Unsurprisingly, considering their agenda, these figures do not detail how many Palestinians were killed by Palestinians. Particularly given that this figure usually comes close to, or exceeds the number killed by Israel.

Also, do the numbers of Palestinians "killed by Israel" include those who blew themselves up? They have in previous such 'reports' which are often little more than Arab propoganda.

The Palestinians could have peace any time they want.

truth seeker, what ever that means. if you bothered to look at b'tselem's website you will find a complete breakdown of deaths and killings, including palestinians killed by other palestinians. for 2006 the total was 55. not anywhere close to the number killed by israel. you don't want the truth, you are just a nasty anti-jewish idiot. peace will come from both sides in this mess, and your provocative rubbish incites hatred rather than supporting understanding and reconciliation. you don't know what the truth is.

"considering their agenda, these figures do not detail how many Palestinians were killed by Palestinians"

Not very many. Despite the Mossad's recent attempt at fomenting civil war - in the same manner the Aggressors did in Iraq - this count remains low.

"Particularly given that this figure usually comes close to, or exceeds the number killed by Israel"

LIAR.

"Also, do the numbers of Palestinians "killed by Israel" include those who blew themselves up?"

No, and since the Palestinians, until very recently, held true to a 2-year, unilaterial cease-fire, there hasn't been very many cases of these acts, period.

"The Palestinians could have peace any time they want."

That's another LIE. They won't have peace until the world or the Israeli People strip the Zionist Extremists from power. After all, these Fascists don't view Arabs as human, and this is their war to wipe Palestine off the map.

UNICEF stated in a recent report that this has been one of the worst years for Palestinian children. When you consider the Extremists currently serving as Israel's rulers, who do not view Arabs as human, is it any wonder?
Killing children is no longer a big deal
By Gideon Levy

More than 30 Palestinian children were killed in the first two weeks of Operation Days of Penitence in the Gaza Strip. It's no wonder that many people term such wholesale killing of children "terror." Whereas in the overall count of all the victims of the intifada the ratio is three Palestinians killed for every Israeli killed, when it comes to children the ratio is 5:1. According to B'Tselem, the human rights organization, even before the current operation in Gaza, 557 Palestinian minors (below the age of 18) were killed, compared to 110 Israeli minors.

Palestinian human rights groups speak of even higher numbers: 598 Palestinian children killed (up to age 17), according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, and 828 killed (up to age 18) according to the Red Crescent. Take note of the ages, too. According to B'Tselem, whose data are updated until about a month ago, 42 of the children who have been killed were 10; 20 were seven; and eight were two years old when they died. The youngest victims are 13 newborn infants who died at checkpoints during birth.

With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very burdensome for every Israeli. Yet it is not on the public agenda. Child killers are always the Palestinians, the soldiers always only defend us and themselves, and the hell with the statistics.

The plain fact, which must be stated clearly, is that the blood of hundreds of Palestinian children is on our hands. No tortuous explanation by the IDF Spokesman's Office or by the military correspondents about the dangers posed to soldiers by the children, and no dubious excuse by the public relations people in the Foreign Ministry about how the Palestinians are making use of children will change that fact. An army that kills so many children is an army with no restraints, an army that has lost its moral code.

As MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash) said, in a particularly emotional speech in the Knesset, it is no longer possible to claim that all these children were killed by mistake. An army doesn't make more than 500 day-to-day mistakes of identity. No, this is not a mistake but the disastrous result of a policy driven mainly by an appallingly light trigger finger and by the dehumanization of the Palestinians. Shooting at everything that moves, including children, has become normative behavior. Even the momentary mini-furor that erupted over the "confirming of the killing" of a 13-year-old girl, Iman Alhamas, did not revolve around the true question. The scandal should have been generated by the very act of the killing itself, not only by what followed.

Iman was not the only one. Mohammed Aaraj was eating a sandwich in front of his house, the last house before the cemetery of the Balata refugee camp, in Nablus, when a soldier shot him to death at fairly close range. He was six at the time of his death. Kristen Saada was in her parents' car, on the way home from a family visit, when soldiers sprayed the car with bullets. She was 12 at the time of her death. The brothers Jamil and Ahmed Abu Aziz were riding their bicycles in full daylight, on their way to buy sweets, when they sustained a direct hit from a shell fired by an Israeli tank crew. Jamil was 13, Ahmed six, at the time of their deaths.

Muatez Amudi and Subah Subah were killed by a soldier who was standing in the village square in Burkin and fired every which way in the wake of stone-throwing. Radir Mohammed from Khan Yunis refugee camp was in a school classroom when soldiers shot her to death. She was 12 when she died. All of them were innocent of wrongdoing and were killed by soldiers acting in our name.

At least in some of these cases it was clear to the soldiers that they were shooting at children, but that didn't stop them. Palestinian children have no refuge: mortal danger lurks for them in their homes, in their schools and on their streets. Not one of the hundreds of children who have been killed deserved to die, and the responsibility for their killing cannot remain anonymous. Thus the message is conveyed to the soldiers: it's no tragedy to kill children and none of you is guilty.

Death is, of course, the most acute danger that confronts a Palestinian child, but it is not the only one. According to data of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, 3,409 schoolchildren have been wounded in the intifada, some of them crippled for life. The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian youngsters is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to horror. Their homes are demolished, their parents are humiliated in front of their eyes, soldiers storm into their homes brutally in the middle of the night, tanks open fire on their classrooms. And they don't have a psychological service. Have you ever heard of a Palestinian child who is a "victim of anxiety"?

The public indifference that accompanies this pageant of unrelieved suffering makes all Israelis accomplices to a crime. Even parents, who understand what anxiety for a child's fate means, turn away and don't want to hear about the anxiety harbored by the parent on the other side of the fence. Who would have believed that Israeli soldiers would kill hundreds of children and that the majority of Israelis would remain silent? Even the Palestinian children have become part of the dehumanization campaign: killing hundreds of them is no longer a big deal.

www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=489479

UNICEF: 2006 One of The Worst Years for Palestine Children


JERUSALEM, December 14, 2006 (WAFA) - United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said that 123 Palestinian children have been killed since outbreak of hostilities, more than double the 2005 figure., adding that some 340 children remain in detention facilities.

UNICEF said Wednesday in a report that 2006 has been one of the worst years for children. "Across oPt, the conflict and closures, the withholding of resources and suspension in funding to the Palestinian Authority, as well as the strike by some public sector workers, have collectively blocked the fulfillment of children's rights," it said.

This year, says UNICEF, whether it is health care and education, protection from violence and abuse, or opportunities to play without fear - the rights of Palestinian children have been violated on an unprecedented scale.

The events of 2006 have impacted children in ways that will take years to unravel. Sonic booms, incursions and shelling created a context of extreme violence, stress and fear for children and their families, says the report.

"The summer, rather than being a time of recreation and play, turned out to be one without recreational opportunities as well as one with fear sine it was among the most lethal summers ever, with 40 child deaths in July alone," the report adds. "At this point in time, more than twice as many children died due to the conflict compared with 2005 - 70 per cent of these deaths were in Gaza."

UNICEF said it will scale up projects where there is need, focusing mostly in education, health, nutrition, child protection, adolescent development, water and sanitation.

A.D (08:08 P) (06:08 GMT)

wafa.ps/english/body.asp?id=8807

The violence really began when Israel, which had surrounded Gaza with artillery emplacements, under Operation First Rain, shelled and murdered and entire Palestinian family, which was picnicking on a beach that only weeks before had been for Jewish use only.
Gaza: a prison again

Khalil Hamra, the Associated Press
Watched by UN High Commissioner for Refugees Louise Arbour, a member of the Athamneh family weeps in a house where several members of her family were killed by Israeli shells.

Adel Hana, the Associated Press
Malak Athamneh, 3, lies in hospital after his Beit Hanoun home was hit Nov. 8. Malak's mother was killed in the attack.

Mohammed Salem, Reuters
The extended Athamneh family lived in this house and three others on the same street in Beit Hanoun, a Palestinian town in northern Gaza Strip.

After the worst years in memory, charities try to offer hope where there is deep despair
By Donald Mcintyre
The Independent

GAZA STRIP (Dec 16, 2006)
Maybe they are just conveniently forgetting other periods in Gaza's turbulent and blood-stained history, but most Gazans will tell you that 2006 is the worst year they can remember.

In Gaza City's deserted gold souk, people are not even coming to sell their jewellery any more.

"We just sit and drink tea," said Yasser Moteer, 35, who runs a jewellery stall. "It's worse than any time in the 20 years I've been here. It's crazy."

The gold-selling started soon after the international and Israeli boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority started to plunge Gaza's economy into collapse last March. But having long ceased to buy here, the poor have nothing left to sell.

Certainly, the 1.3 million people of this ancient coastal strip of territory, a mere 360 square kilometres, can never have experienced as intense a swing of hope to despair as they have in little more than 12 months.

Ariel Sharon's decision to withdraw Israel's settlers and troops in August 2005, for all the criticism that it was unilateral and circumscribed in both its genesis and its implementation, made many Palestinians here, almost despite themselves, hope for a better future.

It was not just the sudden freedom to travel from north to south without the endless delays at the hated Abu Houli checkpoint, or that children in the southern town of Khan Younis could run west through what were now the ruins of the Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim and plunge into a Mediterranean they had only ever dreamt about, or that families could again cross the southern border at Rafah and reunite with their relatives in Egypt.

It was the sense that for the first time in five dark, stifling and dangerous years, Gaza could breathe -- psychologically and, just maybe, economically.

As 2006 nears its close, it is easy to see how cruelly those hopes have been mocked by what has happened this year.

Since Hamas and other Gaza militants seized the Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit, and killed two of his comrades in late June, shells, drones and machine-gun fire from Israeli forces have killed some 400 Palestinians, including civilians -- women and children among them -- in a conflict overshadowed to a large extent by the war in Lebanon.

For five long months, electricity was cut to eight hours a day, damaging water supplies, after a surgically accurate bombing condemned by Israelis as well as foreign human rights groups as collective punishment in breach of humanitarian law.

Reaching a peak in July, the use of sonic booms, often deliberately timed as children were going to school, created misery and fear. As if that was not enough, a far lower but significant number of civilians, also including children, have been killed or wounded in the sporadic fighting between Fatah and Hamas, the two dominant factions in Palestinian politics, or in battles between extended families.

For the immediate survivors of the Israeli shells that killed 17 members of the Athamneh family as they tried to flee their home in Beit Hanoun as it was attacked, the bereavement is, if anything, harder to bear now that just over a month has elapsed since it happened.

In late afternoon sunshine recently, in the eerily peaceful alley where the carnage was perpetrated, Hayat Athamneh, 56, a strong woman who lost three adult sons, all fathers themselves, sat with their still devastated and injured brother Amjad, 31, and his wife, who lost their own son Mahmoud, 10.

"Now I feel it," said Hayat, covering her eyes as they fill with tears.

"It wasn't so bad at the beginning. There were a lot of people around. Now there is nobody."

As she reeled off the list of Palestinian and foreign dignitaries who had visited the site, her daughter-in-law Tahani, 35, said: "They all came. But nothing happened." Tahani talks about the three surviving Athamneh family members, two of them children, who lost limbs in the attack.

"We have to worry about the one who lost arms and legs now and will see the others who haven't. We have to look after them and then worry about where we are going to live."

Her brother-in-law Majdi Athamneh, who lost his 12-year-old son Saad, says that the extended-family members are afraid to go back to their shelled house because of the structural damage, but what's more, they no longer think they should live together as they had for so many years.

"When so many members of one family were killed, it is better to make sure it doesn't happen again and live apart," he said to nods from his relatives.

Eight kilometres away in Gaza City, Adeeb Zarhouk, 44, is a man used to hard work. He used to support his wife Majda and their seven children during the 20 years he was employed in Israel as a freelance metalworker and electrician, and the five years he has worked for an Israeli company in the now flattened Erez industrial zone on the northern edge of Gaza.

But this morning he apologizes for being asleep when we call.

Each day, he hopes for a request to install a satellite TV dish or do another odd job. "But the phone hasn't rung for weeks," he says. "Nobody has any money to do these things."

Zarhouk is part of the 64 per cent increase in "deep poverty" among Palestinian refugees in the last year He is naturally cheerful but, as his wife prepares a three-shekel (80-cent) family breakfast of beans, falafel and a few tomatoes, he says: "When I'm at home by myself, I start crying. When your son asks you for half a shekel and you don't have it ... ."

Zarhouk gets up to wash the tears from his eyes. Then he says that although as a refugee he earned almost $240 a month on a three-month United Nations Relief and Works Agency job program, he now owes $540 in rent and that the family eats meat only when his 20-year-old son gets an irregular $350 handout in lieu of his salary as a Palestinian Authority policeman.

Who does Zarhouk, who voted Fatah in the last election, blame? "I blame democracy," he says with a flash of sarcasm. "The whole world wanted us to have democracy and said how fair our election had been. The problem is they didn't like our results."

The world's boycott of the PA since those elections ended salaries for the PA employees on whose spending Gaza's economy disproportionately depends. The highly professional but desperately under-equipped health service is suffering.

In her bed at Shifa hospital, Intisar al Saqqa is waiting for the drug Taxoter which doctors say she needs to treat breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and her liver.

"Every week, they say it will come on Monday," says her mother, Hadra, 62. "But it doesn't. Inshallah, it will come soon." Her daughter says, "I don't blame anybody."

The agreement Condoleezza Rice persuaded Israel to sign a year ago to the free the passage of goods and people into and out of Gaza has not been implemented, as a UN report pointed out. The UN's Office of Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Gaza's access to the outside world is "extremely limited" and that commercial trade is "negligible."

That is diplomatese for saying Gaza is a prison again. Israel refuses to take the blame, saying the boycott and closures result directly from security anxieties and from the refusal of Hamas to modify its stances on recognition and violence, and refusing -- so far -- to release the Israeli corporal.

Now, with talks between Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas past collapse, there is little hope, and plenty to do for the non-governmental organizations and charities trying to keep Gaza alive.

www.hamiltonspectator.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/Layo