ISRAEL’S military onslaught on Gaza, where it not only used massive bombs and missiles but banned cluster bombs and white phosphorus weapons, killed 1,387 Palestinians, including 320 children, who took no part in any of the fighting.
Blocks of apartments, UN schools and hospitals were shelled and their inhabitants were buried in the rubble.
Palestinian citizens were shot while carrying white flags, but the spirit of the Palestinian people in Gaza remained unbroken.
At the commencement of the attack Israeli forces killed 248 policemen. Most of them died when police stations were bombed on December 28, 2008, the first day of the three-week offensive.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselm stated yesterday that Israel should conduct an ‘independent and credible’ investigation into the massacre.
The Israeli government has not got the slightest intention of conducting an independent and credible investigation, and is actually preparing an even bigger operation should its talks with the Abbas government in Ramallah fail to give it what it wants.
The Israeli military had tried to stress that its objective during Operation Cast Lead was to target Hamas and ‘not the citizens of the Gaza Strip.’
In fact the Hamas forces were virtually untouched, as they were able to make use of prepared shelters, tunnels and defences and were never seriously committed.
The UN confirmed on Thursday that the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip in December and January caused four billion dollars of losses to the Palestinian economy.
The losses represent ‘three times the size of the Gaza economy,’ said Mahmud Elkhafif, coordinator of the UN Conference and Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) assistance programme for the Palestinians.
‘Initial estimates put the economy’s direct and indirect losses at around four billion dollars (2.8 billion euros), including the costs associated with cushioning the humanitarian impact of the military campaign of around one billion dollars,’ UNCTAD said in a report.
Some 88 million dollars was wiped off the GDP due to the halt in economic activity alone in Gaza, it said.
Direct losses, including damage to infrastructure, public buildings, power and water supplies, as well as lost raw material stocks could reach 2.5 billion dollars, it added.
The losses in Gaza came after ‘another lost year for Palestinian development’ in 2008 as the overall Palestinian economy lost ground for the ninth straight year, according to UNCTAD.
Although real gross domestic product was in positive territory with two per cent growth, GDP per head fell by 1.2 per cent, it added.
‘The continued isolation of the occupied Palestinian territory under a tight Israeli closure policy and blockade of Gaza has further fragmented the economy,’ the report said.
The report noted that the closures ‘deepened Palestinian economic dependence on Israel.’
In fact Israeli policy is to annexe the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and to turn the remainder of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into its satellite or ‘bantustan’.
The Palestinian masses will never accept this, and will fight any attempt to foist such a settlement on them.
They however require the active support of workers in the West.
This means that the trade unions must organise an ironclad boycott of Israel, and all of its products, until a Palestinian state is established with East Jerusalem as its capital, with its refugees having the right to return, and with all of the zionist settlements closed down.
