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Palestinian rockets continue to be fired despite unprecedented carnage
The
Arab Monitor
January 6, 2009
Gaza
UNRWA schools, which the UN agency has converted into makeshift shelters for refugees from the fighting, are no longer safe from the Israeli invasion forces' shelling. UNRWA officer John Ging says the very refugees his organization has tried to shelter in a school yesterday night, have been targeted and three of them killed by Israeli invasion forces' shelling this morning. The Israeli forces shelled the building despite it being clearly marked as such, in addition to information passed to the Israeli command structure that the building was housing refugees monitored by UNRWA personnel.
Amidst the carnage, the actual heroes are the health workers, who are working with back-up generators to save lives while they are themselves targeted by the Israelis. Speaking through Al Jazeera, John Ging, visibly dismayed and angered, described the helpless situation of the Palestinian civilian population. He pointed out that for the first time in history the civilian population, women, children, elderly, have no possibility to flee from the artillery shelling and missile fire, which seems to be directed at them on purpose. Ging's declarations are confirmed by the heart-wrenching scenes enfolding at the Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Fathers and grandfathers, holding the corpses of their children and grandchildren, some bent over the bodies of their entire families, tell of tens of corpses still underneath the rubble of buildings, which Israeli soldiers simply blow up as they are advancing, on top of whole families huddled inside.
Relatives of patients at the Shifa hospital, talking to the press, report of more cases of civilians ordered to gather inside buildings, which subsequently are shelled, as well as of cases where people are ordered to evacuate buildings, only to find themselves fired on. In one such attempt to blow down a Palestinian home the Israeli invasion forces killed four of their own, including an officer. All the while Palestinian rockets are still being fired into Israeli territory, making a mock out of the justification for the ongoing carnage, that it was necessary to end the Palestinian rocket launching. Today Arab media report of heavy artillery shelling against districts of the Khan Younis, in the south, prompting fears that the same carnage inflicted in the north will be imposed on the residents of that area. To shield itself from public opinion, the Israeli military command adamantly refuses to let foreign journalists enter the Gaza Strip to assess the results, despite an Israeli High Court's ruling ordering it to do so.
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