http://www.imemc.org/content/view/22767/1/
Adalah appeals Israeli High Court for water supply for the Bedouins
Saed Bannoura - IMEMC & Agencies - Monday, 20 November 2006, 22:10

The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah), petitioned the Israeli District Court in Haifa, on Monday, to connect the unrecognized Bedouin communities with water supply by connecting them to the national water infrastructure.

The families, totalling several hundreds are living in what Israel considers unrecognized communities in the Negev area.

The petition said that Israel's Commissioner's decision not to connect the resident with water resources is based on considerations that seek to promote the government policy to take over and control the lands of the Bedouins and force them to leave their homes.

Attorney Adel Bodeir of Adalah wrote in the center's petition that the residents are deprived from their water supplies, and that Israel is compromising their basic human rights of dignity, and that the Bedouins are not even receiving the basic minimal living conditions.

The center also argued that the residents are not receiving their right to health services.

Moreover, the center argued in its petition that the Israeli government is discriminating against the Bedouins in the Negev by allowing Jewish settlers to have large ranches there without obtaining permits from the state.

The ranches are connected with modern infrastructure, while the Bedouins are suffering and hoping to be connected to water resources by gaining access to the main pipelines in the Negev.

http://www.imemc.org/content/view/22766/1/
Joint statement by six Israeli human rights organizations blames Israel for humanitarian crisis
IMEMC & Agencies - Monday, 20 November 2006, 20:41

Nine Israeli human rights organizations issued an unprecedented joint call to the international community to ensure human rights in the Gaza Strip. The statement comes in light of the dire humanitarian situation there.


Some 80% of the population is extremely poor, living on less than $2 a day. A majority of the population is dependant on food aid from international donors.

In the past four months, the Israeli military has killed over 300 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Over half of those killed were unarmed civilians who did not participate in the fighting. Among the dead, 61 were children.

About 70% of Gaza's potential workforce is out of work or without pay.

On 28 June, Israel bombed Gaza's only independent power station, which produced 43% of the electricity needed by the residents in Gaza. Since then, most of the population has electricity between 6 and 8 hours each day, with disastrous consequences on water supply, sewage treatment, food storage, hospital functioning and public health.

The Gaza Strip is almost entirely sealed off from the outside world, with virtually no way for Palestinians to get in or out. Exports have been reduced to a trickle; imports are limited to essential humanitarian supplies.

Israel cannot shirk its responsibility for this growing crisis. Even after its Disengagement in 2005, Israel continues to hold decisive control over central elements of Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip:

Israel continues to maintain complete control over the air space and territorial waters.

Israel continues to control the joint Gaza Strip-West Bank population registry, preventing relocation between the West Bank and Gaza, and family unification.

Israel controls all movement in and out of Gaza, with exclusive control over all crossing points between Gaza and Israel, and the ability to shut down the Rafah crossing to Egypt.

Israeli ground troops conduct frequent military operations inside Gaza .

Israel continues to exercise almost complete control over imports and exports from the Gaza Strip.

Israel controls most elements of the taxation system of the Gaza Strip, and since February has withheld tax monies legally owed to the PA, and amounting to half of the to tal PA budget.

The broad scope of Israeli control in the Gaza Strip creates a strong case for the claim that Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip continues, along with an obligation to ensure the welfare of the civilian population. Regardless of the legal definition of the Gaza Strip, Israel bears legal obligations regarding those spheres that it continues to control. Israel has the right to defend itself. However, all military measures taken by Israel must respect the provisions of international humanitarian law.

The following Israeli human rights organizations call on the international community to ensure that Israel respects the basic human rights of residents of the Gaza Strip, and that all parties respect international humanitarian law:

http://www.imemc.org/content/view/22737/1/

Jonathan Cook - Sunday, 19 November 2006, 19:46

David Grossman’s widely publicised speech at the annual memorial rally for Yitzhak Rabin earlier this month has prompted some fine deconstruction of his “words of peace” from critics.

Grossman, one of Israel’s foremost writers and a figurehead for its main peace movement, Peace Now, personifies the caring, tortured face of Zionism that so many of the country’s apologists -- in Israel and abroad, trenchant and wavering alike -- desperately want to believe survives, despite the evidence of the Qanas, Beit Hanouns and other massacres committed by the Israeli army against Arab civilians. Grossman makes it possible to believe, for a moment, that the Ariel Sharons and Ehud Olmerts are not the real upholders of Zionism’s legacy, merely a temporary deviation from its true path.

In reality, of course, Grossman draws from the same ideological well-spring as Israel’s founders and its greatest warriors. He embodies the same anguished values of Labor Zionism that won Israel international legitimacy just as it was carrying out one of history’s great acts of ethnic cleansing: the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians, or 80 per cent the native population, from the borders of the newly established Jewish state.

(Even critical historians usually gloss over the fact that the percentage of the Palestinian population expelled by the Israeli army was, in truth, far higher. Many Palestinians forced out during the 1948 war ended up back inside Israel’s borders either because under the terms of the 1949 armistice with Jordan they were annexed to Israel, along with a small but densely populated area of the West Bank known as the Little Triangle, or because they managed to slip back across the porous border with Lebanon and Syria in the months following the war and hide inside the few Palestinian villages inside Israel that had not been destroyed.)

Remove the halo with which he has been crowned by the world’s liberal media and Grossman is little different from Zionism’s most distinguished statesmen, those who also ostentatiously displayed their hand-wringing or peace credentials as, first, they dispossessed the Palestinian people of most of their homeland; then dispossessed them of the rest; then ensured the original act of ethnic cleansing would not unravel; and today are working on the slow genocide of the Palestinians, through a combined strategy of their physical destruction and their dispersion as a people.

David Ben Gurion, for example, masterminded the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 before very publicly agonising over the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza -- even if only because of the demographic damage that would be done to the Jewish state as a result.

Golda Meir refused to recognise the existence of the Palestinian people as she launched the settlement enterprise in the occupied territories, but did recognise the anguish of Jewish soldiers forced to “shoot and cry” to defend the settlements. Or as she put it: “We can forgive you [the Palestinians] for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

Yitzhak Rabin, Grossman’s most direct inspiration, may have initiated a “peace process” at Oslo (even if only the terminally optimistic today believe that peace was really its goal), but as a soldier and politician he also personally oversaw the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian cities like Lid in 1948; he ordered tanks into Arab villages inside Israel during the Land Day protests of 1976, leading to the deaths of half a dozen unarmed Palestinian citizens; and in 1988 he ordered his army to crush the first intifada by “breaking the bones” of Palestinians, including women and children, who threw stones at the occupying troops.

Like them, Grossman conspires in these original war crimes by prefering to hold on to what Israel has, or even extend it further, rather than confront the genuinely painful truth of his responsibility for the fate of the Palestinians, including the hundreds of thousands of refugees and the millions of their descendants.

Every day that Grossman denies a Right of Return for the Palestinians, even as he supports a Law of Return for the Jews, he excuses and maintains the act of ethnic cleansing that dispossessed the Palestinian refugees more than half a century ago.

And every day that he sells a message of peace to Israelis who look to him for moral guidance that fails to offer the Palestinians a just solution -- and that takes instead as its moral yardstick the primacy of Israel’s survival as a Jewish state -- then he perverts the meaning of peace.

Another Israeli peace activist, Uri Avnery, diagnoses the problem posed by Grossman and his ilk with acute insight in a recent article. Although Grossman wants peace in the abstract, Avnery observes, he offers no solutions as to how it might be secured in concrete terms and no clues about what sacrifices he or other Israelis will have to make to achieve it. His “peace” is empty of content, a mere rhetorical device.

Rather than suggest what Israel should talk about to the Palestinians’ elected leaders, Grossman argues that Israel should talk over their heads to the “moderates”, Palestinians with whom Israel’s leaders can do business. The goal is to find Palestinians, any Palestinians, who will agree to Israel’s “peace”. The Oslo process in new clothes.

Grossman’s speech looks like a gesture towards a solution only because Israel’s current leaders do not want to speak with anybody on the Palestinian side, whether “moderate” or “fanatic”. The only interlocutor is Washington, and a passive one at that.

If Grossman’s words are as as “hollow” as those of Ehud Olmert, Avnery offers no clue as to reasons for the author’s evasiveness. In truth, Grossman cannot deal in solutions because there is almost no constituency in Israel for the kind of peace plan that might prove acceptable even to the Palestinian “moderates” Grossman so wants his government to talk to.

Were Grossman to set out the terms of his vision of peace, it might become clear to all that the problem is not Palestinian intransigence.

Although surveys regularly show that a majority of Israelis support a Palestinian state, they are conducted by pollsters who never specify to their sampling audience what might be entailed by the creation of the state posited in their question. Equally the pollsters do not require from their Israeli respondents any information about what kind of Palestinian state each envisages. This makes the nature of the Palestinian state being talked about by Israelis almost as empty of content as the alluring word “peace”.

After all, according to most Israelis, Gazans are enjoying the fruits of the end of Israel’s occupation. And according to Olmert, his proposed “convergence” -- a very limited withdrawal from the West Bank -- would have established the basis for a Palestinian state there too.

When Israelis are asked about their view of more specific peace plans, their responses are overwhelmingly negative. In 2003, for example, 78 per cent of Israeli Jews said they favoured a two-state solution, but when asked if they supported the Geneva Initiative -- which envisions a very circumscribed Palestinian state on less than all of the West Bank and Gaza -- only a quarter did so. Barely more than half of the supposedly leftwing voters of Labor backed the Geneva Initiative.

This low level of support for a barely viable Palestinian state contrasts with the consistently high levels of support among Israeli Jews for a concrete, but very different, solution to the conflict: “transfer”, or ethnic cleansing. In opinion polls, 60 per cent of Israeli Jews regularly favour the emigration of Arab citizens from the as-yet-undetermined borders of the Jewish state.

So when Grossman warns us that “a peace of no choice” is inevitable and that “the land will be divided, a Palestinian state will arise”, we should not be lulled into false hopes. Grossman’s state is almost certainly as “hollow” as his audience’s idea of peace.

Grossman’s refusal to confront the lack of sympathy among the Israeli public for the Palestinians, or challenge it with solutions that will require of Israelis that they make real sacrifices for peace, deserves our condemnation. He and the other gurus of Israel’s mainstream peace movement, writers like Amos Oz and A B Yehoshua, have failed in their duty to articulate to Israelis a vision of a fair future and a lasting peace.

So what is the way out of the impasse created by the beatification of figures like Grossman? What other routes are open to those of us who refuse to believe that Grossman stands at the very precipice before which any sane peace activist would tremble? Can we look to other members of the Israeli left for inspiration?

Uri Avnery again steps forward. He claims that there are only two peace camps in Israel: a Zionist one, based on a national consensus rooted in the Peace Now of David Grossman; and what he calls a “radical peace camp” led by … well, himself and his group of a few thousand Israelis known as Gush Shalom.

By this, one might be tempted to infer that Avnery styles his own peace bloc as non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Avnery and most, though not all, of his supporters in Israel are staunchly in the Zionist camp.

The bottom line in any peace for Avnery is the continued existence and success of Israel as a Jewish state. That rigidly limits his ideas about what sort of peace a “radical” Israeli peace activist ought to be pursuing.

Like Grossman, Avnery supports a two-state solution because, in both their views, the future of the Jewish state cannot be guaranteed without a Palestinian state alongside it. This is why Avnery finds himself agreeing with 90 per cent of Grossman’s speech. If the Jews are to prosper as a demographic (and democratic) majority in their state, then the non-Jews must have a state too, one in which they can exercise their own, separate sovereign rights and, consequently, abandon any claims on the Jewish state.

However, unlike Grossman, Avnery not only supports a Palestinian state in the abstract but a “just” Palestinian state in the concrete, meaning for him the evacuation of all the settlers and a full withdrawal by the Israeli army to the 1967 lines. Avnery’s peace plan would give back east Jerusalem and the whole of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians.

The difference between Grossman and Avnery on this point can be explained by their different understanding of what is needed to ensure the Jewish state’s survival. Avnery believes that a lasting peace will hold only if the Palestinian state meets the minimal aspirations of the Palestinian people. In his view, the Palestinians can be persuaded under the right leadership to settle for 22 per cent of their historic homeland -- and in that way the Jewish state will be saved.

Of itself, there is nothing wrong with Avnery’s position. It has encouraged him to take a leading and impressive role in the Israeli peace movement for many decades. Bravely he has crossed over national confrontation lines to visit the besieged Palestinian leadership when other Israelis have shied away. He has taken a courageous stand against the separation wall, facing down Israeli soldiers alongside Palestinian, Israeli and foreign peace activists. And through his journalism he has highlighted the Palestinian cause and educated Israelis, Palestinians and outside observers about the conflict. For all these reasons, Avnery should be praised as a genuine peacemaker.

But there is a serious danger that, because Palestinian solidarity movements have misunderstood Avnery’s motives, they may continue to be guided by him beyond the point where he is contributing to a peaceful solution or a just future for the Palestinians. In fact, that moment may be upon us.

During the Oslo years, Avnery was desperate to see Israel complete its supposed peace agreement with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. As he often argued, he believed that Arafat alone could unify the Palestinians and persuade them to settle for the only two-state solution on the table: a big Israel, alongside a small Palestine.

In truth, Avnery’s position was no so far from that of the distinctly unradical Oslo crowd of Rabin, Peres and Yossi Beilin. All four of them regarded Arafat as the Palestinian strongman who could secure Israel’s future: Rabin hoped Arafat would police the Palestinians on Israel’s behalf in their ghettoes; while Avnery hoped Arafat would forge a nation, democratic or otherwise, that would contain the Palestinians’ ambitions for territory and a just solution to the refugee problem.

Now with Arafat gone, Avnery and Gush Shalom have lost their ready-made solution to the conflict. Today, they still back two states and support engagement with Hamas. They have also not deviated from their long-standing positions on the main issues -- Jerusalem, borders, settlements and refugees -- even if they no longer have the glue, Arafat, that was supposed to make it all stick together.

But without Arafat as their strongman, Gush Shalom have no idea about how to address the impending issues of factionalism and potential civil war that Israel’s meddling in the Palestinian political process are unleashing.

They will also have no response if the tide on the Palestinian street turns against the two-state mirage offered by Oslo. If Palestinians look for other ways out of the current impasse, as they are starting to do, Avnery will quickly become an obstacle to peace rather than its great defender.

In fact, such a development is all but certain. Few knowledgeable observers of the conflict believe the two-state solution based on the 1967 lines is feasible any longer, given Israel’s entrenchment of its settlers in Jerusalem and the West Bank, now numbering nearly half a million. Even the Americans have publicly admitted that most of the settlements cannot be undone. It is only a matter of time before Palestinians make the same calculation.

What will Avnery, and the die-hards of Gush Shalom, do in this event? How will they respond if Palestinians start to clamour for a single state embracing both Israelis and Palestinians, for example?

The answer is that the “radical” peaceniks will quickly need to find another solution to protect their Jewish state. There are not too many available:

* There is the “Carry on with the occupation regardless” of Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud;
* There is the “Seal the Palestinians into ghettoes and hope eventually they will leave of their own accord”, in its Kadima (hard) and Labor (soft) incarnations;
* And there is the “Expel them all” of Avigdor Lieberman, Olmert’s new Minister of Strategic Threats.

Paradoxically, a variation on the last option may be the most appealing to the disillusioned peaceniks of Gush Shalom. Lieberman has his own fanatical and moderate positions, depending on his audience and the current realities. To some he says he wants all Palestinians expelled from Greater Israel so that it is available only for Jews. But to others, particularly in the diplomatic arena, he suggests a formula of territorial and population swaps between Israel and the Palestinians that would create a “Separation of Nations”. Israel would get the settlements back in return for handing over some small areas of Israel, like the Little Triangle, densely populated with Palestinians.

A generous version of such an exchange -- though a violation of international law -- would achieve a similar outcome to Gush Shalom’s attempts to create a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. Even if Avnery is unlikely to be lured down this path himself, there is a real danger that others in the “radical” peace camp will prefer this kind of solution over sacrificing their commitment at any price to the Jewish state.

But fortunately, whatever Avnery claims, his peace camp is not the only alternative to the sham agonising of Peace Now. Avnery is no more standing at the very edge of the abyss than Grossman. The only abyss Avnery is looking into is the demise of his Jewish state.

Other Zionist Jews, in Israel and abroad, have been grappling with the same kinds of issues as Avnery but begun to move in a different direction, away from the doomed two-state solution towards a binational state. A few prominent intellectuals like Tony Judt, Meron Benvenisti and Jeff Halper have publicly begun to question their commitment to Zionism and consider whether it is not part of the problem rather than the solution.

They are not doing this alone. Small groups of Israelis, smaller than Gush Shalom, are abandoning Zionism and coalescing around new ideas about how Israeli Jews and Palestinians might live peacefully together, including inside a single state. They include Taayush, Anarchists Against the Wall, Zochrot and elements within the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions and Gush Shalom itself.

Avnery hopes that his peace camp may be the small wheel that can push the larger wheel of organisations like Peace Now in a new direction and thereby shift Israeli opinion towards a real two-state solution. Given the realities on the ground, that seems highly unlikely. But one day, wheels currently smaller than Gush Shalom may begin to push Israel in the direction needed for peace.

11/17/06 "Information Clearing House" -- --

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His book, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

http://www.aljazeerah.info/17%20n/Because%20of%20Continuous%20Israeli%20Brutal%20Assault%20on%20Gaza%20Strip,%2090%25%20Gazans%20Eat%20Less%20than%203%20Meals%20a%20Day,%20Only%20a%20Third%20of%20Gazans%20Have%20Running%20Water.htm

Because of Continuous Israeli Brutal Assault on Gaza Strip, 90% Gazans Eat Less than 3 Meals a Day, Only a Third of Gazans Have Running Water

Since 'Operation Summer Rains', 90% Gazans eat less than 3 meals a day, only a third of Gazans have running water

Date: 17 / 11 / 2006 Time: 12:02

Ma'an -

Israel's recent brutal assault on the Gaza Strip both "increases the risk of destabilizing the area" and threatens to cause a "major humanitarian crisis", Médecins du Monde-France (MdMF) warns in a new report issued on Thursday.

Médecins du Monde, an international solidarity medical association, evaluated the Gaza population's health care access and facilities, in addition to general living conditions, in two surveys carried out in June and July 2006.

The MdMF medical teams discovered that access to healthcare declined dramatically. At the beginning of June, 23% of patients in the Gaza Strip took over a week to seek a medical consultation. Since the beginning of July, MdMF reports that it took patients on average four times longer to reach health facilities.

In addition, in May 2006, premature births in hospitals increased by 60%, the report reveals. 52.6% of patients who were consulted by MdM medics were suffering from chronic illnesses. They reported a growing number of psychological illnesses amongst the Gaza population, especially among children.

In a sign of the ongoing violent events in the Gaza Strip, 84.7% of the patients interviewed by MdM had witnessed a traumatic event in the days preceding the consultation.

In regards to their general living conditions, 35% of interviewees told MdM that they were unemployed or had no fixed income. What's more, even amongst those with a job, 30% said they worked in the 'informal sector'.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the level of unemployment in the Gaza Strip stands at around 40%.

MdM also warns that the destruction of vital infrastructure in the Gaza Strip during Israel's recent 'Operation Summer Rains' further hinders access to water, electricity and fuel, in addition to exacerbating the already difficult travel conditions, and of increasing food insecurity.

Before 'Operation Summer Rains', which was launched by the Israeli army following the capture of an Israeli soldier by armed Palestinian resistance groups at the end of June 2006, 70% of interviewees had access to running water. At the time of the incursions, this dropped dramatically to 32.5%.

Also before 'Operation Summer Rains', 40% of those people interviewed by MdM said they ate less than three meals a day. Since the military operation, this number has rocketed to 90%.

MdM calls for Israeli to end its attacks on civilian infrastructure and incursions into Palestinian towns. MdM also calls for all medical staff and facilities to be guaranteed protection, including free access to those injured during military operations.

MdM also calls for the Erez, Rafah, and Karni crossings to be opened, particularly for the entrance of medical equipment and for the passage of patients requiring medical treatment outside the Gaza Strip.

MdM also calls on the Palestinian Authority to forbid any armed men from using any medical facilities and to respect medical workers.

MdM also calls on the Quartet (comprising of the UN, EU, USA and Russia) to ensure that support to the Palestinians is not subject to political considerations.

The MdM report was presented in Paris on Thursday during a press conference with Dr. Pierre Micheletti, the president of Médecins du Monde-France, who participated in the surveys and field visits to the Gaza Strip.

The full report (in French) can be downloaded here.

***

Al-Jazeerah Editor's Note:

Israeli media describe killing civilians as terrorism. However, when Israeli occupation soldiers kill Palestinian civilians, they do not describe the Israeli killers of civilians as terrorists. It's time for Israeli terrorist acts to be described as terrorism.

Israeli occupation forces use the term "arrest" for "kidnapping" Palestinians from their homes. Objective media worldwide should not fall to the Israeli trap. This is kidnapping.

The Israeli occupation of Palestine is illegal under international law. The Israeli occupation government and its occupation forces have no jurisdiction over Palestinians. Only legitimate governments can arrest citizens. It follows that the correct term is "kidnapping" Palestinians, not "arresting" them by Israeli occupation forces.

http://www.imemc.org/content/view/22702/1/
PCHR report: “428 Palestinians, including 80 children and 25 women, killed since June 25”
Saed Bannoura - IMEMC - Friday, 17 November 2006, 13:16

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) reported that Israeli troops killed 434 Palestinians, in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank since June 25; 271 of the casualties were civilians, among them 80 children and twenty-five women. In the period between 9-15 on November, Israeli troops killed six Palestinians, including four children. Four of the victims were died in the Gaza Strip of earlier wounds.

At least 17 Palestinians civilians, including nine children were injured during the Israeli attacks over the past week. Three houses and a commercial store were completely destroyed by the Israeli air strikes.

In the period between 9-15 on November, Israeli troops killed six Palestinians, including four children. Four of the victims were died in the Gaza Strip of earlier wounds.

In the West Bank, soldiers carried at least thirty invasions to Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps and took 55 Palestinians prisoner, including six children and two women. Five more residents were taken prisoner after being stopped at military checkpoints in the West Bank.

Moreover, troops closed the Palestinian Center for Media and Studies in Tulkarem city, in the northern part of the West Bank.

The construction of the Annexation Wall in the occupied West Bank continued, and the army uprooted orchards in Bethlehem and Qalqilia. Dozens of Dunams were annexed in Anata village, northeast of Jerusalem.

Palestinian farmers have been denied access to their orchards to cultivate olives, while settlers in several West Bank areas cultivated Palestinian olives, uprooted and cut dozens of trees.

The settlers also carried several attacks against the residents and their properties especially in Al Tawani village south of Hebron; several children in the village when a group of settlers attacked dozens of schoolchildren.

Settlers also attacked Palestinian houses in the center of Hebron and hurled stones and empty bottles at them.

The settlers also prevented a number of Palestinian civilians from reaching their agricultural lands near “Tilim” settlement, west of Hebron, to cultivate olives.

It its weekly report, the center stated that soldiers fired 310 missiles at the Gaza Strip, most of the missiles weer fired by the F16 American made war-jets.

At least 1456 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 424 children and 107 women, have been wounded by Israeli fire, shells and missiles since June 25.

Hundreds of shells were fired from the ground and from the sea. Dozens of houses were totally damaged, in addition to the destruction of the Ministries of Interior, Foreign Affairs, Economy and the office of the Palestinian Prime Minister in Gaza. Several educational facilities were also targeted by the Israeli missiles and shells.

The center added that at least 315 air-to-surface missiles and hundreds of artillery shells have been fired at Palestinian civilian and military targets in the Gaza Strip.

The Power Station that provides 45% of the Gaza Strip with electricity was repeatedly shelled and destroyed, leaving half of the residents in the Gaza Strip without power supply. Several hospitals are running on electricity generators but the lack of fuel and the incapability of the generators to remain running all the time is increasing the dangers of a human disaster in the Gaza Strip.

Also, troops shelled and destroyed six main bridges in the central Gaza Strip and in the northern part, and shelled dozens of roads used by the residents and bulldozed hundreds of Dunams of farmlands.

Since June 25, troops took prisoner hundreds of civilians including ten ministers and thirty-one member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, including the Speaker, Deputy Speaker and Secretary, have been arrested. Minster of Prisoners’ Affairs, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Labor and Second Deputy Speaker of the PLC were released.

Full PCHR report: http://www.pchrgaza.ps/files/W_report/English/2006/16-11-2006.htm