Israel "BREAKING LAW" With Gaza War

UPDATED ON:
Friday, January 16, 2009
02:28 Mecca time, 23:28 GMT
Courtesy Of Al Jazeera (English)

The president of the United Nations General Assembly has accused Israel of violating international law with its war on Gaza in which almost 1,100 Palestinians have been killed, nearly half of them civilians.

"Gaza is ablaze. It has been turned into a burning hell," Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann told an emergency session of the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday.

He said Israel's offensive was "a war against a helpless, defenceless and imprisoned people" and accused Israel of carrying out attacks on civilian targets.

"The violations of international law inherent in the Gaza assault have been well documented: collective punishment, disproportionate military force [and] attacks on civilian targets, including homes, mosques, universities, schools," he said.

He also rebuked UN member-states for their lack of action over the crisis, saying: "The [UN Security Council] may have found itself unable or unwilling to take the necessary steps to impose an immediate ceasefire, but outsourcing that effort to one or two governments, or through the quartet, does not relieve the council of its own responsibilities under the UN charter.

"The council cannot disavow its collective responsibility. It cannot continue to fiddle while Gaza burns."

Ryad Mansour, the Palestinian observer at the UN, called for an independent investigation of Israel's "grave breaches and systematic violations of international law".

"Since this crisis began, it is without a doubt that a multitude of war crimes have been perpetrated by the occupying power [Israel]," he said while also calling for "measures for the protection of the defenceless Palestinian civilian population."

Gabriela Shalev, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, dismissed the session as a "cynical, hateful and politicised [attempt] to de-legitimize Israel's fundamental right to defend its citizens".

Gaza War 'Genocide'

The emergency meeting had been requested by the 118-member UN member states making up the non-aligned movement.

An Israeli delegate had sought to block the session on procedural grounds by arguing that under the UN charter the 192-member assembly could not rule on a matter already being tackled by the Security Council, but the move was dismissed.

D'Escoto noted that the Security Council last week had called for a Gaza ceasefire leading to the withdrawal of Israeli forces.

"Prime Minister Olmert's recent statement disavowing the authority of Resolution 1860 [the Security Council resolution] clearly places Israel as a state in contempt of international law and the United Nations," d'Escoto added.

He urged the assembly to agree its own non-binding assembly resolution reflecting "the urgency of our commitment to end this slaughter" in Gaza.

Israel has continued its offensive regardless of the resolution which was also rejected by Hamas.

D'Escoto, a former Nicaraguan foreign minister, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that Israel's killings of Palestinians in Gaza amounted to "genocide".

Almost 1,100 Palestinians have been killed during Israel's Gaza offensive, which Israel says is to stop Palestinian rocketfire coming from Gaza.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

HAMAS Refuses To Go Down For The Count

Hamas: We Will Not Accept Israel's Demands For Gaza Cease-Fire

By Barak Ravid,
Haaretz Correspondent, and News Agencies
Last update - 02:45 17/01/2009
Courtesy Of Haaretz NewsPaper

Hamas will not accept Israel's conditions for a cease-fire in Gaza and will continue armed resistance until the offensive ends, Khaled Meshal, the leader of the Palestinian Islamist group, said on Friday.

Speaking at the opening of an emergency meeting on Gaza in Doha, Meshal called on the leaders present to cut all ties with Israel.

Meshal joined Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a surprise appearance at the summit, aimed to show their weight in diplomatic efforts surrounding the Gaza crisis.

Hamas was to send a delegation to Cairo on Friday to discuss Egyptian efforts to mediate a cease-fire in Gaza, a Hamas official told Al-Jazeera television.

Meshal's comments contradicted a report published in the al-Sharq al-Awset daily on Friday, which claimed Hamas was prepared to accept a conditional cease-fire with Israel starting on Saturday.

According to the report, Hamas has set five conditions for the cease-fire:

1. The reciprocal truce would begin on Saturday and be followed by the immediate transfer of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.

2. The Israel Defense Forces must pull all of its troops out of the coastal territory within the first week of the truce.

3. The flow of trade in and out of the Gaza Strip must be renewed and monitored by observers from Egypt, Europe, and Turkey.

4. The Rafah crossing must be reopened and supervised by Palestinian Authority security forces and international observers, until a Palestinian unity government has been established and can take its place.

5. The truce would be instated for one year with an option for renewal.

Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar Assad said Friday that the Arab initiative for peace with Israel is "dead" because of its offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Speaking at the summit in Qatar, Assad called on the participating Arab countries to sever "all direct and indirect" ties with Israel in protest against its continued operation in the coastal strip.

Ahmadinejad, who is also attending the meeting of Arab and Muslim leaders in Qatar, said the Gaza offensive proved that Israel was in its last throes.

Muslim nations "need to cut relations with Israel and America. Just ties. They don't need to do anything more than that," Ahmadinejad said Friday, according to an Arabic translation of his comments.

Earlier Friday, Israeli and Western sources said that Jerusalem has rebuffed some of the conditions initially set forth by Hamas for an Egyptian-proposed truce in the Gaza Strip, including how long it would last and who would manage the border crossings.

Jerusalem has expressed reservations regarding the Islamist group's terms, despite Cairo's apparent promise to crack down on arms smuggling to Gaza - one of Israel's key demands - and Hamas's willingness to accept the offer.

The Israeli and Western sources said Israel had objected to putting a
time limit on the truce. Hamas proposed a 12-month agreement that could later be extended.

"A time limit on any period of quiet is a mistake," a senior Israeli source said. "We saw that when the previous calm ran out of time, it was just an excuse for some to escalate the violence. An open-ended calm is what is needed."

Another Israeli source said that defense official Amos Gilad, who heads the Defense Ministry's diplomatic-security department, returned from his first day of talks in Egypt on Thursday with a reassuring report of progress.

Upon his return, Gilad headed straight to Jerusalem to report to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Gilad was back in Cairo on Friday for further negotiations.

The diplomatic-security cabinet was to meet Friday to vote on the offer, but decided to put off the debate until Gilad returns to Israel with an additional report.

Meanwhile, Livni headed to Washington on Friday to sign a deal of understanding with her American counterpart Condoleezza Rice on the joint supervision and treatment of weapons smuggling from Iran to the Gaza Strip.

"Prime Minister Ehud Olmert authorized this evening the trip of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to the United States in order to promote an American-Israeli outlined agreement intended to deal with weapons smuggling," Olmert's office said in a statement.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Thursday that he believed a cease-fire could be signed in a few days, but this depends on Israel's leadership.

The Egyptian truce proposal, of which Haaretz obtained a copy Thursday, contains three clauses.

First, Israel and the Palestinians would agree to an immediate, time-limited cease-fire, during which the border crossings will be opened for humanitarian aid and Egypt will lead negotiations on a long-term truce.

Second, the long-term truce must include provisions on both border security and an end to the blockade of Gaza.

Third, Fatah and Hamas should resume reconciliation talks.

Egyptian officials told Haaretz they believe the initial, short-term truce should last a few months, to allow plenty of time for negotiations on the long-term cease-fire.

However, the proposal does not require Israel to withdraw from Gaza during the initial truce, and Hamas has said it will not accept the proposal unless that omission is corrected.

Salah al-Bardawil, who was Hamas's Gazan representative to the talks with Egypt, said his organization demands that Israel completely withdraw within five days of whenever the initial cease-fire takes effect.

Hamas also insists that the agreement include a deadline by which the border crossings must reopen.

Israel, for its part, insists that the crossings not be reopened until the smuggling issue is resolved to its satisfaction. It also wants Hamas to agree to an explicit timetable for concluding a deal on kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit and to be more flexible in what it is demanding in exchange for Shalit.

UK Jewish MP: Israel Acting Like Nazis In Gaza

"Israel was born out of Jewish Terrorism" Tzipi Livnis Father was a Terrorist" Astonishing claims in the Hous of Parliamnet. SIR Gerald Kaufman, the veteran Labour MP, yesterday compared the actions of Israeli troops in Gaza to the Nazis who forced his family to flee Poland.

During a Commons debate on the fighting in Gaza, he urged the government to impose an arms embargo on Israel.

Sir Gerald, who was brought up as an orthodox Jew and Zionist, said: "My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town a German soldier shot her dead in her bed.

"My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians."

He said the claim that many of the Palestinian victims were militants "was the reply of the Nazi" and added: "I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants."

He accused the Israeli government of seeking "conquest" and added: "

They are not simply war criminals, they are fools."