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| By israelinsider staff March 25, 2007 |
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Elipaz Balua lost his son, Staff Sergeant Nadav Balua, last July during the Second Lebanon war. Now he is launching a hunger strike to protest Israeli leadership and he says it will continue until Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agrees to resign, Ynetnews reported.
On Friday Balua announced the start of the hunger strike. Balua intends to set up camp in the Rose Garden near Knesset in Jerusalem, where he will remain for the duration of the strike.
"The demand for the prime minister's immediate resignation is because of the wartime failures and the government's inability to function with some of its senior ministers under investigation," Balua said to Ynetnews. "I can't see any reason for their continued time in office, we need a functioning government."
Balua said Olmert is ignoring the wishes of almost the entire population of Israel by continuing to be Prime Minister. "Our fate has summoned us a cynical prime minister who doesn't pay heed to the demands of 97 percent of the people, who doesn't care about the pain of parents who have lost that which is most precious to them, who has drowned us in a sea of corruption and despair the likes of which we have never known. He has not freed us from the burdens of his sins, nor from those of the defense minister he appointed as an act of contempt to the entire nation."
A month after the declaration of the ceasefire last summer, Balua and other parents who lost soldiers during the war signed and circulated a petition calling on the prime minister, defense minister, and IDF chief of staff to resign for their failures in the war. Since then, only the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, has resigned.
According to Balua, "This is not why we sent our sons into battle, Olmert has crossed all the red lines -- this will be a hunger strike -- hunger for new leadership, hunger for the Israel we loved, before the shameless corrupt pests leading us came along."
The bereaved father extended an invitation to all Israelis to take part in the strike. He said, "I call on all those sitting at home and feeling that lump in their throats to come tomorrow and join me in the Rose Garden. This week the government decided to call the last war the Second Lebanon War, imagine in your minds what will happen if such a hollow team leads us to a third war. Soon it will be too late." |
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