Gilad Shalit has been held by Hamas for five years © Private
By Rachel Campbell from Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.
“As the days go by, we begin to despair of the day when we will see our son again. I know neither where he is held nor how he fares … or whether he is even alive.”
(Noam Shalit, Gilad Shalit’s father, addressing the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, 6 July 2009)
Tomorrow marks the fifth year of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit’s captivity. Hamas’ military wing, who are holding him in a secret location in the Gaza Strip, are using him as a hostage with which to conduct their political bargaining with Israel. Since his capture from an army base in southern Israel by Palestinian armed groups on 25 June 2006, he has been denied all contact with the outside world.
Amnesty International is asking activists around the world to sign our petition to Isma’il Haniyeh, Prime Minister of the Hamas de facto administration in Gaza, urging him to alleviate the suffering of Gilad Shalit and his family by immediately complying with its obligations under international humanitarian law to ensure that he is well treated, held in humane and dignified living conditions, and to allow him to communicate with his family, including through sending and receiving letters. Treating Gilad Shalit as a hostage is a flagrant violations of these obligations as Amnesty International stressed again today together with Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights NGOs.
Continuar leyendo ‘Held captive for 1,825 days – time to end the suffering of Gilad Shalit’ »
Destroyed building in Gaza, 1 January 2009. © Sharif Sarhan
4 February 2009: As we leave after more than two weeks in Gaza, we are still shocked and horrified by the scale of the destruction caused by the 22-day offensive the Israeli army launched on 27 December. The task of reconstruction will be truly immense.
The main priority in our fact-finding research has been to investigate the Israeli forces’ direct and indiscriminate attacks on civilians and their homes, but, before concluding our visit, we also spent some time focusing on the wholesale destruction of factories, workshops and farms, for which it is difficult or impossible to see any possible justification. What we found was even worse than we had first realized.
Continuar leyendo ‘The task of reconstruction will be truly immense’ »
1 February 2009: A 13-year-old girl who was asleep in her bed; three primary school-age boys who were carrying sugar canes; two young women on their way to a shelter in search of safety; a 13-year-old boy on his bicycle; eight secondary school students who were waiting for the school bus to take them home; an entire family sitting outside their home – these are among the many victims of missiles fired from Israeli UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), commonly known as drones.
Here in Gaza people call the drones “zannana”, an onomatopoeic description reflecting the buzzing sound that they emit as they fly overhead. Their main function is surveillance, but, in recent years, Israeli forces have also used them to fire missiles, often to assassinate “wanted” Palestinians.
Continuar leyendo ‘Faulty intelligence, wanton recklessness, or a combination of the two’ »
29 January: With virtually all foreign journalists barred from entering Gaza by the Israeli authorities during the three-week long conflict that began on 27 December, the story of the unprecedented scale of the Israeli military offensive there was told mostly through the pictures and film footage taken by local Palestinian journalists.
“Pictures don’t lie; they show the reality. The world seems to find it difficult to believe what Palestinians say or write about what happens to them but perhaps they may believe it if they see it,” a local cameraman told me.
Four Palestinian journalists were killed and several others were injured during the three-week conflict. Basel Ibrahim Faraj, a cameraman for Algerian TV, was fatally wounded when he was near a building in Gaza City which Israeli forces attacked on 27 December, the first day of air bombardment, and died a week later.
Continuar leyendo ‘Journalists under fire’ »
Rocket remants collected at Sderot police station, 28 January 2009 ©Amnesty International
28 January 2009: We read in the news that a home-made rocket was fired from Gaza to southern Israel by Palestinian fighters this morning, but it didn’t fall near any people. We saw yesterday at Sderot and Ashkelon police stations what these rockets – among them Qassems, Grads, Quds – look like: they are very crude, rusty 60, 90, or 120mm pipes about 1.5 metres long with fins welded onto them.
They can hold about five kilograms of explosives as well as shrapnel in the form of nails, bolts, or round metal sheets which rip into pieces on impact. They have a range of up to 20km, but cannot be aimed accurately. Anybody with some basic chemicals and scrap metal can make them. One can readily get a sense of why these rockets are inherently indiscriminate.
Continuar leyendo ‘A day in southern Israel’ »
