10-13-2014 In the last days of ‘Operation Protective Edge’ Israel focused on its final goal — the destruction of Gaza’s professional class – Dan Cohen Mondoweiss

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/protective-destruction-professional?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=66b419a4e4-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b86bace129-66b419a4e4-398495333


At just after 4 am [on the last night], drones and F16s flying at low altitude over Gaza attacked the Basha Tower, a 15-story building only an estimated 100 meters away from the al Shorouq tower. The stately tower was the oldest in Gaza City, as much a symbol of the urban landscape as the World Trade Center was to New York City. Its offices housed medical and dental clinics, non-governmental and media organizations including many of Gaza's most popular radio stations. …The previous night Israeli warplanes and drones brought down the Zafer 4 resident tower, a 14-story residential tower that housed at least 44 mostly middle class families, including that of the director of Fatah's security apparatus in the Gaza Strip. At the same time, it destroyed the 7-story Zourab building, a commercial center in Rafah. Other nearby buildings were threatened with destruction but spared without explanation.

The bombing of these buildings was the finale of Israel's mass destruction of the Gaza Strip, flattening landmark towers that provided essential social and economic functions, and which stood as symbols of the besieged coastal strip's beleaguered professional class. While the war began with the flattening of the areas the Israeli military considers Gaza's "hard shell" — border areas like Shujaiya and Khuza'a — it ended with a brazen assault on its soft core.  The targeting of the professional class, a key pillar of Palestinian society generally considered unsympathetic to the political goals of Hamas, was a new front of economic and social warfare on Gaza….

…Gaza's fishing and farming industries, already crippled under siege, had been decimated. The destruction of more than 360 factories severely damaged Gaza's weak industrial economy.

…Implementing the principle of "searing into the consciousness" articulated by Moshe Ya'alon, this unprecedented level of destruction struck a final psychological blow, sending an unmistakable message that unless Palestinians in Gaza abandon resistance and accept ghettoization and mass-imprisonment, Israel's campaign of mass destruction and killing would resume…

 

Posted by Judith Ferster, AIME member

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