I live alone in my office. My wife and two young children moved in with her father after our apartment was shattered. The neighborhood mosque, where I have prayed since I was a child, had its roof blown off. All the government buildings on my beat have been obliterated.
After days of Israeli shelling, the city and life I have known no longer exist.
Gaza City, with some 400,000 people, stopped supplying water when the fuel ran out for the power station driving the pumps. We listen to battery-run radios for news, even though the outside world watches what's happening to us on television. The Hadi grocery where we once shopped is closed. Food is scarce all over town.
AP Gaza reporter finds hometown in rubble
Lucky my parents aren't alive to see this
Forget the bombardments, forget the electricity, food, even sleep. But no water? Because of the bombardments by sea, land and air, people cannot even go out to get drinking water from the city faucets. And when someone does have running water at home, it's undrinkable.
Because of my parents' history they knew what it meant to close people behind barbed-wire fences in a small area. A year, five years, 10 years. From 1991. How lucky it is that they are not alive to see how how these incarcerated people are bombarded with all the glorious military technology of Israel and the United States.
Brain-cooling devices developed
Scientists have developed new ways to cool the brains of heart attack and stroke victims to protect them from damage and help save lives.
Among the inventions, reported in New Scientist magazine, are a cap that blows cold air across the scalp.
Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?
Kucinich: Israel may be using American weapons illegally
Responding to media reports that Israel had bombed a UN school serving as a refuge for Palestinian civilians, Congressman Dennis Kucinich is calling for a Congressional report on Israel's possibly illegal misuse of US weapons.
Women banned from Baghdad shrine
Iraqi authorities have closed a major shrine in Baghdad's Kadhimiya area to women amid security concerns as a Shia religious ceremony reaches its climax.
Ashura is among the holiest days for Shia Muslims, but women will be barred from the Imam Moussa al-Kadhim shrine.
TVNL Comment: Iraqi women had full equality under Saddam!
Gates estimates 2009 war costs at $136 billion
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would cost almost $136 billion for the 2009 budget year that began Oct. 1 if they continue at their current pace.
Speaking for neither his current boss, President George W. Bush — nor his future one, President-elect Barack Obama — Gates told top lawmakers in a New Year's Eve letter that the Pentagon would need nearly $70 billion more to supplement the $66 billion approved last year.
Ex-Guantánamo detainee describes torture
When Muhammad Saad Iqbal arrived home here in August after more than six years in U.S. custody, including five at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.
In Pictures: the slaughter of Gazan children Victims of the Israeli occupation forces in the tenth day of their attacks on Gaza Strip
The assault on Gaza is now into its tenth day. As the death and injury toll continues to rise hospitals are becoming increasingly overwhelmed. Israel however insists there is not a humanitarian crisis.
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