SINCE the onset of Israel’s brutal war on the besieged Gaza Strip, the Israeli military’s use of live ammunition to kill and wound Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank has significantly increased compared to the previous 10 months, the United Nations has just warned.
In its Humanitarian Situation Update about the West Bank, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on Wednesday that the number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli gunfire in the occupied territory since October 7 stood at 115.
Furthermore, the number of Palestinian children injured by Israeli live fire in the occupied territory has also doubled during the reporting period, with 1,411 children wounded by bullets since October 7, compared to 615 during the preceding 10 months.
The OCHA has also documented 1,250 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians since October, including around 120 settler assaults that resulted in Palestinian deaths and injuries.
According to a UN report, in an attack on August 12, Israeli settlers armed with knives kidnapped two 15-year-old Palestinian shepherds and forced them into a newly established Israeli outpost settlement near Khallet an Nahala, where they ‘assaulted the boys, broke their legs, and urinated on them’.
‘Afterwards, the settlers handcuffed the boys, put them in a vehicle and threw them in an open area, where they were later found,’ the UN said.
Since Israel unleashed a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip in on October 7 last year, casualties have been rising in the West Bank as a result of intensified near daily raids by the regime troops into Palestinian towns.
A total of 624 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces since the beginning of Israel’s Gaza onslaught.
Nearly 40,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have also been killed in Israeli attacks across the besieged Gaza Strip in over 10 months.
This slaughter has not secured a victory for the US-UK- Israel axis.
US and Israeli officials have once again conceded the occupying regime’s failure in its months-long aggression on the besieged Gaza Strip, stressing that the possibility of defeating the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has notably decreased.
The New York Times quoted unnamed American and Israeli officials as saying in a report yesterday that ‘the possibilities of weakening Hamas have diminished further’, and ‘the hostages held in Gaza cannot be recovered by military means’.
US officials have also indicated that Israel has achieved everything that it could militarily in Gaza, and that continued bombings are only increasing risks to Palestinian civilians. They asserted that Israel has ‘reached the end of the line’ in the battlefield.
Underlining that: ‘Israel tried to harm the tunnel network in Gaza but failed to destroy it,’ the officials said, ‘The tunnel network proved to be larger than Israel expected, and is an effective means for Hamas.’
‘Talking about destroying Hamas is like throwing ashes in the eyes of the public, because it is implanted in the hearts of the people,’ Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in an interview with the Hebrew language Channel 13 in June.
Criticising the occupation’s political leaders calling for the elimination of the resistance movement, Hagari added, ‘Hamas is an idea, and you cannot destroy an idea. The political level must find an alternative to it, otherwise it will remain.’
The Israeli regime’s ministry for military affairs says more than 10,000 of the regime’s forces have been afflicted with either physical or mental trauma during the Gaza war.
The working class of the USA, the EU and Europe must now act and organise revolutionary mass actions to stop the war in Gaza by smashing the capitalist states and going forward to socialism.
Sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International must be built in every country to organise socialist revolutions that will deposit bankrupt capitalism into the dustbin of history. There is not a moment to lose!
