Depleted uranium found in Gaza victims
Sun, 04 Jan 2009 13:16:21 GMT
Medics tell Press TV they have found traces of depleted uranium in some Gaza residents wounded in Israel's ground offensive on the strip.
Norwegian medics told Press TV correspondent Akram al-Sattari that some of the victims who have been wounded since Israel began its attacks on the Gaza Strip on December 27 have traces of depleted uranium in their bodies.
The report comes after Israeli tanks and troops swept across the border into Gaza on Saturday night, opening a ground operation after eight days of intensive attacks by Israeli air and naval forces on the impoverished region.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned on Sunday that the wide-ranging ground offensive in the Gaza Strip would be "full of surprises."
A ground offensive in the densely-populated Gaza is expected to drastically increase the death toll of the civilian population.
The latest assaults bring the number of Palestinians killed to over 488 with 2790 others wounded. The UN says that about 25 percent of the casualties were civilian deaths - including at least 34 children.
According to Israeli army officials, at least 30 of its soldiers have been wounded since the start of the ground campaign.
Amid global condemnation of the ongoing violence in the region, the UN Security Council failed to agree on a united approach to resolve the crisis.
"Once again, the world is watching in dismay the dysfunctionality of the Security Council," UN General Assembly chief Miguel d'Escoto said Sunday.
According to diplomatic sources, the US blocked a Security Council resolution, with US Deputy Ambassador Alejandro Wolff arguing that an official statement that criticizes both Israel and Hamas would not be helpful.
The White House has so far declined to comment on whether an Israeli ground incursion into Gaza is a justified measure.
^^^^^
hey , cant you see that the victims were inticrately injected with depleted uranium by Hamas.
and they got it from Iran, so Israel must do the honorable thing and annihilate Persia in a courageous act of self defense.
and about the "UN" that made us, dont worry, we got our one night stand and got the out-now we dont return its calls:thepirate
buitre
quote:
Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
never let the facts get in the way of your bias!
That was a pinpoint operation with the intention to blow up a tunnel that Hamas was gonna use to abduct soldiers (and also give them the possibility to carry out suicide bombings.)
Nevertheless, 35 rockets and mortar shells were fired into Israel during that "cease-fire" - between June 19 till Nov 4 2008.
Indeed, never let the facts get in the way of your bias.
pkcRAISTLIN
quote:
Originally posted by buitre
Nevertheless, 35 rockets and mortar shells were fired into Israel during that "cease-fire" - between June 19 till Nov 4 2008.
not by hamas.
diesel_tron3000
ah man Israel WHAT are you doing? i really wouldn't have a problem with this whole little war except for the fact that israel dominates the out of everyone in the region with weapons our good ole Boys on the hill felt the need to sell...oh yeah and using white phosphorous...and killing like 1500 Palestinians and losing not that many of their own...
seriously how can israel expect to get out of this one?
The17sss
For a good laugh- from a Jewish sketch comedy show like SNL, a parody of the BBC's Gaza media bias:
Why are they laughing when the war's done so much damage to the peace process? Because: There is no peace process. There'll never be peace with Hamas, and they know it.
Lemonad
quote:
Originally posted by diesel_tron3000
ah man Israel WHAT are you doing? i really wouldn't have a problem with this whole little war except for the fact that israel dominates the out of everyone in the region with weapons our good ole Boys on the hill felt the need to sell...oh yeah and using white phosphorous...and killing like 1500 Palestinians and losing not that many of their own...
seriously how can israel expect to get out of this one?
Easy, it is the cancer holding America hostage and it will get out of causing a holocaust if it has to.
A propaganda war is being waged on the internet between supporters of the Israeli and Palestinian sides in the current conflict in the Gaza Strip.
Activists have turned to defacing websites, taking over computers, and shutting down Facebook groups.
US Military sites, Nato, and an Israeli Bank have all been targeted.
Experts have warned users to be on the lookout for phishing emails and webmasters to ensure their servers are secure.
The hacking of security barriers for political or ideological reasons has been branded by some as hacktivism. And it is thought that as use of the internet grows, so too will the number of attacks.
Defaced
On 7 January, pro-Palestinian hackers defaced several high-profile websites, including a US Army website, and the Nato Parliamentary Assembly's website.
Calling themselves "Agd_Scorp/Peace Crew", they replaced pages with white space and a well-known photograph of a boy throwing stones at an Israeli tank in Gaza, and the Israeli, American and British flags with a red strike through them.
"Stop attacks u israel and usa ! you cursed nations ! one day muslims will clean the world from you!" wrote the hackers.
Dwight Griswold, the Nato Parliamentary Assembly's head of IT, says that the attackers persisted in attempting access for a number of days following the initial attack, adding that the intruders did not gain access to any of the Assembly's internal servers.
"The fact is that it's always a cat and mouse game. There is no system that is impenetrable."
Hackers also hijacked the domain names of Israeli online news site ynetnews.com and the Israel Discount Bank. They rerouted visitors to a page showing anti-Israel messages with images of prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Other approaches appealed to a web user's potential loyalties; a website called www.help-israel-win.com asked visitors to download and install a file that was later determined to be a trojan that could allow for remote access to and control of a computer.
The number of attacks has skyrocketed in Israel in the past few months, said Yoav Keren, chief executive of domain name registry Domain The Net.
"It's clear that it is a result of what happening in Gaza," said Mr Keren. "We see it as part of the war."
Israeli Arab and pro-Palestinian sites have also been targeted. Last year, hackers defaced three websites, replacing pages with the Israeli flag and the symbol of the banned far-right group Kach.
Speaking to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the manager of news website Arabs48.com Az-a-Din Badran said his site was "constantly suffering from repeated hack attempts".
Facebook fight
The battle also looms large on social networking site Facebook, where dozens of groups related to the conflict in Gaza have sprung up.
Jewish Internet Defence Force
The JIDF say they do not engage in illegal activity
The clash flared up when a group using the logo of the Jewish Internet Defence Force (JIDF) took control of several of these groups.
They removed content and replaced it with statements supporting Israeli policy and criticising the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza, and replaced the groups' images with the JIDF logo.
Andrew Silvera, who is active on several pro-Palestinian groups on Facebook, was one of those targeted. He said that his account was hacked after he responded to a Facebook request from another user, inviting him to be an administrator of a similar group.
"As soon as I clicked it I realized there was something wrong with the link. It wasn't like a normal Facebook group.
"As soon as I pressed it, that was it, my account just vanished," he said. "They kidnapped my account."
Mr Silvera tried to contact Facebook about his account, but told BBC News that he had as yet received no reply.
Francesco Paris started a Facebook group criticising the JIDF's alleged behaviour online after he noticed that a group he wanted to join had been affected.
"I noticed that all of the discussion boards had been taken down, the description of the group had been changed to 'closed' and the tagline said something like 'Israel for life'," he told the BBC.
"The picture had a 'Jewish Internet Defence Force' [image], I had no idea what that was."
After noticing that the content of several other groups had been similarly altered, he started his group.
Mr Paris said that he received Facebook messages that attempted to gather his account login information.
He provided the BBC with a copy of one of these so-called "phishing" emails, which has a link leading to a fake Facebook login page that asks for users login detail.
A spokesperson for the JIDF, who declined to be named, told BBC News that it is an advocacy group that fights anti-Semitism online.
The group would not confirm whether the Facebook groups were shut down by people affiliated with the JIDF.
"We are not hackers. We are also not involved with phishing. We do not break the law for our work," the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson pointed out that one of the groups included anti-Semitic cartoons and graphic images of injured and dead people and criticised Facebook for allowing "hateful, anti-Semitic, racist material and material which promotes Islamic terrorism and violence" to remain on the site.
"Despite thousands of our members reporting offensive material, Facebook does not seem to act."
Hacked NATO site
Nato's Parliamentary Assembly site was also targeted
A spokesperson for Facebook said that the firm would not respond to specific alleged incidents, but that they were aware of the phishing attacks.
"We have noticed a couple of instances where a page or a group admin has had their account credentials phished. In such cases, we will reset the passwords on the users' accounts and they should have control again.
"We are just a platform and the discussions that are taking place online are also taking place offline," the Facebook spokesperson added.
"We are not taking sides."
Worse to come
Professor Peter Sommer, a cybercrime expert at the London School of Economics, says that security professionals have come to expect such hacktivism attacks.
"It's been going on for at least 10 years. It's a very obvious form of making a protest," he said.
"It's far more attractive than turning up at an airport or outside an embassy and possibly getting arrested, certainly getting cold and possibly bruised in the process."
Social networking sites like Facebook are usually secure "at a fundamental level", he said, but users must take responsibility for their account's security.
"Unfortunately, security at a personal level is relatively hard work and rather tiresome, but there is no feasible alternative."
Peter Power, who sits on the UK Security Review Commission, said that cyberattacks are commonplace, noting a recent attack aimed at bringing down the whole of the UK's internet infrastructure that was stopped at a late stage.
Hacked Facebook group
Hacked Facebook groups had their descriptions and member lists changed
While not as dramatic as such large-scale attacks, simply redirecting a website to a propaganda message also creates a climate of fear.
"When people penetrate websites - and you see it on your screen - it becomes very personal to you. The fear is…'look, if they can do this, what else can they do?'" he said.
Mr Power emphasised that "the UK government is keenly aware of this [threat]" and has set up the CPNI (Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure) to protect the country's essential services.
The Nato Parliamentary Assembly's Dwight Griswold admitted that although they are embarrassing, he is not overly concerned about the messages hackers put on his organisation's website.
"My more worrisome threat is if someone breaks in and doesn't leave a big message like that."
tathi
^^^^ great article
here's another good one:
quote:
Washington Post, Israels Gaza Gamble
This has been a particularly brutal two weeks in the tragic saga of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. It's not very clear as to what precisely all this death and destruction is supposed to accomplish from an Israeli perspective. The utter defeat of Hamas? There's no consensus that this can accomplished by military means; Hamas is an ideological organization with strong support in Gaza, and their structure is woven into the very fabric of the refugee camps. To cow the civilian population of Gaza into withdrawing their support of Hamas? This is not very likely, especially after the sheer quantity of explosives showered on Gaza like confetti, and their resultant toll on the civilian population. Civilians tend to harden their determination when subjected to a constant diet of explosives, as the Germans learned during the London Blitz in WWII. As an election 'gimmick' to show how 'tough' Israel's leaders can be? Perhaps Israel's leaders have lost all sense of moral and ethical proportion if they believe that bombing an oppressed civilian population and its choice of leadership into a state of total submission following two years of virtual siege is a measure of toughness or lack of 'squeamishness.' To present President-elect Barack Obama with a fait accompli when he is sworn in later this month? A crisis that will force the new administration's hand upon taking office? It would not be the first time an Israeli government has attempted to impose its narrow agenda on an incoming U.S. administration.
Whatever the reason, it is a serious gamble, and a gamble without any likely long-term benefits. On the contrary, the long term implications do not benefit the interests of arriving at a final and just settlement to all parties in this dispute, whether Israeli, or Palestinian or Arab. It's certainly a gamble that may change the perspective of Arab governments in their interests in a rapprochement with Israel. There has been for the past few years an offer of peace to Israel by the Arab countries formulated in the Beirut Declaration of March 2002. This offer has so far been gathering dust, unaddressed by Israel, and it could be withdrawn (though this is not really likely.) The pressure from Arab public opinion as a result of this situation may well force the hand of some Arab governments to withdraw their support of this Declaration. To so dramatically reveal the Arab governments' inability to influence anyone at all on the conduct of Israel in Gaza would strengthen the position of Iran and its allies in the region. These are potentially serious consequences. For Israel to gamble with such possibilities is to engage in a serious disservice to their Israeli constituency as well as to their Arab neighbors.
Any and all civilian deaths and casualties should be deplored, be they Palestinian or Israeli. Firing homemade rockets into Israeli territory and bombing civilians in Gaza with modern ordinance are both acts that do not advance the cause of peace. Neither will tormenting a quite helpless refugee Palestinian population in Gaza with an economic embargo, nor denying its basic right to some sort of compensation through an overall peace settlement, nor attempting to coerce them into an abject capitulation to Israel's demands.
As for Hamas, they exist solely as a result of over 40 years of brutal Israeli occupation over the Palestinians without any recourse to a just settlement that would allow these people to have some sort of choice for their own future. At first the PLO/Fatah represented their interests, but Fatah was not able to deliver, thanks to Israeli intransigence and U.S. complicity. Thanks to a compliant U.S., Israel has an effective Security Council veto on any inconvenient resolution that this international body considers that might in any way restrict actions Israel considers 'appropriate' - which may or may not be abhorrent to the international community.
So when a free and open election took place in 2005, Hamas was elected to lead the Palestinian people, not just in Gaza but also in the West Bank. Hamas was brought into power because they are an element just as intransigent, just as doctrinaire and just as hard headed as past Israeli governments have proven to be. The reaction by Israel, the U.S. and Western Europe to this election was, as expected, vociferous. Even the right of the Palestinian people to choose their own leaders, however odious they may be considered, has been denied them. In a cynical display of moral outrage, Israel and the U.S. conspired with Fatah to topple Hamas, through violent means. The end result was that Gaza remained under Hamas control, whereas the West Bank effectively came under Fatah control. In addition Gaza has been under an economic embargo for several years now, causing immeasurable hardship to the Palestinian civilian population, in effect reinforcing a brutal occupation with a state of siege, actions more reminiscent of the excesses of the Middle Ages rather than the 21st century. If Hamas is considered so unsuitable today, 60 years after these Palestinians became refugees, perhaps Israel and its allies should have entered into a sincere and just settlement with more acceptable Palestinian partners decades ago.
Possibly one of the more sinister aspects of this tragedy is the clumsy attempt through media 'spin' to portray Israeli civilians as victims in this crisis. When we see on our TV screens and computer monitors the effects of Hamas 'rockets' on Israeli communities, compared to the sheer havoc wreaked by Israeli high explosives on the Gaza urban landscape and its civilian population, the educated and informed can safely put this fiction aside. As of a couple of days ago, in an TV interview with the BBC, Dr. Mars Gilbert at Dar el Shifa hospital in Gaza informed us that the overwhelming majority of casualties he had treated were civilians and that of the 900 casualties that they had so far cared for at Dar el Shifa, 25% of the fatalities and fully 45% of the wounded were women and children.
In an article that appeared January 7, 2009 in the UK, Avi Shlaim, a respected Israeli historian and Oxford University scholar, wrote that Israel had become a 'rogue' state, by definition a state that ignores and violates international law at will, has an arsenal of nuclear weapons, and practices terrorism (the use of violence against civilians for political purposes.)
In another BBC World interview with another noted Israeli historian, Tom Segev, when posed the question, "After the fighting is over, what should then happen?" answered, "We shall have to talk to Hamas - they may be a terrorist organization, but they are also a political party, a social welfare movement and the elected representatives of the Palestinian people."
These educated and informed Israelis are well aware of the fundamental truth of this situation, which is that Israel's long term security, its very survival, relies on making a just and equitable peace with the Palestinians, making peace with the rest of the Arab World, and making the Arabs their best friends as quickly as possible.
From an Egyptian perspective, the government is not thrilled that Hamas is in this leadership position with the Palestinian people. They are after all the 'little' brother of Egypt's own Muslim Brotherhood, opponents today of the Egyptian government. Egypt also realizes that Hamas will probably survive this onslaught; their survival will be considered a victory and may well have serious repercussions in the Arab World. In short this Israeli gamble, ill-timed, ill-conceived and ill-advised, may well reinforce and encourage political Islamist ideologues and their extremist elements in the moderate Arab World. If Hamas does not survive, even more extremist elements may replace them in Gaza - elements that have been waiting on the sidelines for just such an opportunity, including al-Qaeda.
Originally posted by The17sss
For a good laugh- from a Jewish sketch comedy show like SNL, a parody of the BBC's Gaza media bias:
Why are they laughing when the war's done so much damage to the peace process? Because: There is no peace process. There'll never be peace with Hamas, and they know it.
You find people's destroyed lives funny?
Krypton
The IDF is targeting UN facilities and using white phosphorus. Do they not have a competent public relations department?
The17sss
quote:
Originally posted by Krypton
You find people's destroyed lives funny?
quote:
Why are they laughing when the war's done so much damage to the peace process? Because: There is no peace process. There'll never be peace with Hamas, and they know it.
When did you lose your sense of humor man? The humor is in the parody played against the BBC and their Gaza bias, not in actual destruction of peoples' lives.
