You just keep calling me silly Keith, and I'll just keep presenting evidence to show just who is silly, deluded and just plain WRONG.

Your attempts to fudge the issue to show that only Hamas ever do anything wrong are becoming both tedious and ludicrous. 145 Israelis who were and are directly involved say so.

""It's Mostly Punishment…"
Testimonies by Veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces From Gaza and the Occupied Territories
By Breaking the Silence

November 25, 2012

"There is no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders," President Barack Obama said at a press conference last week.

He drew on this general observation in order to justify Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel's most recent military campaign in the Gaza Strip.

In describing the situation this way, he assumes, like many others, that Gaza is a political entity external and independent of Israel.

This is not so. It is true that Israel officially disengaged from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, withdrawing its ground troops and evacuating the Israeli settlements there. But despite the absence of a permanent ground presence, Israel has maintained a crushing control over Gaza from that moment until today.

The testimonies of Israeli army veterans expose the truth of that "disengagement." Before Operation Pillar of Defense, after all, Israel launched Operations Summer Rains and Autumn Clouds in 2006, and Hot Winter and Cast Lead in 2008 -- all involving ground invasions.

In one testimony, a veteran speaks of "a battalion operation" in Gaza that lasted for five months, where the soldiers were ordered to shoot "to draw out terrorists" so they "could kill a few."

    Israeli naval blockades stop Gazans from fishing, a main source of food in the Strip. Air blockades prevent freedom of movement. Israel does not allow building materials into the area, forbids exports to the West Bank and Israel, and (other than emergency humanitarian cases) prohibits movement between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

It controls the Palestinian economy by periodically withholding import taxes. Its restrictions have impeded the expansion and upgrading of the Strip's woeful sewage infrastructure, which could render life in Gaza untenable within a decade.

The blocking of seawater desalination has turned the water supply into a health hazard. Israel has repeatedly demolished small power plants in Gaza, ensuring that the Strip would have to continue to rely on the Israeli electricity supply.

Daily power shortages have been the norm for several years now. Israel's presence is felt everywhere, militarily and otherwise.

    By relying on factual misconceptions, political leaders, deliberately or not, conceal information that is critical to our understanding of events.

Among the people best qualified to correct those misconceptions are the individuals who have been charged with executing a state's policies -- in this case, Israeli soldiers themselves, an authoritative source of information about their government's actions.

I am a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and I know that our first-hand experiences refute the assumption, accepted by many, including President Obama, that Gaza is an independent political entity that exists wholly outside Israel. If Gaza is outside Israel, how come we were stationed there? If Gaza is outside Israel, how come we control it? Oded Na'aman

    [The testimonies by Israeli veterans that follow are taken from 145 collected by the nongovernmental organization "Breaking the Silence" and published in Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers' Testimonies From the Occupied Territories, 2000-2010.

Those in the book represent every division in the IDF and all locations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.]""

Don T.