SPEAKING at a press conference in the Jordanian capital, Amman, on Thursday, Abdallah al-Dardari, UN assistant secretary-general and director of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), estimated that the destruction caused by Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip could take 80 years to undo, and cost up to $40 billion to reconstruct, and that the Israeli aggression has completely or partially destroyed 72 per cent of all residential buildings in Gaza.
He added that the Israeli attacks have left 37 million tons of rubble across Gaza, warning that the ‘colossal figure’ is increasing every day and approaching 40 million tons.
Dardari further said that the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip through a normal process could take decades.
However the US-UK led intervention into Palestine is not a ‘normal process’, it is a brutal imperialistic intervention to smash the Palestinian revolution and strengthen Israel, that is continuing.
In fact, the US ruling class is carrying out its own counter-revolution at home as the police state raid on the pro-Palestinian University of California at Los Angeles shows, just a day after the students were attacked by pro-Israel gangsters.
At least 200 pro-Palestine protesters were arrested during the pre-dawn raid, led by a phalanx of California Highway Patrol officers carrying shields, batons, and firearms.
The raid took place about a day after police watched on as pro-Israel groups violently attacked the encampment. Late Tuesday night, masked counter-demonstrators mounted a surprise assault on the camp, using sticks to beat the peaceful activists.
In fact, the US counter-revolutionary attacks on students has greatly encouraged Israel.
At least eight Syrian soldiers suffered injuries when Israeli military aircraft carried out a strike against a building operated by Syrian security forces on the outskirts of the capital Damascus on Thursday night.
The provocative nature of the attacks can be seen by the recent exchange of fire between Israel and Iran which took place after an Israeli attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
The US has now given Israel the green light to step up the war. Seeking to provoke Syria, with a bombing attack on Damascus, is a statement that no matter what pressure there is on the US ruling class at home from angry students and workers, the US remains ready for a further war with Syria, and is now more willing and able to give its full support to the Israeli regime for its projected attack on Rafah to try to finish off the Palestinian revolution.
Syria’s official news agency, SANA, citing a military source, reported that Israeli warplanes launched an assault from the direction of the occupied Golan Heights against a site in the vicinity of Damascus at around 10:50 p.m. local time (1950 GMT) on Thursday night.
This could only be done with the permission of the United States.
We can now expect more US-backed provocations from Israel as the US ruling class battles against a working class at home that does not want war with the Palestinians, and more and more realises that its enemy is at home. It is not in Moscow, Beijing or Damascus, it is in Washington DC, and is made up of the US ruling class of plutocrats, with their two party system, of bourgeois Democrats and bourgeois Republicans, through which US capital rules.
The US working class, and the workers of the UK and the EU do not support American imperialism destroying the Palestinian people and putting them under the heel of Israel.
The workers of the world support Palestine, and now the working people must take action in the major capitalist states to have a worldwide general strike in support of Palestine.
The task is to mobilise the working class of the world to take action through their trade unions, to bring down their bourgeois governments that are seeking to use them as cannon fodder for some new war against Russia. The workers of the world must unite to fight capitalism and imperialism.
This means building the International Committee of the Fourth International as the world party of the socialist revolution, that will organise the world revolution to bring down the bourgeois regimes that want to enslave the working people of the planet.
There must be action for a worldwide general strike to support Palestine and to prevent a new world war with Russia and China, that the US-UK axis is seeking to organise. Capitalism has had its day and must be dumped into the dustbin of history by the working people of the world!
