The facts I collected over winter break as I was following the war in Gaza.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, said he was "outraged" by the attack on the UN compound and demanded an explanation as he met Israeli officials in Tel Aviv

Israel has been occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the 1967 War, ignoring the Fourth Geneva Conventions and over eighty United Nations General Assembly Resolutions.

The Israeli military controls the movement of the nearly four million Palestinians through a system of checkpoints, roadblocks, and segregated roads.

The Israeli Army exercises virtually unchecked freedom to detain, threaten, arrest, inprison, torture, and even kill Palestinians, often without charge or trial.

The Israeli government sponsors the transfer of Jewish Israeli citizens from Israel to Israeli colonies in the Palestinian Territories known a-settlements.

Israeli settlers suffer no legal consequences for building new settlements or expanding existing ones on internationally recognized Palestinian land, or for threatening or physically attacking Palestinians.

The "Security Fence" that is currently under construction by Israel in the name of preventing terrorism in fact weaves through, not around, the West Bank, with the primary effect of separating hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians from their land and from each other.


Speaking from Ankara, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, said Israel should be barred from the United Nations while it continues to ignore UN demands to end the fighting in Gaza.

"How is such a country, which totally ignores and does not implement resolutions of the UN Security Council, allowed to enter through the gates of the UN?" he said.

"The UN building in Gaza was hit while the UN secretary general was in Israel... this is an open challenge to the world, teasing the world," he said.]

[friday jan 16]
Many of the more than 40,000 pregnant women in Gaza are unable to leave their homes for medical treatment because of the Israeli onslaught and hospitals swamped with the thousands of injured.

Every year, billions of American tax-dollars are funneled to the Israeli military, which uses most of the money to purchase American-madeweapons.


Fact compiled from Al Jazeera News

http://www.btselem.org/eng

lish/Gaza_Strip
http://electronicintifada.

net/v2/article4933.shtml
http://www.mepeace.org/for

um/topics/the-true-story-b

ehind-this-war
http://www.unitedforpeace.

org/downloads/If%20Gaza%20

falls.pdf
http://electronicintifada.

net/v2/article10055.shtml