Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

'Fire on anything that moves': soldiers relate orders

In all of israel’s genocidal bloodbath in Gaza since Dec 27, its massacres in Zeitoun stand out as particularly heinous. The Samouni family lost 29 members after soldiers forced them all into one building that was subsequently shelled — 22 were killed in the shelling and the others slowly bled to death after being denied medical care. Other families experienced similar atrocities after watching loved ones come under fire when emerging from their homes carrying white flags.

Human Rights Watch accuse the iof of firing on civilians and deliberately denying medical access to the wounded. Now, we seem to have confirmation from israeli soldiers themselves who, due to israeli military censorship, spoke on condition of  anonymity to the (London) Times’s

“Fire on anything that moves in Zeitoun” – that was the order handed down to Israeli troops in the Givati Shaked battalion, who reduced the eastern Gaza City suburb to little more than rubble in a matter of days.

According to Israeli soldiers who took part in the three-week offensive, the destruction of the area, a known Hamas stronghold, was designed to send a wider message to Gazans. “We pounded Zeitoun into the ground,” an Israeli soldier who was deployed in the area, told The Times.

“We knew everything was booby-trapped, we knew that they would try to kidnap us and if they did that was the end, we were finished . . . so we took no chances. We pounded them with fire; they never had a chance.”

… Human Rights organisations have called for an independent investigation into the Israeli army’s conduct in Zeitoun, accusing them of denying medical access to the wounded and firing on civilians. …

READ ARTICLE

Yet another disproof of the propagated purity of arms the iof (yes the lower case is deliberate) claims.

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This entry was posted on 31 January, 2009 by in Gaza, Genocide, Israel and tagged , , .

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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