MUSLIMS CONDEMN ZIONISTS GENOCIDE AGAINST PALESTINIANS IN GAZA

by Syarif Hidayat

      Muslims from all over the world condemn the Zionists genocide against Palestinians through their so-called “Operation Pillar of Cloud” (Hebrew: עמוד ענן‎, Amúd Anán), an ongoing Israel Occupation Forces operation in the Gaza Strip, that was officially launched on 14 November 2012.  The Zionists are committing extreme aggression and genocide against poorly defended Palestinians in Gaza.

    “War is an organized, armed, and, often, a prolonged conflict that is carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political communities, and therefore is defined as a form of political violence. The set of techniques used by a group to carry out war is known as warfare. An absence of war (and other violence) is usually called peace,” according to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

 

     But in Gaza, we are seeing only the Zionist forces committing extreme aggression and genocide against poorly defended Palestinians in Gaza. We don’t see and haven’t seen a war in Gaza. What we are seeing and have been seeing is that the Zionist Forces are committing almost daily barbaric killings of Palestinians, using all kind of sophisticated bombs,  missiles, fighter bombers and the other modern weaponry!

 

   But facts speak for themselves correctly and objectively that the Zionist Israelis are experts at propaganda, disinformation, denying facts and outright lying.

   The Zionists are terrorizing and torturing Palestinians as well as committing Genocide against the Palestinians, creating Palestinian Holocaust, stealing their lands and properties as well as destroying their homes on daily basis with the US full support (financially, economically, politically and militarily) to the tune of three to five billion dollars a year, while at the same time, they continue to complain to the world especially the Washington regime and the US-led western civilization regimes -- their captive markets for their propaganda stuffs -- that the Palestinians are terrorists!

Arab, Islamic Countries Condemn Zionists Aggression

 

   Syria condemned Wednesday the Zionist "atrocities" in the Gaza Strip, and called for action from the international community. "The Syrian government condemns the heinous atrocities committed by the Israeli enemy's army against the Arab Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip," it said in a statement carried by the Syrian official news agency SANA.

  

    It urged the international community to "pressure Israel to stop the sinful aggression on our people in the defiant Gaza Strip."  "Despite the risks of aggression, Syria will always remain faithful to its national and historical duty to the Palestinian people to recover their stolen lands and establish a free Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital," it added.

   For its part, Egypt recalled its ambassador to the occupied territories, according to a statement by Egyptian President Mohammad Mursi's spokesman.  Mursi decided to "recall Egypt's ambassador to Israel," spokesman Yassir Ali said in a statement broadcast on state television.

   He also ordered the foreign ministry to summon the Zionist ambassador to Cairo and asked the Arab League, based in Cairo, to convene an emergency meeting of foreign ministers.

Mursi "offered his sincerest condolences, in the name of the Egyptian people, to the Palestinians for their martyrs," Ali said in his terse statement.

The Israeli operation has drawn fresh condemnation from Turkey and Iran, both Muslim countries that both have good relations with Hamas.

    Turkish President Abdullah Gul "strongly" condemned Israel and criticized Washington for supporting Israel. Turkey's once close ties with Israel have collapsed over an Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship in 2010.

   Iran, a major backer of Hamas, called the Israeli operation "organized terrorism." Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast urged the world to cut ties with Israel.  Iran also condemned the attack on Gaza considering that "they reflect the brutal nature of the Zionist entity."

     As Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast denounced the Zionist aerial strikes against the Gaza Strip causing the martyrdom and injury of tens of Palestinians, it condemned the International Community's, and the Human Rights organizations' in specific, silence towards the the Zionist entity's brutality against the Palestinians. Mehmanparast further considered that "their silence pushes the Israelis to go on with their crimes against humanity in Gaza."

     For its part, the Tunisian Presidency issued a statement condemning the critical escalation in the Gaza Strip, and considered that the unjustified assaults Israel is committing expose the entire region to another explosion. The Tunisian Presidency  spokesman indicated that this outrageous aggression came at a time when the Palestinian factions agreed on pacification, and after the Zionist prime minister claimed that his government was ready to resume peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

     In parallel, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas denounced the Zionist escalation in the strip and warned of its dangers , demanding an instant ceasefire.

A statement issued by the authority clarified that Abbas has demanded the Arab League Secretary General Nabil Al-Arabi to hold an emergency meeting to discuss the Zionist outrageous aggression on Gaza.

     The Arab League announced that it will convene an emergency meeting of foreign ministers on Saturday to respond to the Zionist air strikes in Gaza. The League's Deputy Chief Ahmed Ben Hilli told AFP that "the meeting will be convened on Saturday, based on requests from Egypt and Palestine."  

Indonesia merely urges all parties for restrain

      Short of condemning  the Zionists genocide in Gaza, Indonesian Foreign Minister, Dr. R.M. Marty M. Natalegawa has merely urged all parties to exercise restrain to ease the atmosphere in the region.

      "The Indonesian government has been with concern closely following the situation in the Gaza Strip, Palestine following a series of Israeli military action. Indonesia urges all parties to refrain from further actions, and do not aggravate the situation that may cause further casualties among innocent civilians," Natalegawa said, according to a press release issued by the Indonesian Foreign Ministry, Thursday.

     Referring to the UN Security Council emergency session held on November 14, 2012, the Foreign Minister called for the UN Security Council, in accordance with the mandate under the UN Charter, to take immediate concrete steps to defuse the situation in the region.

      "Indonesia urges UN Security Council to take immediate action and to the effort to restore a conducive situation in the region" said Minister Natalegawa.

     Indonesia also once again calls for all parties back to the negotiating table and seek a final solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict according the relevant UN resolutions.

      "Indonesia believes, the independence of a sovereign Palestinian state living side by side with Israel, in accordance with the principle of " two states solution," is the final solution to resolve the conflict" Minister Natalegawa said.

     MINA correspondent reported earlier, a bomb exploded about 50 meters from Gaza City mosque and 100 meters from the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza.

Indonesian Hizbullah Imaam condemns Israeli attacks

     Meanwhile the leader of Indonesian Jamaah Muslimin (Hizbullah) Imaam Muhyiddin Hamidy has strongly condemned the Israeli attacks which led to martyrdom supreme leader of Hamas' military wing, Al Qassam Brigades Izzudin, Ahmed Al Jabbari, his bodyguard, and one of his family members in the Gaza Strip Wednesday afternoon.

     "This once again proves Israel is the real terrorist. Israeli soldiers never concerned with human rights, especially the right of the Palestinians to independence, " Imaam Hamidy told Mi'raj News Agency (MINA) in Jakarta.

     The leader of Al Fatah Islamic School network in Indonesia further appealed to all the leaders of the Middle East and Islamic countries to unite and close ranks to face the Israeli savagery, at least condemn the Israeli action and provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza .

     Hamidy also called on Egyptian President Mohammed Moursi and leaders of Islamic countries having relations with Israel in order to review the relationship with the Zionist state. "I even appeal to Muslim countries to boycott Israel," he said.

     Egypt itself is one of the most influential Islamic countries in the Middle East as well as having diplomatic relations with Israel following the signing of the Camp David Agreement by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin together with U.S. President Jimmy Carter in 1978.

     Imaam Hamidy who has several times visited Palestine further appealed to all Palestinian citizens to ignore their differences. The struggle for Palestinian independence requires absolute unity among the Palestinians themselves, he pointed out.

UN calls for end to the bloodshed

The ongoing Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip has killed 16 Palestinians and wounded more than 125. Hospitals in Gaza have announced a state of emergency because of a chronic shortage of medical resources compounded by Israel's six-year long siege of the territory.

     As Israeli air strikes continued, a spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Ashraf Al-Qedrah, announced that the death toll had risen to 16; the number of wounded reached 125, including twenty women and 16 children. Over twenty are in a critical condition.

In response to the Israeli attacks, Palestinian resistance groups have launched more than 90 traditional and improvised rockets. Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that three Israelis have been killed and another four have been injured.

    The resistance groups said that they will continue to fire rockets at the Israeli settlements and cities in retaliation for the killing of military leader Ahmed Al-Jabari and Palestinian civilians. Israeli officials, meanwhile, said that they are going to extend "Operation Pillar of Cloud" into a ground operation. "The military operation will continue until Palestinians in Gaza say enough," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday.

      Many residents of Gaza have received automatic telephone calls from Israel warning them about helping Palestinian fighters. Israel also launched balloons to spread leaflets carrying the same message.

     The fresh bloodshed came as the United Nations Security Council called for the violence to stop after an emergency session on Wednesday night.

     The Israeli military launched its operation on Wednesday with the killing of a top Hamas commander followed by what Palestinians said were at least 60 Israeli air strikes.

Ahmed Jaabari, the operational commander of Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, was killed along with his bodyguard, Mohammed al-Hams, in an initial Israeli strike on a car in Gaza City, the Islamist movement said.

     Shortly afterwards, Israel pounded the Gaza Strip with more strikes, killing five more people, two of them children, Hamas health minister Mufid Mukhalalati said in a televised press conference at Gaza City's Shifa hospital.

     Hamas vowed vengeance, saying that Israel had "opened the gates of hell" with the attacks.  Late Wednesday medics reported another fatality in the wave of strikes on targets across the territory. Hospitals and medical centres across Gaza were put on high alert after the initial strikes as Israel warned the hit on Jaabari was only "the beginning" and said "a significant number" of arms dumps were within civilian and residential areas.

     Hamas's Al-Aqsa television showed ambulances racing through the streets on Wednesday, transporting casualties to crowded emergency rooms, including at the Shifa hospital.

A man wearing blue pyjamas was seen carrying his son and two men supported an elderly man as he struggled to move away from the site of one explosion.

    The attacks came after a flare-up in violence between Israel and Gaza-based groups, which saw more than 120 rockets fired from the Palestinian territory into the Jewish state, and Israeli air strikes and shelling that killed seven people.

      Last night the UN Security Council agreed to issue a communique stating that a meeting took place. Indian Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri, president of the 15-nation Security Council this month, told reporters: "The message that must be taken from this meeting is the violence must stop."  The Palestinians Authority had asked the council to issue a statement urging Israel to halt its offensive, but no such declaration was agreed.

      UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's press office said earlier in two separate statements that he spoke on the telephone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mohamed Mursi of Egypt. "(Ban Ki-moon) expressed his concern (to Netanyahu) about the deteriorating situation in southern Israel and the Gaza Strip, which includes an alarming escalation of indiscriminate rocket fire from Gaza into Israel and the targeted killing by Israel of a Hamas military operative in Gaza," the United Nations said.

      Ban also voiced his expectation that "Israeli reactions are measured so as not to provoke a new cycle of bloodshed." He also discussed with Mursi "the need to prevent any further deterioration," the United Nations said.

Obama - The loyal servant of Israel

  

       US President Barack Obama also spoke with Netanyahu and Mursi and reiterated US support for Israel's right to self-defence in light of rocket attacks from Gaza, the White House said.  "The president urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to make every effort to avoid civilian casualties. The two agreed that Hamas needs to stop its attacks on Israel to allow the situation to de-escalate," the White House statement said.

      The emergency Security Council meeting came at the request of Egypt, Morocco and the Palestinians.  "Once again the international community is witness to Israel's malicious onslaught," the Palestinian Authority's UN envoy, Riyad Mansour, told the Security Council.

      "The Israeli occupying forces are now mobilizing on the ground as we speak," Mr Mansour said. "Fear and panic are spreading among the Palestinian civilian population."

The militant group Hamas, not the Palestinian Authority, controls Gaza.

      US Ambassador Susan Rice told the council there was "no justification for the violence that Hamas and other terrorist organizations are employing against the people of Israel," according to the written text of her statement. "We call on those responsible to stop these cowardly acts immediately."

     Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters as he left the council that "we need to see how the situation develops."

     A group of Arab ambassadors appeared before reporters ahead of the council meeting. Speaking on their behalf, Sudanese Ambassador Daffa-Alla Elhag Ali Osman urged the council to condemn Israel's "barbaric heinous attack."

      In a letter to the Security Council, Mansour also called for an end to "extrajudicial killing."  The council's failure to take any action was not a surprise. It is generally deadlocked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which envoys say is due to the US determination to protect Israel.  A new Gaza war has loomed for months as waves of Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli strikes have grown more intense and frequent.

     Mansour said the Israeli action was intended to draw attention away from the Palestinians' plan to seek an upgrade of its observer status at the United Nations from that of an "entity" to a "non-member state," implicitly recognizing Palestinian statehood.

      Israel and the United States have made clear they would oppose the Palestinian upgrade, which would give it the right to join international bodies like the International Criminal Court, where it could file legal complaints against Israel.

      UN diplomats said a vote on the Palestinian request was tentatively scheduled for Nov 29. A senior Western diplomat said the Palestinians would easily secure 120 to 130 votes out of the 193-nation General Assembly, which would ensure the success of their upgraded status at the United Nations.

Three Israelis killed by Hamas rocket

     A Hamas rocket killed three Israelis north of the Gaza Strip on Thursday, drawing the first blood from Israel.  Israeli police said the three died when a rocket hit a four-story building in the town of Kiryat Malachi, some 15 miles north of Gaza. "All the options are on the table, including the possibility of a ground operation," Israeli Army Spokeswoman Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibovich said.

      Israeli warplanes bombed targets in and around Gaza city, where tall buildings trembled. Plumes of smoke and dust furled into a sky laced with the vapour trails of outgoing rockets.

     Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement has claimed that one of its home-made missiles hit Tel Aviv on Wednesday night. It is the first time since the beginning of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that Palestinian rockets have hit the economic capital of Israel.
     Tel Aviv is 75km from the Gaza Strip and was occupied by the Israelis in 1948. As more than 400,000 Israeli live there, Israeli officials have warned that any Palestinian attack against the city will be considered as an unprecedented escalation in the conflict.
      A statement from Al-Qassam, published on its website, said: "The attack on Tel-al-Rabei' [Tel Aviv] is a primary response to the Israeli crimes against the Gaza Strip which have resulted in dozens of fatalities and hundreds wounded, including Ahmed Al-Jabari." The group pledged to make the life of Zionists "hell". "They will regret ever thinking about assassinating our leader," said the group. (HSH)

Sources: International News Agencies