Gaza death toll hits 220 on 9th day of Israel offensive

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: Seven people were killed in three strikes in Gaza on Wednesday evening, raising the toll in nine days of violence to 220, emergency services said.
The deaths followed those of four children killed on the beach in Gaza City, in strikes witnessed by AFP journalists.
Emergency services spokesman Ashraf Al-Qudra said the seven Palestinians killed Wednesday evening included four members of a family in Khan Yunis, among them two children, aged six and four.
Another strike in southern Khan Yunis killed two men in their thirties, and a third strike in Gaza City killed a six-year-old boy.
The deaths followed those of four children on a Gaza beach, all from the Bakr family.
The latest violence raised the overall number of dead in Gaza after nine days of violence to 220, emergency services spokesman Ashraf Al-Qudra said. More than 1,570 have been wounded.
Earlier, a 37-year-old man was killed in an air strike on the Zeitun neighborhood, east of Gaza City, which took place several hours after the army warned 100,000 residents to leave the area and the neighboring district of Shejaiya.
Most of Wednesday’s deaths came in the south, with six people earlier killed in strikes on Khan Yunis and five killed in Rafah, which straddles the Egyptian border.
In Khan Yunis, four people from the Al-Daqqa family were killed in two separate strikes, one of which killed a 65-year-old woman and a 10-year-old boy.
One of the victims in Khan Younis was killed by tank fire.
In Rafah, five men were killed in four separate strikes, one of which hit a house in the city, Qudra said.
According to figures provided by the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), more than 80 percent of the victims were civilians.
So far, one person has been killed in Israel — a civilian who died on Tuesday evening in a rocket strike near the Erez crossing, medics said. Four Israelis have been seriously wounded.
Since the latest violence began before dawn on July 8, 1,021 rockets fired from Gaza have struck Israel, and another 256 have been shot down by the Iron Dome air defense system, army figures show.
Forty-three struck Israel on Wednesday and 24 were intercepted.
During its operation, Israel has struck more than 1,750 “terror targets” across the coastal enclave, the army said.

3 missing, thousands flee as typhoon hits eastern Philippines

MANILA: Tens of thousands of people in the Philippines hunkered down in evacuation centers while three people were reported missing Tuesday as a typhoon pounded its eastern coast amid warnings of giant storm surges and heavy floods.
The eye of Typhoon Rammasun struck Legazpi city in the eastern Bicol region in the early evening, with Manila and other heavily populated regions expecting to be hit on Wednesday afternoon, the state weather service said.
“Roofing sheets are flying off the tops of houses here... the wind is whistling,” Joey Salceda, the governor of Albay province in Bicol said over ABS-CBN television.
He said there had been no reports of deaths while damage to the region — an impoverished farming and fishing region of 5.4 million people — was expected to be “moderate.”
However, Bicol police said three local men were listed as missing off the island of Catanduanes on Tuesday, a day after they pushed out to sea to fish and failed to return.
The Philippines is hit by about 20 major storms a year, many of them deadly. The Southeast Asian archipelago is often the first major landmass to be struck after storm build above the warm Pacific Ocean waters.
In November Super Typhoon Haiyan unleashed giant seven-meter (23-foot) high storm surges that devastated the coasts of the eastern islands of Samar and Leyte, killing up to 7,300 people in one of the nation’s worst ever natural disasters.
More than 96,000 families were moved to evacuation centers Tuesday as a precaution, Social Welfare Minister Corazon Soliman said.
The government declared a school holiday for areas in the typhoon’s path, while ferry services were also shut down and dozens of flights canceled.
“People on the coastal areas are evacuating because of the threat of storm surges,” National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council spokeswoman Romina Marasigan told AFP.
More than a thousand Haiyan survivors in Tacloban, a city in Leyte, fled to an indoor government stadium early Tuesday after the weather service warned of the threat of three-meter waves hitting the coast.
“We’re terrified of storm surges,” mother of three Mary Ann Avelino, 26, told AFP as her family sat on the cold concrete of the bleacher seats, watching puddles form on the floor from the leaky roof.
She said her family had temporarily abandoned a lean-to at the ruins of their coastal home to sit out the new typhoon on higher ground.
State weather forecaster Alvin Pura said Rammasun, which is Thai for “God of Thunder,” struck Legazpi, a city of about 185,000 people, with 130 kilometers (81 miles) per hour winds.
It was then forecast to sweep across around 350 kilometers to the northwest and hit Manila and its 12 million people on Wednesday afternoon.
Rammasun is the first typhoon to make landfall since this year’s rainy season began in June, and President Benigno Aquino stressed to civil defense officials in Manila on Tuesday that people in the typhoon’s path must be made to understand the dangers facing them.
“The objective has to be (to) minimise the casualties and the hardship of our people,” he added.
The state weather service upgraded Rammasun overnight Monday from a tropical storm into a typhoon as its wind speeds built up over the Pacific.

Scars show as Gaza’s children endure third war

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip: The children of the Attar clan have lived through three wars in just over five years, each time fleeing their homes as Israel bombarded their neighborhood in the Palestinian Gaza Strip.
Their psychological scars show. Some act out, others cling to their mothers or withdraw, like 12-year-old Ahmed who sat by himself Monday on a bench in the courtyard of a UN school where his family once again sought shelter.
“They bombed very close to my house,” said the boy, looking down and avoiding eye contact. “I’m scared.”
Experts said it will be increasingly difficult to heal such victims of repeated trauma.
“For the majority of the children (in Gaza), it is the third time around,” said Bruce Grant, the chief of child protection for the Palestinian territories in the United Nation’s children’s agency, UNICEF. “It reduces their ability to be resilient and to bounce back. Some will not find their way back to a sense of normalcy. Fear will become their new norm.”
The Attar clan lives in Atatra, a neighborhood in northeastern Gaza, just a few hundred meters from Israel. Gaza militants often launch rockets at Israel from border areas, turning them into flashpoints and frequent targets of Israeli strikes.
Residents of Atatra fled their homes in Israel’s three-week military offensive in the winter of 2008-2009, during a week of cross-border fighting in November 2012 and again over the weekend.
After Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets over Atatra on Saturday warning residents to leave, sisters Mariam and Sada Attar bundled a few belongings into plastic bags and rushed out of their homes. They had 10 children in tow, as well as Mariam’s husband Omar, who she said suffers from stress-induced psychological disorders and can no longer function normally.
The families sought shelter in the same UN school where they stayed during the previous two rounds of fighting. In all, 20 UN schools took in more than 17,000 displaced Gazans, many of them children, after Saturday’s warnings by Israel that civilians must clear out of northern Gaza.
Members of the Attar clan took over part of the second floor, with more than 40 people sleeping in each classroom. Mariam, Sada, Omar and the children were squeezed into one half of a room, their space demarcated by benches. Another family from the clan stayed in the other half of the room. A blanket draped across an open doorway offered the only measure of privacy.
In the classroom, the scene was chaotic, with children pushing and shoving each other and mothers yelling at them to behave. There was nothing to do for children or grown-ups, except to wait.
Mariam Attar, 35, said they spent the night on the hard floor for lack of mattresses.
She sat on the floor, her back leaning against a wall, and held her youngest, 16-month-old Mahmoud. She said her older children have become clingy, some asking that she accompany them to the communal toilet.
Recalling the latest bombings, she said: “We felt the house was going to fall on top of us and so the children started to scream. I was screaming and my husband was screaming.”
Her 14-year-old son Mohammed said the family cowered on the ground in the living room during the bombing to avoid being hit by shrapnel. He said the time passed slowly because they had no electricity or TV.
Mohammed and Ahmed, who is from another branch of the clan, said they and other children often play “Arabs and Jews,” fighting each other with toy guns or wooden sticks as make-believe weapons. Arabs always win, the boys said.
Rasem Shamiya, a counselor who works for the UN school system, said many of the children show signs of trauma, including trouble paying attention, aggressive behavior or avoiding contact with others. “They are very stressed,” he said. “Since these children were born, they have never known peace.”
Sada Attar, 43, said she worries her children and others in that generation will come to see violence as normal.
“These disturbed children are not going to be good for Israel’s long term interests,” she said. “The child will naturally rise up and confront the Zionist enemy with the stone, with fire, with everything in their power.”
Shortly after she spoke, the children got a brief break from the chaos. Volunteers showed up in the school courtyard, carrying crayons, paper, hula hoops and soccer balls. Ahmed and other boys started kicking a ball around and he quickly became engrossed in the game.
Israeli children, especially in the areas close to Gaza, have also been affected. Since 2000, Gaza militants have fired thousands of rockets at Israeli communities. Psychologists have found high rates of anxiety and bed-wetting among children in the border town of Sderot.
During the current bout, Israeli mothers were seen shielding their children with their bodies as sirens warned of incoming rockets. Other footage showed children weeping and cowering in fear as explosions were heard near their homes.
Several Israeli children were hurt by rockets, including 11- and 12-year-old sisters playing outside and a 16-year-old boy who was seriously hurt by shrapnel as he returned from a barber.
In Gaza, about one-fourth of the over 190 Palestinians killed in the past week were children, according to UN figures.
The children’s fears are very real and parents in Gaza are increasingly unable to reassure them, said Pierre Krahenbuhl, who heads the UN agency that provides aid to Palestinian refugees.
“Today, we met with families who shared with us that they have simply no more answers to give when the children ask them why are the homes shaking, why is there so much destruction,” he said.
On Tuesday, some of the displaced, including Mariam, Sada and their children, left the school and returned home, apparently encouraged by Egypt’s call for a cease-fire that was to take effect later in the day.
However, the hoped-for lull only lasted a few hours. By Tuesday afternoon, Gaza militants had fired about three dozen rockets at Israel and Israel resumed air strikes on targets in Gaza.
Some members of the Attar clan chose to remain at the school despite faint hopes for a cease-fire. “I want to go home, but I am still afraid,” said 42-year-old Mohammed Attar, a relative of the sisters

US warns Israel against Gaza ground assault

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: Washington warned its Israeli ally Monday against any ground invasion of Gaza, as Egyptian officials said the US top diplomat was headed to the region to join efforts to end a week of deadly violence.

The White House stopped short of criticizing Israel over the civilian casualty toll from its devastating air and artillery bombardment of the densely populated Palestinian enclave that has drawn flak from the United Nations and human rights watchdogs.
It said the Israeli government had the “right” and “responsibility” to defend its citizens against rocket attacks by its Islamist foe Hamas from its Gaza stronghold.
But it said even more civilians would be put at risk were Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to heed hard-liners in his governing coalition and send in troops and armor.
“Nobody wants to see a ground invasion because that would put more civilians at risk,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
It was the first time that the White House has specifically warned in a public forum against an Israeli invasion of Gaza, although other US officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, have previously said Washington would not like to see such a step.
With Israel’s punishing air campaign in its seventh day, the death toll in Gaza hit 177, prompting growing calls for a cease-fire which have so far showed little sign of progress.
Ahead of an emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo, Hamas shot down hopes of a deal to end the violence, saying no serious moves had been made.
“Talk of a cease-fire requires real and serious efforts, which we haven’t seen so far,” Hamas MP Mushir Al-Masri told AFP in Gaza City.
“Any cease-fire must be based on the conditions we have outlined. Nothing less than that will be accepted,” he said, in a show of defiance in the face of the withering Israeli bombardment.
Israel has said it is not ready to countenance a cease-fire either, as it seeks to deal ever harsher blows to Hamas and stamp out its capacity to fire rockets deep into the Jewish state.
In a bid to add Washington’s weight to truce efforts, Kerry is to fly into Cairo on Tuesday, Egyptian state media reported.
There was no immediate comment from the State Department, with Israeli press reports suggesting Kerry would also visit Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah, headquarters of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

Iran ( Facebook activities draw harsh prison sentences )

 Monday, Jul 14 2014 

 

Eight people have been handed heavy prison sentences for their activities on Facebook. The charges against them range from "assembly and collusion against national security" and "anti-regime activity" to "insulting sanctities and government officials."

IRNA reports that these individuals were running several pages on Facebook and were arrested last July by order of the prosecutor.

The accused are from various cities including Yazd, Shiraz, Abadan, Kerman and Tehran.

Two of the accused were sentenced to 18 years and 19 years respectively as well as a fine of 1.3 million toumans and 50 lashes. (Total of 128 years)

The others are sentenced to prison terms of 8 to 21 years.

Radio Zamaneh

Palestinian man mourns his two children who were killed ( Heart -breaking )

Sajedeh Arabsorkhi is summoned to Evin Prison

Posted on: 11th July, 2014                              

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HRANA News Agency- Sajedeh Arabsorkhi is summoned to serve a one year prison sentence at Evin Prison.
Sajedeh Arabsorkhi is the daughter of Feyzollah Arabsorkhi a political activist and a member of Iranian Reformist party.
According to the report of Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), she was summoned for interrogations while her passport was confiscated at the airport after her return to the country.
On her personal Facebook page, Ms Arabsorkhi has announced the news of serving the sentence: “I am summoned to serve a sentence without receiving any formal verdict. What is more interesting is that I was also called in by Islamic Revolutionary Guards for interrogations within an hour! Only God knows the status of my cases!”
Whilst she is charged with “propaganda against the Islamic Regime”, she has been released on a 300 million Tomans bail on temporary basis until now.