introduction in that it is a slow motion genocide with the surges of mass killings as we've seen in the past four years with attacks at the beginning of two thousand and eight the end of two thousand and eight and in between and in two thousand and twelve other than that the collective punishment of palestinians in gaza and the israeli policies against palestinians in gaza would be aptly described as a genocide and the presentation blockade or due to the israeli attacks whether bombing or the gunfire on palestinian civilians but is certainly more graphic than a show i always tell my audience that i'm going to show some graphic photos because this is the reality and  no it's not again in fact when internationals are present with farmers the attacks on farmers and their lie on us as well does occur but certainly it occurs with more frequency and more lethality when when internationals are not present with our cameras and video cameras farmers endure this on a daily basis this is part of the israeli policy against civilians in the border regions i was struck with the thought that your remote control it's one of the many sadistic policies it's in fact and israeli soldier be they male or female in a control room which could be in tel aviv for all i know and as i've read in in an article about this remotely control tower there are actually manipulating the gun with something like a joystick similar to what we would if used as children playing violent video games and in fact they're so they're so distance from the reality of what they're doing there they see on a monitor according to this report they see on a monitor who they're targeting and they see with precision because we know that israel has very high tech surveillance equipment so these soldiers see with precision exactly who they're targeting children elderly young men or almost from haro there's no one just on a side note i never called on the i d f because they're not in fact defending their oppressing so i usually say israeli army or israeli occupation forces but nonetheless there's no doubt and in fact on many occasions israeli authorities have given orders to the israeli army to drop leaflets into border regions basically enforcing the so called no go zone or the buffer zone and these leaflets depict the outline of gaza with the borders and then roughly a three hundred meter what they say is a no go zone and the leaflets are written in arabic and they basically say to palestinians you cannot be within three hundred meters of the border or we will take you know so called security policies against you which include children perhaps collecting rubble to be reused in construction or people in in fact even people who catch birds this is part of the palestinian tradition is to catch birds and they happen to be doing this in border regions or people that have homes in the border regions and all these people come under israeli attack well beyond three hundred meters even up to two kilometers but yes the again the sanction israeli policy also applies to fishers or anybody in or near the water really i mean people on the beach even come under israeli navy fire but certainly with regard to the fishers even though palestinians were granted the right to be twenty nautical miles off their coast in palestinian waters this really navy unilaterally imposes a six mile or three mile which wavers  limit on the palestinians and even this is not a set limit even then israeli gunboats will enter within whatever the so called limit is at any given point and they will attack and harass palestinians this is collective punishment this is this is torment yes of course it is i mean it's depriving people of access to land and water which you know it impacts first of all their culture that they have a culture of fishing they have a culture of farming they have an attachment it seems like with the different wars that israel wages on gaza and these policies it certainly is a way of depopulating sure i mean whether people are you know dying because of the different attacks or t diseases they contract from you know poor water or malnutrition i mean people are not dying of starvation and in fact just on a side note israeli authorities actually outlined a document in which they calculated the minimum number of calories palestinians needed would you go into just a little bit of the poverty is manufactured in that palestinians used to have a very successful export you know trade trading exports they say to send strawberries and other fruits and citrus to european markets and even to north american markets they used to export furniture and clothing in textiles and even in the ninety's they used to be a major component of the workforce in israel working in construction and other menial jobs  notable israeli journalist amir haas has documented this that even since oslo in the mid ninety's that israeli authorities have steadily been closing the borders to palestinians thereby reducing the their potential to work in israel there by cutting a significant work proportion of the workforce in gaza off from labor and aside from that completely banning exports obviously is impacting on the economy so that shows that in terms of their income yes that their poverty rates now are manufactured they could be very self sufficient if farmed if they were allowed to farm and fish and export properly but then you get into other aspects of life in gaza the manufactured health crisis right now you're talking about  bombed gaza's only power plant in two thousand and six it hasn't been fully rehabilitated since then they haven't been allowed to bring in the replacement parts and the construction materials to do so so gaza has been suffering under power outages since then when you have eighteen hours a day of power cuts this impacts on the sanitation it means that sewage is now not able to be pumped into the sea which is the only means they can dispense of sewage instead it is overflowing into the streets and people are waiting to and proteins to supplement the flour water and oil they get from the u n and other agencies so no of course they can't buy water so many people end up drinking this water that is brackish and high in nitrates and other things that are obviously contaminants there's a warfare on many fronts there's a warfare on the diet on the hygiene on the economy on the psyche there's psychological warfare with the f sixteen constantly in the skies releasing breaking the sound barrier releasing sonic booms which actually sound like real bombs which further traumatized people particularly children and the constant presence of drones in the sky which we all know are capable of precision bombing and the constant presence of warship the sea witch fire in the farm or the fissures and the presence of tanks and jeeps on the borders which can enter the borders as well i mean there's a psychological warfare for sure and just the whole idea of being completely isolated from the rest of the world cut off and israel's whim and at any point israel decides they can bomb the gaza strip and nobody will stop them so goes it is a place that people in the palestinians in gaza feel like they've been disappeared they feel isolated and that the world has not only does palestine not have any of these things not you know apache helicopters or tanks or cheap or planes although they did at one point by the way high an airport but it was a correspondent destroyed but israelis but not only do they not have these nor the one ton bombs that israel drops regularly on gaza but they also don't have the millions and billions of dollars that america sends to israel every year they don't have the political support the blind political support that america and canada and  again entering gaza's airspace by firing on farmers and fishers etc and by random bombings in the lead up to the attacks in december israel had already been bombing gaza and hamas for its part had actually respected the tru its leaders were assassinated also other documents were released that showed that in fact that the planning for the december twenty seventh attacks on gaza the planning and begun even before this truce was signed it was just a matter of when and when it was convenient and as it happened bombing during the holiday season when people are out of university when families and in the west are celebrating christmas was the perfect time to attack and it had nothing to do with security at all obviously by the un and amnesty international oxfam but i personally saw the victims of white phosphorus badly mutilated by the chemical agent which basically keeps burning until it's deprived of oxygen so you can imagine what it does to the human body  i met families where seven of the family members were deceased they were killed by this brutal chemical weapon and also in my investigations around gaza i saw areas throughout the whole gaza strip not just in gaza city for example but in the north in the west in the south in the east where there were clumps of the white phosphorus weapons that had perhaps been buried by sand or dirt and once you poke at that those clumps and introduce a little bit of oxygen they reignite so we saw this evidence in civilian areas throughout the gaza strip also in one of the main hospitals the liquids hospital in gaza city and also in their rehabilitation hospital where the seventy or so patients were actually invalids and could not flee on their own so i mean they use of white phosphorous to begin with according to apparently according to army regulations or you know international law it's only to be used as a smoke screen and not in civilian areas israel did the exact opposite shelling a school in which people were taking sanctuary and over forty people were killed from that attack alone and there is no re more i mean first of all what does it mean to deal idjit i'm eyes all we're doing is stating the facts were stating what israel has done how city and what international norms and laws israel has breached what conventions israel has breached that is i mean the those facts are legitimate i mean to claim that this is the legitimizing no the israeli authorities do not like these things to be talked about but these are facts and these are had really no awareness to be honest about palestine but when i was introduced through serendipity through research on the various media to the issue of palestine to me it was crystal clear that this is a situation of  people who have been ethnically cleansed from their homeland and now who continue to be occupied who undergone several wars cleansing them further of their land and an occupier that basically not only occupies militarily the gaza strip and part of syria the golan heights but also occupies east jerusalem and the west bank and continues to spend expand their colonies so in my experience there i went as a witness and by the way i call myself well i'm not but if anything a justice activist because in the end that's what it comes down to without justice there cannot be peace and what i and others witnessed in say the occupied west bank regular attacks by the illegal colonists w expanding colonies mean one day there's a palestinian family living in the home the next day they're expelled by these gun toting illegal call israeli leadership have openly stated with regards to jerusalem specifically that they want to day ice jerusalem they want to change the demographics of the city of the area and they want to make it more jewish so this entails demolishing palestinian homes on flimsy pretext including homes that were there even before israel was created in one in some instances what will happen is the family will receive a notic your home doesn't meet building requirements even though the home existed prior to israel's creation in other cases maybe the home was built in recent years but the fact is and this is documented very well by the israeli coalition against house demolitions which documents the over twenty five thirty thousand homes destroyed and sixty seven alone and they document also that it is virtually impossible for a palestinian to obtain a permit to build or expand on their home from the israeli authorities so they not only destroy the homes but then these illegal colonists also occupy palestinian homes and so i mean that and again this is from the this is from the israeli authorities themselves they've said we plan to make the  indignant i've met i mean for example the first person i met that had gone to palestine to witness was a jewish woman in her fifty's and she was livid she was indignant at what she had seen at the the way she saw her religion being used to oppress people in the name of her that and aside from that i've been in the west bank and i've seen middle aged american men going to nonviolent demonstrations in which the palestinians are protesting the israeli annexation of yet more of their land in the west bank and i've seen these middle aged american people saying i can't believe what my tax dollars are going to this is atrocious and i can't believe these you know oppressive policies i mean if you go to palestine and you see the separation wall you see palestinians being humiliated and aggressed at these military checkpoints prevented from moving from point a to point b you see them being nabbed by israeli soldiers and whisked off to detention and perhaps being held for months on end without charge or years on end if you see these things and it's very easy to see these things you would be indignant and if you're not indignant then you need to check and see if your soul is still in your body and if you still have a pulse support by you know the british and by canada and by the u s over the years so it's not a conflict it's again an ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people and further continued colonization and genocide of the land and people recognized that palestinians you know the time has come long ago for justice for palestinians archbishop desmond tutu although he's not a necessary a political leader but he also stands in solidarity with palestinians and if you've seen some american politicians like jimmy carter ex president stand and say i see apartheid but then you have for example the prime minister of my own country who is a raving christian zionist and blindly supportive of israel no matter what israel bombs gaza and lebanon in two thousand and six it's ok israel bombs gaza in two thousand and nine israel's defending itself is for obama's gaza in two thousand and twelve way to go why they're so blindly supportive i think that they have personal agendas some are afraid some are afraid of being ostracized or labeled anti this or that and others maybe perhaps design a spec for sure and it's documented canada's own even has a great book called  a canada building apartheid and the documents the variety of reasons for supporting israel among them political ideologies of zionism and among them fear and being bullied and harassed by the  exactly the i think education is important reaching out to your friends and loved ones and etc and informing yourself not just relying on the corporate media to tell you the facts because more often than not they will tell you and the opposite of the truth empowering yourself and actually taking action on on your own whether it be by contacting your congress or your senate or in canada your parliament etc writing letters challenging the dominant scientists narrative person but also letting our politicians know that yeah design is lobby is strong but we also we want to we have our own demands and our demands are for justice and to hold you accountable you're our political leaders so you don't need to cater to the zionist lobby you need to listen to us because in the end we're paying taxes for you too and you know represent us we're not paying taxes for that money to be sent over to israel to bomb and kill an oppress to boycott in tandem with all sorts of campaigns again contacting politicians letter writing i think there's a variety of ways that we need to show israel that actually the world is watching our viewers i've had people come up to me after and say you know i considered myself very well informed on what what is happening in palestine but i had no idea and they people tell me they're shocked to see somebody could be my grandmother being shot at by an armed israeli soldier or they're shocked to see the trauma of these children who are you know very young but they're like mature adults you  we are definitely under assault with a barrage of lies i mean there are numerous groups that have done studies on the accuracy of reporting regarding stories on israeli issues and palestinian issues for example israeli deaths or palestinian deaths and more often than not these studies find that in fact the reporting favors the israeli narrative by would take hope in the fact that it seems like more people are becoming aware of what's going on of the reality and people who even call themselves a political are finding out from one one way or another whether it's through social media or random encounters so that gives me hope to know that i mean somebody like myself and you know like i said it was just an average person and i still am but now i understand what's going on with palestinians and hopefully i can have some impact on on people i meet and then they in turn can have impact i just i consider myself fortunate to have seen the things i've seen and above all you know the palestinians have interested myself and other people with their message and to get that message out to the world so i'm very grateful you know for any opportunity to share their realities and their their love and their spirit with other people