Ugly and Unacceptable

From the Los Angeles Times:

Reporting from Los Angeles and Jerusalem -- The Red Cross today accused Israel of preventing rescue workers from reaching Gaza City homes where the relief agency said it found 15 bodies and 18 wounded, including children, needing treatment after Israel shelled the area.

In a blistering report, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the Israeli army refused to grant rescuers access to the site in the Zeitun neighborhood for four days, a delay the agency said it considers unacceptable.

[snip]

"The ICRC/PRCS team found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses," the statement said. "They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses."

[snip]

The Israeli army had built earth walls, making it impossible to bring ambulances into the neighborhood, the report said. "Therefore, the children and the wounded had to be taken to the ambulances on a donkey cart," it said.

Israeli soldiers also ordered the rescue team to leave the area but the team refused to depart, the report said.

From the Washington Post:

JERUSALEM, Jan. 8 -- The United Nations on Thursday said it was indefinitely suspending all humanitarian aid deliveries in the Gaza Strip, citing a series of Israeli attacks on U.N. facilities and personnel during the 13-day Israeli offensive.

The suspension appeared likely to deepen a sense of crisis in Gaza, where more than half the territory's 1.5 million people live on food aid from the United Nations and where water, power and cooking gas are all in short supply.

[snip]

[United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesman Chris] Gunness accused Israel of "deliberately targeting" aid workers. He said the locations of U.N. facilities and the movements of its workers are communicated to the Israeli military.

In a completely unrelated move, Israel continues to bar the media from entering Gaza despite a ruling from their own Supreme Court to allow access to journalists.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports on UN and Red Cross Outcry here.
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To infinity and beyond

Because I've seen this show before and I know the plot and I know the story never ends.

From Huffington Post:




Glenn Greenwald @ Salon:

Opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are so entrenched that any single outbreak of violence is automatically evaluated through a pre-existing lens, shaped by one's typically immovable beliefs about which side bears most of the blame for the conflict generally or "who started it."

Hilzoy @ Washington Monthly:

One of the many things that makes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict so utterly dispiriting is that it's impossible to think of anything good coming of any of this. Worse than that, it's hard to imagine that even the people involved think anything good will come of it.

What, exactly, do the Palestinians lobbing rockets into Sderot think they will accomplish? That the Israelis will look about them and say: Holy Moly, I had no idea this place was so dangerous!, and leave? Do the Israelis think: even though we've bombed the Palestinians a whole lot, and it's never done much good before, maybe this time it will be different! Maybe Hamas will say: heavens, this is a pretty serious round of attacks; maybe we should just sue for peace -- ? Or what?

Cernig @ Newshoggers:

Indiscriminate unguided rocket attacks on civilians and indiscriminate but deliberately targeted airstrikes on civilian infrastructure are both wrong. Collective punishment is collective punishment and is morally wrong no matter the relative intensity by which both sides pursue it or what has gone before in the way of provocation. Wrong (Strength 2) + Wrong (Strength 5) cannot ever = Right (Strength 7). All you can say is that one is less wrong but still ultimately morally reprehensible. You then (if you have any intellectual or moral integrity) have to open yourself to debate about how you weigh the relative wrongness of actions without retreating to strawman charges of anti-semitism or anti-arabism.

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