Thoughts from the Computer Lab

The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) claim that less than 25% of the deaths in Gaza are civilian.
IDF spokesmen says that of the 900 names of the dead they have recieved from Palestinian hospital sources 150 are women and children, and they estimate no more than 250 civilians have been killed total.

Al Jazeera, (an Arab news network stationed in Qatar), says that 40% of the deaths are civilian.

The Jerusalem Post says that some Palestinian sources claim more than half of the people killed in Gaza have been civilians.

I watched a video on youtube of a British doctor in a hospital in Gaza about a week ago. He claimed that half of the people coming into the hospital were women and children (this means the wounded).

So what does this mean? Who is being killed here?

Israel, I believe is fighting in its ground campaign those who fight them ie. those with guns. They call these people Hamas militants. I wonder if they are all so easily distinguished between Hamas and people who have just decided to pick up a gun against the attacking army. On the ground, I atleast hope, Israel is only shooting those who shoot back. Some of those that shoot back might be more of what we would call civilians than militants, but... well, anyway.

But, with the bombing campaign Israel does not seem to be distinguishing very well. I believe them when they say they make house calls before bombing. Well, I believe that they have made house calls -- calls to houses to tell them to get out before the area is bombed. I don't believe they make house calls every time, or even close to every time. (Obviously not).

And, well, they have bombed a UN school, a mosque... lots of other things that I don't know. In each place they claim there were weapons stock piled underneath or Hamas militants hiding there. So, Israel is bombing targets where there are civilians in order to get at the Hamas amid the civilians or the weapons below them. It is not merely that civilians standing near by the fighting are getting hit, some are being hit directly because they are with the wrong people or in the wrong places.


I started writing just now because I am in the computer lab, trying to do work but we just had another alarm. There is a safe room next to the computer room so we just went in there (people meandered in). There were two booms, and one sounded close. Really loud. I don't know where it was. It wasn't next to the dorms or anything but must have been in a neighborhood nearby. We only had one alert yesterday and none the day before. They have been lessening. Two people were seriously hurt in this last rocket to hit here and six others wounded. They are the first serious injuries here.


I don't know what I meant to say with the stuff about civilians, just that it is all so unclear.

But this talk/ media on Gaza is making me think, aren't all the wars we wage terrible? I mean civilians are killed in the crossfire all the time, but maybe because the wars the US has been fighting have been so far away from us -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- the media coverage of them has been mostly sanitary. As in more sanitary than what they show and imply in their coverage of Gaza. I did not get the same sense of widespread suffering of civilians from the coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan as I do with the coverage of Gaza. Does this mean that the suffering was not there, or only that the media did not report it in the same way they report it in Gaza? Of course, I probably wasn't paying close enough attention to IRaq or Afghanistan to make very dependable claims.
Regardless of my weak amount of information, I wonder, if we take out the fact that Israel is implicated in the reason Gaza's situation exists, is Israel killing more civilians/ being more cruel towards civilians than the US was in its two previous wars? Well, both are ongoing I guess.

I read that US dropped food and aid in between its bombings of Kabal, AFganistan in 2001. And we all know that the army used smart missiles which can hit specific buildings even if shot from very far away. The implication of all this -- the aid and the smart missiles -- is that the US killed only the bad guys and helped the good, the innocent. But we know from Gaza that civilians are in every building. Whether the missiles are smart or not, they still kill civilians.

One thing I am learning in my studies here is that the US is not as benevolent as we believe it to be. We forget when we are in the center (in the US I mean), what the US's policies really look like from the outside. Our government tells us it goes after the bad people around the world and aims to help the innocent. But we determine who is bad and good, and the people in the societies themselves do not see things the same way. When the US targets Iraq, it targets Iraq. For the people in Iraq, an attack on Iraq feels like an attack on everyone there. Or, well to be more I don't know more subtle, even if the people of Iraq see the US working against certain factions, they are probably suffering as well. Basically, well Basically this is crap and I need to be more specific.


It is 6:45 pm on Thursday (Israel's equivalent of Friday, ie. the start of the weekend) and the only people still in the computer lab with me are Arab. All the Jews have gone home for the weekend, or stopped working. I have noticed the same thing in the library the last week. Out of the students who stayed at the University after the war started and classes were cancelled a high percentage were Arab.
It's like a party for them in here. I mean they're all cracking jokes with one another.
Arabic really is a cool language. You can't speak it and be a wimp -- there are so many guttural, and what sound to the American's ear as empathtic sort of noises. Just listening to it reminds you that there are so many parts of the mouth and the throat that can be used in speech that we never use. I quit my arabic class because I didn't have the energy or the drive to learn a new language right now... It felt like forcing myself to do yoga exercises that were damn hard for me to do and that I had not decided I wanted to do, but was only doing because I was told I had to. But anyway, it's still nice to listen to other people doing it.