ISRAEL intensified its bombardment of Gaza over the weekend hitting 200 targets in a single 24-hour period on Friday and Saturday.
Just one of these strikes, targeting Gaza City, killed 90 Palestinians – including 76 members of a single extended family.
This intensification of the genocidal indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, including the use by Israeli forces of a controversial Artificial Intelligence (AI) targeting programme, that has been called a ‘mass assassination factory’, comes just days after the UN Security Council passed a watered down and meaningless resolution calling for more aid and urgent steps for a ‘sustainable ceasefire’.
Yet a further ramping up of genocidal attacks was the response of the Zionist Israeli government, confident that it retains the full support of US imperialism despite all the hand-wringing from President Biden about civilian deaths.
Among the targets hit was a residential block in the Maghazi refugee camp near Deir al-Balah that killed over 100 people and left families still trapped under the rubble.
Deir al-Balah was also hit in overnight bombings despite previously being designated by Israeli forces as an ‘evacuation zone’, a safe area for Palestinians.
Gaza Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra said that the death toll at the Maghazi refugee camp was likely to rise, telling Al Jazeera ‘What is happening at the Maghazi camp is a massacre that is being committed on a crowded residential square.’
There are no ‘safe’ zones for Palestinians, a fact underlined by the UN’s humanitarian team during a visit to Deir al-Balah.
Gemma Connel, who led the UN visit to the refugee camp, likened the situation in Gaza to a ‘human chessboard’ with thousands of Palestinians being constantly displaced and forced to move from one area to another trying to find somewhere safe.
She said ‘it really feels like people being moved around a human chessboard because there’s an evacuation order somewhere. People flee that area into another area, but they’re not safe there.’
Connel added that Israeli strikes spared no areas in the besieged Gaza Strip, with air strikes hitting those areas now under any ‘evacuation order’ by the Israeli army.
By yesterday at least 20,274 Palestinians, the majority being women and children, had been killed and more than 54,536 injured in the campaign by the Zionist regime to drive Palestinians from their land through genocidal terror.
But this campaign has failed to crush Hamas and the resistance of the Palestinian people.
Indeed at his weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reported to have admitted ‘The war is exacting a very heavy cost from us’ with the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) admitting that 15 of its soldiers had been killed in fighting over the weekend.
On Monday Netanyahu told his Likud Party members that despite these losses and despite all the resolutions from the UN calling for a ‘sustainable ceasefire’ Israel will expand its Gaza ground offensive in the coming days and that the war on Palestinians ‘will be a long battle, and it isn’t close to finished’.
Netanyahu has been given the green light from the US and UK governments to carry out this war to exterminate Palestinians or drive them into Egypt or the sea in order to secure the state of Israel as the armed encampment of imperialism in the oil rich region guaranteeing the security of the Middle East for capitalist exploitation.
The working class throughout the world have shown their overwhelming support for the revolutionary struggle of the Palestinian people to defeat their Zionist oppressors.
Now is the time for this support to be translated into action by workers in the UK, Europe and the US demanding that their trade unions call general strikes to bring down their bourgeois governments that support Zionist genocide, and bring in workers governments that will provide all the aid required by the Palestinians to smash the occupation of their land and go forward to the independent state of Palestine.
The working class has the power to end the genocidal slaughter in Palestine, and end imperialist war by bringing down capitalism and going forward to workers governments and socialism.
This is what has to be done!
