Elder of Ziyon brings to our attention an interview on ABC Australia from last month, in which a woman called Moira Kelly claimed there are no birds in Gaza.
But as AIJAC shows, the claim that there are no birds at all in Gaza, this “phenomenal little statistic,” is a ridiculous and easily disproven lie:
It is hard to imagine how ABC news staff could have not caught Kelly’s blatant exaggeration and even felt free to put the ABC’s imprimatur on the claim by including it in the story summary. Yet even the most cursory investigation would have confirmed that the Gaza Strip, like its neighbour Israel, is literally teeming with avian life.
Type “birds in Gaza Strip” into Google and the very second response you get, in terms of relevance (the first being a Wikipedia article) is a bird checklist by the World Bird Database which lists 171 species of birds in the Gaza Strip.
The third most relevant response is a scholarly paper from 2011 by Dr. Abdel Fattah N. Abd Rabou from the Department of Biology at the Islamic University of Gaza.
The paper, “Notes on Some Palestinian Bird Fauna Existing in the Zoological Gardens of the Gaza Strip” focuses mainly on birds in captivity in the Strip. However, the paper also includes a survey of the natural bird life in the area.
Writes Dr. Abd Rabou:
The Gaza Strip, which is located at the southern portion of the Palestine coast along the Mediterranean Sea, is blessed with a considerable number of bird fauna including terrestrial and aquatic forms. Dense concentration of birds occurs over the Gaza Strip during spring and autumn migration seasons [5, 6]. It is worth mentioning that wetlands, including the wetland ecosystem of Wadi Gaza, are considered as very productive ecosystems, having rich bird fauna. They provide bird fauna with all necessary requirements such as shelter, protection, food and breeding, resting and roosting places … etc [7-13].
Here is a photo of Gaza birds taken last year:
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By the way, in Moira Kelly’s website, we can read:
The delegation had also been invited to meet with Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader and Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and his team in his compound.Moira was one of the last Australians to have met with him before his death and found him to be a misunderstood man of great faith and great compassion, and above all, passionate about his people.
I’d just add there have been many other examples of birds sighted in Gaza, including:
