I sit in the shade of a palm roofed hut on the edges of the dunes, momentarily defeated by the heat, the grit, the jostling crowds, the stench of the open sewers and rotting garbage.

Barefoot boys, clutching kites made out of scraps of paper and ragged soccer balls, squat a few feet away under scrub trees.

It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loud speaker.

"Come on dogs," the voice [of an Israeli soldier] booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!"

I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore"!" "Your mother's cunt!"

The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.

A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.

Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven year old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other countries I have covered - death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo - but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

HARPER'S--Oct. 2001

Humanitarian Groups Warn Conflict a Potential Catastrophe for Iraqi Children

By Alan L. Heil Jr.

"They have guns and bombs and the air will be cold and hot and we will burn very much."

--Assem, 5 years old

"I would like to send a message to President Bush: 'A lot of Iraqi children will die. You will see it on TV and you will regret [it].'"

--Aesar, 10 years old

"I do not expect them to kill so many. It is not acceptable. Maybe the American people have some sympathy with us since we are peaceful and do not want to attack them."

--Shahad, 11 years old

Fear among Iraqi children is pervasive amid talk of a war that could alter their lives and those of their families in unimaginable and terrible ways for years to come.

This is the finding of the International Study Team, a group of multidisciplinary experts in health, nutrition, food security, child psychology, and international humanitarian law. During a week-long field survey in late January, the non-governmental group sampled views of the country's 13 million youngsters 18 years and younger. The specialists, including internationally-known child psychologists Magne Raundalen and Atle Dyrgrov, spoke with children in schools and often in their own homes, without Iraqi government minders present. Based on their interviews of children and their parents in more than a hundred households in Baghdad, Basra and Kerbala, the Study Team's report is the most comprehensive on-site survey of the possible impact of war on children that has been conducted in Iraq. Entitled Our Common Responsibility, it is available at <http://www. warchild.ca/docs/final_report_report_january_29v 1.0.pdf>.

"Should war occur," the Study Team's report concludes, "the world can expect a grave humanitarian disaster, with children even more vulnerable than they were in the 1991 Gulf war. Iraqi children are at grave risk of starvation, disease, death and psychological trauma. While it is impossible to predict both the nature of any war and the number of any deaths or injuries, casualties among children will be in the thousands, probably the tens of thousands, and possibly in the hundreds of thousands."

Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs--April 2003

Israel's Psychological Terrorism

Flashbacks: 500,000 Palestinian Children Suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

By Robert Younes

Without warning the child jerks straight up, gasps audibly and shakes his head. Sweat appears on his forehead, and a frightened, painful look replaces his smile. Moments earlier Khalil a 12-yearold composite of many Palestinian children-was playing peacefully with his plastic toy in his home in Nablus. Suddenly, however, tears appear at the corners of his eyes as a vivid, violent motion picture flashes before him: Khalil and his teenage cousin Samer are walking hand in hand down a street in their home town. Turning a corner, they find an Israeli jeep stationed 50 meters ahead of them. Amid loud staccato sounds, Samer falls backward and crumples to the ground. Blood pours from multiple spots on his chest and head. Khalil bends down to help, but, as the child desperately tries to staunch the flow of blood, his cousin dies.

These terrifying visions torment Khalil almost daily. Each time he experiences them, his heart beats faster in his chest, he shakes and quivers, and he becomes frightened and immobilized. He believes his repeated visions are so abnormal that he dare not tell anybody about them lest they think he is majnoon (crazy).

In his sorrow and sadness, Khalil blames himself for his cousin's death three months ago. Samer would be alive today, he believes, if Khalil hadn't chosen that route in Nablus. His feelings of guilt, shame and responsibility for his cousin's death prevent him from turning to his family for comfort and playing with his brothers and sisters. Adding to his distress, Khalil's entire family are depressed, and shed bitter tears when they think of Samer.

Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs--March 2003

Children Are a Chief Target as the Israelis "De-develop" Palestinian Society

By Rachelle Marshall

"It is part of a systematic destruction of the Palestinian entity, the Palestinian infrastructure, the Palestinian political system, the Palestinian economy, the destruction of everything Palestinian." --Abdul Jawad Saleh, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, commenting on Israel's demolition of Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah and extended siege of his office, New York Times, Sept. 23.

"You are leaving behind you a scorched land, a scorched country, and you are mainly leaving behind you a scorched people..." --Yossi Sarid, Israeli opposition leader, to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Oct. 14, just before Sharon left for Washington to meet with George W. Bush.

The mass protests that erupted in the West Bank and Gaza in September 2000 and soon turned into an unequal battle between the Israeli army and Palestinians armed with stones, guns, and homemade bombs, entered a new and more violent phase this fall as the army embarked on a campaign of unrestrained killing. Moderate Palestinian leaders persistently tried to convince militants to end their attacks against Israelis, arguing they were certain to bring on massive retaliation by Israel, only to have Israel provoke new violence whenever there was a period of quiet.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who enjoys the Bush administration's unwavering support, has made no secret of the fact that his aim is to subdue the Palestinians, not negotiate peace. Consequently he keeps tension alive by keeping West Bank cities and towns under curfew, preventing Palestinian farmers from harvesting their fruit, building cement walls and ditches across Palestinian land to protect settlements, and allowing triggerhappy soldiers to enforce curfews with live ammunition. Israel may be the only country in the world that considers violating a curfew, throwing a stone, or even walking to school capital offense punishable by death. The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem reported that between mid-September and midOctober, 12 Palestinian children were shot to death by soldiers enforcing curfews.

By early October the total number of Palestinian deaths since the intifada began had reached more than 2,000, including more than 260 children. A report by Amnesty International blamed many of these casualties on the Israeli army's "reckless shooting shelling and aerial bombardments of residential areas." On the same day that Amnesty's report was released, Israeli soldiers shot dead two 10-year-old boys.

Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs--Dec. 2002

Some readers will be tempted to hide behind the illusion that dead, brutalized, traumatized children in Palestine are a separate issue from the one million Iraqi children dead because of America's sanctions...but, given the Israel lobby's "donations" to virtually our entire Congress [see Follow the $$] and the group of Israel-obsessed Neo-cons that are often called "the architects of U.S. Foreign Policy" [see "Operation Iraqi INVASION"], that is too disingenuous for anyone with half a brain to believe.

There will be more of this section.

I will stop when Israel stops.

Ron D