These are three videos of the Palestinian side of Israel’s current invasion of Gaza, beginning Jan 27-28:
A few days ago, Israel’s deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians living in the occupied Gaza Strip with a “holocaust.” Journalists immediately noted the language and responded.
The comments came a day after Israeli occupation forces killed 31 Palestinians, nine of them children, one a six-month-old baby, in a series of air raids across the Gaza Strip. Israel claimed that the attacks were in retaliation for a barrage of rockets fired by resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip, which killed one Israeli in the town of Sderot on Wednesday, 27 February. Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, said the rockets were in retaliation for the extrajudicial execution of five Hamas members carried out by Israel on that Wednesday morning.
Today, Israeli forces killed another 50 Palestinians so far, at least half of them innocent civilians, again including children, at least eight.
As reported by IBRAHIM BARZAK (on Huffington Post):
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israeli troops, tanks and aircraft targeted Gaza militants bombarding southern Israel with rockets and mortars Saturday, killing 50 Palestinians in the deadliest day of fighting in Gaza since Hamas seized control in June.
As many as two dozen civilians died in the fighting, including a baby and a young child. Two Israel soldiers were also killed. Gaza Health Ministry official Dr. Moaiya Hassanain said 160 people were wounded and 14 of them, including a baby, were in critical condition. The intense fighting pushed the Palestinian death toll to more than 80 since fighting flared Wednesday. About half of those were civilians.
Palestinians leaders called the killings “genocide” and threatened to call off peace talks with Israel. “The response to these rockets can’t be that harsh and heinous,” said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “It is nowadays described as a holocaust.”
In response to Israel’s bloody attacks on civilians inside of Gaza, Khalid Amayreh, a Palestinian journalist, reflected on similar retaliation against civilian populations during WWII:
In June, 1942, in reprisal for the assassination of the Nazi commander Reinhard Heydrich, the Germans carried out a murderous rampage of murder and terror throughout Czechoslovakia. The small Czech village of Lidice bore the brunt of the German revenge, with the SS killing all the men, deported all women and children and razed the village to the ground.
Similarly, in March 1944, thirty-three German soldiers were killed when members of an Italian resistance group set off a bomb close to a column of German troops, who were marching on via Rasella in Rome. Adolph Hitler got furious and ordered that within 24 hours, ten Italians were to be shot for each German soldier that had been killed. Herbert Kappler, the local German commander, quickly compiled a list of 320 civilians who were to be assassinated as vengeance. On March 24, the victims were transported to the Ardeatine caves where they were summarily executed by the SS.
Numerous other `pacification operations’ were carried out by the Nazi armies against civilians throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, in which men, women and children were brutally killed to avenge the death of German occupation soldiers by local resistance fighters.
Now what is the difference between these Nazi atrocities and what Israel, the “only democracy in the Middle East,” is doing in the Gaza Strip, where “the most moral army in the world” is slaughtering babies as young as six-months’ old? I know that many Jews, especially Zionist Jews, have developed almost instinctive knee- jerk defensive reactions to any comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. However, the truth must be proclaimed aloud, irrespective of how many Zionists will get angry.
Israel claims that it doesn’t murder innocent civilians deliberately. But this is a big, obscene lie, of which even most Israelis are aware. Mistakes happen a few times, but when the wanton slaughter of children occurs each day and every day of the year, it means it is policy.
In addition, when the number of victims, especially innocent victims, as in Gaza, even intent itself becomes irrelevant.
(snip)
In the final analysis, murdering knowingly is murdering deliberately, regardless of the prevarication and the verbal juggling.
If anyone is offended by Khalid Amayreh’s conclusion, he/she must appreciate that the Palestinian people living in the West Bank and Gaza have suffered for 40 years under a brutal military occupation, whose sole purpose is their ethnic cleansing and the theft and colonization of their lands. In resisting their occupation, thousands of Palestinians, most of them innocent civilians, have died in retaliation.
However, if another historical comparison seems more appropriate, please feel free to comment about it.
UPDATE: It was reported by Haitham Sabbah that the first video was censored by YouTube and is no longer available. Another source is provided.
