Priest defends defacing Israeli memorial

A Catholic priest who splattered a mixture of his blood and paint on an Israeli memorial plaque during a protest yesterday said it was a symbolic act and nothing compared to the killing taking place in Gaza.

About 1000 people marched through central Wellington protesting against Israel's air and ground offensive in Gaza and calling on the New Zealand Government to end its neutral stance.

Father Gerard Burns, the parish priest of Te Parisi o te Ngakau Tapu in Porirua, was one of the protest leaders and smeared the blood and paint on the Yitzhak Rabin peace memorial.

Mr Rabin was prime minister of Israel from 1974-1977 and again from 1992-1995. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli radical in 1995.

Kiwi Friends of Israel called for Father Burns to apologise for his actions.

"Kiwi Friends of Israel strongly supports the right of all New Zealanders to have a robust debate on the rights and wrongs of Israel's policies but attacking peace memorials isn't legitimate behaviour.

"The desecration is doubly contemptible given Mr Rabin's lifelong commitment to peace and stability in Israel and Palestine.''

Father Burns does not agree Mr Rabin's commitment to peace was ``lifelong'', but rather he ``converted'' to peace later in life.

The paint was a ``symbolic action'' and a ``denunciation of the (Israeli) state, not an attack on the Jewish faith.

"I have a great esteem for the Jewish faith. I mean the founder of Christianity was Jewish ... but, the Israeli state is another beast altogether.''

The prophets of Judaism would be criticising Israel's actions, Father Burns said.

An Israeli flag was also burnt at the protest.

There was no comparison between the burning of a flag, or painting of a monument and the killing taking place in Gaza, he said.

As for the New Zealand Government's response, Father Burns believes ``not taking a side is taking a side. It's to say you accept what's going on''.

He said despite being a small country New Zealand had shown in the past, with opposition to South African rugby tours (during the apartheid era), banning of cluster bombs and anti-nuclear stance, that it could spark global change.

Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully said earlier the Government was not prepared to choose sides.

He said the Government's stance was in line with the international community, including the United Nations and European Union.

Father Burns did not find it strange that a New Zealand Catholic priest should take a stand against an Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"One of the people that I am very keen to support is the Christian Palestinians. It's not just Jews against Muslims. It's a political war with some religious implications.

"Denouncing injustice is a priestly role ... I might be failing in my duty if I didn't do it.''

Catholic Church spokeswoman Lyndsay Freer told The New Zealand Herald priests were entitled to their individual views.

The New Zealand church's stance echoed Pope Benedict's address last week.

"We feel that in the interests of peace and dignity dialogue must take place, and the killing must stop, from both sides.''

New Zealand's Tertiary Education Union (TEU) today called on the Israeli and Palestinian governments to "respect the peaceful role that education institutions play in communities'' and keep war out of Palestine's schools and tertiary education institutions.

Their call follows the bombing of a Gaza school yesterday that killed over 40 people.

School attack

Israeli tank shells have killed more than 40 Palestinians at a UN school where civilians had taken shelter, medical officials said, in carnage likely to boost international pressure on Israel to halt a Gaza offensive.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said she was looking into information on the incident at al-Fakhora school in Jabalya refugee camp, on the fourth day of a ground assault launched after a week of air strikes failed to end Hamas rocket salvoes.

People cut down by shrapnel lay in pools of blood in the street. Witnesses said two Israeli tanks shells exploded outside the school, killing at least 42 civilians and wounding dozens – Palestinians who had taken refuge there and residents of nearby buildings.

A senior UN official in Gaza said 350 people had been sheltering at the school and the United Nations regularly gave the Israeli army exact geographical coordinates of its facilities to try to keep them safe from attack.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, asked by reporters about the deaths, said she was "not familiar" with the incident.

"Unfortunately, (Hamas fighters) are hiding amongst civilians," she said, adding that Israel was trying to avoid civilian casualties.

In a separate attack earlier in the day, three Palestinians were killed in an air strike on another school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

The deaths in Gaza, home to 1.5 million people, raised to 77 the number of Palestinian civilians killed on Tuesday alone, according to medical officials.

The spike in civilian casualties could prove to be a turning point in Israel's "Operation Cast Lead," launched on December 27 with the declared aim of removing the Hamas rocket threat.

The killing of dozens of unarmed Lebanese in Israel's bombing in the village of Qana in the 2006 Lebanon war drained foreign support for its campaign against Hezbollah guerrillas. Israel said it had not known civilians were in the area.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States "would like an immediate ceasefire" but one that is "durable, sustainable and not time-limited" – comments that stopped short of a formal demand for a truce now.

International efforts already under way to end the fighting have focused on securing a deal that would meet Israel's demand that Hamas, an Islamist group in charge of the Gaza Strip, could not rearm once hostilities end.

"If there is an end to terror, an end to the smuggling of ammunition from Sinai to Gaza, the Israeli fighting will stop," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, referring to rockets and other weaponry Hamas obtains through tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border.

In fighting on Tuesday, Israeli forces pushed into the southern town of Khan Younis and battled Hamas militants on the outskirts of the city of Gaza. Palestinian medical officials said four militants were killed.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip, at least 631 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,700 wounded since Israel began its offensive.

Ten Israelis, including three civilians hit by rocket fire, have been killed in the conflict. At least five rockets landed in Israel on Tuesday, including one that hit the town of Gadera, 28km (17 miles) from Tel Aviv. A three-year-old girl was wounded.

TRUCE EFFORTS

A senior Israeli official said French President Nicolas Sarkozy, on a Middle East visit and in partnership with Egypt, was pursuing "a serious initiative" for a ceasefire.

Commenting on the deaths at Jabalya school, Sarkozy said during a visit to French UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon: "It reinforces my determination for all this to stop as quickly as possible. Time is working against us. We must find a solution."

Talks were focusing, the Israeli official said, on the size of an "international presence" along the blockaded Gaza-Egypt border, where rockets and other weapons have reached Hamas through a network of tunnels.

Tony Blair, the Middle East envoy of major powers sponsoring Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, said Sarkozy, the European Union and the United States were all in agreement that new anti-smuggling measures would be needed to clinch a ceasefire.

"What is being talked about is a credible plan to stop the smuggling," Blair, a former British prime minister, told reporters in Jerusalem.

He said he hoped the plan could be completed quickly and that enhanced Israeli security would lead to "a significant advance in opening up Gaza to the outside world."

Hamas, which has rebuffed Western demands to recognize Israel, end violence and accept existing interim peace deals, has demanded a lifting of the blockade of the Gaza Strip in any future ceasefire. It seized the territory in 2007.

Most of the deaths reported by Gaza hospitals in recent days have been civilians.

The Israeli military said it killed 130 militants since it began a ground assault on Saturday, a figure that suggested the total Palestinian death toll might be close to 700 and that bodies could still be on the battlefield.

Many of the Gaza Strip's 1.5 million people lack food, water or power. In southern Israel, schools remained closed and hundreds of thousands of people have been rushing to shelter at the sound of alarms heralding incoming rockets.

- Reuters