So read a July 14 article on the JTA. Some settlers write back?

Several Gaza Strip settlers wrote their Israeli identification numbers on their arms in a bid to recall concentration camp inmates' tattoos.

Thursday's protests, adopted by several residents of the Gush Katif settlement bloc, appeared to have begun with a local woman who scrawled her identification number on her arm and showed it at a military checkpoint rather than furnish her ID card. The Yesha settler council urged the protesters to abandon the ploy, which outraged survivors of the Nazi genocide.

"The plan by some right-wing activists to put their identity numbers on their arms perverts the historical facts and damages the memory of the Shoah," said Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. "It is important that the memory of the Shoah remain a unifying factor in Israeli society, not the opposite."

Israel is trying to mitigate its disengagement woes with a 2.2$ billion request for additional loan guarantees from the US Government, to help offset costs of moving its citizens out of the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank, territory Israel has held under a state of belligerent occupation since 1967, and whose settlement is illegal under international convention and law. The rest of the money is to be used Judaizing the Negev and the Galilee, further displacing Bedouin, Druze, and Palestinian Arabs with Israeli citizenship. A CNN poll showed that 94% of US respondents oppose this additional aid for ethnic cleansing, but it the number is still being debated between the US and Israel, and will have to pass thru congress, where it will no doubt be thoroughly opposed by AIPAC, an American organization which puts the needs of the American people first. (JPost, July 14)

In other disengagement woes, Israel has no place to put the construction rubble from destroying Gaza settlements, which will include asbestos, but apparently there's no problem in taking the rubble to the Sinai and letting the Egyptians deal with it.(Ha'aretz, July 14)

Not being able to import the illegal waste from its illegal settlements has not stopped Israel from carting away as much Quartz-rich sand from the Gaza Strip before disengagement. A June 23 article in Palestine-info.co.uk,claims: "Israel steals Gaza Strip yellow sand causing environment disaster." The article continues:

Gaza - Reflecting the Israeli hatred against everything Palestinian, including sand, and their unlimited greed to steal what they don't own, the Israeli occupation companies with full backing from their racist government have been stealing and transporting for a long time thousands of cubic meters of the Quartz-rich Gaza Strip yellow sand used in glass manufacturing into the green line that will definitely lead to an environmental disaster in the Strip.

"Information available to the PA environment ministry indicate that those companies were stealing nearly 600 dump truck-full of the yellow sand and they actually started this malicious work since they occupied the Strip in 1967", Yousef Abu Safiah, PA environment minister said.

"However, the occupation intensified and expedited this process in an unprecedented manner after declaring its pullout plan from the Strip", he added, pointing out that 15 million cubic meters of this sand were stolen since the Aqsa intifada, almost five years ago.

Information confirming this pattern was reported on the website of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), a regional environmental organization of Jordanians, Israelis and Palestinians, reported on their website in May,2003:

The Israeli Authorities have Launched an Organized Campaign to Steal Sand from Gaza Strip (31· March 03, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida,). Palestinian officials accused the Israeli authorities in Gaza of stealing sand from the Gaza Strip to Israel for commercial use. According to the General Information Commission's report, Palestinian Security forces have counted 2,555 Israeli trucks loading sand from the area around Netzarim Settlement. It is estimated that thousands of cubic meters of sand were stolen, a fact that might cause a huge ecological damage. The report stressed the importance of the .sand layer as a natural filtration mechanism that purify water that reach the aquifer in Gaza District.

The same report was picked up by BBC Monitoring and quoted in WW3 Report#58

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