Palestine



Israeli missiles pound Gaza into new Dark Age in 'collective punishment'

As a textbook example of hi-tech precision bombardment it could hardly be improved. Smoke was still rising yesterday from the scorched wreckage of the six transformers at Gaza's only power station, each destroyed by a single missile fired by an Israeli warplane some 10 hours earlier.

Had they hit the huge cylindrical diesel tank 100 metres away they would have set the whole power station alight. But the strike was clinically effective, cutting all the electricity to 700,000 Gaza consumers, threatening water supplies and depriving its public of light, cooking, broadcast news, and a crucial issue in scorching summer temperatures fans.

"I'm so surprised that they did this," said Dr Derar Abu Sisi, the operations manager at the Al Nusirat power station. "We have been right through the worst of the intifada but this didn't happen." It would, Dr Abu Sisi said, take a "minimum of three to six months" to restore supplies at a cost between $5m (£2.8m) and $7m. "The Geneva Convention says it is not allowed to attack infrastructure for the civilian people," he added. "You might expect that economic infrastructure could be a target in the last stages of a war. But this is not like that."

It is upsetting reading about what is currently going on in the Gaza Strip, I have a friend there, a nurse who works at Rafah Hospital and when I ask him how he is, his first reply is 'I am surviving', I honestly don't know how he does it.

It always seems like one step forward and two steps back with the Israel/Palestine situation and it provokes such fierce arguments from both sides.

I don't claim to have the ultimate solution but I think if Palestinians were given jobs and are able to earn a decent wage I'm sure young men would not be tempted to blow themselves up or kidnap Israeli soldiers, its really quite simple, give them something to live for.