Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine - Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967. Summary Gaza has again been the focus of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).
In response to the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit by Palestinian militants on 25 June 2006, and the continued firing of Qassam rockets into Israel, Israel conducted two major military operations within Gaza - “Operation Summer Rains” and “Operation Autumn Clouds”. In the course of these operations, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) made repeated military incursions into Gaza, accompanied by heavy artillery shelling and air-to-surface missile attacks. Missiles, shells and bulldozers destroyed or damaged homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, public buildings, bridges, water pipelines and electricity networks.
Agricultural lands were levelled by bulldozers. About 70 per cent of Gaza’s workforce is out of work or without pay and over 80 per cent of the population live below the official poverty line. The construction of settlements continues. Israel and the psychology of "never again" - Israel Flotilla Attack. Why does Israel continue to act against its own interests?
Over the years, and especially since 2006, the Jewish state’s deadly, over-the-top military actions in response to provocations from Hamas and Hezbollah — and now from a flotilla ferrying humanitarian aid to Gaza — have backfired. And in each case, the Jewish state has grown less secure by increasing its international isolation and fueling fury much closer to home.
Four summers ago, Israel’s war in Lebanon displaced a million people in an attempt to crush Hezbollah, which grew from the settling dust and resentment of an Israeli invasion a generation earlier. But the 2006 war only made Hezbollah stronger. Israel could have predicted such consequences. Then came another kind of confrontation, from a civilian flotilla armed with food, toys, books, medical supplies and a mission to break the blockade of Gaza. The unwillingness of the United States and the EU to break the stranglehold led directly to this week’s calamity. Israel, Extraordinary Rendition and the Strange Case of Dirar Abu Sisi. On a cold Ukrainian winter night in mid-February 2011, a Gaza civil engineer named Dirar Abu Sisi was lying in bed in a railroad sleeper car traveling to Kiev to visit his brother, Yousef, whom he hadn't seen in 15 years.
Abu Sisi had come to Ukraine as a refugee applying for Ukrainian citizenship. While there, he was staying with his wife's family, who are Ukrainian natives. Though he was the deputy chief of Gaza's only power plant, he and his wife, Veronika, increasingly felt that Gaza was an unsafe place to raise their six children. During his stay, he had formally applied for citizenship so that he might resettle his family in Ukraine.
But something strange happened that night on the train. Abu Sisi claimed in a prison interview with a Gaza human rights group that he was transferred to a private apartment in Kiev, where he was questioned by Israeli Mossad agents. In early March, a confidential Israeli source reported to me that Abu Sisi was in an Israeli prison. Israel and Palestine: Here comes your non-violent resistance.