GAZANS MARK THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF THE WAR

Saleh Hasan

GAZA STRIP, Dec 28 (Bernama) -- On Monday, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
marked the second anniversary of the three-week Israeli offensive launched on
Dec 27, 2008 which led to the current blockade of this narrow strip measuring 40
km long and 10 km wide.

That assault had claimed the lives of about 1,419 Palestinians and left
thousands homeless after their houses were destroyed.

Hundreds of Gaza families are now living in shelters and tents because of
the blockade, which prevents construction materials from entering into Gaza,
which has a population of about 1.5 million squeezed into an area of about 400
sq km, making it one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

The Israelis decided to wage war in an attempt to "curb the rockets fired
from Gaza Strip by Palestinian militants on Israel".

But Hamas, the Islamic movement which won the Palestinian Parliament
election in 2006 and later seized Gaza Strip from its rival Fatah, the faction
led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in 2007, had always denied
that Israeli claim.


Hamas said the Israeli offensive was to punish Palestinians who voted for
the resistance programme against Israel.

Israel has for many years restricted entry to and exit from Gaza, but it
intensified its blockade of Gaza in June 2007, after Hamas came into power in
order to isolate Hamas.

Gazans had been taking part in several ceremonies to commemorate the
anniversary.

In the northern Gaza Strip, dozens of Palestinians together with some Hamas
members of Parliament and other leaders of the Palestinian national factions
gathered to honour their "martyrs" by planting palm and olive tress bearing
their pictures.

The project was implemented by the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Agriculture
and by the Gaza Authority of Environment.


"This project aims to plant 100,000 tress of olive and palm and this number
represents the number of our martyrs who were murdered in the Israeli aggression
throughout the history of Palestine", said Dr Ibraheem Youssef, Chairman of the
Authority of Environment in Gaza.

In the Ezbit Abed Rabbo area, where hundreds of houses were bombed and
demolished then, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP) rallied to light candles during a protest against the absence of
international justice.

The demonstrators also called on the international community to prosecute
Israeli leaders involved in war crimes.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) has meanwhile issued a
statement condemning the fact that Gaza remained sealed off from the outside
world.

It also said that of the 1,419 Palestinians killed during the offensive, 83
per cent were civillians, and a further 5,300 were injured.


Meanwhile, masked militants from Palestinian armed factions told a news
conference here that they were fully prepared to confront any Israeli threat and
that the forces of the Israeli occupation would come to regret if they invaded
any area in the Gaza Strip.

"The Palestinian resistance cannot be defeated and the occupation does not
understand any language except the language of power," said a spokesman for the
masked militants.

Some Gazans who survived the offensive still have bitter memories etched in
their minds. Mustafa Ahmed, 28, who has been working as a police officer, cannot
forget some of the horrors during the war.

He was among hundreds of policemen who were taking part in exercises at the
Hamas police station in Gaza City before Israeli warplanes rained bombs.

But he was lucky to get a permission from his officer to leave the station
20 minutes before the bombardment in order to take his sick daughter to the
Al-Shifa hospital.

"Once I arrived at the hospital, I heard the sounds of the air strikes
but I
never expected that these strikes were targeting our area," Mustafa recalled.

The policeman was terribly shocked as he identified the bodies of his
comrades that were brought to the hospital.

"Fate was the main reason behind my survival," said Mustafa while holding a
poster of his dead comrades.

Mahmoud Matter, a Palestinian schoolboy blinded by shrapnels from the
Israeli missile attacks, has been suffering chronic pains from his wounds.

The boy was making his way to buy bread for his family and little did he
know then that it would be a walk that would cost him his eyesight.

His broken-hearted mother always blames herself for asking her son to get
bread.

"If I had known about the consequences, I would not have asked him to go
outside our home even for a minute."

Mahmoud frequently questions himself why he was hit.

"My only guilt was carrying a sack of bread which could threaten Israeli
security, so they had to target me," he said sardonically.

-- BERNAMA