nhboy
Ubi bene ibi patria
Source.
"So much for President Obama’s appeal for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. So much for the United Nations. So much for an incursion limited to destroying Hamas’s tunnels into Israel. On Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces stepped up the assault on Gaza, bombing more than a hundred targets, including the Finance Ministry, two Hamas-controlled television stations, some buildings in Gaza City’s harbor, and the territory’s only power station.
The resumption of hostilities came after a temporary truce ended and Hamas fired more rockets into Israel. In a television address on Monday night, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, told Israelis to prepare for a lengthy battle. Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, said that the offensive was being “intensified,” and that was certainly how it seemed to residents and reporters in Gaza.
On Tuesday, large plumes of smoke arose from storage tanks at Gaza’s sole power station, which was hit by Israeli shelling. “The power plant is finished,” its director told reporters. Already forced to endure lengthy power cuts, many Gaza residents now face the prospect of having no electricity at all. (The territory imports some electricity from Israel, but many power lines have been damaged in the bombing.) The Gaza City municipality said that the bombing could also impact the local water supply, which relies on power pumps, and it told residents to limit their consumption.
Meanwhile, the casualty count continues to rise. More than a hundred Gaza residents were killed in Tuesday’s attacks, according to local officials, including an undetermined number of children. All told, during the three-week campaign, more than eleven hundred Palestinians have lost their lives, and more than six thousand five hundred have been wounded, officials in Gaza say. On Israel’s side, three civilians and fifty-three soldiers have been killed."
.....
"If that means making a break with the United States and the military aid it provides, some conservative Israelis, and conservative supporters of Israel in this country, are ready to go there. “The experience of the Obama years has sharpened the perception among pro-Israel Americans that aid can cut against Israel by giving presidents with bad ideas more leverage than they would otherwise have,” Noah Pollak, the executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel (E.C.I.), a group that has been highly critical of Obama, recently told Eli Lake, of The Daily Beast.
In Lake’s article, which was titled “Some of Israel’s Top Defenders Say It’s Time To End U.S. Aid,” he also quoted Elliott Abrams, the neocon ex-Bush Administration official, as saying, “Israel should be less dependent on American financial assistance,” and Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economics minister and the head of the right-wing Jewish Home Party, who remarked last year, “Today, U.S. military aid is roughly one per cent of Israel’s economy. I think, generally, we need to free ourselves from it.”
"So much for President Obama’s appeal for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. So much for the United Nations. So much for an incursion limited to destroying Hamas’s tunnels into Israel. On Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces stepped up the assault on Gaza, bombing more than a hundred targets, including the Finance Ministry, two Hamas-controlled television stations, some buildings in Gaza City’s harbor, and the territory’s only power station.
The resumption of hostilities came after a temporary truce ended and Hamas fired more rockets into Israel. In a television address on Monday night, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, told Israelis to prepare for a lengthy battle. Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, said that the offensive was being “intensified,” and that was certainly how it seemed to residents and reporters in Gaza.
On Tuesday, large plumes of smoke arose from storage tanks at Gaza’s sole power station, which was hit by Israeli shelling. “The power plant is finished,” its director told reporters. Already forced to endure lengthy power cuts, many Gaza residents now face the prospect of having no electricity at all. (The territory imports some electricity from Israel, but many power lines have been damaged in the bombing.) The Gaza City municipality said that the bombing could also impact the local water supply, which relies on power pumps, and it told residents to limit their consumption.
Meanwhile, the casualty count continues to rise. More than a hundred Gaza residents were killed in Tuesday’s attacks, according to local officials, including an undetermined number of children. All told, during the three-week campaign, more than eleven hundred Palestinians have lost their lives, and more than six thousand five hundred have been wounded, officials in Gaza say. On Israel’s side, three civilians and fifty-three soldiers have been killed."
.....
"If that means making a break with the United States and the military aid it provides, some conservative Israelis, and conservative supporters of Israel in this country, are ready to go there. “The experience of the Obama years has sharpened the perception among pro-Israel Americans that aid can cut against Israel by giving presidents with bad ideas more leverage than they would otherwise have,” Noah Pollak, the executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel (E.C.I.), a group that has been highly critical of Obama, recently told Eli Lake, of The Daily Beast.
In Lake’s article, which was titled “Some of Israel’s Top Defenders Say It’s Time To End U.S. Aid,” he also quoted Elliott Abrams, the neocon ex-Bush Administration official, as saying, “Israel should be less dependent on American financial assistance,” and Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economics minister and the head of the right-wing Jewish Home Party, who remarked last year, “Today, U.S. military aid is roughly one per cent of Israel’s economy. I think, generally, we need to free ourselves from it.”
