SINCE the Israeli regime’s war cabinet vote last week to occupy Gaza City and force the removal of its entire Palestinian population of one million, the city has been under continuous bombardment.
Thousands of residents have been forced to flee Gaza City’s southern Zeitoun neighbourhood after six days of relentless Israeli airstrikes, shelling and demolition of buildings by Zionist occupation forces.
The Zeitoun neighbourhood is home to around 50,000 Palestinians, most of whom have little or no access to food and water according to the Gaza City municipality.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported on Saturday that 400 homes in Zeitoun had been destroyed as the largest neighbourhood in Gaza City has been targeted as part of a full-scale military operation to destroy the entire Gaza Governorate.
Euro-Med warned that Israel’s escalation of its genocide as a prelude to imposing its military control over Gaza City ‘portends intents to commit unprecedented mass killings of civilians’ and it issued a call for the international community to take urgent action to curb Israel’s ongoing war crimes in the Gaza Strip.
Prior to the vote by the Zionist war cabinet last week Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had proclaimed his intention for Israel to take complete control of Gaza.
This provoked what Israeli media reported to be a ‘heated exchange’ between Netanyahu and the army’s chief of staff Eyal Zamir. Zamir clashed with Netanyahu over the plan to fully occupy Gaza telling the prime minister: ‘You’re going to create a trap in Gaza’ for the Israeli military.’
The military are not opposed to genocide and ethnic cleansing, they are split over the impossibility of Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), which rely on ‘exhausted’ reservists, being able to occupy and control the entirety of Gaza in the timescale Netanyahu and his war cabinet were demanding.
Using terror, mass murder and starvation to drive a million Palestinians from Gaza City is being seen as a first phase of a full-scale takeover of the Strip.
On Saturday, the IOF announced preparations for the forcible ‘evacuation’ of Palestinians from ‘combat zones’ in Gaza City to southern Gaza from Sunday claiming that Palestinians removed would be provided with tents and other shelters transported through border crossings by the United Nations and international relief organisations.
The UN had warned last Thursday that thousands of Palestinian families already enduring appalling humanitarian conditions could be ‘pushed over the edge’ by brutal attacks to drive them from Gaza City.
The Palestinian group Islamic Jihad in a statement described the military announcement as ‘part of its brutal attack to occupy Gaza City’ and ‘blatant and brazen mockery of international conventions’, adding: ‘Forcing people to flee amidst starvation, massacres and displacement is an ongoing crime against humanity.’
While Palestinians and international humanitarian agencies are calling for international action to ‘curb’ Israel’s genocide, all Labour prime minister Keir Starmer could say about the Israeli plan to occupy Gaza City was to urge Netanyahu to ‘reconsider’ and that Israel should ‘de-escalate’.
Starmer made this pathetic appeal to Netanyahu while the Labour government continues to provide the components used by Israeli aircraft to bomb Gaza City to rubble along with the rest of the Strip in a genocidal war that has officially killed nearly 62,000 Palestinians so far.
Workers and youth, who have demonstrated their overwhelming support for the Palestinian struggle against Zionist occupation and their refusal to be intimidated by Labour’s attempts to use the police and courts to stifle opposition to the genocide enablers in the Starmer government, are demanding real action not just words.
The working class has the power to end the UK’s complicity with genocide by forcing the TUC to call a general strike to bring down this Labour government and end all support for the Zionist state of Israel by replacing it with a workers government and socialism.
This is the way forward.