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| Turki al-Faisal blasts US over Gaza genocide |
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Olmert warns Hizbullah against attacking Israel; UN official deplores horrific tragedy in Gaza Strip
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
RIYADH/OCCUPIED-AL-QUDS/GAZA CITY: A member of the Saudi royal family blasted the US government on Tuesday for its “reckless” position towards Israeli genocide on the Gaza Strip.
“The Bush administration has left you (with) a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza,” Prince Turki al-Faisal said in a message directed at President-elect Barack Obama.
“Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza,” Faisal, a former ambassador to the United States, said at a forum on relations between the Gulf region and the US. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal slammed Israeli politicians for “shedding Palestinian blood in what has become a tactic for Israeli parties to settle their election battles.”
In an address read out at the forum by his deputy, the minister said peace in the region will not be achieved unless Israel pulls out of the territories it occupies.
He called on Obama to live up to his campaign message of “change”, urging cooperation with the Arab world. “Together we can reach a peaceful and permanent solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he said.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Tuesday again sent a veiled warning to the Lebanese Hizbullah militia that Israel was ready to respond on its northern front if threatened.
“Let it be clear, we will make no compromise on our security... No one should get the wrong impression over our determination and our alertness on any front. We are not afraid of any confrontation or threat,” Olmert said.
“We truly hope that no one will put us to the test,” he said in a speech broadcast on army radio on the 11th day of Israeli carnage in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
His comments were a thinly veiled reference to Lebanon’s Hizbullah militia with which Israel fought a war in 2006 just weeks into Israel’s last major offensive against the Gaza Strip.
Two weeks after Israel launched its assault on Gaza in June 2006 — after Palestinians in the territory seized a soldier in a cross-border raid—Hizbullah launched a cross-border raid of its own and seized two Israeli soldiers.
In response, Israel unleashed a war on Hizbullah that lasted for 34 days and killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
In a related development, a senior UN official on Tuesday deplored what he called a “horrific tragedy” after visiting a Gaza hospital where doctors struggled to cope with the number of casualties from the Israeli carnage.
“This is a horrific tragedy here and it’s getting worse moment after moment. People coming in all the time with more and more injuries,” said John Ging, who heads the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA.
“I’m shocked by what I’ve seen and heard, this is the point where the inhumanity is visible and shocking in terms of the nature of injuries, the brutality of the injuries the scale of the injuries,” he said of Gaza City’s Al Shifa hospital.
Everyone in Gaza is “terrorised and traumatised,” he said, adding that “there is no safe haven; you can’t even flee this violence.” “This is the rule of the gun now and this has to stop,” said Ging. “This is the result of political failure,” he said.
Over 800 Palestinians have died since Israel unleashed its ‘Operation Cast Lead’ against the democratically elected government of Hamas on December 27.
Hamas, facing a massive Israeli air and ground assault on its Gaza Strip stronghold, has the capacity to fire rockets and mortars at Israel for weeks, the Maariv daily quoted an intelligence report as saying on Tuesday.
“Hamas has enough rockets and mortar shells to continue firing deep into Israeli territory for weeks,” said the report presented to parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee by General Yossi Beidatz, head of the research department for military intelligence, according to the daily. Beidatz said that Hamas “has not raised the white flag in the past and wants to remain in power.”
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ISSN 1563-9479 
