Torture is ongoing as I write: The FINANCIAL TIMES April 6 reported, "The Israeli human rights organization B'tselem yesterday petitioned the High Court after receiving reports of torture at the Ofer detention center near Ramallah.") Throughout the 80s I spoke with Palestinian officials, doctors, lawyers and other professionals, all of whom gave personal testimony about ongoing, deliberate acts that, under the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention articles governing occupation, were clearly illegal.
About all of the foregoing the Hebrew press was quite open while the US press was almost invariably silent.
We now arrive at the current nightmare. What is underway is collective punishment of the sort I and other journalists have documented for decades, ratcheted up a thousand fold in full-blown war atrocities committed throughout the West Bank and almost certainly beginning in Gaza, from which I received an American relief worker's e-mail this morning.
For the past week my computer has delivered to me daily – even hourly - accounts of war crimes from Ramallah and other Palestinian cities by Palestinian doctors, lawyers, authors, and students, and by internationals.
The desperate e-mailers plead with me and others to call our congress people and senators, to write letters to the press, to organize publicly.
About all of the foregoing the Hebrew press was quite open while the US press was almost invariably silent.
We now arrive at the current nightmare. What is underway is collective punishment of the sort I and other journalists have documented for decades, ratcheted up a thousand fold in full-blown war atrocities committed throughout the West Bank and almost certainly beginning in Gaza, from which I received an American relief worker's e-mail this morning.
For the past week my computer has delivered to me daily – even hourly - accounts of war crimes from Ramallah and other Palestinian cities by Palestinian doctors, lawyers, authors, and students, and by internationals.
The desperate e-mailers plead with me and others to call our congress people and senators, to write letters to the press, to organize publicly.