.

This week the death toll in Gaza passed the 1,000 mark, after three weeks of Israeli air and ground attacks. But surprisingly, no one has reported an even more appalling statistic: that there are some 1.5 million injured Palestinians in Gaza. How is is possible that such an astounding figure could have passed the world's media by? The reason apparently is that they have been relying on the highly unreliable statistics provided by official Palestinian sources. It appears that the Palestinian health ministry only records as wounded those Gazans who need to stay in hospital because of the severity of their injuries. That means they only count the more than 4,500 Gazans who have suffered injuries such as severe burns from exploding Israeli phosphorus shells; shrapnel wounds from artillery rounds; broken or lost limbs from aerial bombardment; bullet wounds; physical trauma from falling building debris; and so on. But in fact there is another, far more reasonable standard for assess...

If any doubt remained that the United Nations is in need of drastic reform, it has to have been evaporated by the Security Council's "activities" since the beginning of Israel's brutal offensive against the Gaza Strip on December 27 . During this time, the council has failed utterly to act in a manner befitting the urgency due a civilian bloodbath, repeatedly delaying action aimed at ending the crisis and initially producing a weak "statement" when a firm resolution was obviously required . Representatives of various member states have alternately sulked and dithered, leaked nasty comments about one another to the media, threatened to walk out, and even sought additional delays. And after a decidedly watery resolution finally was arrived at late Thursday night in New York, both Israel and Gaza's Hamas leadership dismissed it within hours . For an organization whose resolutions are known to languish for decades awaiting implementation, wasting a couple of...

YouTube & &Twitter Days after sending aircraft to strike Hamas militants in Gaza, the Israeli government is launching a campaign to dominate the blogosphere. Among other things, the Israeli military has started its own YouTube channel to distribute footage of precision airstrikes. And as I type, the Israeli consulate in New York is hosting a press conference on microblogging site Twitter . It's pretty interesting to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reduced to tweets of 140 characters or less ("We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?"; "we're not at war with the PAL people. we're at war with a group declared by the EU& US a terrorist org"). The Jerusalem Post quotes Maj. Avital Leibovich, the head of the Israeli Defense Forces' foreign press branch on the digital media campaign. "The blogosphere and new media are another war zone," sh...

The Bombing of Gaza by Dr. Eyad Al Serraj The bombing went on for about 10 minutes. It was like an earthquake on top of your head. The windows were shaking and squeaking. My 10-year-old was terrified, he was jumping from one place to another trying to hide. I held him tight to my chest and tried to give him some security and reassure him. My 12-year-old was panicking and began laughing hysterically, it’s not normal. I held her hand and calmed her and told her she would be safe. My wife was panicking. She was running around the apartment looking for somewhere to hide. We live on the ground floor so we headed to the basement. Not very far from our home is the headquarters of the police and there was a massive bomb. The chief of police was killed. Two streets away there was another bomb and more people were killed. The office of the president is about one kilometre from our house and it was also bombed. We went downstairs to the basement and tried to hide ourselves from the shelling. T...

Israel's policies against the Palestinians are tantamount to a " crime against humanity", the United Nations' human rights rapporteur has said. Richard Falk said in a statement on Tuesday that the UN must "implement the agreed norm of a responsibility to protect a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a crime against humanity". The statement came on the same day that the UN Human Rights Council urged Israel to implement 99 measures to improve its rights record. Falk said it would seem "mandatory" that the UN's International Criminal Court investigate Israel’s policies in regard to the Palestinians. "[The court could] determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law," he said. The Israeli government has faced a level of criticism by "normally cautious UN officia...