Israel Massacres Gaza

Settler Jews from Europe launch missile attacks on Gaza (Al-Jazeera)

Gaza Mosque hit by Israeli air forces, they try to spin it, as usual.

Left: Smoke and fire are seen after the Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip.

Israel said it had bombed a mosque in Gaza City on Saturday because it was used for "terrorist activities."

Palestinian medical workers said two Palestinians were killed in the attack, one of a series of Israeli air strikes on Gaza that killed 227 Palestinians in a 12-hour period.

An Israeli military spokesman said Israel had sought to avoid attacking religious institutions but "anyone responsible for attacks (on Israel) will not find refuge in any facility."

The spokesman said the mosque was situated in the city's Rimal district. He said Hamas rockets had struck Israeli houses of worship, and that one fired on Saturday had damaged a synagogue.

Left: Bodies of Hamas policemen lie on the ground of their destroyed police compound following an Israeli air strike in Gaza December 27, 2008. Israeli air strikes in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Saturday killed at least 195 Palestinians, health officials in Gaza said. (Reuters/Zoher Dolah [GAZA])

On December 27th and 28th Israeli air strikes targeted police stations and other infrastructure in Gaza killing at least 300 people and injuring a thousand, with 200 critically wounded. As the strikes continue the death toll is expected to increase.

Egypt has offered to open the Rafah crossing at its border with Gaza on a limited basis to receive wounded Palestinians. The Egyptian government's cooperation with Israel's blockade of Gaza has been very unpopular among Egyptians and Hamas has suggested that ending such cooperation could be a main focus of its response. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said on Saturday:

Left: A Palestinian bombing victim carries a wounded child after Israeli missile strikes in Gaza City.

"The simplest response to the massacre today is to reopen Rafah crossing once and for all. I tell our Arab brothers that the simplest response to the massacre is to end the siege." Exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal called on Saturday for Palestinians to wage a new intifada against Israel, including a return to suicide missions.

Protests against the Israeli bombing and invasion are taking place all through the Middle-East and Palestine. In occupied Palestine hundreds of Arabs and Jews took to the streets of Tel-Aviv to protest the massacre in Gaza yelling “no one can tell us that this massacre is suppose to protect us.” The apartheid Israeli police were extremely violent and six people were detained.

Ali Abunimah on The Electronic Intifada writes: US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplanes and Apache helicopters dropped over 100 bombs on dozens of locations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip killing at least 195 persons and injuring hundreds more. Many of these locations were police stations located, like police stations the world over, in the middle of civilian areas. The US government was one of the first to offer its support for Israel's attacks, and others will follow.

Left: Palestinians carry a body from the rubble following the missile strikes.

Reports said that many of the dead were Palestinian police officers however at least a third of the victims were civilians. Among those Israel labels "terrorists" were more than a dozen traffic police officers undergoing training. An as yet unknown number of civilians were killed and injured; Al Jazeera showed images of several dead children, and the Israeli attacks came at the time thousands of Palestinian children were in the streets on their way home from school.

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Egypt to recall its ambassador to Tel Aviv, after what Egyptian officials described as "murder," reported the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. However, this subterfuge by the Egyptian is merely a ploy to deflect their complicity with the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Egypt is against Hamas as they are seen by the government as allies of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization outlawed in Egypt.

In the photograph above, Egyptian riot police stand guard as protestors shout slogans during a demonstration in front of the journalists' syndicate in Cairo against the Israeli bombardment on the Gaza Strip. Egypt condemned as "murder" Israel's air raids on Gaza that killed at least 300 Palestinians, offering to open its Rafah border crossing with the territory to allow the wounded through for treatment. Apparently, Egypt is mounting a public relations campaign to bolster its image in the Arab world with these latent Gaza loving maneuvers. Hamas has since rejected the offer from Egypt.