One-sided approach

There is no response either to the "accidental" destruction of the offices, pharmacy, disabled centre, ambulance and generator of the Oxfam-funded Palestinian Medical Relief Society.

The US and the EU, which dispense regular lectures to the occupied, dispossessed, blockaded and suffering Palestinian people about the need to forswear violence, are unmoved by this carnage.

And there may well be a further escalation of the slaughter, with the Israeli cabinet split between those who wish to maintain the current "targeted" assassination programme and others backing a full-scale invasion of Gaza.

Given the concentrated and overcrowded nature of Gaza, it is not difficult to imagine the consequences of an onslaught by the Israeli war machine.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offers self-defence as the justification for the ongoing assaults on Gaza, pointing to one death and a number of injuries by Palestinian resistance groups' use of crude, home-made erratic rockets.

He fails to acknowledge the disparity in casualties, with just 13 Israeli civilians dying as a result of Palestinian rockets over the past seven years.

In contrast, Israeli human rights group B'Tselem calculates that 379 Palestinians died at the hands of the Israeli armed forces last year.

In this January alone, they killed 87 Palestinians, including 24 non-combatants, yet the Palestinians are categorised as violent terrorists while the expansionist, zionist-colonialist regime is portrayed as resisting terrorism.

While this mayhem proceeded in January, US President George W Bush gave a dishonest speech at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which was spun by compliant media to appear to call for "an end to the occupation that began in 1967."

The less-publicised sting in the tail was his observation that a peace agreement would "require mutually agreed adjustments to the armistice lines of 1949 to reflect current realities," such as the illegal presence of over 400,000 zionist settlers on the West Bank.

This was a follow-up to his April 2004 letter to then Israeli leader Ariel Sharon that it would be "unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final-status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."

And, in that letter, the US president declared that the "solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final-status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state and the settlement of Palestinian refuges there rather than in Israel."

In other words, every Jew in the world has a right to settle in Israel, which is denied to Palestinian Arabs who were born there.

And this is the negotiating framework within which hapless Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas seeks a peaceful settlement with the occupying power.

The world cannot sit back and allow mass murder and systematic dispossession of the Palestinian people to continue unremarked.

Israel is in breach of international law, having ignored over 30 UN security council resolutions on its occupation of Palestinian land. How long can its "special case" category continue?