Gaza residents who have lost family fear more destruction as ground assault looms By Reuters

GAZA (Reuters) -As Israel prepared on Sunday for a ground assault on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, Palestinians who have lost numerous family members in air strikes were bracing for more destruction if Israel hits back on an unprecedented scale on its territory.

Um Mohammad Al-Laham sat next to her 4-year-old granddaughter Fulla Al-Laham, who lay in a Gaza hospital which like others is operating on low supplies of medicine and fuel.

She said an Israeli airstrike hit the family home, killing 14 people including Fulla’s parents, siblings and members of her extended family.

“All of a sudden and without warning, they bombed the house on top of the residents inside. No-one survived except my grandchild Fulla. May God cure her and give her strength,” said the grandmother, who has witnessed many wars between Hamas and the Israeli army over the years. She says this is the toughest.

“Fourteen people martyred, no-one was left except Fulla Saeed Al-Laham. She doesn’t talk, nothing, just lays in her bed and they give medicine.”

One other 4-year-old child in the family had also been left with almost no relatives, the grandmother said.

Israel has unleashed the heaviest air strikes ever on Gaza in retaliation for the biggest attack on the country one week ago by the Palestinian militant group Hamas since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Israel has vowed to annihilate the militant group Hamas in retaliation for a rampage by its fighters in Israeli towns eight days ago in which its militants shot men, women and children and seized hostages in the worst attack on civilians in the country’s history.

Some 1,300 people were killed in the unexpected onslaught, which shook the country, with graphic mobile phone video footage and reports from medical and emergency services of atrocities in the overrun towns and kibbutzes.

Israel has responded with the most intense bombardment Gaza has ever seen, putting the small enclave, home to 2.3 million Palestinians, under siege and destroying much of its infrastructure.

Israel has told Palestinian to leave their homes and move south.

Hamas urged people not to leave, saying roads out were unsafe. It said dozens of people had been killed in strikes on cars and trucks carrying refugees on Friday, while medics, Hamas media and relatives say whole families have been killed in the air strikes. Reuters could not independently verify these claims.

Some residents said they would not leave, remembering the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” of 1948 when many Palestinians were forced from their homes during the war that accompanied Israel’s creation.

Israel has intensified its bombings across Gaza City and the north. Gaza authorities said more than 2,300 people have been killed, a quarter of them children, and nearly 10,000 wounded.

Rescue workers searched desperately for survivors of night-time air raids. One million people have reportedly left their homes.

The expected Israeli ground offensive combined with the air strikes themselves have raised fears of unprecedented suffering in the narrow, impoverished enclave.

Witnesses in Gaza City told Reuters the Israeli offensive had forced more people from their homes. Gaza’s largest Shifa hospital was overcrowded with people who had fled their houses.

“We are living the worst nightmare of our lives. Even here in the hospital we are not safe. An air strike hit in the area outside the hospital around dawn,” said a 35-year-old woman who declined to give her name.

Taking the road to southern Gaza, which is considered safer, has become more difficult as several people who had made the journey say Israel continues to bomb around it.

Ashraf Al-Qidra, spokesman of the Gaza health ministry, said 70% of the people in Gaza City and the north of the strip are deprived of health services after the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA evacuated its headquarters and suspended its services.

East of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, where hundreds of northern residents have fled to, some locals cooked for displaced people, using firewood to prepare 1,500 meals of meat and rice donated by residents.

“We used to cook on cooking gas for the first two days but we are running out of gas, so we are cooking on firewood,” said Youssef Abu Assi, one resident helping out.

The development trend of world fine chemical industry

China has made considerable progress in fine chemicals,The development trend of world fine chemical industry Articles while still a gap compared with developed countries, the overall level and per capita consumption level is still far behind developed countries.

Petrochemical and fine chemical is an important part of the chemical industry is based on sales performance chemicals. Chronological order by forming industry, fine chemical industry is divided into two parts, both traditional and new areas. Consists mainly of traditional fine chemicals: dyes, paints and pesticides; new areas of fine chemicals, including: food additives, feed additives, electronic chemicals, paper chemicals, water treatment chemicals, plastic additives, leather chemical products, etc., will be new areas of international Specialty Chemicals Fine Chemicals known.Compared with the petrochemical industry, fine chemical has the following characteristics: the production of various sizes, vary widely from 10 million tons / year to only tens of kilograms / year, and many more mass produced; products of high added value, Copper Chromite(CC) usually the product of profit margin of 10% or more, some as high as 30% to 50%; lower total cost of the product is relatively low, but the downstream impact on product quality and performance of the larger; the impact of formulation on the nature of products is very large, formula often results in a slight difference in performance of the great changes; product innovation cycle is short, be based on changes in the downstream product update or improve; closely related to human life, if not fine chemical products, human life would be unimaginable.The rate of fine chemicals has become a measure of a country or region chemical development of the main signs. With economic development and technological advances, the world has entered a mature fine chemicals. The development of fine chemicals faster than the general chemical products, fine chemicals rate continues to increase. Eighties fine chemical rate of 45 developed countries to 55%, 55 ~ 63% of the nineties, twenty-first century will reach 60 to 67%. Although China from the “Plan”, through 20 years of development, the construction of a large number of fine chemicals plant, built a number of fine chemical industry base, or park, fine chemical rate has reached 48%, but there is still great compared with other countries the gap.Fine and specialty chemicals with the country’s economic level and the development of basic petrochemical industry is closely related. Thus the United States, Western Europe and Japan is the world’s fine and specialty chemicals production and consumption of more developed countries and regions. The total turnover of the three global specialty chemicals account for about 77% of turnover.With the base oil and chemical raw materials industry than the fine and specialty chemicals, especially with the size of the economy is closely related to the quality of the economy, so the future of the global fine and specialty chemicals consumption will continue to show healthy development of the situation, especially with the vast number of developing improvement in the level of industrialization in the country, of fine and specialty chemicals demand will increase. The future of the global fine and specialty chemicals trends are as follows: the next five years the global fine and specialty chemicals market will average 3.1% growth rate expected in 2008, 10-Hydroxydecanoic Acid the market will reach $ 450 billion, the development of rapid in the areas of: bulk drugs, enzymes, specialty polymers, nano-materials, separation membranes, specialty coatings, electronic chemicals and catalysts, but pesticides, dyes and textile chemicals show a downward trend.The competition will be intensified science and technology, a worldwide restructuring will be inevitable. The new century, as the world economic slowdown, demand slowed down, fine and specialty chemicals in developing countries more and more into the international market, many well-known fine and specialty chemicals company’s operating performance decline. To consolidate market share, improve economic efficiency, a new round of mergers, alliances, restructuring will revival.For the user, fine and specialty chemicals use small, relatively low value, so as to achieve the effect of use, users are more concerned about the performance of the product, so they tend to choose custom manufacturing. Use varieties of fine and specialty chemicals other features, such as plastic processing needs plasticizers, flame retardants, antioxidants, heat stabilizers products, user-friendly procurement, purchase cost savings, more and more Fine and specialty chemicals manufacturer in sales of own products, while other types of products purchased, so that users need to buy one product for all additives.In the past 10 years, as enterprises engaged in fine chemical production increased dramatically, making the fine chemical products supply and demand imbalance, basically are in oversupply, resulting in fine chemical and contract chemical production has become more competitive. Faced with such a highly competitive market of chemical raw materials, in order to get orders they must have their own unique competitive advantage. This unique competitive advantage depends on the synthesis of a major breakthrough in process development, the cost has dropped significantly. In order to make their production process has major breakthrough not only in the original process development process based on this step or that step to improve the yield of a few percent, or increase solvent recovery. More important objective is to significantly cut the production process of many steps