IS THIS A REVENGE FOR THE JUDEOCIDE (SHORA, HOLOCAST)? Before the ground invasion, at least 243 Palestinians had already been killed in Gaza and more than 1,800 wounded. Scorecard: 200 - 1 The Israeli government has seized on Hamas’s failure to immediately observe a cease-fire, about which it was never consulted, as the pretext for escalating its one-sided war against the nearly two million Palestinians confined to the narrow and densely populated Gaza Strip. Fresh Israeli air strikes Tuesday sent the Palestinian death toll in Gaza climbing to the 200 mark, with another 1,400 or more wounded. Meanwhile, the crude and mostly homemade rockets fired from Gaza in response claimed their first victim on Tuesday. A civilian was mortally wounded by shrapnel while bringing candy to Israeli troops massed at the Erez crossing between Israel and the northern end of the Gaza Strip in preparation for a possible ground invasion. The carnage will now soar. For the past two weeks, Israel has rained death and destruction upon Gaza, targeting not only more than 1,000 civilian homes, but cafes, mosques, health centres, vehicles clearly marked as media, water plants and sewage treatment facilities. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday ordered the mobilisation of another 18,000 army reservists. The lightly armed Palestinian fighters who will try to defend their people are confronting over 60,000 Israeli troops, equipped with US-supplied tanks, heavy artillery, jet fighters, helicopter gunships, armed drones and the latest in personal body armour. Before the ground offensive, health authorities already alleged that the IDF was again firing illegal white phosphorous munitions, as it did during the assault on Gaza in 2008–2009, and as American forces did during the 2004 siege of Fallujah in Iraq. Oppose the Israeli invasion of Gaza The coming days will reveal whether the IDF has been ordered to completely level the targeted communities, on the pretext of destroying tunnels from Gaza into Israel and ending the ability of Hamas fighters to launch their ineffective rocket attacks. What is unfolding is a calculated war crime against a defenceless population of 1.8 million Palestinians, who are trapped in the tiny strip of land of less than 200 square miles by the blockades imposed by the Zionist state in the north and east, and by the Egyptian regime in the south. All those in ruling circles who assert that the onslaught is a justified response to the firing of crude rockets into Israel by the Islamist Palestinian movement Hamas are beneath contempt. Just one Israeli has died as a result of Hamas’s retaliation to the slaughter of dozens of its members and hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including scores of women and children, by Israeli airstrikes. Throughout June, Israeli forces used the pretext of searching for three missing teenagers to rampage through the West Bank, detaining over 600 alleged Hamas members and terrorising the Palestinian population. The assertion that the invasion of Gaza was provoked by Hamas’s rejection of an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire is no less contemptible. The so-called ceasefire included none of the basic demands of the Palestinians, above all the lifting of the economic blockade and the release of those detained by Israel in the West Bank and other political prisoners. It was offered solely so that it would be rejected and give the US, the European powers and the Arab states the propaganda they needed to legitimise the Israeli assault. Moufeed al-Hasainah, the Hamas housing minister, stated yesterday: “We want a ceasefire, but not a ceasefire at any cost. We’re not animals. What is a ceasefire without an open border crossing? Without salaries? Without jobs?” Brigadier General Motti Almoz, the spokesman of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), declared that as of 10 p.m., Thursday night, “large ground forces accompanied by massive air force support, naval forces and intelligence, are taking over targets in Gaza, operating against tunnels and terror activists and infrastructure.” Journalists who have filed Twitter reports and other accounts of the initial stages of the assault have already described scenes of terror in northern Gaza towns such as Beit Lahiya and Al Atatra. The Palestinian side of the border is being pounded by tank and artillery fire, airstrikes and Israeli warships off the coast. Electricity has been cut off, plunging the area into total darkness, except for the flashes of explosions. The Palestinian Health Ministry has reported “dozens taken to hospitals in the north, reportedly choking from some sort of gas.” Netanyahu’s representatives have stated that the objective is not to overthrow the Hamas government. The aim of the offensive is to carry out mass killings and inflict mass destruction, then withdraw and leave Gaza a smoking ruin. In the north of the strip, leaflets dropped by the IDF from the air ordered the populations of six entire towns near the Israeli border to abandon their homes and seek refuge in Gaza City. Residents of four towns in the centre of the territory were ordered to evacuate to Khan Younis, while in the south, people in two towns were instructed to move to Rafah. Tens of thousands of people could not or would not obey the edict and are now at the mercy of the Israeli military. The actions of Netanyahu’s regime testify to the complete moral disintegration of the defenders of Zionism and the utter dead-end of its reactionary perspective of carving out a sectarian Jewish capitalist state in the Middle East. The Zionist attempt to channel the immense class and social tensions within Israel into crushing the decades-long resistance of the Palestinian population has assumed genocidal dimensions. However many die in Gaza over the next days and weeks from Israeli missiles and bullets, the lives of hundreds of thousands are threatened by the virtual collapse of water supplies and sewage treatment. Netanyahu’s government could not carry out its war on the Palestinian people without the host of accessories to its crimes. US imperialism supplies Israel with endless political and military aid. The European powers issued a predictable statement, declaring that while the European Union “deeply deplores the loss of innocent lives” in Gaza, “Israel has a right to protect its population.” see: BBC´s HARDtalk Speaks to Israeli historian, Professor Ilan Pappe, @ https://youtube/watch?v=4lsmFS75ed4
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 06:37:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015