THE Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh showed solidarity with photojournalist Moath Amarneh during the Palestinian cabinet meeting yesterday in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah by covering his left eye.
Amarneh lost his left eye on Friday after being seriously injured by a metallic bullet fired by an Israeli soldier in Surif in the south of the West Bank while covering a protest against land confiscation.
‘If Israel wants to shut down Moath’s eyes, all of our eyes are his,’ said Shtayyeh.
He added that Israel targets Palestinian journalists ‘to silence the voice of truth,’ noting that the Israeli forces did not only attack Amarneh’s eyes, but also quelled a sit-in staged by journalists in support of the injured photojournalist and viciously attacked them.
Shtayyeh praised the widespread popular solidarity movement with Amarneh, saying that this also sheds light on other Palestinian victims of Israel, most notably the Abu Malhous Sawarkeh family, which lost eight of its members in an airstrike carried out by Israeli warplanes in the Gaza Strip last week.
Israeli forces detained at least 11 Palestinians and ransacked several houses across the West Bank yesterday, said the Palestine Prisoners’ Society (PPS).
The Israeli regime, while carrying on with its ceasefire breaking attacks on Gaza, has spread its terror to Ramallah and all over the West Bank.
Al-Quds also reported that dozens of journalists were injured from Israeli military gunfire or suffocated by tear gas fired by Israeli forces who suppressed protests in solidarity with Amarneh across the West Bank.
It said in a press statement that five Palestinians were detained from the southern West Bank district of Hebron.
The Al-Quds and al-Ayyam newspapers printed photos showing Israeli soldiers attacking journalists who staged the sit-in protest in solidarity with Amarneh at the northern entrance of Bethlehem city.
Furthermore, the Palestinian dailies said that Israeli occupation authorities seized hundreds of dunums of Palestinian-owned land in the northern West Bank district of Salfit.
Meanwhile the silence in the West and in the UK is deafening, as these vicious attacks on Palestinian journalists escalate to prevent them telling the truth to the world, in words and pictures, of what the Israeli occupation is doing to the Palestinians.
It is a disgrace that there has not been a single protest from the Labour Party and its leader over this monstrous terror directed by Israel against the Palestinian people and their journalists.
In fact Jeremy Corbyn, while addressing the CBI yesterday, denounced the holocaust but did not have a word to say about the cruel oppression of the Palestinian people, and the blinding of a Palestinian journalist. Corbyn has allowed the imperialist propaganda that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism to dominate as he keeps his mouth closed.
News Line urges the NUJ to take up the case of the blinded Palestinian journalist, and the attacks that are being directed against Palestinian journalists in occupied Palestine.
Not just the NUJ but all trade unions in the UK must take action over the terror that has been unleashed against Palestinian journalists.
The trade unions and the TUC must organise a boycott of Israel. They must demand that the Labour Party champions the case of the Palestinian journalists under attack who have now been thrust into the vanguard of the struggle.
Labour and the TUC must demand that this targeting of Palestinian journalists and Palestinian demonstrators must be stopped at once.
The TUC must demand that Labour recognises the state of Palestine when it is elected as the government and must break off all relations with Israel,including the British arming of the Israeli state.
Labour must pledge that in government it will assist in the development of the Palestinian state in all of its aspects, industrial, political and military to create a new situation in the Middle East in which Jews and Arabs can live side by side and flourish. This is the way forward!
