THE GENOCIDAL onslaught against the 1.4 million Palestinian men, women and children forced into the tiny city of Rafah on the border with Egypt began in earnest at the weekend.
In preparation for a ground invasion, Israeli forces on Sunday night launched air and sea attacks on Rafah that killed at least 67 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
And at least 100 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed and nearly 230 wounded in air raids and artillery strikes on Monday.
In a statement, Hamas said the ‘terrorist Netanyahu government’ had ‘blatantly disregarded the decisions of the International Court of Justice issued two weeks ago which prescribed urgent measures including stopping any steps that could be considered acts of genocide.’
It is not just the Zionist regime that is blatantly disregarding the ICJ decision.
Since its preliminary findings, the governments of the US and UK have remained absolutely silent on the findings of the court.
Instead, US president Joe Biden has restricted himself to calling Israel’s attack ‘over the top’ while Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, said last week that any ‘military operation that Israel undertakes needs to put civilians first and foremost… And that is especially true in the case of Rafah.’
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu naturally takes all these warnings with a large pinch of salt, confident in the knowledge that US imperialism is backing its genocide to the hilt, and all public utterances about ‘protecting civilians’ is just a cover-up for US complicity in the deliberate campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing.
As Reuters news agency pointed out, in all the pious words ‘there was nothing to suggest the rhetoric from Washington would be backed by action.’
In fact, Biden gave the green light to Netanyahu in a telephone conversation on Sunday where he ‘reaffirmed’ support for the Israeli military operation, while adding that any military operation in Rafah should not proceed ‘without a credible plan for ensuring the safety’ of the 1.4 million Palestinians sheltering there.
Netanyahu was only too happy to say he had a plan, and that was to disperse all Palestinians in Rafah, driving them to the north of the Gaza Strip – the area they had already been driven from.
The Zionist plan is to ethnically cleanse every last Palestinian from their land, and drive them into Egypt or the sea.
Grasping this meaningless ‘assurance’, Biden gave the green light to the barbaric bombardment of Rafah, to be followed by a military invasion.
The go-ahead has been given to the Zionist regime to use all the brutal methods to carry out a massacre in Rafah using all the money, weapons and political cover provided by the US and its accomplices in the UK and other Western governments.
According to the director of Kuwait Hospital in Rafah, Suhaib al-Hams, the Israeli army are using internationally prohibited incendiary missiles in its raids on Rafah and he said: ‘We disbelieve in the world’s democracy, its false freedoms, and its false justice. Its duplicity has been revealed, and its disgrace has been exposed.’
The duplicity and complicity of the US and major imperialist nations in backing and defending the Zionist regime, the main imperialist outpost in the Middle East, has been revealed in all its barbarism to the tens of millions of workers and young people across the UK, Europe, the US and the world, who are rising up demanding an end to genocide and for the victory of the Palestinian revolution.
At the same time, the leaders of the trade unions like the TUC stay silent, and just watch the slaughter and massacres unfold in Gaza.
The working class are refusing to remain as bystanders in this genocidal war.
The time has come for the powerful working class to take its own action by forcing its trade union leaders to call general strikes in the UK, the US and EU to overthrow their Zionist-supporting governments and bring in workers’ governments and socialism.
The victory of the world socialist revolution is the only way forward for the victory of the Palestinian people to establish their own independent state of Palestine.
