whether Israel could use less lethal methods to contain the protesters, Yaakov Amidror, Israel’s former national security adviser and a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, said that such a question was an example of those who “can sit in an air-conditioned office, drinking coffee and give advice to the Israeli army that is facing off against many thousands of Palestinians.”

“It was clear to Israel and now it is clear to the whole world that there was no popular protest. This was an organized mob of terrorists organized by Hamas,” said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon.

But Yehuda Shaul of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group that gathers testimonies from past and serving Israeli soldiers, granting them anonymity, says Israel’s use of live ammunition should be seen in a wider context.

“That’s common that we try to suppress with a heavy response, trying to break the will of the people,” he said. He pointed to the first month of the second Palestinian uprising, or “intifada,” against Israel, when the military fired more than a million bullets in the first month alone.

Mourners gathered at Khalil’s grandparents’ house in Maghazi, a refugee camp in central Gaza, to pay their respects. The family is not affiliated with Hamas but supports its rival, the nationalist Fatah group, with its yellow flags hanging inside.

Khalil’s mother recounted how her daughter had been looking forward to the demonstrations for weeks. In previous weeks, she had filled bags with rocks to carry to the stone throwers at the front. Her mother said she had tried to stop her from going to the protest this week, but Khalil was determined.

“Maybe I will die, but others will get in,” she recalled her daughter saying. “She kept saying if we liberate our land, we’ll find a house. She said if I die, I’ll be less of a burden.”

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/world...bers/wcm/e48c2fea-c9b8-4b37-8ccd-0475f88675c2
 
Editorial: A moral dilemma on the Israel-Gaza border
Terry Glavin | May 16, 2018​

palestinians-israel.jpg

Palestinian protesters burn tires during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, east of Khan Younis, Tuesday, May 15, 2018. Israel faced a growing backlash Tuesday and new charges of using excessive force, a day after Israeli troops firing from across a border fence killed dozens of Palestinians and wounded more than 2,700 at a mass protest in Gaza.


At least 60 Palestinians were killed. Another 2,700 were reportedly injured. Among the dead: a double amputee throwing stones from a wheelchair, a 14-year-old girl – her mother said she had longed for martyrdom – and an eight-month-old infant, dead from inhaling tear gas.

Among the wounded was a Canadian doctor, Tarek Loubani, shot in the legs.

What happened on Monday is as appalling and and as horrible as Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s office says it was: “Civilians, members of the media, first responders and children have been among the victims.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau settled on the same, perfectly reasonable tone: “My concern today and the thoughts of the world are on the victims of the terrible violence. Children, journalists, innocents.”

It was the bloodiest day in Gaza since 2014. It appears to be quite true that most of the dead and wounded from Monday’s protests, involving perhaps 40,000 people at 13 locations along the Gaza border, were unarmed Palestinian civilians. Hamas, the bloodthirsty terrorist group that seized Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a 2007 coup, identified 10 of the dead as members of its feared internal security unit. Another Hamas official said in a media interview that perhaps as many as 50 of the dead were among its members. Saraya al-Quds, the armed wing of the Khomeinist proxy, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, identified another three as its own militants.

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Relatives of eight-month-old Leila Anwar Ghandoor, who died in the hospital on Tuesday morning from tear gas inhalation, grieve at her home before her burial on May 15, 2018 in Gaza City, Gaza.

It appears to be true that only a small minority of the Gazans who flocked to the protests on Monday participated directly in any violent activity. Still, among those who did were hundreds of rioters, some of whom climbed the Gaza security fence at various points along its 60-kilometre course. Some threw rocks or crude explosive devices at Israeli positions. Some burned tires to create billows of black smoke in an effort to obscure efforts to breach the fence, and others flew kites containing burning fuel in order to set fire to farm fields on the Israeli side. More than 400 hectares of agricultural land have been burned in this way in recent weeks.

Around noon on Monday, an Israeli Special Forces unit caught eight men who had managed to breach the security fence. The group opened fire on two approaching Israeli Defence Forces vehicles and threw grenades in their direction. The eight were shot dead. Three more of Monday’s dead were shot and killed while they were trying to cut through the security fence. They were armed with knives and grenades. It is quite true, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, that “every nation has the right to defend its borders.”

It is also rather beside the point now.

israel-guatemala.jpg


Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gestures as he speaks during the dedication ceremony of the Guatemala Embassy in Jerusalem, Israel, Wednesday May 16, 2018.

More than 100 Palestinians have been killed since the first major “March of Return” protest on March 30. The protests began with Ahmad Abu Artema, a 33-year-old Gazan poet and social media personality. Artema appears to have genuinely imagined some sort of wholly non-violent uprising that might lead the poor of Gaza out of their misery, and eventually, into the welcoming arms of Israelis.

That, too, is beside the point now.

With its Iron Dome technology, Israel has largely succeeded in defending itself against what had been a constant terror of Hamas rockets. With Israel’s $1.1-billion investment in a sophisticated and nearly completed “underground wall” of concrete and sensors, the enormous effort Hamas has expended in building tunnels under the Gaza fence, paid for with funds pilfered from international aid allotments, has been squandered.

What Israel is now facing is a different and far more sinister security challenge. Hamas exists for the sole purpose of doing violence to Israel and to Israelis. By its various bloodcurdling pronouncements and exhortations, Hamas had made it clear that what it failed to accomplish with its rockets and tunnels, it is now prepared to attempt with the corpses of young, desperate and deluded young Gazans, piled in heaps along the Gaza security fence.

958876386.jpg


People cheer as Hamas leader Ismail Haniya speaks to protesters at the border fence with Israel on May 15, 2018 in Gaza City, Gaza.

Until now, the IDF’s rules of engagement in coping with intrusions along the Gaza security fence have been coldly rational, justifiable and quite straightforward. First, shoot to warn. Then shoot to wound. As a last resort, shoot to kill.

Suicidal provocations along the Gaza fence did not begin on March 30, when Ahmad Abu Artema’s starry-eyed notions of a non-violent uprising went sideways. They have been a frequent occurrence, ever since Hamas threw out its Fatah rivals more than a decade ago. Back then, Israel established a deadly security zone along the fence.

Since 2005 – until the recent encounters – more than 80 Palestinians had been killed in that zone. Last December, the IDF shot and killed eight Palestinians at a single raucous demonstration at the security fence, and over a two-week period nearly 300 Gazans were injured in encounters with the IDF along the fence. It is a messy, bloody business. Sometimes, innocents get killed.

Several weeks before the deaths of 15 Palestinians during the March 30 demonstration, Brig.- Gen. Yehuda Fox, commander of the IDF’s Gaza division, warned that if there was a breakdown in the “reconciliation” talks between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, controlled by the decrepit Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah organization in the West Bank, “they’ll say Israel is the problem. ‘Let’s go to jihad and start a war.’ ”

mideast-conected-regional-conflicts.jpg

In this Tuesday, May 15, 2018 file photo, Israeli soldiers guard on top of a watch tower in a community along the Israel- Gaza Strip Border.

In those talks, Hamas made it clear and plain that it had no interest in governing. It was willing to surrender almost all of its authority in Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, but it refused to relinquish its military wing or swear off terror attacks on Israel. Fatah, meanwhile, has played a callous game of brinksmanship, using the suffering of Gazans as its trump cards. By February, roughly 40,000 Hamas employees had already gone months without paycheques. In Ramallah, Abbas stopped paying Israel for the electricity it sends into Gaza by transmission line and also stopped payment for the fuel that runs Gaza’s electrical power station.

Following the attempted assassination of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and the PA’s spy chief, Majid Faraj, during their April visit to Gaza, the talks have gone nowhere. With all the Arab states except Qatar closing its doors on Hamas, Egypt’s closure of the Rafah border crossing and Hamas losing $20 million a month in revenues from the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel, Gaza’s coffers are empty, and Palestinians are at their wits’ end. Already struggling from Israel’s decade-long blockade, by March 30, the desperation of Gaza’s 1.8 million people had become unbearable, and as Fox warned, Hamas had found a new way to “go to jihad” and start a war.

That is the predicament Israel is facing. If Hamas persists in luring Palestinians to martyrdom at the Gaza fence, the IDF’s rules of engagement – first shoot to warn, then shoot to wound, then shoot to kill – become morally untenable. An abomination.

It is not right, or fair, but this is the dilemma, and it is Israel’s dilemma to resolve.

http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-a-moral-dilemma-on-the-israel-gaza-border

Editorial: Hamas will always win the PR war, even as Israel wins the military victories
Barbara Kay | May 22, 2018

afp_1468ek.jpg

In his May 16 column, Terry Glavin takes Israel to task for the deaths and injuries of Gazan Palestinians sustained in the border clashes he concedes that Hamas orchestrated.

Yes, Glavin understands that “Hamas exists for the sole purpose of doing violence to Israel and to Israelis.” Yes, clearly “what (Hamas) failed to accomplish with its rockets and tunnels, it is now prepared to attempt with the corpses of young, desperate and deluded young Gazans.” And yet, he concludes, “If Hamas persists in luring Palestinians to martyrdom at the Gaza fence, the IDF’s rules of engagement — first shoot to warn, then shoot to wound, then shoot to kill — become morally untenable. An abomination.”

Well, that’s quite a strong word, abomination. A very damning word. Myself, I save it for truly depraved actions like the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons on whole villages of innocent people — man, woman and child — by a monstrous tyrant who will stop at nothing to retain power, and who has proved many times that he’s devoid of any respect for the lives of those who aren’t kin or politically useful. I’m referring to Syria’s Assad, of course — and having read Glavin’s columns over the years, I know he shares my horror.

And this explains some of my surprise. “Abomination” is not a word I would ever use for any engagement with enemy forces undertaken in a democratic nation whose military, made up of ordinary citizens, comes out of a culture in which respect for human life is legendary. As Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, who has made a close study of IDF policies and techniques of asymmetric warfare, has said: “I have fought in combat zones around the world including Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Macedonia and Iraq. I was also present throughout the conflict in Gaza in 2014. Based on my experience and on my observations: the Israel Defense Force, the IDF, does more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

Illuminating the validity of Col. Kemp’s statement, the Monday edition of the Wall Street Journal published an op ed by Israeli Brig. Ronen Manelis, spokesman for the IDF, titled “The Truth about Hamas and Israel.” In it Manelis reveals the depths of Hamas cynicism. Hamas provided free transportation to the security fence for all Gazans, including women and children. They were paid $14 a head or $100 per family to attend. The injured received $500. That’s pretty abominable. So’s this: Hamas gave everyone with a video camera VIP access to “the show,” and free wifi too to make sure no injury went unrecorded (both real and fake: one video shows an “injured” victim borne away on a stretcher hopping off completely unscathed when presumably out of camera range.)

According to Manelis, the “protest” theme was a complete fabrication: “The IDF had precise intelligence that the violent riots were masking a plan of mass infiltration into Israel in order to carry out a massacre against Israeli civilians.” Hamas operatives were dressed as civilians. On Facebook Hamas had posted maps for operatives indicating the fastest route from the border to nearby Israeli homes, schools and daycare centres. That’s abominable.

Manelis states that IDF soldiers “acted with courage and restraint, following strict rules of engagement to ensure minimum civilian injury and loss of life while still protecting the border.” The optics did not favour Israel, naturally, because the truth can’t make much headway when an enemy is prepared to put its own women and children in harm’s way, calculatedly using their bodies for propaganda purposes.

The IDF policy was indeed to warn first and shoot as a defensive action. Their first priority was, quite rightly, self-defence and defence of Israeli civilians. And as Manelis writes, “The soldiers of the IDF won this week by keeping Israeli families safe and by stopping Hamas from accomplishing its stated goals.”

But yeah, Hamas is winning the propaganda war, and the proof is that even a seasoned and objective journalist like Terry Glavin is so frustrated with the human cost of this reckless, feckless and essentially futile act of jihad, that he’s essentially asking Israel to find a way to stop it, as if there were some magical, casualty-free solution the IDF could employ, if only it chose to, in defending a border against a rabid mass of suicide-prone enemies.

Israel is constantly subjected to double standards — by the UN, by biased journalists, by anti-Semites on social media. In choosing to use this morally charged locution, “abomination,” with regard to the IDF, even the brilliant and knowledgeable and honourable Terry Glavin, whose writing on foreign affairs I greatly admire, has not only succumbed to uncharacteristic rhetorical carelessness, but in doing so, has given comfort and ammunition to polemical jackals for whom he normally and justifiably feels the greatest contempt.

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/bar...ar-even-as-israel-wins-the-military-victories
 
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Editorial: Hamas will always win the PR war, even as Israel wins the military victories
Barbara Kay | May 22, 2018

afp_1468ek.jpg

In his May 16 column, Terry Glavin takes Israel to task for the deaths and injuries of Gazan Palestinians sustained in the border clashes he concedes that Hamas orchestrated.

Yes, Glavin understands that “Hamas exists for the sole purpose of doing violence to Israel and to Israelis.” Yes, clearly “what (Hamas) failed to accomplish with its rockets and tunnels, it is now prepared to attempt with the corpses of young, desperate and deluded young Gazans.” And yet, he concludes, “If Hamas persists in luring Palestinians to martyrdom at the Gaza fence, the IDF’s rules of engagement — first shoot to warn, then shoot to wound, then shoot to kill — become morally untenable. An abomination.”

Well, that’s quite a strong word, abomination. A very damning word. Myself, I save it for truly depraved actions like the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons on whole villages of innocent people — man, woman and child — by a monstrous tyrant who will stop at nothing to retain power, and who has proved many times that he’s devoid of any respect for the lives of those who aren’t kin or politically useful. I’m referring to Syria’s Assad, of course — and having read Glavin’s columns over the years, I know he shares my horror.

And this explains some of my surprise. “Abomination” is not a word I would ever use for any engagement with enemy forces undertaken in a democratic nation whose military, made up of ordinary citizens, comes out of a culture in which respect for human life is legendary. As Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, who has made a close study of IDF policies and techniques of asymmetric warfare, has said: “I have fought in combat zones around the world including Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Macedonia and Iraq. I was also present throughout the conflict in Gaza in 2014. Based on my experience and on my observations: the Israel Defense Force, the IDF, does more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

Illuminating the validity of Col. Kemp’s statement, the Monday edition of the Wall Street Journal published an op ed by Israeli Brig. Ronen Manelis, spokesman for the IDF, titled “The Truth about Hamas and Israel.” In it Manelis reveals the depths of Hamas cynicism. Hamas provided free transportation to the security fence for all Gazans, including women and children. They were paid $14 a head or $100 per family to attend. The injured received $500. That’s pretty abominable. So’s this: Hamas gave everyone with a video camera VIP access to “the show,” and free wifi too to make sure no injury went unrecorded (both real and fake: one video shows an “injured” victim borne away on a stretcher hopping off completely unscathed when presumably out of camera range.)

According to Manelis, the “protest” theme was a complete fabrication: “The IDF had precise intelligence that the violent riots were masking a plan of mass infiltration into Israel in order to carry out a massacre against Israeli civilians.” Hamas operatives were dressed as civilians. On Facebook Hamas had posted maps for operatives indicating the fastest route from the border to nearby Israeli homes, schools and daycare centres. That’s abominable.

Manelis states that IDF soldiers “acted with courage and restraint, following strict rules of engagement to ensure minimum civilian injury and loss of life while still protecting the border.” The optics did not favour Israel, naturally, because the truth can’t make much headway when an enemy is prepared to put its own women and children in harm’s way, calculatedly using their bodies for propaganda purposes.

The IDF policy was indeed to warn first and shoot as a defensive action. Their first priority was, quite rightly, self-defence and defence of Israeli civilians. And as Manelis writes, “The soldiers of the IDF won this week by keeping Israeli families safe and by stopping Hamas from accomplishing its stated goals.”

But yeah, Hamas is winning the propaganda war, and the proof is that even a seasoned and objective journalist like Terry Glavin is so frustrated with the human cost of this reckless, feckless and essentially futile act of jihad, that he’s essentially asking Israel to find a way to stop it, as if there were some magical, casualty-free solution the IDF could employ, if only it chose to, in defending a border against a rabid mass of suicide-prone enemies.

Israel is constantly subjected to double standards — by the UN, by biased journalists, by anti-Semites on social media. In choosing to use this morally charged locution, “abomination,” with regard to the IDF, even the brilliant and knowledgeable and honourable Terry Glavin, whose writing on foreign affairs I greatly admire, has not only succumbed to uncharacteristic rhetorical carelessness, but in doing so, has given comfort and ammunition to polemical jackals for whom he normally and justifiably feels the greatest contempt.

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/bar...ar-even-as-israel-wins-the-military-victories


Editorial: Why the Israel-Palestine debate makes people lose their minds
By Terry Glavin | May 23, 2018

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Palestinians ride in a donkey cart past graffiti showing U.S. President Donald Trump with a footprint on his face and Arabic that reads, "For al-Quds (Jerusalem) and the right of return we resist," in Gaza City, Sunday, May 20, 2018.


There is something about Israel that seems to make people lose their damn minds. It is a disturbing phenomenon. It is by no means confined to that vast and utterly useless constituency that pretends to be pro-Palestinian, and draws liberally from the expansive resources of Western bourgeois activism, and yet has somehow failed to lift so much as an ounce from the crushing weight of suffering that burdens the backs of the desperate masses in Gaza.

It is a kind of craziness that is ubiquitous, too, within several United Nations’ agencies, most notably and paradoxically the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, but also in the very existence of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine. UNRWA sets the descendants of the Arabs tragically displaced by Israel’s war of national liberation 70 years ago into a distinct and perpetual category of international refugee, quite apart from the jurisdiction of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. UNRWA’s entire raison d’etre gives every impression of being grounded in the delusion that the Jewish state of Israel is merely a temporary, racist, colonial settler state aberration which will one day just vanish, allowing the five million or so Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza to throng joyfully, at long last, through the streets of a Judenrein Tel Aviv.

In the most fashionable discourse, there is much room permitted for debate and the airing of differences of opinion, of course. Should Israel never be forgiven for standing up to several Arab armies and winning, in 1948, or should Israel never be forgiven for standing up to several Arab armies and winning, in 1967? Discuss.

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The recent horrors at the demarcation line between Israel and Gaza — more than 100 people killed and thousands more wounded by Israeli sniper fire over a seven-week period — have provided ample opportunity for the elucidation of crazy points of view, along with deranged and genuinely despairing expressions of grief and anger, across what you might call “both sides” of the Israel-Palestinian cacophony.

Owing to the surfeit of propaganda and public relations exercises involved, you should not be too hard on yourself if you find it difficult to sort out what the hell has actually happened. Proper journalism is necessarily central to resolving the confusion, but the news media is also the conduit through which the most outrageous lies are most efficiently told. Expending some serious effort in the attempt to report, explain, provide necessary context and offer useful analysis is particularly and perhaps uniquely fraught with hazard in the matter of Israel and Palestine. As someone routinely dismissed as a shill for my shadowy Zionist paymasters, although sometimes vilified as a jihad-enabling Sharia Bolshevik, I can attest to this, personally.

This is not to say, by any stretch, that my esteemed comrade and colleague, the columnist Barbara Kay, has called me any such names, or that Barbara has lost her damn mind. But she upbraided me personally in the pages of the National Post, in ways that are instructive in the corrosive, life-of-its-own nature of propaganda.

A long story short, then. “Hamas is winning the propaganda war,” Kay quite justifiably concludes. But by way of evidence, she cites my own observations and arguments, which I laid out in a May 16 column in the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post, as “proof.” My case is accurately summed up by its Post headline, “Hamas is brutally putting Israel in an impossible situation and Israel will have to adapt,” and in the sub-head, “If Hamas persists in luring Palestinians to martyrdom at the Gaza fence, the IDF’s rules of engagement become morally untenable.”

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People cheer as Hamas leader Ismail Haniya speaks to protesters at the border fence with Israel on May 15, 2018 in Gaza City, Gaza


I won’t waste any time with the inside baseball involved in this, except to point out that I am well aware, and said so, that Hamas is grotesquely employing the deaths of Gazans in a kind of mass suicide-by-cop ritual. Kay takes me to task for concluding that Israel is bound by a solemn moral duty to refuse to go along with this macabre strategy, and perhaps — if Hamas persists in this — the Israel Defense Forces’ rules of engagement at the Gaza fence (first shoot to warn, then shoot to wound, then shoot to kill) should be revisited.

A great deal of what you might call a public relations effort on Israel’s behalf has been expended, much of it sadly in vain, to show the direct culpability of Hamas, the gruesome terror cult that rules Gaza, in the Gaza fence bloodletting. The extraordinarily high casualty count of the “May 14 massacre,” as the events of that day are now widely described, is a clear Hamas propaganda victory. The 62 dead and 2,770 injured, roughly 1,300 of whom were wounded by gunfire, makes May 14 bloodier than any single day during the 2014 Gaza war, even. As the Israel Defense Forces’ own Lt. Jonathan Conricus puts it: “The amount of casualties has done us a tremendous disservice, unfortunately, and it has been very difficult to tell our story.”

But it has not helped that the effort to explain the hideously cynical role Hamas has played in the deaths — by exhorting demonstrators to rush the heavily defended Gaza fence, knowing full well the fatal consequences, by hiding its own armed operatives among unarmed protestors, and so on — has itself inadvertently depended upon Hamas propaganda. This headline, for instance, or a version of it, has appeared around the world: “Hamas admits 50 of the 62 protesters killed were its own militants.”

In fact, Hamas formally claimed 10 of the dead were its own. But then a Hamas official, Salah Bardawil, said in an interview that “In the last rounds of confrontations, if 62 people were martyred, Fifty of the martyrs were Hamas and 12 from the people. How can Hamas reap the fruits if it pays such an expensive price?” But Ahmed Abu Artema, the Gazan social-media personality who conceived of the protests in the first place cast doubt on the claim (“This is rhetoric … the reporter provoked him with his question”). The IDF has identified only 24 terrorists, affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, among the dead.

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It is not an easy thing, getting to the truth of all this, and coming to some rational judgments about the apportionment of blame for the horrible predicament Gazans are obliged to endure: a crushing hopelessness, a quarter of their meagre personal incomes spent on drinkable water, an unemployment rate approaching 50 per cent, the tyranny of Hamas, and no escape.

But who do Gazans blame for this? It’s not what you might think. In a March public opinion survey undertaken by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, less than one-third of Gazans blame Israel, which has maintained a strictly enforced cordon around Gaza ever since the bloody Hamas coup of 2007. Most properly blame Hamas, or its rival Fatah, or the Palestinian Authority. A similar poll undertaken a month earlier put support for Hamas among Gazans at nine per cent.

It’s complicated. Relying on propaganda won’t help you sort things out, and well-meaning public relations exercises are no match for whatever it is — anti-Semitism is commonly only a shout away — that causes outwardly reasonable people, when the matter turns to Israel, to lose their damn minds.

http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/co...tine-propaganda-makes-people-lose-their-minds
 
I'm incline to agree with the people who think this is Hamas convincing Palestinians to commit the biggest wave of mass suicide-by-cop in history. And this time they actually have no problem dragging innocent children to their graves.

When a mob try to breech another country's borders, the soldiers tasked to defend that border have no choice but to warn/wound/kill them, in that order. That policy and the rules of engagement used here is not some kind of breaking news. It's common sense.

Hamas knows this, but they're egging Palestinians on to do it anyway.

Whether that would help the Palestinian cause at all or just bring more senseless deaths is remain to be seen.
What border are you talking about? Israel has not agreed to any borders and even if they did the security fence actually encroaches on the territory that virtually ever modern deal recognized would include within Palestine. Even Baby Bush at one point said the security fence was an impediment to peace but of course the Israelis want impediments to peace and so they built it anyway. Imagine if Trump built the wall but it snaked into Mexican territory and then he ordered the border patrol to violently defend it. And even one of your own links states this:
“Cutting or attacking the fence is an offence,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer. “It has to be countered, but countered with reasonable force. There is no meter that I know of that would put the safety of the border fence at the same importance of the life of a 14-year-old.”

Hamas is not the only actor in Palestine, other groups have been involved in organizing this series of protests. I know they are the great boogeyman in this conflict but Hamas are not some puppet master controlling all Palestinians.
 
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the EU is just trying to seem relevant ever since the UK left. Its funny cause its true
 
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