IN a statement issued on Wednesday, the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was ‘deeply concerned’ about the Israeli regime’s all-out military assault on the occupied West Bank and called for ‘an immediate cessation’ of the military attack that was continuing yesterday.
On Wednesday morning, Israeli troops launched the biggest attack on the West Bank, that is illegally occupied by the Zionist state, for 57 years.
Hundreds of troops and airstrikes were launched against three cities, Jenin, Tulkarem and Tubas, in the West Bank killing at least 17 Palestinians including children, according to the WAFA news agency.
In his statement, Guterres condemned the loss of life and urged Israel to protect civilians and ensure their safety, saying: ‘All those injured must have access to medical care and humanitarian workers must be able to reach anyone in need.’
Guterres continued: ‘These dangerous developments are fuelling an already explosive situation in the occupied West Bank and further undermining the Palestinian Authority.’
Nominally, the Palestinian Authority is in charge of the West Bank but in reality it is dominated by the Zionist occupiers since it was illegally occupied in 1967.
Since then, Israeli troops have regularly killed and arrested Palestinians in the West Bank with complete impunity, in open defiance of all the previous UN resolutions declaring Israel an occupying power.
In 2022 alone, at least 220 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks across the occupied territories, a figure that has increased to at least 582 killed in the 11 months of the Zionist war in Gaza.
This week, saw a massive expansion of attacks with tanks, bulldozers tearing up houses and planes bombing the cities under the pretext that Iranian arms were flooding into the West Bank across the border from Jordan.
This completely unsubstantiated claim was clearly designed to act as a cover for what is nothing more than an extension of the genocidal war being waged in Gaza to the occupied West Bank.
It follows months of increased settler attacks carried out under the protection of the Israeli military with the aim of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank, driving them out through a deliberate campaign of genocidal slaughter.
Guterres already had Israel’s negative answer to his call for a cessation to the military attacks and for access by the Zionist forces to provide medical care to injured Palestinians.
On Wednesday, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) was forced to suspend the movement of its employees across the Gaza Strip following an attack on one of its vehicles at an Israeli military checkpoint.
According to WFP, one of its cars containing a team returning from delivering aid on Tuesday evening was directly shot at by Israeli troops just metres from an Israeli controlled checkpoint.
The car was clearly marked and had official clearances from the Israeli authorities for the journey.
The calls by the UN for a cessation of this offensive will be completely and contemptuously ignored by the Israeli regime, as have all the resolutions passed calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Israel acts with impunity, confident it enjoys the complete and unswerving support of US imperialism and its faithful lapdogs in the UK and Europe. Without this support, the Israeli regime would collapse in days. With the UN completely powerless to act, the only force that can put an end to genocide is the working class taking action.
The time has come for the powerful working class to intervene by demanding their trade unions call general strikes to bring down the governments in the US and UK who are complicit and encouraging genocide through arming the Zionist regime.
In the UK, the TUC annual conference starting on Sunday 8th September must force the TUC leaders to end their shameful silence on Palestine, come off the fence and immediately organise a general strike to bring down the Labour government of Keir Starmer, which has given total support to Israel’s war of extermination, replacing it with a workers government that will recognise the State of Palestine and provide all the support necessary to sustain it.
Join the lobby called by the WRP and Young Socialists on Monday 9th September to demand the TUC acts to support the Palestinian revolution.
