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Who uses civilians in Gaza as human shields? Israel - 1,200 times in 5 years


Washington's Blog
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 23:41 UTC
Israelis frequently accuse Palestinians of using human shields.

That claim is highly questionable.

However, in 2005, the Israeli high court found that Israeli soldiers had used Palestinian civilians as human shields 1,200 times in the past 5 years. As Ynet reported at the time:
israel,boy,human,shield
© PalestineChronicle.com
Customary Israeli practice in violation of international law.
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz on Tuesday demanded that the High Court review a ruling it issued last Thursday in which it declared that the 'human shield' procedure employed by the IDF when detaining Palestinian terror suspects is illegal and violates international law.

Sources at the Ministry of Defense said that Mofaz' comments are not an attempt to subvert the Court's decision, adding that the defense minister intends to use democratic means to revoke the ruling.

According to defense officials, the Israel Defense Forces made use of the 'human shield' procedure on 1,200 occasions over the last five years, and only on one occasion did a Palestinian civilian get hurt.

An 18-year-old Palestinian was killed in 2002 during one such operation.

Mofaz instructed the IDF to freeze the use of the 'human shield' and 'early warning' procedures in its arrest operations in the territories until the Court holds a new hearing on the issue.

Comment: As usual, the psychopathic Zionist regime accuses its enemy of what the regime itself does. In fact, practically everything Israel accuses Hamas of doing, Israel actually does: violates ceasefires, stalls workable peace plans, fires 'rockets' into Israel, abducts young Israelis, trains their children to be racist terrorists...

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Bacon n Eggs

Hypocrites! EU may consider filing WTO appeals against Russian food bans


RT
Thu, 07 Aug 2014 22:13 UTC
Linkevicius
© AFP Photo / Raigo Pajula
Lithuanian Foreign minister Linas Linkevicius.
The European Union is likely to consider filing appeals with the World Trade Organization (WTO) after Russia announced import bans on products from the EU, Lithuania's Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius said Thursday.

"We will consult with our partners. It is in the interest of the WTO to protect members of the European Commission. This is done cooperatively. So, I think these issues will be address. It is too early to speak about all the implications, we need to carefully review and draw conclusions. Now, it's hard to say, it's too soon," Linkevicius said, as quoted by RIA Novosti.

Lithuania is one of the EU nations that is most dependent on trade with Russia, which imported €25 billion of goods from the Baltic state in 2013. From that, €1.3 billion of exports to Russia were agriculture goods and alcoholic beverages.


Comment: Lithuania would do better to complain about the groundless sanctions against Russia that led to this food ban.


This would not be Lithuania's first complaint in the WTO over Russia's so-called trade discrimination. At the end of June Riga filed a formal complaint with the WTO over Moscow's pork ban, which it announced in January after two cases of African swine fever were discovered in Poland and Lithuania.

In 2013, Russia imported $6.7 billion of meat and meat products in total. The largest suppliers came from now-banned countries like Denmark (6.6% of total Russian meat products), Germany (6.4%), USA (5.3%), and Canada (3.8%).

Comment: How about appeals against sanctions on Russia? Double standards, anyone?

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Clock

Kiev suspends phony ceasefire after intl team halts efforts - because Kiev wasn't obeying ceasefire


RT
Thu, 07 Aug 2014 21:52 UTC
donetsk osce
© Reuters / Valentyn Ogirenko
A car of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is seen at a checkpoint controlled by the Ukrainian army near the town of Debaltseve, Donetsk Region August 6, 2014.
Kiev has suspended a ceasefire with the self-defense forces at the site of the Malaysian Airlines plane crash in eastern Ukraine, after the international recovery team searching for victims halted their efforts over security concerns.

The fighting is now feared to escalate as Kiev seeks to regain control over the area largely controlled by militia.

"The ceasefire in the plane crash zone, announced by the President of Ukraine at the request of international experts, which has been thoroughly observed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, will not be in place at the beginning of the second phase of the investigation," the Ukrainian government said in a statement on Thursday.

This comes after The Netherlands, who lead the international probe, announced it was halting the mission to recover victims and debris of the July 17 MH17 crash because of fighting between Ukrainian forces and rebels in the area.


Comment: Thoroughly observed? Someone should give the Kiev govt a dictionary; so often they seem to get the meaning of words so totally wrong.


Prime Minister Mark Rutte said that the risk posed to the team of Australian, Dutch and Malaysian experts working in the area was too great to continue the operation under current conditions.
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Bad Guys

Dennis Kucinich: Crimes against humanity in Gaza: is it really a 'buffer zone' - or a bigger plan?

Dennis Kucinich
The Guardian
Tue, 05 Aug 2014 06:00 UTC
tanks
© Bjorn Kietzmann / Demotix / Corbis
The US Senate unanimously approved $225m funding for Israel’s Iron Dome on Friday, as Israel continues to ask for more funding from Washington.
It's time to step back and ask if we want to support Israel if it wants to eject all Palestinians from their land

Late last week, the White House decried Israel's attack on a UN school in Gaza as "totally unacceptable" and "totally indefensible", then proceeded to approve $225m in funding for its Iron Dome. On Monday, the US state department went further, calling the airstrikes upon a UN school "disgraceful" - and yet America provides Israel with more than $3.1bn every year, restocking the ability of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) to hit more schools, and to wage total war against an imprisoned people, because of their nationality.

American taxpayers should not be paying for this. And the western world should stop rejecting serious inquiries about Israel's moral inconsistencies, or allow it to benefit from cognitive dissonance and information overload amid the current crisis in Gaza.

There is a land grab going on. The Israeli prime minister, Binjamin Netanyahu, has shrunk Gaza's habitable land mass by 44%, with an edict establishing a 3km (1.8-mile) buffer zone, a "no-go" zone for Palestinians - and that's quite significant, because a good part of Gaza is only 3 to 4 miles wide. Over 250,000 Palestinians within this zone must leave their homes, or be bombed. As their territorial space collapses, 1.8m Gazans now living in 147 square miles will be compressed into 82 square miles.

Gaza's entire social and physical infrastructure of housing, hospitals, places of worship, more than 130 of its schools, plus markets, water systems, sewer systems and roads are being destroyed. Under constant attack, without access to water, sanitary facilities, food and medical care, Gazans face an IDF-scripted apocalypse.

With Gaza's land mass shrinking due to Israeli military action, it's about time someone asked: What is the end game? Three weeks ago, Moshe Feiglin, deputy speaker of the Knesset, called for Gaza to "become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel."

Israel has a housing crisis? After the "no-go" buffer zone is evacuated, there will be 21,951 Palestinians per square mile in Gaza, while Israel's population density stands at 964 persons per square mile.
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Star of David

The truth behind the spin: All the essential facts about Gaza you need to know

Omar Baddar
Salon
Tue, 05 Aug 2014 09:00 UTC
gaza propaganda
© Associated Press/Lefteris Pitarakis
A displaced Palestinian boy, still inside a classroom, eats a snack at the Abu Hussein U.N. school in Jebaliya refugee camp. Some 3,300 Gazans seeking shelter from the fighting had been crowded into the U.N. school in Jebaliya refugee camp when it was hit by a series of Israeli artillery shells.
As the death toll rises, cease-fires come and go, and protests mount, here are the key facts to keep in mind.

Two related things happened over the weekend: First, the death toll of Israel's assault on Gaza climbed to more than 1,800 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, including some 400 children. Second, In Washington, D.C., an estimated 50,000 demonstrators gathered in front of the White House to protest the American role in this violent escalation, and then marched on to the Washington Post building (for symbolism's sake) to protest mainstream media coverage of the crisis.

I have recently debunked the ubiquitous allegation that "human shields" are responsible for Gaza's rising civilian death toll, and exposed the talking points used to invert the reality on the ground. Here, I would like to explain what brought 50,000 people out on the streets of Washington; namely the mishandling and misrepresentation of this crisis by both the U.S. media and the U.S. administration.
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Monkey Wrench

Judge quashes Fort Collins', Colorado fracking ban

Steve Lynn
Northern Colorado Business Report
Thu, 07 Aug 2014 20:28 UTC
A Larimer County District Court judge has struck down Fort Collins' five-year moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, dealing the second blow in a month to Front Range cities that have sought to ban the drilling technique.

Larimer District Judge Gregory Lammons in a nine-page opinion issued Thursday ruled in favor of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association in its lawsuit challenging a fracking ban passed by Fort Collins voters in November. The temporary ban was meant to be in place while the effects of oil and gas development on human health were studied.

"The five-year ban on the use of hydraulic fracturing within the boundaries of the City of Fort Collins is preempted by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Act for two reasons: the five-year ban substantially impedes a significant state interest and the ban prohibits what state law allows," Lammons said in his decision.

City of Fort Collins officials had defended the city's moratorium as different from Longmont's fracking ban, while the Oil & Gas Association contended the fracking ban broke state law. Fracking involves pumping water mixed with sand and chemicals into a drilled hole to retrieve oil and natural gas from shale deep underground.
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Folder

New Snowden document labels Israel as top spy threat to U.S.

Jeff Stein
Newsweek
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 20:29 UTC
Image
© Baz Ratner/Reuters
An Israeli soldier rides an armored personnel carrier toward a staging area near the Gaza Strip border on August 4, 2014.
Israel was singled out in 2007 as a top espionage threat against the U.S. government, including its intelligence services, in a newly published National Security Agency (NSA) document obtained by fugitive leaker Edward Snowden, according to a news report Monday.

The document also identified Israel, along with North Korea, Cuba and India, as a "leading threat" to the infrastructure of U.S. financial and banking institutions.

The threats were listed in the NSA's 2007 Strategic Mission List, according to the document obtained by journalist/activist Glenn Greenwald, a founding editor of The Intercept, an online magazine that has a close relationship with Snowden, a former NSA and CIA contractor who fled the U.S. with thousands of top-secret documents last year.
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Sherlock

Was Malaysian Flight 17 shot down by a jet fighter? A German expert thinks so

Mike Whitney
CounterPunch
Mon, 04 Aug 2014 20:15 UTC
Image
"From start to finish, the Ukraine crisis has been instigated by US imperialism. Every action Washington has taken has been directed at exacerbating and intensifying this crisis. The longer this crisis goes on, the clearer it becomes that US policy is directed not so much at Ukraine as at Russia itself. Ukraine, it would seem, is meant merely to provide the pretext for a war with Russia."

- Bill Van Auken, "Does Washington want war with Russia?", World Socialist Web Site
German pilot and airlines expert, Peter Haisenko, thinks that Malaysia Flight 17 was not blown up by a ground-based antiaircraft missile, but shot down by the type of double-barreled 30-mm guns used on Ukrainian SU-25 fighter planes. Haisenko presented his theory in a widely-circulated and controversial article which appeared on the Global Research website titled "Revelations of German Pilot: Shocking Analysis of the "Shooting Down" of Malaysian MH17. "Aircraft Was Not Hit by a Missile". Here's an excerpt from the article:

"The facts speak clear and loud and are beyond the realm of speculation: The cockpit shows traces of shelling! You can see the entry and exit holes. The edge of a portion of the holes is bent inwards. These are the smaller holes, round and clean, showing the entry points most likely that of a 30 millimeter caliber projectile...." ("Revelations of German Pilot: Shocking Analysis of the "Shooting Down" of Malaysian MH17. "Aircraft Was Not Hit by a Missile"", Global Research)
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Magnify

Monitoring agency reports no violations on Ukrainian border by Russia


RT
Thu, 07 Aug 2014 20:06 UTC
Image
© Reuters / Sergei Karpukhin
Alexander Hug (C), deputy head for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) monitoring mission in Ukraine.
The OSCE monitoring mission on the Russian-Ukrainian border has registered no violations of international law by the Russian side during its week-long stay at the Gukovo and Donetsk checkpoints, mission head Paul Picard said.

During his press conference, Picard was asked to comment on Western claims that Russia is shelling Ukrainian territory and has starting deployment troops to the country.

"In these two border crossings we haven't seen such happenings," he replied.

The observers were assessing two checkpoints - Gukovo and Donetsk - on the border with Ukraine's Lugansk Region, which are separated from each other by around 30km.

Gukovo checkpoint is currently closed from the Ukrainian side, but traffic at the Donetsk border crossing is "high," Picard stressed.
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Brick Wall

Russia responds to sanctions by banning agricultural products from USA, EU, Norway, Canada, and Australia


RT
Thu, 07 Aug 2014 19:50 UTC
Image
Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev has signed a decree on the full ban for imports of beef, pork, poultry meat, fish, cheese, milk, vegetables and fruit from Australia, Canada, the EU, the US and Norway.

The ban will last a year, starting August 7.

The Prime Minister also said Russia has stopped transit flights by Ukrainian airlines to such destinations as Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey, adding that the country was considering a ban of transit flights for European and US Airlines to the Asia-Pacific region.

Western sanctions were a "dead-end track", but Russia has been forced to respond to the measures taken by the western countries, Medvedev added.

Alcohol imports from both the EU and the US will not be restricted.
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