THE United Nations has confirmed that more than 100,000 Palestinians have been forced to leave Rafah, amid intensified Israeli strikes on the southern city in Gaza.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) also estimated that ‘around 110,000 people have now fled Rafah, looking for safety.’
The agency stressed that, ‘nowhere is safe in the Gaza Strip & that living conditions are atrocious’, reiterating its call for a ceasefire, which Israel and the imperialist powers have rejected.
‘The only hope is an immediate ceasefire,’ the UN agency said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. It noted that the forced displacement comes as ‘the Israeli forces’ bombardment intensifies in Rafah’.
The Israeli military has already gone ahead with waging limited ground attacks against the city, and seized control of Gaza’s side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, which is the main corridor for the transfer of aid into the besieged strip.
Since the start of its offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has killed more than 34,900 Palestinians and injured more than 78,000 others.
The Palestinian national liberation movement, Hamas, says the Israeli regime has rejected a proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza, stressing that the ‘ball is completely’ in Israel’s court in the truce talks.
The Hamas negotiating delegation left Cairo and is heading to Doha. ‘In practice, the occupier, Israel, rejected the proposal submitted by the mediators and raised objections to it on several central issues,’ the group said in a message to other Palestinian resistance factions, adding it stood by the proposal.
‘Accordingly, the ball is now completely in the Israeli occupation’s court,’ Hamas stressed. Hamas said on Monday it had agreed to a ceasefire proposal put forward by Egyptian and Qatari mediators.
The group said the proposal includes the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, the return of displaced Palestinians to their homes, and a prisoner swap, with the aim of a ‘permanent ceasefire’.
Israel has long been opposed to the idea of a permanent ceasefire, saying its genocidal war on Gaza is aimed at destroying Hamas.
Even the White House has conceded that Israel’s potential full-scale invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah will not defeat the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas.
Israel launched the devastating war on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas waged the ‘surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm’ against the occupying entity, in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
The regime has now blocked water, food, and electricity to Gaza, plunging the coastal strip into an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.
Since the start of the offensive, the Israeli attacks have killed at least 34,904 Palestinians and injured 78,514 others, while an estimated 10,000 Palestinians are believed to be buried under the rubble of buildings flattened by the regime’s bombs.
In fact, it is the working people of the world that hold the key to the solution of this crisis.
The workers and youth of the world from California to the European Union, Africa and Australasia support Palestine.
Now is the right time for them to enter the fight by urging their reformist trade unions to enter the struggle for a free Palestine, from the River to the Sea.
The trade unions leaders of the major capitalist states must now be made to enter the battle alongside the hundreds of thousands of youth that are occupying their colleges and universities and marching from one end of their countries to the other.
In fact, the millions of trade unionists in the UK and other capitalist states must see to it that trade union leaderships, like that of the TUC, are made to call general strike actions to bring down their capitalist governments, to go forward to socialism.
This is the way to win the struggle, not just for a free state of Palestine, but to begin a new chapter of the worldwide socialist revolution.
There is a huge crisis of world capitalism. It is now in its death agony, with its leading lights, the American and British bourgeoisie, in a desperate economic and political crisis.
Now is the time to make the TUC in the UK call a general strike to bring down the Tories and help bring in a state of Palestine, as a prelude to the UK working class taking power itself and going forward to socialism!
