IT didn’t take long for the Israeli government to carry out its plan to invade Gaza and carry out a pogrom against the Palestinian people.
Late Thursday night, all talk was of a ceasefire brokered by the Egyptian government, a comprehensive deal to end the fighting between Israeli and Palestinian forces in Gaza.
The Israeli government, led by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, were certainly not interested in any ceasefire.
While the Egyptians were trying to broker a deal thousands of Israeli troops were moving into Gaza that same night, backed by tanks and covered by an artillery barrage.
The initial death toll by Friday morning stood at 24 Palestinians killed, including three children killed by tank fire.
By Friday morning Netanyahu declared that he was going to ‘significantly widen’ this ground offensive, claiming that it was now not about rocket attacks but about destroying the Palestinian tunnel network in Gaza.
According to the Israelis their limited aim is to destroy tunnels used by Palestinian militants to infiltrate into Israel.
The fact that such incursions have only very rarely occurred, and then on a very limited scale, has not prevented the Zionist state from promoting this as yet another ‘existential threat’.
In fact their main aim is to destroy all the tunnels in Gaza, tunnels that operate as the very lifeblood of the Palestinian people.
With their borders completely closed by both the Israelis and the army regime of Sisi in Egypt, it is only by using these tunnels that Gaza can survive.
In March this year it was reported that the Egyptian military had destroyed 1,370 tunnels under the town of Rafah that were used to transfer food, fuel and consumer goods into Gaza.
Having effectively sabotaged the attempts at the last US version of a peace process, the Israelis have prepared and are now implementing Netanyahu’s vision of a Palestinian state that is nothing more than a refugee camp, policed by Israeli troops.
If proof were needed about the intention of the Israelis to launch a murderous war against Gaza and all of the Palestinian people, one only has to consider the demands made by Hamas and Islamic Jihad that had they been accepted, would have been the basis for a ceasefire.
The 10 demands made were hardly extreme and rather than calling for the immanent destruction of the state of Israel, they actually offer a ten-year truce with them.
The 10 demands are the most basic demands that any state could make, including the withdrawal of Israeli tanks from the border in order that Gaza farmers may peacefully access their own land, and the freeing of all Palestinian prisoners illegally detained following the killing of the three settlers.
Other demands concern the ending of the brutal military siege of Gaza and the reopening of all border crossings, along with the opening of an international seaport and airport in Gaza, which they even concede would be run and monitored by the United Nations.
These demands are the most basic that any sovereign state could make and expect to receive.
But the Israelis are not interested in ten-year truces. All they want is to invade Gaza and then the West Bank to destroy all resistance to their 47 years old occupation, and prevent the formation of a Palestinian National Government through the slaughter of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children.
With almost every trade union in Britain passing motions of support for the establishment of a Palestinian state, the time has come to move from passive support to taking action.
The unions in the UK and the western world must call mass demonstrations to demand an end to the occupation and for the recognition of the Palestinian unity government.
The unions must impose an immediate complete and permanent boycott of all Israeli goods and services and support the Palestinians by supplying them all of the aid that they require.
The unions in every country must immediately launch a massive campaign to end this murderous invasion, end the Israeli occupation and for the immediate establishment of the Palestinian state led by its national unity government.
