The nightmare which is Beit Hanoun

Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University's Refugee Studies Centre. She has lived and worked in Gaza City, Beirut and Jerusalem and has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, where she has worked as a free-lance journalist and a human rights activist.

Loewenstein, writing in Counterpoint, deals with Gaza, the horrific conditions there and the latest outrage in Beit Hanoun with the Israeli tank-shellings resulting in the death of 19 people, many of them children:

"Do you believe this was an accident? that an international investigation will ever take place? Like after Jenin? Like after Dan Halutz and his 2000 pound bomb which was dropped on an apartment building in Gaza City killing 15 people, 9 of them women and children? Like after the siege of Jabalya in the fall of 2004? Like after Operation Rainbow in Rafah? Like after Huda Ghalia's family was blasted into nothingness during an outing on a Gaza beach? Will US eyes, glued to their glaucousy TV screens to find out which marketed candidate won the corporate-managed midterm elections, ever know that that another massacre of Palestinians took place?"

This is a horrific and graphic piece of what is happening in Gaza and how the world in effect ignores Israeli's actions.

Meanwhile, as reported on AlJazeera, Human Rights Watch has called for a thorough investigation of the Bei Hanoun incident.

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