ISRAELI Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said yesterday that Israel would ‘not tolerate the firing of rockets on our cities and towns’.
His remarks came after the security cabinet approved the call-up of some 40,000 reservists, as a senior official said the military was preparing all options to stamp out the rocket fire, ‘including an invasion or a ground operation,’ the biggest since the Cast Lead invasion of 2008-2009.
So far not a single Israeli has been killed or injured by a Palestinian rocket!
Thousands of Palestinians would be killed and wounded and hundreds of Israeli troops killed in any attempt to invade Gaza. ‘We have been instructed by the political echelon to hit Hamas hard,’ military spokesman General Moti Almoz said in an interview with army radio on Wednesday. Two brigades were already stationed around Gaza, with more to join them in coming days.
General Moti Almoz added that ‘Overnight, the IDF hit about 160 targets in the Gaza Strip. Over the last two days we attacked a total of about 430 targets.’ The attacks were by planes and drones.
The overnight Israeli operation against the people of Gaza killed 28 people, medics said Wednesday, and wounded more than 150, in the deadliest day of violence in the coastal strip since the 2008 Cast Lead invasion.
The first casualties early on Wednesday morning were six members of the same family. In the worst strike on Tuesday, a missile slammed into a house in the southern city of Khan Younis after people had reportedly formed a human shield to protect it, killing seven people.
The blast shook buildings in the city, and Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV replayed what it said was a video of the strike, which sent a tall cloud of debris rising into the air.
We repeat that all this has happened after Palestinian ‘rocket fire’ did not succeed in injuring or killing a single Israeli, with the Israelis using their US supplied ‘Iron Dome defensive system’.
However, there have also been massive clashes all over the West Bank with hundreds of Palestinians injured by the Israeli occupying forces and their supporting gangs of armed settlers.
The original incident that touched off the current clashes was the killing of three Israeli settlers in the Hebron area. Their death was avenged by the kidnapping and burning to death of a young Palestinian and the injuring of hundreds of young Palestinians in the clashes that followed.
Now the Israeli armed forces are massed on the Gaza border and also in the West Bank awaiting the order to attack and level Gaza and destroy all resistance in the West Bank, with the strategic aim of preventing the formation of a Palestine National Unity government, allying Fatah and Hamas, in the only way that the Israelis know how, by killing large numbers of Palestinian men, women and children.
In other words the Israeli solution is far from ending the 47-year occupation, in fact it is for strengthening it, through the mass murder of Palestinians. In fact the actions of the last couple of weeks were prepared by the Israeli government’s deliberate sabotage of the latest version of the peace process, which was billed as a now or never opportunity to agree to form a Palestinian state.
The Israeli government sabotaged this by refusing to halt the building of all settlements, by refusing to release all Palestinian prisoners, and by insisting that Palestinians must accept not only the right of Israel to exist, that was not enough for Netanyahu, but that they must accept that Israel was a Jewish state, meaning that everybody else was a guest, liable to removal.
As well, Netanyahu made it clear that his vision of a Palestinian state was a bigger refugee camp, with Israeli troops in charge of entry and exit. As if that was not enough, Netanyahu has now openly demanded that a Palestinian government, to be valid, must have the approval of Israel, ie. must not have Hamas in it.
Israel consciously prepared the explosion that is now taking place, which it wants to use to invade Gaza. The UK and Western trade unions must give their total support to the Palestinians. They must call mass demonstrations, they must call for the recognition of the Palestinian unity government and demand that the occupation must be ended at once.
They must also supply the Palestinians with any aid and support that is requested, ie they must cease to be bystanders watching the Israeli regime do its worst to the Palestinian people.
