The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression website is gone. Kevin Metcalf, a main contributor to CJFE, describes how the website – and his job – met a sudden death after the organization condemned the targeting of journalists in Gaza by Israel. Metcalf writes that this censorship was caused by public employees exerting “undue influence over a civil society group, on behalf of a foreign government.”
Crowds of young men went to the border area, setting tires on fire to create a smokescreen to obstruct the vision of Israeli snipers. They were met with gunfire and tear gas as they hurled stones at the heavily armed Israeli soldiers backed up by tanks and warplanes. Israel, which controls all of Gaza’s border crossings, airspace and waters, imposed a ban on the entry of tires, and Israeli forces brought huge fans and massive water cannons to extinguish the fires…
The US is in a toxic relationship that has made us indifferent on our best days, complicit in murder on our worst. Our mainstream media and our government join with Israel in bloodguilt.
The world was watching as peaceful Gazan protesters met heavily armed Israeli soldiers at the border Saturday. Responses to the violence range from full support to utter denial.
Even before the protest began, Israeli spokespeople framed it preemptively as a Hamas production, even though it was supported by Gaza civil society organizations and all political parties. Civilian Gazans’ willingness to walk to that fence measures their yearning to express themselves as humans and claim their freedom, even at immediate risk.
Israeli military snipers fired at hundreds of civilians, hitting over 750 and killing 15, but two Palestinians who dared return fire at the soldiers who were massacring them are “terrorists,” their actions labeled “terror attacks” and their sentence – death. The shooting on the Gaza border shows once again that the killing of Palestinians is accepted in Israel more lightly than the killing of mosquitoes
Israeli forces have killed seven unarmed Palestinians in Gaza as thousands march for freedom and to return to their homes. The “Great March of Return” has been organized by by civil society organizations and all political factions in the besieged enclave.
The Associated Press’s news story on the upcoming Great Return March echoes Israeli talking points…
Israeli forces are mobilizing against a mass peaceful protest by Palestinian families in Gaza demonstrating for their right of return to land that Israel has confiscated for Jewish only habitation… Their demands: “to be let out from the cage you have bound them in, to fish without being shot, to return to the village that you have torn down, to travel outside the barbed wire you surround them with… The Israeli cabinet has issued a “shoot to kill” policy.
A boy who threw stones at IDF jeeps suffered the punishment of execution by a soldier; it was the third time in recent weeks that soldiers aimed at stone-throwers’ heads.