THE UN agency for Palestinian refugees yesterday issued the latest dire warning that time is running out for any chance of averting a catastrophic famine in Gaza saying ‘Restrictions must be lifted now’ and that ‘the clock is ticking fast towards famine’.
Last week, a report from the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works agency for Palestine) said that over 70% of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza are facing ‘catastrophic hunger’ as a direct result of the deliberate Israeli policy of blocking food and aid from reaching the Gaza Strip.
Also yesterday, the UN’s most senior human rights official Volker Turk in an interview with the BBC said there was a ‘plausible’ case that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.
If intent was proven, Turk added, this would amount to a war crime. The proof of the Zionist regimes war crimes exists already in overwhelming abundance.
Since the start of the genocidal campaign of mass bombings, ground attacks on schools and hospitals throughout Gaza, at least 32,490 Palestinians, overwhelmingly women and children, have been killed and 74,889 injured.
Such is the outrage internationally at the barbaric drive to eradicate Palestinians from their land in Gaza, that the UN Security Council on Monday passed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and emphasising the need for food and humanitarian aid to enter Gaza.
The fact that the US was not confident enough to publicly block this resolution and just abstained on the grounds that it was ‘non-binding’ and will be ignored by the US and Israel, did not go down well with the Zionist regime and its supporters in the western imperialist countries.
How dare the US abstain and the UK government vote in favour of a resolution that, despite being largely symbolic, dares to hold Israel to account for its mass murder of Palestinians and called for humanitarian aid and food to stave off mass starvation.
This is a betrayal of the ‘right of Israel’ to break international law in its push to drive Palestinians out through terror they screamed – not just in Israel but also in Britain in the pages of the Daily Telegraph.
Yesterday, the Telegraph carried a comment article by Andrew Roberts, a Tory peer and right wing historian, headed: ‘The West’s shameful betrayal of Israel gives Hamas the chance to kill again.’
‘Wars,’ Roberts writes ‘are not won through ceasefires, and Jerusalem should be allowed to finish off the terrorists in Rafah’.
Roberts dismisses the death toll amongst Palestinians in Gaza, writing that: ‘The truth is the IDF’s ratio of civilian deaths to Hamas terrorists killed is likely to be astonishingly low for modern close-combat urban warfare,’ while he is careful not to mention starvation and famine.
Roberts is simply parroting the propaganda pushed out by the Israeli regime.
This is propaganda that tens of millions of workers and masses throughout the world have rejected with contempt, demonstrating their support for Palestine and demanding action to end Israeli genocide and secure an independent state of Palestine.
While workers and young people are demanding action, the TUC has remained silent with no call for any action to enforce the terms of the UN Security Council resolution by sanctioning Israel and ending all arms sales used to commit genocide.
Since Monday, there has been no comment from the TUC on the resolution, let alone a call for unions to mobilise against a Tory government that has been complicit in its support for the Zionist regime’s murderous war to drive Palestinians from their land, or take action against the arms companies that continue to supply the Israeli war machine.
This week, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions issued a call to the US unions and the international labour movement to go beyond verbal statements of support and take measures to ‘stop this war of extermination’.
The TUC in the UK along with unions in the US and Europe must take up this call by organising general strikes to bring down the imperialist governments and their allies who are complicit in genocide replacing them with workers governments and socialism.
The way forward to ending the imperialist backed slaughter in Palestine is through the victory of the World Socialist Revolution
