US SECRETARY of State Antony Blinken arrived in Egypt yesterday at the start of yet another Middle East tour – his fifth since the start of Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza – with the stated aim of preventing the war spreading throughout the region.
The US government’s way of preventing the spread of war consists of launching attacks on Houthi positions in Yemen, accompanied by further attacks on sites in Syria and Iraq, in a desperate attempt to stem the armed response of resistance groups to the atrocities being committed in Gaza.
Blinken and president Joe Biden talk incessantly of ‘brokering a deal’ through these whistle-stop tours of their former staunch allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia which are designed to keep them onside in the Israeli drive to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, while at the same time providing the Zionist state with all the arms and money it depends on.
This week, the US Senate released text of a deal to send billions more in ‘aid’ to Israel, with Biden reported to be demanding $14.1 billion in ‘security assistance’ to Israel. This is on top of the billions handed out to the Israeli government every year to prop up what is nothing more than an armed outpost for US imperialism in the oil-rich Middle East.
While Blinken jets around the region trying to promote the lie that the US is attempting to broker some form of temporary ceasefire, the Israeli government and military have made no secret that they are extending the genocidal war throughout Gaza and the entire region, confident of the full support of US imperialism.
United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths warned this week that the war in Gaza is a ‘wildfire’ that could spread across the region, following the announcement last week that Israel intends to extend its military assault to the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
Rafah, a small city on the border with Egypt, was one of the last places of refuge for Palestinians seeking safety from the campaign of relentless bombing and ground invasions to the north of the Gaza Strip – a campaign that has killed at least 27,585 people, mainly women and children, according to the latest health authority figures.
The Israelis previously declared Rafah a ‘safe’ refuge, and its population has increased five-fold to at least 1.4 million, making it the Strip’s most populous city with the people forced to shelter in tents or sleep in the open in dangerously overcrowded and insanitary conditions.
The Israeli military have now declared that they will expand their attacks to what is now the Gaza Strip’s most crowded city with a population already on the verge of famine with many sick.
Head of the World Food Programme, Cindy McCain, said: ‘People in Gaza risk dying from hunger just miles from trucks filled with food’ – aid trucks deliberately held up by Israel at the Rafah crossing in order to starve Palestinian men, women and children.
Last week, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant declared that the genocidal war will be expanded to the ‘safe zone’ of Gaza, writing on X: ‘We will continue until the end, there is no other way.’
The end for the Zionists, with the full support of US imperialism and its UK lap-dog, is to drive every last Palestinian out of their land into Egypt, the sea or the grave.
The working class and people of the world will never stand back and watch this genocidal act of ethnic cleansing.
The heroic struggle of the Palestinian resistance against the brutal occupation of their land from 1948, now culminating in an all-out genocidal war of extermination, has won the support of tens of millions of workers and youth across the globe who have marched demanding victory to the Palestinian revolution and demonstrating their hatred for the governments that support the Zionist regime.
Now the time has come for the working class to take action by demanding that their trade union leaders call general strikes to overthrow their Zionist-supporting governments and bring in workers’ governments and socialism.
Only the overthrow of capitalism in its final most degenerate imperialist stage through the victory of the world socialist revolution can end genocide and secure the independent state of Palestine.
