Ynet

6th January, 2009

Demonstrations in Israel’s main regional ally Turkey led swelling Muslim protests Sunday over the ground offensive in Gaza.

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Safa Joudeh writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 5 January 2009

A Hamas fighter in the Gaza Strip, October 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

The evening of 3 January, we realized that if there was any truth to Israeli war minister Ehud Barak’s words, it’s that this invasion will be a long one. At approximately 9:15pm local time Israeli forces entered the Strip from three locations. From the east of Gaza City and the northern towns of Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya, tanks rolled into the Palestinian residential areas while Israeli F-16s created a cover from the sky. At the same time, Israeli tanks and infantry troops entered Rafah from the southeast, while tanks shelling and artillery fire rained on the Mintar area of Gaza City. Israeli warships were simultaneously barraging Gaza City from the sea. The entire Strip was surrounded and being heavily pounded by Israeli missiles and artillery fire.

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Al-Manar TV

06/01/2009 …It’s the eleventh day of the Israeli offensive on Gaza and the fourth day of the ground operation. 11 days have passed and Israel has so failed to achieve any clear objective; a reason to dump all calls for ceasefire. On the ninth of January, PA chief Mahmoud Abbas’s term ends and on the twentieth of January US President Barack Obama takes the oath. Time is not in Israel’s favor as elections are a few weeks ahead. The political confusion has been reflected recently on the battleground in Gaza. Israeli elite soldiers are getting killed, at least 3 on Monday night alone and settlers are still haunted by Palestinian resistance rockets. Practically, nothing has changed in Gaza for Israel to save face. The stigma of Israel’s blood thirst in Gaza, however, adds another paragraph to the books of Israel’s reference to massacres. Read the rest of this entry »

STOP THE WAR ON GAZA

Stop Israel’s crime against humanity

Scotland-wide Demonstration

Please circulate this email as widely as possible

Edinburgh

Saturday 10 January 2009

Assemble 12:30pm East Market Street (behind Edinburgh Waverley Train Station)

March through the city centre and to the US Consulate.

Bring in-date medicine for Gaza, and spare shoes.

Supported by Stop the War Scotland, Glasgow and Edinburgh, Pauline McNeil MSP, Sandra White MSP, Muslim Association of Britain, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Glasgow Palestine Human Rights Campaign, Lebanese Community Scotland, Scottish Afghan Society, Scottish Islamic Foundation, Scottish Friends of Palestine, and others to be confirmed.

Stop the Massacre: Israel out of Gaza: End the Blockade: Free Palestine

From Stop the War’s national call for demonstrations:

500 dead. Thousands injured. United States blocks UN call to stop the carnage.

This ground attack is intended to turn Gaza into Israeli killing fields. Within hours of troops entering Gaza, hospitals reported that 23 people had been killed and that twenty of them were civilians.

Demonstrations across the world call for an immediate stop to the carnage. Every country in the world bar one wants the killing and destruction to stop now. But just as it did in the Lebanon War in 2006, The United States has given the green light to Israel to intensify its barbarism.

The US is blocking all UN diplomacy for an immediate ceasefire with the tacit compliance of the British government, which calls for an immediate ceasefire while at the same time endorsing America’s refusal to allow any discussion in the United Nations to achieve this end.

When Israel broke the six month ceasefire on November 4, it was the trigger for this long planned invasion, deliberately timed for the last few weeks of George Bush’s presidency and a few weeks before Israeli elections, in which all the leading politicians are competing as to how many Palestinians they can kill.

We urge all of our supporters to do all keep informed about our activities at the website www.stopwar.org.uk and by subscribing to our regular newsletters. Everyone who is shocked and outraged by Israel’s barbarity, and the prospect of hundreds more Palestinian civilians being killed by the fourth most powerful military in the world, should commit themselves to helping mobilise for the protests in the coming week and for making the national demonstrations on Saturday 10 January in Edinburgh and London the biggest yet seen in this country for the freedom of Palestine.

Send items for the next edition of the newsletter to edinburghstw@tiscali.co.uk

Go to www.stopwar.org.uk for more info on the Stop the War Coalition and its activities