On 01 June Israeli snipers shot and killed Razan al-Najjar, a 21-year-old volunteer paramedic in Gaza. She was wearing a white medical coat , and was tending wounded protestors when she was shot. She and other paramedics had approached the wounded, with their hands in the air.
Another unarmed Palestinian shot by a heavily armed military that boasts that they know exactly what they are doing. She’s not the first to be killed , not even the first woman, not the first paramedic. Maybe the first woman paramedic to be targeted.
What motivated Razan to be a first responder instead of waiting back in a tent for victims to be bought to her by male paramedics? She had told interviewers that she wanted to prove that being a first responder was a woman’s job too, and that her father was proud of her.
She told interviewers last month, “We have one goal, to save lives and evacuate people. And to send a message to the world: Without weapons, we can do anything.”
Razan al Najjar lived in a farming village east of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Her father had a shop that sold motorcycle parts, which was destroyed in an Israeli air strike during the 2014 bombings.He has since been unemployed.
The eldest of six children, Razan did not score well enough in her high school exams to attend university, so instead she chose to train for two years at a hospital in Khan Younis, as a paramedic. She then volunteered with the Palestinian Medical Relief Society.
Her father reports that his daughter rose before dawn on Friday June 01, to eat and pray before the start of the daily, sunrise-to-sunset Ramadan fast.
That was the last time he saw her.
KiaOraGaza has a link to an interview with her.
Can you imagine the reaction of the West’s media and Western Governments, if, God forbid, a missile, rock, whatever, launched, or thrown by a Palestinian, any Palestinian, maybe a ‘lonewolf’, anywhere, killed a young Israeli volunteer nurse giving aid?
Why does the West continue to turn a blind eye to Israel’s blatant contempt for international law..to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians which Noam Chomsky describes as sadistic?
Every world leader who looks the other way is complicit. At least NZ is not selling weapons to Israel, like the Americans and British are.
But unless our Government shows real anger and expels the Israeli Embassy, then New Zealand is complicit too.
So here is an open question to the Government. How many Palestinians would have to be slaughtered before the Government would follow the example of South Africa and shut down the Israeli Embassy ?
How many children? How many journalists holding cameras and wearing jackets marked PRESS? How many paramedics?
How many 21-year old women volunteer paramedics?
Is there a Red Line?
And why is it impossible to get the world’s powerful, including the media they control, to even consider that maybe …
PALESTINIAN LIVES MATTER !!!
Lois Griffiths is a human rights activist.
Low life swines.
Pig ignorant of any decency, empathy, and Genevra conventions except when it suites them to cry victim as they do with sickening frequency.
Gaza presents a problem for its inhabitants.
On the one hand if they refuse to get involved with the terrorist activities of Hamas, they stand a good chance of being tortured or murdered.
On the other hand if they do as Hamas demands and attempt what are essentially suicide missions to invade nearby Israeli suburbs and kill the residents, they stand a good chance of being shot doing that too.
“PALESTINIAN LIVES MATTER !!!”, really?? please let Hamas know lois as it’s them that are using protestors as human shields to fire on Israel soldiers at the border fence! A muslim life is worth next to nothing to another muslim as long as they can get a false message out there that Israel are big bullies and add in the PA and Hamas fake videos they shoot that has shown them as idiots for the propaganda they crave. If it were not so serious, these fake video’s would be funny in their amateurishness.
Oh, please stop being an apologist for a repressive regime that shoots unarmed opponants!! The Israeli Zionists are no better than the Gestapo who shot innocent Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto!
You can spread your malicious lies all you like, Mr Im Right, but eventually Israel will be forced to abandon it’s malevolent apartheid policies and Palestine will be a free state. Your support for zionism only delays that by about a second.
“So here is an open question to the Government. How many Palestinians would have to be slaughtered before the Government would follow the example of South Africa and shut down the Israeli Embassy ?” How many white farmers need to be slaughtered before the world shows interest in Sth Africa?, when the begging bowl is passed out again as there will be not enough food being produced to feed the population, then once again it will be everyone elses fault?, Mandella must be spinning in his grave.
Time for the Israeli embassy to be shut down.
..AND the lying Zionist Federation of New Zealand to be deported to Israel.
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