Will Obama’s U.N. Ambassador abstain on a war crimes vote on this?
The latest fighting overshadowed a visit to Israel where the secretary general was supposed to be exploring efforts to establish a ceasefire in Gaza.
In some of the most intense ground combat of the 20-day-old assault on Gaza, Israeli tanks powered into the southern suburb of Tel el Howa clashing with Palestinian militants firing rockets.
The tanks advanced under a barrage of artillery and mortar fire that struck the al Quds, al Fata and al Wafa hospitals.
There were unconfirmed reports that Shifa, Gaza City’s biggest hospital, was on fire after being struck by Israeli shells.
Israel has repeatedly claimed Hamas commanders are hiding in Shifa although it has provided no evidence to support this.
A tower block housing various media groups including the Gaza offices of Reuters was shelled, injuring two employees of an Arabic television network.
The French government issued a forthright condemnation of Israel’s actions.
“We condemn in the strongest terms the bombings this morning by the Israeli army of several hospitals and a building housing international media in Gaza city,” Eric Chevallier, spokesman for the French foreign ministry in Paris, said.
“We condemn with equal strength the bombing that hit the headquarters of the UN in Gaza, injuring three staff members.
[U.N. Secretary General] Ban said Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, had assured him the incident had been “a grave mistake” which was being taken “very seriously”.
“He assured me that extra caution will be given to UN facilities and stuff and that this will not be repeated,” he said.
Shifa Hospital is where Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert has been working during the current Israeli assault on Gaza:
I think it’s important to understand that the most devastating weapon they are currently using is actually the siege of Gaza, which has been on for eighteen months, which means a lot of starvation, lack of food, water, power supplies, medicines, napkins, anything that people need to live. So it’s one-and-a-half million people who basically is now without their absolutely necessary means for living their lives, and that is, of course, illegal.
…
When it comes to the DIME [dense inert metal explosive] weapons, we have seen a substantial number of amputations, where the amputees do not have shrapnel injuries. On the contrary, they have torn apart their legs, often one or two or even three limbs, their arm also. Some of them are beyond salvage, because the amputations are so high and so fierce that it also affects the lower part of the body. Some are survivable. But typical for these amputations is that there is no sign of metal fragments or shrapnel..The additional effect in animal studies on the DIME weapon is that the residuals in the muscle in mice will cause a very severe form of muscle cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma, which easily spreads to the lungs. This remains to be shown.
In case they weren’t successful killing you the first time around.
Back to Dr. Gilbert:
The condition in Shifa Hospital and in the other hospitals in Gaza is horrifying. I’ve been to Gaza for the last ten years, in and out, teaching and training people in the medical field. I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean, all windows in the Shifa Hospital are out, due to the bombing of the mosque across the street. They have very unstable electricity. They lack supplies, disposables, surgical equipment, trolleys, beds even. They have a fantastic staff, who are working heroically to save their patients, but we have been doing surgery with, almost regularly, two patients in each OR, on the wall, on the floor, in the corridors. The lifts are barely working. The ICU had to triple its capacity with makeshift ICUs.
It is really, truly a scene from Dante’s Inferno. It is these loads of patients coming in. We had 120, 130 patients coming a day, children, women. And I would say approximately 90 percent—I repeat, 90 percent—of the killed and injured that we have seen are civilians. Up ’til yesterday, 971 people have been killed; of them, one of three is a child below eighteen. 4,500 injuries, as of yesterday at 4:00; among them, every second is a woman or a child. So this is really targeting civilian Palestinian population. And we had a large number of pediatric cases with head injuries, with complicated fractures—
This is your foreign policy on Bush.
Five more days…