Realities of Gaza

MARC GARLASCO
Garlasco is senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch and has recently returned from Gaza, where he investigated the June 9 shelling deaths of a Palestinian family on a beach there. The Israeli military inquiry disavowed responsibility for the bombing. Garlasco said: “An investigation that refuses to look at contradictory evidence can hardly be considered credible.” Garlasco is a former military analyst with the Pentagon.
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Dr. MONA EL-FARRA
A physician and community activist in northern Gaza, El-Farra was at the hospital that received many of the victims of the June 9 bombing. An interview with her is available at Democracy Now. She can also address the general humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the West Bank.
El-Farra’s blog, “From Gaza, with Love”

MUBARAK AWAD
President of Nonviolence International, Awad said today: “Frustration is building up among the Palestinians as they have been deprived of the necessities of life. Israel is preventing not only disbursement of international aid — but even of Palestinians’ own tax money from being used for governmental services. The West seems rather oblivious to the desperate state of the Palestinians. Gaza is fundamentally a big prison. All this is making the Palestinians more radical.”
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LAILA EL-HADDAD
Currently in Maryland, El-Haddad is a journalist based in the U.S. and the Gaza Strip. She said today: “The lesson to be learned out of all this is that the policy of unilateralism as practiced by Israel can never succeed in achieving a just and secure peace for all.”

El-Haddad added: “There has been an outcry because of the kidnapping of the Israeli soldier off Gaza’s border. It bears reminding that there are some 9,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails — most being held without charges, under deplorable humanitarian conditions, including medical negligence, unsanitary surroundings, and routine beatings, position torture and strip searches.”

El-Haddad is a regular contributor to the Guardian Unlimited and is a correspondent for Al Jazeera’s English-language website. Her blog, “Raising Yousuf: A Diary of a Mother Under Occupation,” is named after her two-year-old son.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167