THE United States, along with other Western countries, has pitched in to accelerate Israel’s war on Palestinians through a campaign of deliberate starvation to accompany the carpet bombing of Gaza.
Not content with arming the Zionist regime with all the weapons required to bomb Gaza, reducing it to rubble and killing over 26,000 mainly women and children, the US and its faithful allies are now joining in the deliberate policy of killing thousands more through starvation and disease.
This emerged clearly with the decision by the US to suspend funding of the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) last Friday, a decision that was swiftly followed by other Western supporters of the Israeli regime’s genocidal war on Palestinians.
Britain, Germany, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland and Italy all followed the lead of US imperialism in announcing they too would ‘suspend’ the vital funding of UNWRA, the organisation that over two million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip depend on for increasingly limited aid.
UNRWA has said that cutting funding by some of its largest donors endangers its aid work in Gaza where, along with its attempts to distribute the tiny amount of food that has managed to get through the Israeli blockade, its buildings have been used as shelter for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the non-stop bombardments.
The UN flag flying over these buildings has in fact provided little or no protection, with UNRWA facilities being repeatedly struck.
Over a dozen Palestinians were killed last week when an Israeli tank fired at an UNRWA training compound in Khan Younis where over 30,000 people were sheltering after being driven from other areas in Gaza. Over 150 UNRWA workers have been killed in Gaza, making this the largest loss of life by its aid workers during a conflict in the 78 year history of the United Nations.
The sole basis for the decision to suspend funding was unsubstantiated accusations by the Israeli government that 12 UNRWA employees were involved in the Hamas operation to break the siege of Gaza on 7th October.
Israel has a long record of making accusations without any evidence that UNRWA, which employs 30,000 people to provide aid and humanitarian services for Palestinians, is a supporter of Hamas and the Palestinian resistance.
The stated intention of the Zionist regime is to drive UNRWA out of Gaza leaving Palestinians to starve without any aid or humanitarian relief.
In this extension to a genocidal war of daily bombings and a deliberate programme of inflicting famine the US, UK and their faithful Western lapdogs have demonstrated their complicity.
It is no accident that this decision to end funding to UNRWA happened immediately after the International Court of Justice in the Hague made its interim ruling in the case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. The ICJ ruling stopped short of ordering a ceasefire, but amongst its rulings it ordered that ‘Israel must ensure the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza.’
Israel and its imperialist backers have nothing but contempt for the rulings of the ICJ, and are not bound by any ‘humanitarian’ considerations when it comes to supporting genocidal war in support of their Zionist ally.
With Israel increasingly being seen as failing in its war to smash Hamas and destroy the resistance of the Palestinians – despite all the mass killings and blockades to starve Gaza into submission – this latest attack on the UN aid agency will only inflame workers and young people across the US, UK and EU who support the Palestinian revolution.
Tens of millions of workers and youth are rising up demanding an end to genocide and for the victory of the Palestinian revolution.
Now is the time to put that support into action by demanding their trade union leaders call general strikes to bring down the governments that support and are complicit in Israeli genocide and bring in workers’ governments and socialism.
The victory of the world socialist revolution is the only way forward for the victory of the Palestinian people to establish their own independent state of Palestine.
