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. Beit Hanoun was the subject of particularly heavy attacks, and on 8 November 19 civilians were killed and 55 wounded in an artillery attack. The construction of settlements continues. Israel and the psychology of "never again" - Israel Flotilla Attack | Gaza 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. In 1988, it tried to weaken Yasser Arafat and his secular PLO by encouraging the growth of Hamas and its Islamic adherents. This “enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy didn’t work either, leading to years of attacks and reprisals and, eventually, to the 2009 war in Gaza. 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. Just outside the village of Poltava, two policemen rousted Abu Sisi from bed and took him away, according to a witness in the bunk under Abu Sisi, who saw the entire incident unfold. 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.