Israel To Keep Troops In Gaza
By David Walsh
19 January,
2009
WSWS.org
A tense truce presently exists in the Gaza Strip after Israel’s declaration of a unilateral ceasefire Saturday night and Hamas’ announcement of a one-week ceasefire twelve hours later. An undisclosed number of Israeli troops still remain in Gaza however, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has made clear there was no commitment, nor any timetable for a withdrawal. Nor is there any Israeli commitment to opening Gaza’s borders and ending the devastating blockade.
While some Israeli tanks and armored vehicles withdrew from areas
in southern and northern Gaza, Olmert said that Israel reserved “the
right to react and renew its military actions” if the Palestinians
continued firing rockets into southern Israel.
For their part, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups announced
a temporary ceasefire and stressed their demand for “the withdrawal
of the enemy forces from the Gaza Strip within a week, along with
the opening of all the crossings for the entry of humanitarian aid,
food and other necessities for our people in the Gaza Strip.”
The truce may well be only a pause in the violence.
The Bush administration brokered the ceasefire, with a Friday meeting
in Washington between US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Israeli
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni playing a critical role. The memorandum
of understanding signed by Livni involves promises by the US promising
to deploy technical, intelligence and military assets across the Middle
East and to enlist NATO and US-allied Arab regimes to help prevent
arms getting into Gaza, particularly from Iran.
The agreement is highly ominous. While the Wall Street Journal notes
that the memorandum “doesn't call for the US to employ its own
troops in the Palestinian territories,” it adds that “US
officials compared the scope of the agreement to the Proliferation
Security Initiative, a Bush administration program that focuses on
interdicting ships and airplanes believed to be trafficking equipment
used in developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.”
Washington is thus promising to seize Iranian or Syrian ships or airplanes
on the pretext that they may be carrying arms to Hamas. The US-Israeli
agreement contains the seeds of a new and wider war.
US officials indicated that “the memorandum will remain in effect
after Barack Obama is inaugurated next week. Rice said she has been
briefing the Obama transition team on the memorandum's implications.”
(Journal)
State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack drove home the point, noting
that the agreement “commits the United States,” adding
that Rice had discussions with incoming Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton concerning the issue.
“I think it’s safe to assume that we wouldn't have moved
forward if we hadn’t done some careful consultations prior to
signing this with the incoming [Obama] folks,” McCormack told
the media.
The timing of the Israeli ceasefire and the US-Israeli deal coincides
with the eve of the inauguration. It seems clear that the Israelis
intended to halt the assault on Gaza, at least temporarily, before
Obama took up residence in the White House. It is also clear that
the plans being worked out between Israel, the US, Egypt and the European
Union to strangle Palestinian resistance and undermine the Hamas government
in Gaza have the full support of the incoming US administration.
Olmert also issued a clear threat to Iran and Syria in his ceasefire
announcement, declaring that the military operation “proved
again the power of Israel and improved its deterrence against those
who threaten it.” One of the motives of the brutal offensive
was to send a message to Iran in particular, which Israeli officials
continually refer to as Hamas’s sponsor.
The international diplomatic effort as a whole is aimed at further
isolating and disarming the Gazan population and toppling the Hamas
administration, installing in its stead the US-backed and Fatah-led
Palestinian Authority. This, however, seems an unlikely outcome given
the widespread hatred and disgust among Gazans for the Palestinian
Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas. The PA acted throughout the
onslaught as the stooge of the Israelis and Americans, violently suppressing
demonstrations and protests in the West Bank against the Israeli offensive
in Gaza.
European Union officials also play their role in this cynical game.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel,
the British, Italian and Spanish prime ministers Gordon Brown, Silvio
Berlusconi and Jose Luis Zapatero and Czech premier Mirek Topolanek
met with Egyptian officials first on Sunday and then traveled to Jerusalem
for a summit with Olmert.
The European politicians spilled crocodile tears over the deaths of
hundreds of Gazan children, without indicting Israel as the guilty
party, and spoke strongly in defense of “Israel’s right
to protect its citizens from Hamas rockets.” (Reuters)
According to press commentary, the EU-Israeli summit and related diplomatic
maneuvers are concentrated on developing effective means of preventing
Hamas from “re-arming,” while nothing is being said about
opening Gaza’s borders. The blockade and suffocation of Gaza
will continue, with US and European support. Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Jordan and the other Arab states also play their part in this dirty
business.
With much of Gaza flattened by Israeli bombs and artillery shells,
residents came out of shelters and other hiding places Sunday to look
at the massive destruction. According to Gaza municipal authorities,
approximately 20,000 residential and government buildings were damaged
and another 4,000 entirely destroyed. Some 50 of the UN’s 220
schools, clinics and warehouses were shelled or otherwise attacked
by the Israelis.
The Palestinian death toll presently stands at more than 1,300, but
that is expected to rise. Medics pulled at least 100 bodies, including
those of several children, from the rubble Sunday in the Al Tuffah
area, Jabal Al Rayyis, Al Kashif, Al Atatra, Al Qarm, Al Zeitoun and
Jabaliya. An official of the Palestinian Ministry of Health added
that dozens of residents were still missing and presumed dead. The
search through the rubble will continue for several days.
According to Hamas medical authorities, the dead include 418 children,
110 women, 120 men over 50, 16 paramedics, 4 reporters and five foreigners.
Foreign journalists, prevented from entering Gaza since the fighting
began three weeks ago, got their first glimpse of the carnage Sunday.
Correspondent Paul Wood told the BBC “that in the town of Beit
Lahiya he saw the first real destruction-streets churned up by Israeli
heavy armour, overturned cars, a lake of raw sewage in the street
and a mosque left as a charred ruin.”
A Newsweek reporter noted that the “situation was the most dramatic
in Gaza City, which Western journalists reached for the first time
today… Today the Beach Road opened, and journalists arrived
in Gaza City to find scenes of what John Ging, the local head of the
UN Relief and Works Agency, described in an interview as ‘destruction
on an unimaginable scale.’”
“Parts of the densely populated city looked like Grozny [the
capital of Chechnya bombed by Russian forces] on a bad day; one neighborhood,
eastern Jabaliya, had nearly every building reduced to a pile of rubble,
roofs flattened to the ground-at least 50 of them in close proximity
along several blocks. Even relatively untouched neighborhoods had
signs of heavy machine gun fire tattooed up and down the walls, with
the occasional gaping hole from a tank shell or rocket.”
Israeli atrocities continued up to the declaration of the ceasefire
and beyond. In the hours after the declaration of a truce, Israeli
troops shot dead an eight-year-old girl in the northern town of Beit
Hanoun and a 20-year-old man near the southern town of Khan Yunis.
On January 15, the Israeli air force bombed and set ablaze the Al-Quds
hospital in a southwestern district of Gaza City, where some 500 people
were sheltering. According to Al Jazeera, hospital officials said
the fire was sparked by a “phosphorus shell.” Two hospitals
east of the city were also hit by shells Thursday.
The Israelis continued their policy of targeting Palestinian leaders
until the final days of the current round of fighting, assassinating
Hamas’s interior minister, Said Siam, on Thursday. The death
prompted a mass rally at his funeral on Friday.
On Friday an Israeli strike hit the home of a Palestinian doctor,
Izzeldin Abuelaish, who had been giving reports to Israeli television
on conditions in Gaza over the past three weeks, and killed three
of his daughters and a niece. The news program went on the air as
the doctor was attempting to save the girls’ lives.
Also on Friday, a mother and five of her children were killed by an
Israeli tank shell in the al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza
Strip, witnesses and
medics said. The children were reportedly aged 7 to 12 and the mother was 30 years old.
On Saturday, two brothers, five and seven, were killed in a tank attack
on a UN school in Beit Lahiya. Their mother lost both her legs in
the attack and subsequently died. The boys and their mother had been
sheltering from repeated Israeli air strikes over the northern Gaza
Strip.
Britain’s Daily Mirror reported: “[P]ictures clearly showed
a marked UN vehicle outside the building while terrified locals sprinted
for cover as a hail of fire rained down, seriously injuring 13 others.”
John Ging of the UN Relief and Works Agency commented: “These
two little boys are as innocent, indisputably, as they are dead. The
question now being asked is: Is this and the killing of all other
innocent civilians in Gaza a war crime?”
Another UNRWA spokesman, Christopher Gunness, told reporters: “Gaza
is unique in the annals of contemporary suffering in that it is a
conflict with a fence around it. There is nowhere safe to flee.”
Gunness said the UN would call for a war crimes investigation.
According to Palestinian sources, bombings of UN facilities have killed
nearly 50 people in Israel's three-week long offensive in the Gaza
Strip.
A UN official, cited in the Sydney Morning Herald January 19, claimed
that Israel deliberately blocked the building up of vital food supplies
before the launch of its war against Hamas. The UN’s chief humanitarian
coordinator in Israel, former Australian diplomat Maxwell Gaylard,
accused the Zionist regime of failing to honor its promise to open
its border with Gaza during several months of truce from June 19 last
year.
“The Israelis would not let us facilitate a regular and sufficient
flow of supplies into the Strip.” For four or five months, according
to Gaylard, “up to even 19 December, less of our supplies and
spare parts and items of equipment… got in than before the 19th
of June.”
This policy, both a provocation against Hamas and part of a plan to
make certain that supplies ran out once the fighting began, is further
evidence that the murderous Israeli assault, far from an act of 'self-defense’
in response to rocket attacks in December, was planned well in advance.