GAZA’S Government Media Office (GMO) has announced that the Israeli occupation army has killed 20 Palestinian Christians in the Gaza Strip during over 14 months of genocidal attacks, designed to eradicate every last Palestinian.
20 Palestinian Christians killed represent 3% of the total number in the enclave.
Ismail Thawabteh, GMO Director General, in a statement on Wednesday evening said: ‘The numbers and facts show the extent of the suffering faced by this essential component of the Palestinian fabric. The Israeli occupation forces have killed more than 20 Christians during this act of genocide, all of whom were civilians, including women, children and the elderly.’
The number of Christian Palestinians in Gaza has decreased to around 650 as a result of Israeli genocide.
Thawabteh emphasised that the deliberate targeting of the tiny Christian community in Gaza is part of a systematic policy to erase the diverse human and historical presence in the Strip, where the Zionists do not respect any religious sanctities.
He pointed to the deliberate targeting by Israeli forces that have destroyed three main churches in Gaza, while civilians in residential areas, populated by the Christian community around the churches, have been directly targeted.
Thawabteh stressed that the continued targeting of Christians in Gaza is not just numbers or statistics but an all-out assault on a shared history, culture and identity that extends over decades.
He insisted that the Palestinian Christian community is an integral part of the Palestinian people, and targeting it is an attack on the entire Palestinian existence.
Thawabteh issued a call on the international community to urgently intervene to end the war crimes and ethnic cleansing being carried out by the Zionist regime, while insisting that: ‘Gaza, with its Muslims and Christians, will remain resistant to the attempts of genocide and uprooting carried out by the Israeli occupation, and its churches and mosques will stand as witnesses to the resilience of its proud people.’
This resilience and refusal of the Palestinian people to be crushed by a genocidal war that has claimed over 45,000 lives and injured 107,000 Palestinians in more than 440 days of continual atrocities by the Zionist regime, has created a crisis for both Israel and its imperialist masters in the US.
On every count, the regime of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has failed in its objectives to drive Palestinians into submission, release the hostages, and destroy the Hamas resistance movement.
Similarly, its military assault on Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah failed dramatically, along with the Zionist dream, shared by world imperialism, of reshaping the Middle East through the military might of Israel.
All the attacks launched against Yemen, which has been steadfast in its support of Palestine, by the US and UK, designed to frighten the Yemeni armed forces from targeting Israeli vessels in the Red Sea, along with missile attacks on military targets in Israel – which have succeeded in penetrating the supposedly invincible ‘iron dome’ protecting the Israeli entity – have failed to crush Yemeni support for Palestine.
On Christmas Day, the Yemeni parliament affirmed the country’s right to defend its unity, security, stability and sovereignty by all possible and available means.
The parliament further denounced the ‘shameful’ silence of Arab countries, in the face of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, and called for urgent action to end genocide in Gaza, and called for urgent action to end it, and for the real ‘war criminals’ to be held accountable for their crimes.
In the UK the leadership of the TUC are equally guilty of silence, and refusing to support the demands of the overwhelming mass of workers and youth for action against a Labour government, that arms and supports the Israeli regime and is complicit in genocidal war on Palestinians.
The time is long overdue for the working class to force these leaders out by demanding an emergency conference of the TUC, to sack them and bring in a new leadership that will organise the strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down the Labour government and go forward to a workers government.
A workers government will immediately break with the Israeli regime, recognise the independent state of Palestine, and provide all the necessary financial and military support required for the victory of the Palestinian revolution.