Tens of Thousands Cross Downed Gaza Wall

[Hissyspit]

Source: Associated Press

Tens of thousands cross downed Gaza wall
By IBRAHIM BARZAK, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 12 minutes ago

RAFAH, Gaza Strip - Tens of thousands of Palestinians poured from the Gaza Strip into Egypt Wednesday after masked gunmen with explosives destroyed most of the seven-mile wall dividing the border town of Rafah.

The Gazans crossed on foot, in cars or riding donkey carts to buy supplies made scarce by an Israeli blockade of their impoverished territory. Police from the militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza, directed the traffic. Egyptian border guards took no action.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said Israel has no forces on the Gaza-Egypt border and, "therefore it is the responsibility of Egypt to ensure that the border operates properly, according to the signed agreements."

- snip -

Thousands of Gazans began crossing into Egypt and returning with milk, cigarettes and plastic bottles of fuel. Mohammed Abu Ghazel, 29, said he had crossed the border three times. He bought cigarettes worth $53 in Egypt and sold them for five times that in Gaza, he said. "This can feed my family for a month," he said.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080123/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_palestinians

[psychopomp]

1. Pharoah...

set my people free!

Good for them.

[Ian David]

14. Let My People Shop! n/t

[The Stranger]

23. More like, "Let my people eat to survive . . . "

[Ian David]

30. Let them eat rockets. n/t

[ohio2007]

33. Rockets are thier leading export .nt

[Ian David]

34. I have a very simple, one-step plan for ending the whole mess.

Open a Club Med in Palestine.

Think about it.

Do you know ANY country-- no matter how poor-- that has a Club Med, where there is a Civil War going on?

[peacebird]

2. What does it say when 10k people cross the border and return with food & fuel?

Maybe that Israel is starving them and leaving them without fuel for generators needed because Israel is slowing fuel for the power plants? Israel has LOST all my sympathy between their gross overreaction in Lebanon and their atrocious treatment of the people in Gaza. Israel has long since lost the "high moral ground".

[Ian David]

15. And Cigarettes.

Probably also bought pitbulls and ate at The Olive Garden.

[Raster]

25. Israel is America's pitbull.

[Ian David]

31. More like sacrificial lamb on the altar of the Xian Apocalypse. n/t

[Raster]

32. Both, actually.

[dipsydoodle]

16. Israel is conducting collective punishment

which is illegal. Yes - they long lost the moral high ground.

[zanne]

21. They lost the moral ground, all right.

It's a pity.

[Threedifferentones]

27. They were living on stolen land to begin with.

I sympathize with Jewish people all over the world who have been victims of groundless hatred, but the modern state of Israel never had the moral high ground.

[ohio2007]

35. actually, many are never going to return back to their open air prison

I doubt they checked their ID's at the breached wall

[xchrom]

3. wow -- tens of thousands.

tens of thousands.

[jonnyra]

4. America and Israel

are the evil threatening the world with their weapons of mass destruction. Invading and occupying lands and holding the citizens hostage. What Israel is doing is sick and it is evil just as what America has done to Iraq is sick and evil. It is truly scary what we have become.

[leftchick]

6. I agree

both countries are guilty of the same evils and the world knows it.

[elehhhhna]

18. Only one question left: Which will be the first of the two to officially be declared

a "failed state" ?

[leftchick]

5. Roberts on CNN" Israeli officials are worried they will come back with coke, cigarettes

and weapons. wtf?

[Robbien]

8. Projection

If they were in the same situation, guns would be on their shopping list.

[raebrek]

26. Someone beat me to it. n't

[ConcernedCanuk]

7. There ya GO Mexico - Watch and Learn

.
.
.

People don't LIKE walls,

so don't be surprised if the Great Wall of the USA gets taken down also . . .

[yellowcanine]

17. Robert Frost probably said it best........

Mending Wall
by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

[DLnyc]

22. Thank you for a very fitting post. He really did say it well. n/t

[ConcernedCanuk]

28. There is only one line (actually repeated) that the PNACers will latch on to.

.
.

I betcha you know which one it is.

yup

'Good fences make good neighbors'

that's the one

(sigh)

[ohio2007]

36. Mexicans are not running to a US Wal-Mart and making a run back for the border

I'd say those in Gaza watched how it's done in Mexico and outnumbered any border patrol.

?
btw
why is the wall on the Egyptian border ?
Seems Egypt's wall was tested....how long til a surge on the Israeli border wall is tested?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. This situation is not getting enough press coverage

While I respect Israel's right to security, its long-standing policy of mass punishments for individual offenses is actually having the making the Palestinians angrier.

They may think they're "tough on terrorism," but I have to borrow Dr. Phil's ONE good catch phrase and ask them, "How's that workin' for ya?"

[gratuitous]

10. Merkel: Border security is Egypt's responsibility

What a disingenuous wad of fuck, as if the wall that was destroyed was erected by either the Egyptians or the Palestinians. But this kind of duplicity plays with a certain uninformed segment of the American populace, so there's no sense in abandoning it quite yet.

[indio55555]

11. Good for them.

and good for Egypt for not turning them back.

c/p from yahoo.

In Egyptian Rafah, a market stall selling pistols and ammunition clips for Kalashnikov assault rifles had no customers Wednesday. Weapons are generally brought into Gaza through smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border.

An off-duty Hamas policeman, who only gave his first name, Abdel Rahman, said there was no need to buy weapons from Egypt.

"You can buy weapons in Gaza, guns and RPGs," he said, adding that they were easier to find than cancer medicine or Coca-Cola.

[dropkickpa]

12. What is so upsetting to me

Is the ghettoization of Palestinian areas. Has no one fucking learned from history?!?! Does ANY of this resemble anything else we've seen before? And yet, 'muricans sit idly by and say it's all about terrorism and whatthefuckever else we make up to make it seem okay, just as we have countless times in the past. Ghettoization is reprehensible, and when people make multiple trips so that they can get *food*, I get more and more angry.

The Warsaw Ghetto was established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940. At this time, the population of the Ghetto was estimated to be 440,000 people, about 37% of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was about 4.5% of the size of Warsaw. Nazis then closed off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16, 1940, building a wall with armed guards.

[EFerrari]

29. I agree. We may be unteachable. n/t

[Scurrilous]

13. In pictures: Gaza border break

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7204102.stm



Video:

http://video.ap.org/v/default.aspx?g=28ce2dd8-32d2-42dc-8a4f-0b13286fd50b&f=flmih



Eyewitness: Gazans surge across border

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7204238.stm

The BBC's Ian Pannell witnessed dramatic scenes on the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, after Palestinians forced the barriers down.

"I'm standing on the 10m-(30ft) high corrugated metal wall that was physically knocked down this morning.

My left-hand side is in Egypt, my right-hand side is in the Gaza Strip.

There is a man walking over flattened corrugated metal, pulling a goat into Gaza.

We have seen people crowding around petrol stations, desperately filling up on fuel.

We have seen families with luggage, cases held up high, as people are pouring in both directions across this border, but primarily from Gaza into Egypt.

This has been an opportunity for people to catch up with family and friends, but also to catch up on shopping.

Nobody is attempting to stop this

Essentially what has happened here is that the people of Gaza have forced on Egypt and Israel and the international community what everyone else refused to allow to happen - which was for the border crossing to be opened.

They have done it themselves."

[elehhhhna]

19. k&r DHS better reconsider that wall around Mexico.

[ohio2007]

37. 'around' Mexico? Mexico isn't an apartheid state "inside" the US

nt

[methinks2]

20. Thank God

How wonderful that they can obtain a little temporary relief. I wonder what those without funds will do? How do you buy food and fuel without cash? Kudos to Egypt for allowing this!
Collective punishment of a group of civilians because of their enthnicity and religions is always wrong, no excuses.

[K8-EEE]

24. Maybe somebody showed them Reagan's "take down that wall" schpeil

They were inspired by Ray-gun, that's it! Makes about as much sense as "Reagan ended the Cold War..."

[ohio2007]

38. then Egypt should absorb and annex the whole Gaza strip sort of like west Germany had to put

east Germany on welfare life support until the standard of living in the east could be brought up . Hidden behind the iron curtain was a shroud of unemployment and atropy. East Germany was much like that of Gaza unemployment today.
Only those working for 'the state' had a few crumbs of food to flaunt

[YankmeCrankme]

40. Except, Palestinians aren't Egytian.

If they were you'd have a point.

[otherlander]

39. kick

:kick: