ON Tuesday night, the United Nations General Assembly vote for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza was passed overwhelmingly with 10 countries, led by the US, opposing and 23 (including Britain) abstaining.
The response of the Israeli regime was to denounce the call for a ‘humanitarian ceasefire’ and the demand for Israel to obey international laws on not targeting civilians, hospitals and children in a genocidal campaign that has killed nearly 20,000 Palestinians, the majority (about 70%) being women and children.
Israel’s foreign minister Eli Cohen was contemptuous when he said it will continue its murderous war on Palestinians ‘with or without international support’, while Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised ‘nothing will stop us’ and vowed to ‘continue until the end, until victory, until the elimination of Hamas.’
In reality, what Netanyahu is aiming for is the elimination of every last Palestinian through a war to drive them from their land into either Egypt or the sea.
For this massive ethnic cleansing, the Zionist regime is solely reliant on the support of US imperialism and its faithful poodles in Britain.
Backed by the US government, the Israelis have increased their onslaught against Palestinians this week, with occupation forces carrying out continuous attacks on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank city of Jenin.
The Jenin camp was established in 1953 to house the tens of thousands of Palestinians forced from their land by Israeli terror in 1948.
The camp and the city of Jenin, along with Gaza, have long been seen as the main symbols of Palestinian resistance to the Zionist occupation and subjected to years of attacks and invasions by Israeli troops.
From Tuesday, this attack on Jenin was ramped up with Israeli forces surrounding three hospitals in the area and destroying houses in the camp as part of a widespread and continuing campaign of destruction of homes.
Occupation forces bombed abandoned houses in the eastern neighbourhood of the city of Jenin, while they continued raids, searches and arrest campaigns.
Yesterday, 17-year-old Mousa Ahmed Khatib was shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces, becoming the 11th Palestinian killed in the assault on the city and camp this week.
Alongside this, people are dying in Jenin because they cannot access hospitals according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
MSF reported that a man had to carry his sick 13-year-old son on foot to a hospital after an Israeli tank blocked the ambulance carrying him.
His son died on arrival.
MSF further reported that Israeli forces tear-gassed the hospital claiming children were throwing stones at armoured cars, while ambulances were fired upon, leading to patients being readmitted with gunshot wounds.
The Israelis are, up till now, getting away with their genocidal war because of the support of the US and the complicity of the Tories who try to use abstention as a cover for their wholehearted support of the Zionist war to drive Palestinians out of their land.
Equally complicit is the leadership of the TUC which has remained shamefully silent, refusing to take any action against the Tories in support of Palestine.
The TUC at its emergency Congress last Saturday also treacherously refused to take any action against the Tory anti-strike laws.
The disgraceful and cowardly TUC is refusing to take any real stand against genocide by Zionism, or against a Tory government that is engaged in a class war at home to drive the working class into poverty by smashing its right to strike.
The working class and the youth must put an end to this treachery.
The working class and youth, who overwhelmingly support and identify with the Palestinian struggle, must declare that enough is enough.
The basic right of the Palestinian people to their own state of Palestine, free from Zionist occupation, stands alongside the basic right of the working class to independent trade unions and the right to strike.
The TUC leaders by abstaining from this struggle are complicit accomplices of the Tories and must be removed, and replaced by a leadership prepared to call an immediate general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government that will smash all anti-strike laws and give all the material support required by Palestinians to go forward to the independent State of Palestine.
