"The beauty of Gaza" 22.5 days per capita

 The apartheid regime of the modern era dips to another low point of barbarity. ----RT:An Israeli soldier accused of killing a Palestinian mother and daughter carrying a white flag during Operation Cast Lead will serve just 45 days in prison. He agreed to a plea bargain and had his charge downgraded to “illegal use of weapon”.

­The plea bargain on the reduced charge – down from manslaughter – was approved on Sunday by a military court in Jaffa.

The investigation into the killing of a 64-year-old mother and her 35 year-old daughter, shot while walking with a group of Palestinians holding white flags after their home was bombed, was opened following a complaint filed by Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
The incident happened on January 4, 2009, during the Israeli Operation Cast Lead.
It happened when a group of Gaza civilians carrying makeshift white flags approached an IDF position manned by Givati soldiers, including the unnamed infantry sergeant, identified by Israeli media as "Staff Sergeant S”.
“S” opened fire on the group, without an order from his commanding officer.
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By now “S” is the only Israeli soldier to face manslaughter charges for suspected unlawful killings during Israel’s war against Gaza in 2008-2009.
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The human rights group has called for independent investigations into some 20 cases involving the killings of 92 Palestinians. Instead, they say, the military launched its own investigation into 11 deaths, including the “S” case.
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War crimes is what it is.

'Cast Lead' was the invasion by Israel of Gaza where they bombed the Palestinian parliament, shelled clearly marked United Nations schools with chemical weapons etc, etc, etc, taking the opportunity over the Christams - New Year holidays and the inter-regnum between Bush leaving and Obama being sworn in to terrorise and murder their way through the refugee camps. And all the while the NZ Foreign Minister, Murray McCully, was on holiday and didn't want to make any statements on the subject. Very soon after this the NZ government invited the Israelis to set up an embassy.

Last year former PM Geoffrey Palmer then went on to excuse the murders in the Israeli assault and hijacking of relief vessels heading to Gaza who were in international waters in the Mediterranean.

The stooges of the NZ government are doing the bidding of the US and Israelis in a very blatant fashion, yet the NZ media prefer to conceal the extent of this abrogation of independence from the public and peddle the regime line that we can hold our head up high and that we are well respected. If we are we certainly don't deserve to be. Like y'know... when we chaired the UN Security Council when the Rwanda genocide was going down and sat on our hands?

Won't hear about that in NZ. Won't hear a cross word anywhere when your hands are over your ears chanting "La, la, la, la, la we've got the best race relations in the world, la, la, la, la, la!" repeatedly in the foetal position while the looming reality that the NZ regime can never have a Maori Prime Minister and can never implement the Treaty or the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous people or put the country on the decolonisation schedule inevitably inches closer to a denoument.

But back to the other colonial entity and the consequences and practices of their confiscation and occupation policy:

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The death toll from the three-week Gaza War was 1,417 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. Four of the latter are believed to have died from friendly fire.

Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that of those Palestinians killed, 926 were civilians, including 429 women and children. 236 were combatants and 255 were members of the Palestinian security forces.
Back in 2009 The Times published an anonymous account of deliberate killings of Gaza civilians.
The soldiers' testimonies included accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot from a rooftop while crossing a main street during the fighting.
"I don't know whether she was suspicious, not suspicious, I don't know her story," one non-commissioned officer was quoted as saying to Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy. "I do know that my officer sent people to the roof in order to take her out… It was cold-blooded murder."

He then revealed how soldiers were clearing houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight.

"When we entered a house, we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside and just go up story by story… I call that murder. Each story, if we identify a person, we shoot them. I asked myself – how is this reasonable?"
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"That's the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn't have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him," said one soldier after being asked why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.

According to The Times, IDF troops also used Palestinian children as human shields to check for traps and explosives. The soldiers, who ordered a nine-year-old boy to open bags suspected of containing explosives, were charged in 2010 with “inappropriate behavior and overstepping authority.”
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