UN: Israeli buffer zone eats up 30 percent of Gaza's arable land »
Posted By dissent 5 months, 4 weeks ago in NewsGaza City, Gaza - Israel's warning came from the sky, as it often does in the Gaza Strip. But this time warplanes dropped neither bombs nor missiles on the impoverished Palestinian territory, but thousands of tiny leaflets warning Gaza's residents to keep away from the 30-mile-long border they share with Israel.
Stay at least 300 meters (1,000 feet) from the border, the May 25 pamphlets advised Palestinians, or risk being shot by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Once a plush scene of rolling olive, citrus, and pomegranate groves, much of the border region is now just a barren landscape, marked only by the presence of IDF tanks, military watchtowers, and the occasional pop of gunfire.
Farmers and their families have been displaced, too afraid to return to their fields, while international humanitarian organizations are unable to make an assessment of the needs and damages of the area in the aftermath of the assault.
"We haven't been able to visit this area. No organization has," says Mohammed al-Shattali, project manager for the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in the Gaza Strip.
"The war increased the amount of land destroyed, particularly in the border areas, and the farmers can't replant anything because it's too dangerous," he says. "The Israeli soldiers, they shoot at everything – dogs, sheep. They are very tense."
Read Full Story at csmonitor.com »
397 Views Share Story 45 Comments Report
Submitted By:
dissent
we live in a culture of war.
let's make it a culture of peace.
"my country is the world. and my religion is to ...
Who Also Submitted:
RSS Join the Discussion
+ Add CommentComments So Far: 45 (view all)
-
-
100%
Justice4All5 months, 4 weeks ago
-
0%
Commodore15 months, 4 weeks ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
Yes, I agree w/U Thinker22. All the Palestinians have to do is negotiate and try to make a better deal. Complaining and griping will do nothing to gain more land. Since Palestinians and 98% of all other arabs have no credibility we all know this won't happen. Of course the IDF is shooting at anything. When all of your neighbors want to exterminate U then I think that would make a nation trigger happy. Terrorist actions certainly have done nothing to achieve more land or any kind of a better deal. How long will it be before the Palestinians figure that out? Forever?
Reply-
100%
hyperbola5 months, 4 weeks ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
No point in negotiating with thieves and ethnic cleansers. Time for an international court to return land and property to its real owners.
Reply
Sderot - A town built on the ashes of an ethnically cleansed and defaced Palestinian village
We’ve been hearing a lot lately about Sderot, a town that has become the centrepiece of Israeli propaganda. Israeli spokesmen, and Israel’s stooges in the media and among politicians in Britain, the European Union and the United States, repeat ad nauseum the mantra about Palestinian home-made rockets "raining down" on Sderot, although only 1 in 500 causes a fatality. It is a mantra that has been used to justify the countless thousands of Israeli bombs, missiles, grenades and tank shells that are blasted into Gaza's tight-packed humanity. Bu what do we know about Sderot? Below is an insight into the town's history.
Israeli land thieves built Sderot on the ashes of an ethnically cleansed and defaced Palestinian village called Najd.
Sderot was settled by Jews in 1951. In All That Remains, Walid Khalidi says that Sderot, along with the settlement of Or ha-Ner, founded in 1957, were established on the village lands of Najd, which means "elevated plain" in Arabic.
According to Umkhalil, Najd's Palestinian villagers, approximately 620 in 1945, were expelled on 13 May 1948, before Israel was declared a state and before any Arab armies entered Palestine. UN Resolution 194 and also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, Section 2, stipulate that the villagers of Najd have a right to return home to their personal property and to their native village.
Najd is 14 kilometres from Gaza. Palestinian Arabs own 12,669 dunums in Najd, although Israel refuses to honour their rights to their personal property, and refuses them their inalienable right to return home. In 1945 Jews owned 495 dunums of land in Najd and public lands consisted of 412 dunums.
In short, Sderot is an illegally occupied territory stolen from Palestinians.
Israeli Goebbels: Stop lying to the world about needing to defend what is not rightfully yours. You're worse than bank robbers saying they have a right to defend their loot!
http://205.188.101.197/story/2009/01/29/sderot-a-t...
-
-
0%
truthiness5 months, 4 weeks ago
-
100%
hyperbola5 months, 4 weeks ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
Ah, the zionist blooming desert myth again truthi?
Reply
Fact is that Palestine was renowned for production of fruit and vegetables, even strawberries, centuries before the zionists turned up and started speading their silly propaganda.
Isn't it true that Palestine was destitute until Israelis made its desert bloom?
http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-...
As it will be proven below based on British Mandatory statistical books and other sources, this myth about Palestine and its indigenous people was concocted to romanticize the "Jewish return and redemption of the Promised Land". Let's get a detailed accounting of the agricultural production in Palestine for the season of 1944-1945, we will directly quote the British Mandate (who prepared two volume books, titled Survey of Palestine, for the United Nations in 1946-7) as follows:
(see original article for table)
Let's contemplate the following lands statistics about Palestine (based on CIA's WorldFact Book) before we draw any conclusions.
(see original article for table)
Based on these statistics, it is clear that the indigenous population planted 13 times more than newly immigrated European colonizers, which explains why the majority of them preferred to work in the services and manufacturing industries. It should be emphasized that the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund provided lots of subsidies and incentives (such as free consultation, loans, and attractive long term lease programs) to encourage Jews to "redeem" the land. On the other hand, Palestinian agriculture was profitable and sustainable without any assistance from the local government.
It should be emphasized that Jews owned under 7% of Palestine of which only 44% was used for agricultural purposes by Jews (click here to see the exact scanned page from Survey of Palestine p. 376). In this regards, we ask the reader how could this myth be true if Jews cultivated under 3% of Palestine?
Soon after Nakba, the victorious Jews destroyed most of the usurped Palestinian farms and groves, especially the olive and orange groves that required extensive labor to maintain and harvest. In this regards, it is worth quoting the Israeli Zionist writer Meron Benvenisti who described the Palestinian landscape soon after Nakba as follows: -
100%
dissent5 months, 4 weeks ago
-
Add a Comment
Sign In With Your Propeller Account
Please keep your comments relevant to this story.
To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.