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MENASSAT features a sampling of today's news coverage - a mixture of Op-Eds, blogrolls, and underreported items picked by the MENASSAT editorial team to highlight what is happening on day four of the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip.

  Ali Al-Faifi, 3, holds a poster, as he joins with other protesters in the centre of Cardiff, Wales, Tuesday Dec. 30, 2008, to peacefully protest against the Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip. © AP Photo/Ben Birchall

MENASSAT begins today's media coverage of the on-going Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip with an Op-Ed by Ali Abunimah "Israel's bomb are only the latest variation in the killing of Palestinians." Abunimah is co-founder ofThe Electronic Intifada and author of the book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.

“Deprived of food and medicine by an Israeli blockade, the most vulnerable Palestinians die silent deaths every day.”

"I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing." Those chilling words were spoken on Al Jazeera on Saturday by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defense official in the Sderot area adjacent to the Gaza Strip.  For days Israeli planes have bombed Gaza. Almost 300 Palestinians have been killed and a thousand injured, the majority civilians, including women and children. Israel claims most of the dead were Hamas "terrorists."  In fact, the targets were police stations in dense residential areas, and the dead included many police officers and other civilians. Under international law, police officers are civilians, and targeting them is no less a war crime than aiming at other civilians... Israel says it is acting in "retaliation" for rockets fired with increasing intensity ever since a six-month truce expired on December 19th.  But the bombs dropped on Gaza are only a variation in Israel's method of killing Palestinians. In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food, cancer treatments and other medicines by an Israeli blockade that targeted 1.5 million people -- mostly refugees and children -- caged into the Gaza Strip. The orders of Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, to hold back medicine were just as lethal and illegal as those to send in the warplanes. MENASSAT continues with the efforts of the Free Gaza Movement to get humanitarian aid supplies into the Gaza Strip from the sea. On Monday night, the S.S. Dignity, a 66-foot British-owned ship, attempted to return with aid supplies to the Gaza Strip. According to numerous sources, S.S. Dignity was rammed by the Israeli navy and forced away from the Gaza port. On five previous attempts, the Israeli navy had allowed the aid ship through the naval blockade.

The  humanitarian aid ship S.S. Dignity.© FGM 

TYRE, LEBANON - International activists on an aid boat bound for Gaza were forced back to the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre on Tuesday after a clash with an Israeli naval ship forced it to divert to Lebanon. A spokesman from Israel’s Foreign Ministry confirmed there had been "physical contact" between its vessel and the 60-foot cabin cruiser "Dignity," which sailed from Cyprus late on Monday. Activists from the "Free Gaza" movement told Reuters their boat, carrying 3 1/2 metric tons of medical aid and 16 people, was rammed and shot at in international waters 70-80 miles off Gaza by an Israeli naval vessel. There were no casualties. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, denied there had been any shooting, and said the aid boat had failed to respond to radio contact. After the first day of air strikes last Saturday, Israel declared the Gaza coastal territory a closed military zone. Among the 16 activists and aid workers aboard Dignity was former U.S. congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. McKinney, who ran as the Green Party candidate for president, sees the voyage as a humanitarian mission, according to her father, former Georgia state (USA) Rep. Billy McKinney. “Her mother did not want her to go,” he said, referring to concerns at home for her safety. “But I think that certain people have missions in life and you can’t deter them.”

As for damage, the Dignity had a gaping hole in its superstructure and an activist said sea water had leaked in after the collision. 

"It was like ramming a Mini (car) with a truck," Eleni Theocharous, a Cypriot lawmaker on board the boat, told Reuters.

The Dignity docked in Tyre escorted by a Lebanese navy vessel and several fishing boats waving Lebanese and Shi'ite party flags. Scores of Palestinians and Lebanese greeted the boat at the port.  Cyprus state radio said the Cypriot government would seek explanations from Israel over the incident. The vessel was carrying medical aid donated by Cyprus and there were at least three Cypriots on board, including the parliamentarian. Free Gaza is a U.S.-based organization which has sent regular shuttles of aid to Gaza from Cyprus since August. Activists said they were looking for another boat to sail to Gaza from Tyre with supplies from the Dignity. "We are determined to go to Gaza and we are looking for another boat," said activist Derek Graham. "The Cypriot government gave us this medicine to deliver, and we will deliver it." (Sources: Reuters, Atlantic Journal-Constitution, International Herald Tribune)

Natalie Abu Sha'ra: 'It makes sense for me to be in Gaza'

Just a week before Israel's latest assault against Gaza, a humanitarian aid ship was allowed through the Israeli blockade of the Strip. On board was Natalie Abu Sha'ra, a 21-year-old Christian from South Lebanon who defied her own country's travel ban to come to the aid of people in Gaza. She told her story to MENASSAT's Olfat Haddad.  

_____ The blogosphere has been actively engaged in the on-going Gaza crisis. MENASSAT features a piece - "Still as death, dark is life" - from Laila al Haddad's blog "Raising Yousuf and Noor: diary of a Palestinian mother."  Haddad, a Palestinian from Gaza, a journalist, blogger, and a mother of two writes about her experiences, "from potty training to border crossings."  ------- There is a complete black out in Gaza now. The streets are still as death.” I am speaking to my father, Moussa El-Haddad, a retired physician who lives in Gaza City, on Skype, from Durham, North Carolina in the United States, where I have been since mid 2006- the month Gaza’s borders were hermetically sealed by Israel, and the blockade of the occupied territory further enforced.  He is out on his balcony. It is 2am.  “I can only see gray plumes of smoke slowly rising all over the city, everywhere I look” he says, as though they were some beautiful, comforting by-product of some hideous, malicious event.  He takes a deep restorative sigh before continuing. “Ehud Barak has gone crazy. He’s gone crazy. He is bombing everywhere and everything…no one is safe”. Explosions are audible in the background. They sound distant and dull over my laptop’s speakers, but linger like an echo in death’s valley.  They evoke terrifying memories of my nights in Gaza only 2 years ago. Nights that till this day haunt my 4 year old son-who refuses to sleep on his own.   “Can you hear them? Our house is shaking. We are shaking from the inside out.” “Laila-your mother, she is terrified” he adds.   She comes to the phone. “Hello, hello dear,” she mutters, her voice trembling.  “I had to go to the bathroom. But I’m afraid to go alone. I wanted to perform wudu’ before prayer but I was scared. 

"Remember days when we would go to the bathroom together because you were too afraid to go alone?” she laughs at the thought-it seems amusing to her now, that I was scared to find my death in a place of relief; that she is now terrified of the same seemingly ridiculous scenario."

It was really the fear of being alone. When you “hear” the news before it becomes news, you panic for clarity- you want someone to make sense of the situation, package it neatly into comprehensible terms and locations. Just to be sure-its not you this time.  “It’s strange, my whole body is shaking. Why is that? Why is that?” she rambles on, continuous explosions audible in the background. “There they go again. One boom after another. 15. Before that, one or two, maybe 20 total so far.”  Counting makes it’s easier. Systemizing the assaults makes them easier to deal with. More remote.  We speak to each other throughout the day. She calls sometimes to let me know if there are gunships overhead, or explosions around them. As though there was something I could do about it; as though my voice would somehow make them disappear... ....It is Noor’s one year old birthday January 1. She will turn one. I cannot help but think- who was born in bloodied Gaza today? Visit Leila al Haddad's blog for the full account -------- MENASSAT turns last to a comprehensive media analysis of the situation in Gaza written by Jamal Dajani who produces the Mosaic Intelligence Report on Link TV.Dajani writes in the Huffington Post: NEAR NAHAL OZ, ISRAEL - The Israeli "all-out war" on Gaza has entered its fourth day leaving more than 363 dead and 1,800 wounded. Israeli troop movements on the Gaza border point to an imminent ground battle in the upcoming few days.  On Monday, the Israeli military declared the Gaza border, where tanks, artillery and troops are massing for a possible ground offensive, a closed military zone. Reporters are being barred by Israel from going into Gaza to cover the carnage. Many have been relegated to reporting from behind Israel's declared military zone, some report from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv and rely on phone dispatches by stringers in the Gaza Strip.  The best television coverage I've seen so far comes from Al Jazeera; the most provocative comes from Hezbollah's Al Manar. The Israeli coverage on IBA TV and Ch 10 reminds me of FOX News during the Iraq War with a focus on military strategies, graphics and interviews, with Israeli government spokesmen and generals.  At Beit Agron, the Israeli Government Press Office has not yet issued my "visiting journalist credentials." I went there in person three days ago, thinking they would be processed and delivered to me the same day.  As I waited, a steady stream of international reporters applied for and received theirs. The press office liaison hands a British journalist his credentials and smiles, "don't forget to report that we were first attacked by Qassam rockets; they're hitting us we're not hitting them."  The office wall is adorned with rockets fired by Hamas on the Israeli town of Sderot. A Korean journalist poses in front of them and does a "stand-up."  The polite but evasive liaison keeps making excuses for the delay in issuing my press card. He keeps uncovering additional material that is missing in order to complete my application. He finally tells me that he won't have an answer for me until the next day... I won't bore you with the details, but I am Palestinian American.