THE US ruling class, Israel’s chief backer, supplying it with the most modern weaponry and a blank cheque to do its worse to the Palestinians, has cautioned against a large-scale Israeli offensive in Rafah, warning it would cause a ‘disaster’ and backfire onto them.
US President Joe Biden calls Israel’s attack on Gaza ‘over the top’ and says he continues to work ‘tirelessly’ for an extended ‘pause in fighting’, despite the billions the US is spending on arming Israel.
The US ruling class is revealing, with its splits and divisions, its feet of clay. Meanwhile the Israeli gangsters do their worst and kill, kill and kill again.
Despite US warnings of ‘consequences’, Israeli snipers in Khan Younis have killed at least 21 people outside Nasser Hospital with medical staff among those targeted. Within 24 hours, 107 Palestinians have been killed and 142 injured.
UN chief, Antonio Guterres, says half of Gaza’s 2.3 million population ‘is now crammed into Rafah with nowhere to go’, warning the displaced ‘have no homes’ and ‘no hope’.
At least 27,947 people have been killed and 67,459 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. The death toll in Israel from the October 7 Hamas attacks stands at 1,139.
Palestinian children say: ‘Every child in the world gets up happy, but we wake up terrified’.
Five members of the same family have been killed in an attack on their house in Rafah in southern Gaza. Several children and a woman are among the dead, with the Palestinian Health Ministry reporting that at least 107 people have been killed in the most recent 24-hour reporting period.
Survivor Hala al-Mashukhi, told Al Jazeera, her father, mother and three-year-old brother were killed when an Israeli bomb targeted their house in Rafah. Her sister, Dima, 10, was the only other person in the family to survive the attack. She said: ‘We wake up terrified because of the sound of the shelling and explosions.’
In fact 28,000 people have been killed and 67,000 injured in Gaza since the war began in October, with UNICEF stating that the Gaza Strip has the worst levels of malnutrition of any place in the world.
It added: ‘There is no safe area in Gaza.’
Two weeks since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling, the situation for civilians in Gaza has become even worse, according to humanitarian organisation Islamic Relief. The group warned Israel’s attack on Rafah ‘will have catastrophic consequences for civilians’.
Since the ICJ ruling, ‘thousands more people have been killed and injured, and famine is becoming more likely every day as the Israeli siege continues to cut families off from food, healthcare and water’.
An Islamic Relief staff member in Gaza said: ‘Israel is starving us. We either get killed by bullets or starvation. My children and I haven’t eaten fruit or vegetables for months, and people get killed when they try to meet aid trucks arriving from the UN.’
Islamic Relief called on world leaders and governments to demand an ‘immediate ceasefire and implementation of the ICJ ruling’. They are not listening!
International aid organisations warn any major Israeli operation in Rafah would compound what is already a humanitarian catastrophe.
‘If they aren’t killed in the fighting, Palestinian children, women and men will be at risk of dying by starvation or disease,’ said Bob Kitchen of the International Rescue Committee. ‘There will no longer be a single “safe” area for Palestinians to go to.’
Israel’s four-month air, sea and ground offensive – among the most destructive in recent history – has driven most people from their homes and pushed one-quarter of the population towards starvation. Netanyahu says the offensive will continue and expand until ‘total victory’ over Hamas.
Negotiations continue on a ‘possible’ ceasefire. Talks are under way about a ‘possible truce’ in Gaza while Israel is still bombing much of the besieged territory after rejecting a Hamas offer of a full ceasefire.
Meanwhile, the US and UK ruling classes continue to back, arm and defend the Zionist entity that is Israel, their main imperialist outpost in the Middle East.
The working class of the world is told that it must not interfere with the Zionist regime, while the trade union leaders like the TUC stand by and just watch the slaughter and the massacres and do nothing.
The WRP and the Young Socialists call on the working class of the UK, the US and the EU, to take action and to force the calling of general strikes to bring down the major imperialist regimes, and bring in workers governments. This is the way to peace and security for all!
