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Textbook injustice in Gaza

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Schoolchildren are stuck for basics as Israel blocks supplies

By Mohammad Omer

(source: TheRebel.org)

As the 456,000 schoolchildren in the Gaza Strip start their academic year, they face chronic shortages of everything from paper, textbooks and ink cartridges to school uniforms, school bags and computers, the result of the Israeli blockade. At the same time, severely overcrowded classrooms are having to accommodate students whose schools were destroyed or damaged in the last siege, early this year.
The only supplies on the market are smuggled in through tunnels from Egypt.

Yet even when materials are available, many cannot afford them: 80 per cent of Gaza’s 1.5 million people live below the poverty line. The ministry of education has instructed teachers not to expect pupils to have "too many textbooks", but Ahmed Abdelhameed, who has eight school-age children, says that "teachers still ask for the full quota of school supplies, as if we were living in Sweden".

"I can no longer understand why we need to suffer, why textbooks and pencils are not allowed," he says. "Does Israel see these as threatening weapons, too?"

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Us group charged with child trafficking in haiti

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By Bill Van Auken

(source:World Socialist Website)

Ten members of a Baptist Church-affiliated “rescue” group from Idaho have been detained in Haiti, accused of child trafficking for attempting to spirit 33 Haitian children out of the country without any official permission.

The group claimed to be taking the children to an orphanage in the neighboring Dominican Republic, ultimately to be adopted by evangelical Christian families in the US. The orphanage, however, exists only on paper, and many of the children said that their parents or other close relatives had survived the January 12 earthquake.

The incident is part of what amounts to a second invasion of Haiti, following the country’s occupation by thousands of US soldiers and Marines and the blockading of its coastline by US warships and Coast Guard cutters.

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