HUMAN Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report on April 27: ‘The oppression of Palestinians has reached a threshold and a permanence that meets the definitions of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.’
It has already forwarded these findings to the International Criminal Court (ICC) stating: ‘Denying millions of Palestinians their fundamental rights, without any legitimate security justification and solely because they are Palestinian and not Jewish, is not simply a matter of an abusive occupation.
‘These policies, which grant Jewish Israelis the same rights and privileges wherever they live but discriminate against Palestinians, reflect a policy to privilege one people at the expense of another.’
HRW urges: ‘The ICC Office of the Prosecutor should investigate and prosecute those credibly implicated in the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.’
Israel, in a huge crisis, without a government but with a very dominant military and a powerful US ally, decided not to wait for the ICC to act, but to strike first.
It did this with a major provocation announcing that the Palestinians would not be able to campaign for their general election in occupied East Jerusalem.
Since then, Zionist mobs have attacked Palestinians and sought to drive them from their homes. The Palestinians have fought back and are now determined to win the battle for Jerusalem and their independent state.
Palestinian resistance factions have launched ‘Operation Sword of al-Quds’ to liberate Jerusalem from the Israeli occupation.
Operating under the ‘Joint Operations Room’ they have announced that resistance fighters have fired hundreds of rockets towards the occupied territories. The rocket fire was in retaliation for the Tel Aviv regime’s raids on the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, they said.
‘Operation Sword of al-Quds (Jerusalem) is aimed at the liberation of the holy city, and is in response to the Occupation’s crimes against its residents as well as cries by its freedom-loving locals,’ the statement stressed.
Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement, has warned that Israel will face escalation unless it withdraws its forces from two flashpoint areas in Jerusalem.
‘We tell the enemy that we have already warned it against insistence on aggression against our sanctities and people without any restraint. It is now time for it to pay the costs.’ It added: ‘We have built up strength to protect our people wherever needed. We will not abandon them, no matter what the consequences might be. Our weapons are for all of our people, wherever they are.
‘Let the cowardly enemy know that the era of singling out al-Quds (Jerusalem) and al-Aqsa Mosque is long gone,’ the Joint Operations Room stated.
‘Hamas will continue its operations unless Israel ends its al-Quds, al-Aqsa Mosque raids’ head of Hamas’ political bureau Ismail Haniyeh said, stressing that the equation relating the Gaza Strip to Jerusalem al-Quds is fundamental and never-changing: ‘When al-Quds (Jerusalem) called for help, Gaza answered the call.’
He added: ‘We have decided to continue our operations unless the Israeli Occupation stops all its acts of aggression and terror in al-Quds (Jerusalem) and the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque.’
Additionally, Palestinian resistance groups in the Gaza Strip fired a massive barrage of rockets at the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon at dawn yesterday, threatening to turn the city ‘into hell.’ The attack came shortly after Israeli warplanes conducted new airstrikes on Gaza killing 25 Palestinians including nine children. The Gaza ministry reported that 103 people were injured in the impoverished coastal sliver.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has condemned the Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip and called on the international community to act quickly to put an end to the ongoing Israeli crimes against Palestinians, and to force the Tel Aviv regime to cease its aggression that aims to Judaize Jerusalem, and forcibly displace Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood.
The Palestinian people are now standing fast and must be supported by all of the TUC trade unions and the working class of the UK and the USA.
The TUC in the UK must call an emergency national demonstration in support of Palestine and call political strikes as well as imposing a boycott on all Israeli goods. Now is the time for the workers of the world to intervene to win the battle by establishing the State of Palestine!