Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza is causing widespread mental trauma, especially among children. In parallel, delivery of desperately needed emergency mental health services has ceased.
Since its premises were destroyed by Israeli bombs on 30 December the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) – a member of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) – has been unable to provide care to an ever increasing number of traumatised civilians. Another IRCT member centre in Gaza, the Jesoor Organization, is also unable to operate due to the security situation.
Children are particularly vulnerable to the traumatising effect of the bombs and shells raining down on densely populated civilian areas.
On Monday, speaking to the IRCT from his home in the town of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, a psychiatrist from the GCMHP described his three children’s intense fear in the midst of the frequent explosions:
“I have two boys of four and three and a girl of one year. The girl is too small to understand what is going on, but the boys are very scared – they act like they know something bad is going to happen any moment” he said.
“Each time we hear the sound of an incoming missile, people start running for cover, but you don’t know where it will hit, and there are no safe places anywhere – we don’t have shelters. The children scream and run, following the parents, sensing their fear and bewilderment.”
“When yet another building is hit”, he added, “children of 4-5 years of age ask questions like ‘how many dead?’ and ‘are they going to shell our house?’”
“The situation is horrific right now, but it does not stop when the bombings are over.” He concluded: “I cannot even begin to imagine the scale of trauma that is building up as this goes on; it will take enormous effort to deal with the mental trauma of our children afterwards.”
From the headquarters of the IRCT in Copenhagen, Denmark, Secretary-General Brita Sydhoff says: “I am absolutely appalled by Israel’s targeting of densely populated urban areas. Attacks on civilian areas by both sides are deplorable, but Israel’s attacks are grossly disproportionate and are disrupting vital health services.”
“I am extremely alarmed that our two member centres in Gaza, the GCMHP and the Jesoor Organization, are unable to operate during a time when their services are desperately needed” she adds and concludes:
“Israel’s reckless attacks and blockade are endangering the lives and health of the entire population of Gaza in blatant breach of international law and fundamental human rights. I urge the government of Israel to cease its offensive and immediately take all necessary measures to ensure the access of Gaza’s civilian population to vital health services and other fundamental humanitarian needs.”
For more information, please contact Mr. Sune Segal, Head of Communications, at +45 33 76 06 00 or sse@irct.org
Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of cognitive science at MIT, along with two colleagues, Johannes Haushofer, and Anat Biletzki, have published an important analysis of the ending of Israeli-Palestinain ceasefires.
They set the background:
How did the recent ceasefire unravel? The mainstream media in the US and Israel places the blame squarely on Hamas. Indeed, a massive barrage of Palestinian rockets were fired into Israel in November and December, and ending this rocket fire is the stated goal of the current Israeli invasion of Gaza. However, this account leaves out crucial facts.
First, and most importantly, the ceasefire was remarkably effective: after it began in June 2008, the rate of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza dropped to almost zero, and stayed there for four straight months (see Figure 1, from a factsheet produced by the Israeli consulate in NYC). So much for the widespread view, exemplified in yesterday’s New York Timeseditorial that: “There is little chance of restraining Hamas without dealing with its patrons in Syria and Iran.” Instead, the data shows clearly that Hamas can indeed control the violence if it so chooses, and sometimes it does, for long periods of time.
Second, and just as important, what happened to end this striking period of peace? On November 4th, Israel killed a Palestinian, an event that was followed by a volley of mortars fired from Gaza. Immediately after that, an Israeli air strike killed six more Palestinians. Then a massive barrage of rockets was unleashed, leading to the end of the ceasefire.
What their analysis shows is that the overwhelming number were broken by Israel. This number approaches 100% when one looks at pauses in fighting over a week were ended by Israel:
We defined “conflict pauses” as periods of one or more days when no one is killed on either side, and we asked which side kills first after conflict pauses of different durations. As shown in Figure 2, this analysis shows that it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern — in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause — becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.
Thus, a systematic pattern does exist: it is overwhelmingly Israel, not Palestine, that kills first following a lull. Indeed, it is virtually always Israel that kills first after a lull lasting more than a week.
They draw two conclusions:
First, Hamas can indeed control the rockets, when it is in their interest. The data shows that ceasefires can work, reducing the violence to nearly zero for months at a time.
Second, if Israel wants to reduce rocket fire from Gaza, it should cherish and preserve the peace when it starts to break out, not be the first to kill.
Do you think there’s any chance this analysis will penetrate the overwhelmingly biased US press? Neither do I. But we can hope…
There is an old Biblical saying that “The Truth Shall Make You Free.” In this instance, the truth may be essential for world survival. For reasonable policy can only be based upon an actiual understanding of the situation.
The moste emailed article on Aljazeera examines the biased reporting of the Gazan conflict:
In the US, Gaza is a different war
By Habib Battah
The images of two women on the front page of an edition of The Washington Post last week illustrates how mainstream US media has been reporting Israel’s war on Gaza.
On the left was a Palestinian mother who had lost five children. On the right was a nearly equally sized picture of an Israeli woman who was distressed by the fighting, according to the caption.
As the Palestinian woman cradled the dead body of one child, another infant son, his face blackened and disfigured with bruises, cried beside her.
The Israeli woman did not appear to be wounded in any way but also wept.
Arab frustration
To understand the frustration often felt in the Arab world over US media coverage, one only needs to imagine the same front page had the situation been reversed.
If an Israeli woman had lost five daughters in a Palestinian attack, would The Washington Post run an equally sized photograph of a relatively unharmed Palestinian woman, who was merely distraught over Israeli missile fire?
When the front page photographs of the two women were published on December 30, over 350 Palestinians had reportedly been killed compared to just four Israelis.
What if 350 Israelis had been killed and only four Palestinians – would the newspaper have run the stories side by side as if equal in news value?
Like many major news organisations in the US, The Washington Post has chosen to cover the conflict from a perspective that reflects the US government’s relationship with Israel. This means prioritising Israel’s version of events while underplaying the views of Palestinian groups.
For example, the newspaper’s lead article on Tuesday, which was published above the mothers’ photographs, quotes Israeli military and civilian sources nine times before quoting a single Palestinian. The first seven paragraphs explain Israel’s military strategy. The ninth paragraph describes the anxiety among Israelis, spending evenings in bomb shelters. Ordinary Palestinians, who generally have no access to bomb shelters, do not make an appearance until the 23rd paragraph.
To balance this top story, The Washington Post published another article on the bottom half of the front page about the Palestinian mother and her children. But would the paper have ever considered balancing a story about a massive attack on Israelis with an in-depth lead piece on the strategy of Palestinian militants?
Context stripped
Major US television channels also adopted the equal time approach, despite the reality that Palestinian casualties exceeded Israeli ones by a hundred fold. However, such comparisons were rare because the scripts read by American correspondents often excluded the overall Palestinian death count.
By stripping the context, American viewers may have easily assumed a level playing field, rather than a case of disproportionate force.
Take the opening lines of a report filed by NBC’s Martin Fletcher on December 30: “In Gaza two little girls were taking out the rubbish and killed by an Israeli rocket – while in Israel, a woman had been driving home and was killed by a Hamas rocket. No let up today on either side on the fourth day of this battle.”
Omitted from the report was the overall Palestinian death toll, dropped continuously in subsequent reports filed by NBC correspondents over the next several days.
When number of deaths did appear – sometimes as a graphic at the bottom of the screen – it was identified as the number of “people killed” rather than being attributed specifically to Palestinians.
No wonder the overwhelmingly asymmetrical bombardment of Gaza has been framed vaguely as “rising tensions in the Middle East” by news anchors.
With the lack of context, the power dynamic on the ground becomes unclear.
ABC news, for example, regularly introduced events in Gaza as “Mideast Violence”. And Like NBC, reporters excluded the Palestinian death toll.
On December 31, when Palestinian deaths stood at almost 400, ABC correspondent Simon McGergor-Wood began a video package by describing damage to an Israeli school by Hamas rockets.
The reporter’s script can be paraphrased as follows: Israel wanted a sustainable ceasefire; Israel needed to prevent Hamas from rearming; Hamas targets were hit; Israel was sending in aid and letting the injured out; Israel was doing “everything they can to alleviate the humanitarian crisis”. And with that McGregor-Wood signed off.
Palestinian perspective missing
There was no parallel telling of the Palestinian perspective, and no mention of any damages to Palestinian lives, although news agencies that day had reported five Palestinians dead.
For the ABC correspondent, it seemed the Palestinian deaths contained less news value than damage to Israeli buildings. His narration of events, meanwhile, amounted to no less than a parroting of the official Israeli line.
In fact, the Israeli government view typically went unchallenged on major US networks.
Interviews with Israeli spokesmen and ambassadors were not juxtaposed with the voices of Palestinian leaders. Prominent American news anchors frequently adopted the Israeli viewpoint. In talk show discussions, instead of debating events on the ground, the pundits often reinforced each other’s views.Such an episode occurred on a December 30 broadcast of the MSNBC show, Morning Joe, during which host Joe Scarborough repeatedly insisted that Israel should not be judged.
Israel was defending itself just as the US had done throughout history. “How many people did we kill in Germany?” Scarborough posed.
The blame rested on the Palestinians, he concluded, connecting the Gaza attacks to the Camp David negotiations of 2000. “They gave the Palestinians everything they could ask for, and they walked away from the table,” he said repeatedly.
Although this view was challenged once by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US official, who appeared briefly on the show, subsequent guests agreed incessantly with Scarborough’s characterisation of the Palestinians as negligent, if not criminal in nature.
According to guest Dan Bartlett, a former White House counsel, the Palestinian leadership had made it “very clear” that they were uninterested in peace talks.
Another guest, NBC anchor David Gregory, began by noting that Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian president, ”could not be trusted”, according to Bill Clinton, the former US president.
Gregory then added that Hamas had “undercut the peace process” and actually welcomed the attacks.
“The reality is that Hamas wanted this, they didn’t want the ceasefire,” he said.
Columnist Margaret Carlson also joined the show, agreeing in principal that Hamas should be “crushed” but voicing concern over the cost of such action.
Thus the debate was not whether Israel was justified, but rather what Israel should do next. The Palestinian human tragedy received little to no attention.
Victim’s perspective
Arab audiences saw a different picture altogether. Rather than mulling Israel’s dilemma, the Arab news networks captured the air assault in chilling detail from the perspective of its victims. The divide in coverage was staggering.
For US networks, the bombing of Gaza has largely been limited to two-minute video packages or five minute talk show segments. This has usually meant a few snippets of jumbled video: explosions from a distance and a momentary glance at victims; barely enough time to remember a face, let alone a personality. Victims were rarely interviewed.
The availability of time and space, American broadcast executives might argue, were mitigating factors.
On MSNBC for example, Gaza competed for air time last week with stories about the economy, such as a hike in liquor sales, or celebrity news, such as speculation over the publishing of photographs of Sarah Palin’s new grandchild.
On Arab TV, however, Gaza has been the only story.For hours on end, live images from the streets of Gaza are beamed into Arab households.
Unlike the correspondents from ABC and NBC, who have filed their reports exclusively from Israeli cities, Arab crews are inside Gaza, with many correspondents native Gazans themselves.
The images they capture are often broadcast unedited, and over the last week, a grizzly news gathering routine has been established.
The cycle begins with rooftop-mounted cameras, capturing the air raids live. After moments of quiet, thunderous bombing commences and plumes of smoke rise over the skyline. Then, anguish on the streets. Panicked civilians run for cover as ambulances careen through narrow alleys. Rescue workers hurriedly pick through the rubble, often pulling out mangled bodies. Fathers with tears of rage hold dead children up to the cameras, vowing revenge. The wounded are carried out in stretchers, gushing with blood.
Later, local journalists visit the hospitals and more gruesome images, more dead children are broadcast. Doctors wrap up the tiny bodies and carry them into overflowing morgues. The survivors speak to reporters. Their distraught voices are heard around the region; the outflow of misery and destruction is constant.
Palestinian voices
The coverage extends beyond Gaza. Unlike the US networks, which are often limited to one or two correspondents in Israel, major Arab television channels maintain correspondents and bureaus throughout the region. As angry protests take place on a near daily basis, the crews are there to capture the action live.
Even in Israel, Arab reporters are employed, and Israeli politicians are regularly interviewed. But so are members of Hamas and the other Palestinian factions.
The inclusion of Palestinian voices is not unique to Arab media. On a number of international broadcasters, including BBC World and CNN International, Palestinian leaders and Gazans in particular are regularly heard. And the Palestinian death toll has been provided every day, in most broadcasts and by most correspondents on the ground. Reports are also filed from Arab capitals.
On some level, the relatively small American broadcasting output can be attributed to a general trend in downsizing foreign reporting. But had a bloodbath on this scale happened in Israel, would the networks not have sent in reinforcements?
For now, the Israeli viewpoint seems slated to continue to dominate Gaza coverage. The latest narrative comes from the White House, which has called for a “durable” ceasefire, preventing Hamas terrorists from launching more rockets.
Naturally the soundbites are parroted by US broadcasters throughout the day and then reinforced by pundits, fearing the dangerous Hamas.
Arab channels, however, see a different outcome. Many have begun referring to Hamas, once controversial, as simply “the Palestinian resistance”.
While American analysts map out Israel’s strategy, Arab broadcasters are drawing their own maps, plotting the expanding range of Hamas rockets, and predicting a strengthened hand for opposition to Israel, rather than a weakened one.
**********
Habib Battah is a freelance journalist and media analyst based in Beirut and New York.
The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of Al Jazeera.
ACTION ALERT: PsySR Urges Action for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza
Dear PsySR Members and Friends,
Psychologists for Social Responsibility urges you to join us in strongly advocating that the U.S. Congress, the U.S. government, and the leaders of other nations and international organizations immediately prioritize:
(1) Immediate international action for a ceasefire on all sides in Gaza and Israel.
(2) Intensive humanitarian relief efforts.
(3) Much more vigorous and sustained international leadership for negotiations involving all sides and including the issue of mutual recognition and security for Israel, Gaza, and all Palestinians.
The emergency humanitarian crisis in Gaza demands such immediate action.
PsySR urges you to contact today your lawmakers, national government officials, and all other relevant contacts that you can make to strongly advocate for such emergency U.S. and international action.
I will say that, whatever one’s feelings about the historical justice of “Zionism” and the creation of Israel, we all know that Israel is there and will remain. Jargon about the “Zionist-colonialist entity” and such is a great gift to the most hard-line forces in the Israeli government. Nothing else can help them build support for their meme that the Palestinians, and the rest of the world, hate and want to destroy them.
Sometimes I hope for one united Israeli-Palestinian country. One can dream. But such a country can only be created through the voluntary consent of the vast majority on both sides, not by force.
In the meantime, social justice forces should do their best to avoid taking sides between countries or peoples, while rightly criticizing the unjust actions of governments, all governments. Given the disproportionate forces of destruction available to them, most of my criticism has been of Israel. I’m sure that will continue. But Hamas and other Palestinian factions are not blameless.
Certain actions of Hamas may be understandable, but it is silly to consider them a heroic resistance. Like the Israeli government, many in Hamas are macho fools more concerned to look “strong” than to actually lead to a better life for Palestinians. There is no way that shooting largely impotent rockets to terrorize others will improve the lot of Palestinians. Rather, it provides cover for the destruction of Gaza civilians. Neither will a resumption of horrifying suicide bombings of Israeli civilians.
Let’s hope that cooler heads in both camps will eventually (soon) realize that they have to sit down and talk. Perhaps someday the two peoples can then laugh and cry and eat and drink and dance together. Otherwise, they will continue dying together.
To Help Palestine, Be Pro-Israel Too
by Ira Chernus
Three viewpoints on the Gaza war fill the U.S. mass media: pro-Israel, anti-Israel, and neutral or even-handed. All three are harmful to the suffering people of Gaza. The one view that can help them is the one that barely gets a hearing. It’s pro-Palestine, pro-peace, AND pro-Israel.
It’s easy enough to see why support for Israeli policy hurts the Gazans. U.S. political leaders are heavily influenced by the view that’s usually called “pro-Israel,” equating support for Israel with support for its government’s war policies. Even if our leaders might want to take a different approach (and it’s doubtful how many really would), they fear the political repercussions. So they don’t put U.S. weight behind any effort toward a just peace.
As long as that one-sided view prevails at the highest levels, the U.S. cannot be the kind of neutral broker that most Americans want us to be. According to columnist Glenn Greenwald, a recent poll shows 71% of the public here wanting the U.S. to support neither side. But our politicians consistently tilt toward Israel, pushed on by the overly loud voices that see Israel always in the right and Hamas in the wrong.
Yet a neutral, even-handed approach in the U.S. news media is dangerous for the people of Gaza too. It treats Israel’s massive high-tech firepower, which has killed over 500, as somehow equivalent to Hamas’ aimless, largely ineffectual rockets that have killed five. That gives Americans the impression there’s a fair fight going on between two equally violent and equally suffering sides. Most people conclude that if neither side is the good guy, it’s none of our business and we should just ignore it. At least they themselves ignore the conflict. That gives the “pro-Israel” lobby and the U.S. government a freer hand to follow a one-sided course.
Even for the minority of our people who want to be politically aware and involved in the Middle East, the even-handed view makes a realistic approach difficult, because it ignores or masks so many crucial facts beyond the disproportionate violence.
Israel, not Hamas, broke the recent truce, both by attacking Hamas on November 4 and by imposing an economic strangle-hold on Gaza. Israel’s blockade left the people of Gaza desperately lacking in food, fuel, electricity, medical supplies, and other necessities for weeks before the current attack began. Israel has consistently ignored Hamas truce offers. Instead, helped by the U.S., it has tried to destroy the Hamas government, which Palestinians democratically chose to rule them. Israel, helped by the U.S., has also consistently inflamed tensions between Hamas and Fatah and blocked their efforts at creating a unified regime.
Anyone who does not know, or ignores, those crucial facts can hardly hope to frame a just resolution to the conflict. Yet all of that background simply disappears from the supposedly even-handed approach in our news media.
That might seem to leave only one fruitful approach: Stand up for the Palestinians, condemn Israel as the aggressor, and demand that it stop its attack immediately. It’s understandable that Americans of good moral conscience might take such an approach. But from a practical point of view, it will not do the Palestinians of Gaza any good. It might even harm them more.
Political action that is merely “pro-Palestinian” allows the mass media to portray the engaged public divided into two neat camps-pro-Israel and anti-Israel-as if those were the only two options. Of course the mass media like simplistic pictures of two protest groups, diametrically opposed, on opposite sides of the street. It boosts their ratings. But it also lets supporters of Israeli policy feel even more justified, saying that “everyone who’s not for us is against us.”
It also encourages the average American to assume that there is no way out of this mess except to choose sides. In that case, since most know only what the political leaders and mass media tell them, they will choose the Israeli side.
Most importantly, action that is merely “pro-Palestinian” makes it harder to achieve the only political goal that really counts here in the U.S.: getting our government to take a different direction. There are some members of Congress and some mid-level staffers in the Obama administration who are not locked into a knee-jerk pro-Israel position. They are open to the possibility of using U.S. influence to change Israeli policy. The only way to set that change in motion is to encourage these “movable” figures in the government to speak out for a new direction.
But that would be very risky for their own careers. If they appear to represent a stridently anti-Israel view, they won’t get anywhere — except perhaps ushered out of the government entirely. So they need political cover. They have to be able to urge a new U.S. policy as a pro-Israel policy. Then they have at least a chance of making some headway against the existing pro-Israeli tilt.
Fortunately for them, and for us, a genuinely pro-Israel policy — one that cares about the peace and security of the Israeli people — will and must oppose the militaristic policies of the current Israeli leadership. The only way for Israel to achieve peace is to recognize the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to their own fully independent and completely viable state in all of the West Bank and Gaza — with no Israeli settlements or security roads or military personnel left in Palestine; with the Palestinians left alone to have whatever government they democratically choose, even a government devoted to Islamic principles; with no surreptitious Israeli policies undermining the political and economic success of the Palestinian state; with the Israeli people living in peace and safety, within the borders of June 4, 1967 (with minor border rectifications mutually agreed upon, if necessary); with the Palestinian people compensated, both monetarily and by formal Israeli apology, for the injustice and suffering they have endured for sixty years.
This is the truly pro-Israel policy. It’s the only one that can break down the wall — both literal and psychological — that Israeli Jews have created to separate themselves from their neighbors. It’s the only one that can give Israel peace and security and release the energies of its people to realize the Zionist dream, to fulfill the highest aspirations of the Jewish people. It calls for the Jewish people to give up nothing that is truly their right and due.
It’s also pro-Palestinian and pro-peace. It opens the way to productive cooperation between Jews and Palestinians, living side in two secure states, not merely in grudging toleration but in genuine friendship and mutuality.
If enough of the “movable” people in congress and the Obama administration start making that argument, both in public and in private, U.S. policy will begin to change — very slowly, to be sure, but it will change. And that will produce fundamental change in the Middle East. Regardless of what Israeli leaders say to win votes at home, in fact they need U.S. support to continue their policies of occupation and force.
So even if your only goal is to relieve the suffering of the Palestinians, the best strategy right now is to avoid the appearance of being a one-sided “pro-Palestinian” advocate. The best strategy is to declare that you are pro-Palestine, pro-Israel, and pro-peace. Demand an end to the Israeli occupation and a guarantee of full independence for Palestine, but at the same time insist over and over that you support this program because you want the best for everyone in the region, Israelis as well as Palestinians.
This is the program being advocated by Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, J Street, and other Jewish peace organizations in the U.S., as well as by Gush Shalom and other Jewish movements in Israel, which can still bring thousands into the streets to demonstrate for peace and justice. The best way to help the Palestinian people now is to forge a powerful alliance between these groups and the many groups advocating Palestinian rights, recognizing that ultimately we all want the same thing.
Ira Chernus, a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea. Having written extensively on Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and George W. Bush, he is now writing a book tentatively titled “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Origins of the National Insecurity State.” He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu.
Juan Cole has just sent around a notice of this story from the Telegraph telling of a mass killing in the Gaza town of Zeitoun, where a Red Crescent medic has confirmed the killing of about 70 members of one extended family.
If I am reading this account correctly, it seems to imply that the killings were a deliberate massacre:
They said that after the Israeli army first took the town on Saturday night soldiers had ordered about 100 members of the clan to gather in a single house owned by Wael Samouni around dawn on Sunday.
At 6.35am on Monday the house was repeatedly shelled with appalling loss of civilian life.
A handful of survivors, some wounded, others carrying dead or dying infants, made it on foot to Gaza’s main north-south road before they were given lifts to hospital. Three small children were buried in Gaza City that afternoon.
According to the survivors between 60 and 70 family members had been killed by shrapnel and falling masonry.
I have also heard from a human rights advocate who has been in contact with the UN in Gaza that 16 schools have been destroyed. Combined with the present story, and yesterday’s mass deaths at two UN-run schools, it is beginning to look like the Israeli military are deliberately massacring various civilian groups.
Despite prior confirmed accounts of Israeli massacres, I remain skeptical. I cannot see how these types of actions further the interests of the Israeli government that has invested so much into their propaganda war. Yet, I also cannot understand as repeated “accidents” their repetitive attacks on schools or the killings reported in this story. An independent investigation by trustworthy sources is desperately needed.
Here is the complete Telegraph story:
Gaza medics describe horror of strike which killed 70
Growing evidence emerged today of the bloodiest single incident of the Gaza conflict when around 70 corpses were found by a Palestinian paramedic near a bombed-out house.
By Tim Butcher in Jerusalem
Mohammed Shaheen, a volunteer with Palestinian Red Crescent, was in the first convoy of ambulances to reach the site of the blast in Zeitoun since it was first occupied then shelled by the Israeli army.
His testimony confirmed accounts, first reported in The Telegraph, from survivors of the extended al Samouni clan who said they feared between 60 and 70 family members had been killed.
“Inside the Samouni house I saw about ten bodies and outside another sixty,” Mr Shaheen said.
“I was not able to count them accurately because there was not much time and we were looking for wounded people.
“We found fifteen people still alive but injured so we took them in the ambulances.
“I could see an Israeli army bulldozer knocking down houses nearby but we ran out of time and the Israeli soldiers started shooting at us.
“We had to leave about eight injured people behind because we could not get to them and it was no longer safe for us to stay.” Mr Shaheen was in a convoy led by a jeep from the International Committee of the Red Cross that made its way down war-damaged tracks past demolished houses to the town of Zeitoun.
Concerns had been growing that Zeitoun had witnessed massive civilian casualties after surviving members of the Samouni clan reached Gaza City three days ago.
They said that after the Israeli army first took the town on Saturday night soldiers had ordered about 100 members of the clan to gather in a single house owned by Wael Samouni around dawn on Sunday.
At 6.35am on Monday the house was repeatedly shelled with appalling loss of civilian life.
A handful of survivors, some wounded, others carrying dead or dying infants, made it on foot to Gaza’s main north-south road before they were given lifts to hospital. Three small children were buried in Gaza City that afternoon.
According to the survivors between 60 and 70 family members had been killed by shrapnel and falling masonry.
Convoys of ambulances twice headed to the area to look for wounded but they were driven back by Israeli shooting.
During today’s three hour lull in offensive operations by Israel, the ICRC led the rescue convoy in although it took a long time for the convoy to make its way down war-damaged.
According to Mr Shaheen, the death toll was as high as described by the survivors.
Obama has apparently selected CNN doctor Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. Now I don’t know very much about Dr. Gupta. But I do know that he accused Michael Moore of distorting facts, and he was wrong. And the acknowledgment was begrudging. Not a sign of great integrity.
At a time when we need a firm advocate for a national health plan, this is a sad appointment.
So apparently Obama plans to appoint CNN’s Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.
What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.
Here is the Moore-Gupta debate on Larry King Live. I notice that Larry King is strongly biased against Moore, allowing Gupta to claim Moore distorted the facts, but not allowing allow Moore to reply in any detail:
