‘YOU do not want peace at all. You have destroyed all chances of peace and you should bear all the responsibility,’ Palestinian President Abbas declared yesterday about the Israeli enemy.
At the same time the Palestinian Premier Haniya declared that Hamas will seek revenge for the massacres of the Palestinian people, while both leaders called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to put an end to the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Yesterday the inhabitants of the embattled Palestinian town of Beit Hanoun were burying their dead – 20 people, 13 of them women and children – whose houses were shelled in the middle of the night, after Israeli troops and their tanks were forced to leave the town.
Scores of Palestinians were also wounded as artillery shells slammed into their homes.
Earlier on Friday 3rd November, Israeli tanks had opened fire on several hundred women who were trying to protect a group of fighters surrounded in a Beit Hanoun mosque.
In all, in the last eight days 80 Palestinians have died on the Gaza Strip at the hands of Israeli forces, while, since last June, the Israeli military have killed over 300 Palestinians, including many women and children, in Gaza.
Badly shaken by the defeat of Bush in the US mid-term congressional elections, EU foreign ministers and even the US Secretary of State Rice have said that the shelling of Palestinian homes was a ‘terrible tragedy that we deeply regret,’ and expressed ‘deep sorrow’.
Even the British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett has admitted that even she found the Israeli massacre ‘hard to justify.’
The Israelis have expressed their ‘regrets’ for the mass murder that they committed, saying that they are ending their artillery attacks on the town, pending an inquiry, but insisting that their military attacks on the Gaza Strip will continue, and that they will carry on murdering Palestinians.
Meanwhile, President Bush is to meet the Israeli Premier Olmert next week to discuss the next steps in their terror campaign against the Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian people.
The first thing to say about this situation is that the tears of the EU and other imperialist powers over the Beit Hanoun massacre are crocodile tears.
What has allowed the Israeli government to mount a military campaign against the Gaza Strip for the last 80 days is the fact that the EU, the UK and the US refused to accept the democratic choice of the Palestinian people when they elected a Hamas government. The EU, US and UK imposed an economic and financial siege on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and have spent every day since that election plotting to remove that government.
The Israeli military campaign is central to this policy. It is an attempt to create the conditions where the Palestinian masses will allow their government to be removed, rather than put up with the bombings and shootings and shellings day after day after day.
That after 300 deaths, the EU and the UK are finding mass murder ‘hard to justify’, is because of the blow that has been struck against Bush by the US workers, a blow that has further undermined the Blair government in Britain.
The way forward now is for Hamas and Fatah to form a government of national unity, that accepts that Hamas is entitled not to recognise Israel, and calls the Third Intifada to secure Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, to establish a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, with the end of all of the Zionist settlements and with the right of all Palestinian refugees to return.
The time to form the national unity government is now, while the imperialists and Zionists are seeking to recover their balance after the heavy blow that has been delivered to the Bush regime.
This is the way to avenge those who have fallen to Israeli tank and artillery shells.
