crime against humanity

Palestinians are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. Food imports cover only 41% of demand. 80% of Gazans receive food aid and 80% live below the poverty line.

People who are seriously ill are being prevented from accessing essential medical treatment outside Gaza. Over 40 Gazans have died as a result of being denied medical treatment by the Israeli authorities and 20% of essential drugs and 31% of essential medical supplies are no longer available inside Gaza.
Israel is cutting fuel and electricity supplies, affecting essential health and water facilities. 210,000 people are able to access drinking water for only 1-2 hours a day.

Given the contamination that we found during the war, and we confirmed after the war in research in 1994 and '95, absolutely nobody should come within 25 metres, or climb on, or crawl in, or get anywhere near, depleted uranium destroyed or contaminated equipment, buildings or structures without full respiratory and skin protection. And if they don't, if they have that and there's whole areas that are totally contaminated because of the size of the battle, no wonder these people are sick...

Within those areas where the destroyed or contaminated equipment is, unless that is physically removed and totally disposed of properly, the disaster is for eternity. You cannot have contaminated equipment in terrain where people can inhale, ingest or get uranium contamination into a wound. You can't have women and children run in their back yard where uranium penetrators - each one solid uranium 238, not coated, not tipped, up to 4500 grams in mass- are laying. Who in their right mind would allow any women or child or anybody to play in their sand box or swing on their swing set with solid uranium contamination all over their back yard?

"We are seeing an astonishing rise in even the rarest of abnormalities' said British trained plastic surgeon Professor Ala. "I can show you a baby born one hour ago if you are strong and not prone to fainting" said Dr. Janeen.

A nurse brought in a small bundle wrapped in cloth - sterile wrappings, baby clothing is just a memory in another formerly internationally renowned hospital. Unwrapped the tiny being, making a little bleating noises, had no eyes, no nose, a sweet little mouth, but no tongue or osophegus, no hands or genitalia. Hopelessly twisted small legs were joined together from the knees upwards by a thick 'web' of flesh. "We see many similar" commented Dr. Janeen.

After the Americans destroyed our village and killed many of us, we also lost our houses and have nothing to eat. However, we would have endured these miseries and even accepted them, if the Americans had not sentenced us all to death. When I saw my deformed grandson, I realized that my hopes of the future have vanished for good, different from the hopelessness of the Russian barbarism, even though at that time I lost my older son Shafiqullah. This time, however, I know we are part of the invisible genocide brought on us by America, a silent death from which I know we will not escape.

Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU particles traveled 2,400 miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation quadrupled.

But it is in the Middle East, predominantly Iraq, where the bulk of the radioactive waste has been dumped.

In the early Nineties, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority warned that 50 tons of dust from DU explosions could claim a half million lives from cancer by year 2000. Not 50 tons, but an estimated two thousand radioactive tons have been fired off in the Middle East, suggesting the possibility over time of an even higher death toll.

Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, says, "For every genetic defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands more that will be expressed." She adds, "the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive."

Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written: "Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad, where half the population of 5 million people are children who played in the burned- out tanks and on the sandy, dusty ground."

"Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults," Caldicott wrote. "My pediatric colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a sevenfold increase in childhood cancer and a sevenfold increase in gross congenital abnormalities," she wrote in her book, "Nuclear Power is not the Answer"(The New Press).

I must remind you ... this was done in violation of the United Nations Charter by using lies; I am not mincing my words: they were lies, damn lies. By throwing people out of their land, the British government knowingly led many of the them to a certain death. No human being would treat another human being the way the British treated the Chagossian people. For a comparison we have to go back to the days of slavery. And for this, Britain received a thieves' ransom; and still they refuse to obey the court and let people go even to the outer islands.

BAQUBA, Sep 2 (IPS) The violence around the continuing U.S. military operations in this city has robbed children of their childhood.

Only two provincial schools and one private kindergarten school are functioning in this city of 280,000, located 50 km north of Baghdad. Most children know neither school nor play.

Or even the food they want. "We parents can hardly meet the basic requirements of food," Mahdi Hassan, a father of four, told IPS.

On 27 July 1943, the RAF killed 50,000 people in Hamburg. Reflecting on this barbarity, nuclear physicist Freeman Dyson who was then a clerk for Arthur "Bomber" Harris wrote that the Nazis "had sat in their offices, writing memoranda and calculating how to murder people efficiently, just like me. The main difference was that they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals, while I went free." Eighty percent of all the bombs in World War II fell in the last ten months of the war during which the British, for instance, decided to bomb residential areas with the argument that this would foreshorten the war. The US borrowed this logic at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but only after the USAF firebombed Tokyo on 8 May (General Curtis LeMay who directed the operations, said "we knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town. Had to be done"). On 13 February 1945, the RAF killed 100,000 in Dresden; on 6 August 1945, the USAF killed 100,000 instantly in Hiroshima (another 100,000 died over the course of the next year).