The Israeli atrocities are beginning to come out.
msnbc.com
Relief worker describes carnage
April 14 — A people and culture under attack is how humanitarian aid worker Peter Holland characterized the devastation he witnessed in Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin. Holland said residents described a young girl being picked off by an Israeli sniper for no apparent reason. He told of wanton destruction, unimaginable sanitary conditions and of Palestinian death scenes that surely equal the carnage caused by any suicide bomber.
IN TWO interviews with MSNBC, Holland, who works for OXFAM, Quebec, a non- government organization that provides relief in times of crisis, spoke of what he has witnessed in three days of visits to the besieged Palestinian territories, or what Israel calls “disputed territories.”
Speaking from Jerusalem, Holland described Palestinian residents of the ancient city as glued to Al Jazeera, watching the kind of crisis TV coverage that united Americans in the aftermath of Sept. 11. When he put Arab neighbors on the phone they told of video images of the charred bodies of 10-year-old boys and of a woman weeping over the mangled corpse of her husband’s body.
Asked about Palestinians characterizing the scene as a massacre, Holland replied, “I think it’s a fair term to use.” But appearing immediately afterwards on MSNBC, Raanan Gissin, a senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, dismissed Holland’s account.
Gissin told anchor Jane Hanson, “It’s preposterous. He’s looking into the camera and regurgitating those lies. I mean this is just sheer lies…this was not a massacre, this was a battle for Israel’s survival against terrorists who have taken no concern — not for their people and not for our people.”
International relief agencies have been denied free access to civilian populations and are still barred entirely from the Jenin refugee zone. OXFAM has a center in the camp but its staff and their families have not been heard from for 10 days. Aid workers talk of death tolls in the hundreds.
Said Holland, “You have to wonder what it is that the Israelis are trying to hide?” |
