"JERUSALEM, 9 March 2009 UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman concluded a four-day visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel on Saturday with a call for stronger action to protect children.
Veneman said Palestinian and Israeli childrens well-being and mental health have been severely affected by the conflict.
She noted that children on both sides have borne the brunt for far too long, adding that they want and deserve a total, enduring end to the violence."
"On the 61st anniversary of the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, ethnic cleansing continues apace in occupied Palestine. We spend the hour listening to excerpts from the hard-hitting documentary film, Occupation 101, which takes viewers through the brutal chronology of dispossession, exile and military occupation in Palestine even before 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel."
"Israel’s air assault on Gaza began with attacks on the Strip’s main police stations, including one in Rafah’s densely populated Junaina neighborhood which left twenty-five officers dead. Over the course of the war, approximately two hundred and fifty civilian policemen would be killed and every major police office damaged or destroyed, according to figures provided by the Ministry of the Interior."
"The Israeli assault on Gaza was a brutal and one-sided onslaught where one of the most powerful armies in the world used its deadliest weapons against a virtually defenseless population. Like the Lebanon war in 2006, Israel’s military campaign was little more than a string of war crimes that succeeded only in butchering thousands of civilians (including a frightening number of children) but did little to weaken the resistance, the declared target of the war."
San Francisco State University (SFSU) Women's Herstory Month Committee, A.S. Women's Center, and the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative
Description
A one day conference that will examine the significance of the recent invasion of Gaza, and expose the specific ways in which current neoliberal policies and imperialist wars deepen oppression in terms of gender, sexuality, race and religion.
