NEWS LINE salutes the heroic determination of the Palestinian people in their struggle against the illegal and brutal Israeli occupation of their land.
Yesterday, hundreds of thousands of unarmed Palestinians marched on the barbed wire fence, erected by Israel around Gaza turning it into an open air prison camp for its two million inhabitants, demanding the right to return to their own land and homes.
They were met with a murderous barrage of sniper fire which exceeded in lethality even the shooting carried out in the previous six weeks of weekly protest. Until yesterday over 50 Palestinians had been killed by sniper fire with 9,000 injured.
Yesterday the number of deaths was quite literally increasing every ten minutes!
By early afternoon more than 40 had been killed and over 2,000 injured with that figure set to increase dramatically by sunset. These are not just slight injuries, the Israelis are using ammunition designed to cause maximum damage as it leaves the body, meaning that a leg wound frequently results in life changing injuries including amputation.
Such ammunition is illegal under international law just as the Israeli settlement programme, a euphemism for the continued driving of Palestinians from their land, is deemed illegal by the UN.
The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process has expressed his outrage over the killing of unarmed Palestinian children but such outrage has not resulted in any action by the UN or Britain and the EU. They have sat back in silence and watched the wanton killing of Palestinian men, women and children. No sanctions, no condemnation of the Israeli state as a rogue state that deserves to perish, just the tacit signalling that it is free to continue.
This silence has emboldened the Israeli regime who were given the green light by Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, smashing forever the fiction of a ‘peace process’. Yesterday was the day that the US formally opened its embassy in Jerusalem, a ceremony carried out in the presence of Trump’s son-in-law and his daughter that marks a new stage in the drive to destroy the Palestinian people and drive them out of their own country.
Jerusalem is internationally recognised as being illegally occupied by Israel but again this provocation by US imperialism has passed by with only verbal protestations from the UN and the other imperialist powers. What Trump’s move has done is to completely stiffen the resolve of the Palestinians, especially the youth, to take the struggle to even further. Neither bullets nor tear gas will weaken their determination.
On the contrary, the original intention was for the action against the wire fence to culminate today, the day which marks the 70th anniversary of the declaration of the state of Israel. It is also Nakba (catastrophe) Day, the day when 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by the Zionist regime.
But yesterday the Palestinians stated that this would not be the climax of the ‘Great Return March’ but the start of a new uprising against Zionist occupation. They are rising up and will not tolerate living in the hell-hole that Israel has turned Gaza into, with electricity, gas and water turned off for its two million strong people every day by the Israeli authorities.
Workers in Britain, the home of the Balfour Declaration, which called to establish the state of Israel and to drive the Palestinians out, must take action today against this vicious illegal onslaught by the Zionist regime.
They must not stand by and see the Palestinians massacred by Israel. They must demand the trade unions take immediate strike action and oppose this brutal murder of Palestinians. The TUC and all the unions must also immediately carry out a total boycott of all Israeli goods.
The Tories, who support the Zionist state of Israel and US imperialism, must be brought down now. We need a workers government that will recognise a secular state of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital and the right of all Palestinian refugees to return.