“Urgent … international action towards a mandatory, comprehensive military embargo against Israel.”

Though directly motivated by Israel’s latest war of aggression against the 1.6 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, the statement is also a reaction to Israel’s decades-old military occupation and persistent denial of the UN-sanctioned rights of the Palestinian people.

The statement signed by Nobel Peace laureates Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Perez Esquível, former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters, Directors Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker, international best-seller Naomi Klein and co-drafter of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Holocaust survivor Stéphane Hessel, among others, adds that “Israel’s attempt to justify this kind of illegal use of belligerent and disproportionate military force as “self-defence” does not stand up to legal – or moral – scrutiny, as states cannot invoke self-defence for acts that serve to defend an unlawful situation which they have created in the first place.”

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stay-human:

26th November, 2012

GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — A Palestinian man on Monday died of wounds sustained in an Israeli strike that killed two of his relatives on the first day of Israel’s military offensive on the Gaza Strip.

Ahmad Ali Masharawi sustained major burns when an Israeli missile hit his garden in Gaza City on Nov. 14. His infant nephew, 11-month-old, Omar Masharawi, was killed immediately, as was his pregnant sister-in-law Hiba Mashharawi Turk.

BBC correspondent Paul Danahar wrote on Twitter that Ahmad Masharawi had been trying to carry Omar to safety when the house was hit engulfing them both in flames.

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What’s that? The world’s forgotten Gaza again?

‘In Jerusalem tonight, Israel’s Prime Minister hinted at more severe military action if the new ceasefire doesn’t hold’, we were told in the televised news on the ceasefire. It is yet another example of BBC journalists not holding a critical eye on power, like last week when Jonathan Marcus wrote of Netanyahu’s ‘choice’ to establish a ‘policy of targeted killings’. Now, Netanyahu may flippantly ‘hint’ at ‘more severe military action’ without scrutiny applied to the praise of his ‘peace-bringing’ role offered by Obama et al.

During the last week BBC’s journalists in Gaza have provided an exceptional level of reporting throughout the conflict, their twitter accounts a valuable resource in keeping up-to-date with events inside Gaza. This standard, however, does not extend to the reports on the BBC website, which instead rely heavily on the rhetoric of ‘officials’ and politicians.

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Heart-wrenching personal account from on the ground in Gaza.