Israel has expanded its murderous air attack on Gaza into a full ground assault. With all borders sealed, 1.5 million Palestinians are trapped—with little electricity or fuel and severe shortages of food, clean water and medicines. Download Solidarity pdf Broadsheet
Gaza’s morgues are filling up and its hospitals are overflowing—with the injured queuing in corridors to be treated with dwindling medical supplies.
Western leaders blame the Hamas resistance group for the conflict. The media mostly go along with this, or at best portray it as a clash between two sides that are equally to blame.
But Israel is a terror state, armed with F-16 fighter jets, helicopter gunships and tanks, that is attacking a largely impoverished and isolated people. The West has backed Israel to the hilt.
Israel claims it is trying to stop Hamas firing rockets. But rocket attacks have killed just 19 Israelis in the last eight years. During the same period Israel has killed 3000 Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel’s agenda is the destruction of the democratically-elected Hamas government—and wiping out any Palestinian resistance.
An Israeli military spokesman said that “anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target”.
This means that all of Gaza’s infrastructure has become a “legitimate target”.
Israel has justified its destruction of Gaza’s schools, universities and mosques by claiming that Hamas is storing weapons in them.
Gaza City’s main vegetable market was destroyed as people were shopping for food.
This week it deliberately bombed three schools run by the UN. At one school in the Jabalya refugee camp at least 40 people were killed—despite the UN providing the Israeli military the school’s exact location and promising that there were no military operations there.
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[Backed by the West
The conflict has exposed the shameless hypocrisy of Western leaders.
George Bush says there cannot be a ceasefire until the Palestinians surrender to Israel’s demands. Kevin Rudd has expressed his “concern” about the death toll but refuses to condemn Israel’s attacks. He also called for Hamas to be crippled as a military force as a condition of a ceasefire.
Both ignore the fact that, while a “ceasefire” held from June to November, no Israeli was killed by rocket fire from Gaza. Israel broke the ceasefire on November 4, forcing the Palestinians to respond.
And during the ceasefire Israel’s maintained it devastating economic blockade of Gaza. For the past year and a half this has cut off supplies of the most basic necessities, such as food, medicine and water.
A ceasefire on Israel’s terms would allow the blockade to continue, with tens of thousands of Palestinians suffering from malnutrition, disease and poverty.
Anger at the slaughter has sparked mass demonstrations across the world in solidarity with the Palestinians, calling for an immediate end to the Israeli bombing and the blockade of Gaza. Millions of people are also demanding that Gaza’s borders are opened.
Any hope of lasting peace in the Middle East will only be realised if there is justice for the Palestinian people. This means an end to the racist state of Israel and the so-called “war on terror”, which has produced more wars and instability. It is only a global mass movement of ordinary people on the streets that can bring about this change.
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