NEARLY three dozen Palestinian civilians, including women and children, have already been murdered by Israeli military forces bombing various neighbourhoods in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
Medical sources at Kuwait Specialised Hospital in Rafah, located 30 kilometres (19 miles) southwest of Gaza City, said 35 people were killed and 129 others injured as a result of the Israeli offensives in the last 24 hours.
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA, citing medical sources, also reported that seven Palestinian citizens, including children, were killed in the early hours of Wednesday, in an Israeli bombing of al-Zaytoun neighbourhood, east of Gaza City.
The Israeli regime has seized control of the Rafah border crossing and intends to use this control to drive hundreds of thousands of Gazans from their homes!
Meanwhile, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has warned of disruptions in aid delivery and fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip via the Rafah crossing bordering Egypt.
It noted that the famine would worsen, especially in the northern Gaza Strip, if supplies are cut off. Additionally, the General Authority for Borders and Crossings in Gaza said in a brief statement that operations at the Rafah land crossing were suspended following the entry of Israeli tanks into the crossing facilities from Palestinian territory.
Passenger movement from Gaza has ceased, and the entry of humanitarian and relief aid into the territory has been halted, it added.
The director general of the Gaza Government Media Office, Ismail al-Thawabta, said the occupation of the Rafah land crossing by Israeli forces constitutes a real catastrophe amid complete international silence, stressing that the measure has cut off the only lifeline to Gaza in light of the travel ban on ordinary people, the wounded and patients who have been trapped in the Gaza Strip since the start of the genocidal war.
Thawabta continued that Israeli troops have also closed the Kerem Shalom border crossing, which has resulted in the stoppage of humanitarian aid deliveries into the Gaza Strip, and further deterioration of the humanitarian crisis there.
The Tel Aviv regime has also imposed a ‘complete siege’ on the territory, cutting off fuel, electricity, food and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there. Since the start of the offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has killed 34,789 Palestinians and injured 78,204 others.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said that a ground invasion of Rafah would be ‘intolerable’, and called on Israel and Hamas ‘to go an extra mile’ to reach a truce deal. Hamas was prepared to do so. Israel declined.
‘This is an opportunity that cannot be missed, and a ground invasion in Rafah would be intolerable because of its devastating humanitarian consequences, and because of its destabilising impact in the region,’ Guterres told reporters on Monday, ahead of a meeting with Italian President Sergio Mattarella in New York.
The workers of the world who support Hamas and the liberation of Palestine must not allow the Zionists to turn their entry into Gaza into a desperate attempt to completely destroy Hamas, and the Palestinian people.
The trade unions in the UK, the EU and the USA must follow the example of the youth and take up arms in support of Palestine and in defence of Hamas.
Students showing support for the Palestinians have set up camps in the UK outside Oxford and Cambridge universities, demanding their universities divest from Israeli institutions that profit from the genocidal war in Gaza.
Similar camps have been established in other UK universities, from UCL to Manchester to Warwick, as well as Cambridge. They have been inspired by campus protests across the United States.
Now they must organise a march on the major trade union offices and demand that they use the massive power of the trade unions to call general strikes in the UK, the USA and the EU to bring down the Tory and the other capitalist governments, to go forward to workers power and socialism.
Now is the time for workers and students to unite to bring down the Tories and to go forward to workers governments and socialism in the UK, the EU the USA, and in Palestine. Forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution!
