SINCE January, Israel has launched massive attacks on refugee camps in the West Bank killing dozens of Palestinians and forcing at least 40,000 to flee their homes, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) reported yesterday.
The Zionist regime started its military campaign on January 21, first targeting the Jenin refugee camp and the adjoining city of Jenin, before expanding raids throughout the occupied territory.
Several refugee camps – including Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur Shams and Far’a – have been ‘nearly emptied of their residents’ UNRWA reported, describing the incursions as ‘the single longest in the West Bank’.
In the Tulkarm refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank, some 50 homes and 280 shops have been completely destroyed. Speaking to the press, Tulkarm Deputy Governor, Faisal Salama, said the Israeli army is ‘working to reshape the features and geography of the Tulkarm camp through extensive demolition of Palestinian properties’.
Salama said of the onslaught on the camp as being ‘a massacre and an illegal plan carried out amid Arab and international silence’.
The silence from the US and its imperialist ‘allies’ in the UK and Europe about the extension of ethnic cleansing from Gaza to the West Bank has indeed been deafening.
Not a word of condemnation or even acknowledgement that the Zionist regime having failed to achieve any victory over the Palestinian is Gaza are now using the same genocidal tactics throughout Palestinian territories.
In the same way, there is silence over the continued breaking by the Israeli occupation force of the peace agreement forced on Netanyahu by US president Trump.
This agreement has been violated many times by Israel over the past 4 weeks, with displaced Palestinians returning to northern Gaza being targeted with shells and gunfire, while relief supplies are denied entry to the Strip despite the terms agreed upon.
Despite the ceasefire, Gaza’s Health Ministry reports that at least three Palestinians have been killed and 11 injured in Israeli attacks in the past 24 hours.
The ministry also confirmed that 48,297 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, while 11,733 people have been wounded.
Gaza’s government media has updated its death toll to at least 61,709 people, saying that thousands of Palestinians missing under the rubble are presumed dead.
The Israeli Zionist regime, reeling from its failure in Gaza, is turning to ethnically cleanse the entire West Bank and all Palestinian lands.
At the same time, Trump is pushing his vision of the US buying up the whole of Palestine and turning Gaza into a holiday resort for Israelis and wealthy Americans.
It is not just the governments of the imperialist nations that are remaining silent about the war crimes and genocide being carried out despite the cloak of a ceasefire.
The leaders of the TUC in Britain have remained shamefully silent and inactive over the mass slaughter being carried out in Gaza and now the West Bank.
Despite countless motions being passed unanimously at TUC conferences supporting Palestine and calling for its recognition as an independent state, the TUC have done nothing except to work hard to prevent workers and their unions from taking any real action.
Hundreds of thousands of workers, youth and students have marched and demonstrated throughout London demanding an end to genocide and for an independent state of Palestine. The TUC have refused to organise any real action to mobilise the power of the working class.
While the working class has demonstrated their overwhelming support for Palestine, the TUC have worked to divert this mass movement away from real action, into the dead end of becoming just a protest movement.
The time for just protesting over Gaza is over.
Workers must force their trade unions to immediately call an emergency meeting of the TUC General Council to mobilise the working class in a general strike to bring down the Starmer government and bring in a workers government that will recognise the independent state of Palestine and provide the Palestinians with all the weapons and support required for the victory of the Palestinian revolution.
