Listening to Tales of Horror

Tonight I drove down to Janesville to listen to Kathy Kelly, who has recently returned from visiting Ghaza after the Israeli invasion and massacre. What I heard was horrifying.

There were whole neighborhoods destroyed and bombed out. The IDF told Kathy's team that certain areas had no women and children left in them. When they got in, they discovered women and children still around. One place had a grandmother, paralyzed from the waist down. The family was trying to get her to the hospital, but IDF snipers were shooting at Palestinians who got too close to the hospital. So Kathy got a stretcher from the hospital, yelling out, "I'm American," and ran over to the family to help the grandmother get to the hospital.

Kathy spoke of listening to a doctor taking a call to answer if the oranges were safe to eat. The IDF had bulldozed many orange groves, which the families depend on for their livelihood. They were therefore going through and picking up the oranges on the ground. But they had to call the doctor after they noticed that their hands were itching, and a foul smell was coming off the oranges. Were these safe to eat? The doctor knew that if they didn't use them, the families would no longer have a way of earning a living, or getting food. So he told them to wash the oranges really well.

Chemical studies confirmed that white phosphorus had been used on the population of Ghaza. There are reasons most human rights groups condemn the practice. Those injured by white phosphorus were brought into the hospitals, still burning. The burn seeps into the skin, going deeper and deeper. If the burning is stopped, and the wound exposed to oxygen again, the phosphorous flares up and begins burning again. Doctors treating burn patients would get secondary effects themselves from breathing the white phosphorous fumes. Two patients whose burn wounds were cleaned and healed completely were shipped to Egypt for further treatment. They both died, not from burns, but because white phosphorous is also a poison in human bodies when it gets into the blood stream.

If you're an American, it was your tax dollars that funded the ammunition and chemical weapons that were used on the people of Ghaza.

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