THE ISRAELI regime intensified its genocidal attack on the southern city of Rafah, which sits on the border with Egypt, over the weekend.
Yesterday, Israeli military forces ordered medical staff at Rafah’s Kuwaiti Hospital to evacuate while the city was subject to continued air attacks.
Al Jazeera reported that medics based in the hospital feared that an attack on it would mean the ‘complete collapse’ of the limited medical system in Rafah.
The Israelis’ seizure of military control of the Rafah crossing, blocking completely even the limited trickle of aid entering across the border, has had a catastrophic effect on a health system already being systematically destroyed.
Along with food, the blockade of fuel for hospital generators means that the health system across Gaza faced collapse in ‘a few hours’ according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
In a post on social media the Ministry wrote:
‘A few hours separate us from the collapse of the health system in the Gaza Strip as a result of the failure to bring in the fuel necessary to operate electricity generators in hospitals, ambulances, and to transport employees.’
Meanwhile, fierce fighting reported between Israel and armed Palestinian resistance forces in the north of Gaza has been taking place over the weekend.
The large refugee camp in the Jabalia area, some four kilometres from Gaza City, was attacked on Sunday with the Israelis ordering an estimated 100,000-150,000 Palestinians to evacuate.
The United Nations Palestinian Refugee Agency, UNRWA, expressed ‘extreme concern’ about the evacuation demands for both Jabalia as well as Rafah.
In Rafah, according to UNRWA, at least 360,000 Palestinians have been forced out of the city and onto a tiny strip of land composed mainly of sand dunes on the Mediterranean coast.
The fierce fighting in Jabalia has upended the boasts by the Zionist regime that it had crushed Hamas in the north before moving on to Rafah.
According to reports in Israeli media, Israeli army chiefs are complaining to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the army is now fighting in places like Jabalia which they had previously taken and declared free from Palestinian resistance fighters but are now forced to return.
The media are reporting that occupation forces are also still being deployed and fighting in areas across the north of the Gaza Strip from which they had been withdrawn after claiming to have crushed Hamas.
The Wall Street Journal, in an article on Sunday, noted that Hamas’s fighters ‘are re-establishing themselves in northern Gaza’ and quoted Michale Milshtein, a former head of Palestinian affairs for the Israeli military intelligence, saying: ‘You leave, and two minutes later, Hamas is back.’
Retired Israeli Brigadier General, Shlomo Brom, told the Journal that all the military onslaught on Rafah ‘wouldn’t be an end to the war. An end to the war can be achieved only through a political decision by the two sides to agree a ceasefire.’
While these military chiefs are openly admitting that the war against Palestinians is failing, the Zionist regime will never agree to a ceasefire and the defeat of Netanyahu’s boast that he would crush Hamas and destroy all Palestinian resistance.
He made this clear when he rejected out of hand the proposal by Hamas to accept a ceasefire deal last week.
A ceasefire would be a terminal blow to the Zionist regime.
It would also represent a blow to the myth of the military invincibility of US imperialism and its allies, delivered by a Palestinian people who, despite thousands of innocent men, women and children being murdered, refuse to surrender.
In their struggle, the Palestinians have won the support of ten of millions of workers and youth across the world and now is the time for this support to be turned into action.
The working class in the US, UK and Europe, whose governments support and arm the genocidal Zionist entity, must demand that their trade unions call general strikes to bring down their capitalist governments, and replace them with workers’ governments and socialism.
This is the only way forward – to put an end to capitalism and imperialist wars with the victory of the world socialist revolution.
