ITV - John Pilger - Looking from the side, from Belsan to Gaza

ITV - John Pilger - Looking from the side, from Belsan to Gaza: "Looking to the side, from Belsen to Gaza
18 Jan 2007
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the warnings of genocide in Gaza, and the suffering of 1.4 million Palestinians living a 'life in a cage' as the world looks on. He quotes Israeli journalist Amira Hass on the experience of her mother in a Nazi concentration camp and the Germans who watched, 'looking from the side'.

A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders. 'Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run and no space to hide,' wrote the senior UN relief official, Jan Egeland, and Jan Eliasson, then Swedish foreign minister, in Le Figaro. They described people 'living in a cage', cut off by land, sea and air, with no reliable power and little water and tortured by hunger and disease and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes.

Egeland and Eliasson wrote this four months ago as an attempt to break the silence in Europe whose obedient alliance with the United States and Israel has sought to reverse the democratic result that brought Hamas to power in last year’s Palestinian elections. The horror in Gaza has since been compounded; a family of 18"