Explosions rocked Gaza City from north to south as Israeli fighter jets hit homes, clinics and government buildings. The Israeli military said it killed a top commander of the Islamic Jihad armed resistence group, Hamas, the group that governs Gaza, also fired rockets towards Israeli cities. Most of them were intercepted by Israel’s air defence system. And Israel released a fake video claiming that it showed Hamas rockets next to homes in Gaza. Which is completely a lie. The video was a decoy rockets from an Israeli military exercise in 2018.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and rights groups meanwhile called for a probe into allegations of war crimes committed by Israel. As the IDF anihilated Gaza's best and biggest bookshop, Samir Mansour bookshop. Samir has/had all sorts of books especially in English and other foreign languages. Isarel denies also books to the Palestinians. Israel has also destroyed Gaza's only Coronavirus testing lab.
Today, dozens of air strikes pounded Gaza as US President Joe
Biden, under pression, finally expressed support for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in a phone
call with Binyamin Netanyahu.
A new front in the conflict opened as the Israeli military said it also shelled Lebanon in response to six failed rocket launches from southern areas in the neighbouring country.
Meanwhile, from the Jordan river to the sea, Palestinans are collectivelly on strike today in the largest national action in many decades. Since the First Intifada and perhaps with the same determination and strenght of 1936. Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa and all of occupied Palestine are participating in the general strike today. The national unity proves that colonial borders are only effective in the minds of the colonizer.
At least 213 people, including 61 children, have been killed in
Gaza since the latest violence began more than a week ago. Some 1,500 Palestinians were also seriously injured. Dozens lightly wounded and hundreds of children traumatized.
More than 58,000 Palestinians have been displaced by Israeli air
strikes that have destroyed or badly damaged nearly 450 buildings in the Gaza
Strip, said the UN aid agency.
About 47,000 of the displaced people have sought shelter in 58
UN-run schools in Gaza, Jens Laerke, spokesman of the United Nations Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told reporters.
Laerke also said 132 buildings had been destroyed and 316 had been
severely damaged, including six hospitals and nine primary healthcare centres.
Israel has reported 11 dead in the past week, including two children and soldiers. And 300 wounded, in all. Lightly and seriously.
"In 2019, I wrote a piece in which I reiterated that we, Palestinians of Gaza, have already made our choice. I wrote: “We will not die a slow and dishonourable death while thanking our killers and labouring under the self-deception that portrays slavery to the occupier as a fait accompli.” Our struggle is non-sectarian, one that is enshrined in the basic principles of the International Declaration on Human Rights, no matter how hard the hypocritical Western media tries to conceal the truth.
And now apartheid Israel has decided to launch yet another
murderous campaign of bombardment against one of the most densely populated
areas on earth, the Gaza Strip. Again, the victims include innocent civilians:
children, women, and men. Some 200 Palestinians have been killed, including 40
children. On May 15, dozens of Palestinians were massacred in Al Wehda Street
in downtown Gaza City alone.
Medical staff have also not been spared. On May 16, Dr Ayman Abu Alouf, head of the internal medicine
department of the Al-Shifa Medical Complex, was killed along with most of his
family.
With American-made F-16 fighter jets, Israel has bombed and
flattened dozens of residential buildings and hundreds of homes.
Ambulance and civil defence crews have been attempting for days
now to retrieve Palestinians who have been buried by rubble, some using their
mobile phones to call for help before taking their last breaths.
The message is very clear to us – it is civilians that Israel is
after!
Once again, apartheid Israel has deployed its longstanding Dahiya
doctrine – a blueprint for massacre and devastation outlined by Gadi Eisenkot,
head of the army’s northern division, after the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon.
Having decimated the Dahiya neighbourhood of Beirut with a vicious
34-day air bombardment, Eisenkot declared that “What happened in the Dahiya
quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is
fired on … From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are
military bases.”
In other words, every resident of Gaza,
even a day-old baby, is a legitimate military target for Israel.
The ultimate goal of the Israelis is to
brutalise Palestinians into submission, into giving up any resistance, any
claim to their own land. As former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said in 2002,
for the Israeli army victory would be “sear[ing] into the Palestinian and Arab
consciousness” that “terrorism and violence (read: resistance) will not defeat
us”.
As with previous massacres, this time once
again Israel and the Palestinians – the oppressor and the oppressed – are
equated as “two sides to a conflict” and what constitutes legitimate resistance
under international law is put on the same level as a brutal illegal
occupation. US President Joe Biden says apartheid Israel has the right to
defend itself. The fact that Israel has an actual army, disproportionately
greater firepower and is an occupier is neglected as usual, as is the stark
difference in the death toll. Biden, Boris
Johnson, Angela Merkel and other Western leaders and their “house Arabs” are
just incapable of seeing the humanity of Palestinians.
Despite all the evidence, they reject recognising that this is an
occupation, launched by a settler-colonial power that seeks to ethnically
cleanse an entire indigenous population in order to solidify and legitimise its
colony. What is happening in Gaza is incremental genocide, not a “security
operation”. And yet Palestinians are being asked to give in to a slow death,
die aimlessly, showing no form of rebellion, and accept that if they die
resisting, then it would be their own fault.
The question that is on Palestinian minds is: Why is this allowed
to happen, 27 years after the fall of the apartheid regime of South Africa? We
know why Israel is doing it – we are the unwanted goyim, the refugees whose
very existence is a constant reminder of the original sin committed in 1948,
the premeditated crime of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. It is
worth mentioning that two-thirds of Gaza residents are refugees entitled to
their right of return as stipulated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
In Gaza, we know that Israel is going to get away with it, simply
because it has never been held to account for any of the massacres it has
committed. We also know that it is going to commit more and worse crimes. The
United Nations, the European Union, the Arab League, the so-called
“international community” at large, have failed the Palestinian people and will
continue to do so.
The question is: What more do people who love freedom need to see
in terms of death and destruction to translate their words of support into
action? What more than the dead bodies of hundreds of Palestinian children? No
child, whether Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Christian or of any other religion should
see what Palestinian children are seeing right now.
Palestinians will no longer accept the dictates of the so-called
“international community” which continues to favour Israel and cover up its war
crimes. In the light of the great sacrifices made by our people, any talk of
merely improving the conditions of our oppression is a betrayal of the
Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes.
We do not want crumbs. We want to return to our lands and we want to live in them with
our full rights under international law.
It is the ethical responsibility of every single person who
believes in freedom for all to make sure that genocide and apartheid do not
happen again.
This is why we say now that Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
against Israel is the responsibility not only of civil society organisations,
but of every single individual. This is what we can all do. We can boycott
Israeli goods and Israeli institutions, divest from Israeli businesses and
demand sanctions on the Israeli government.
If we do so together and in solidarity, only then will Israel
start to reconsider what it has done to the Palestinians.
Gaza could be the spark that initiates a different Palestine
between the Jordan River and Mediterranean in the heart of the Middle East. The
current uprising in the West Bank and Palestinian towns in Israel could be the
birth pangs of a new reality characterised by the end of the racist two-state
solution and the establishment of a secular democratic state on the historic
land of Palestine, an inclusive state like South Africa.
Let the Gaza war in 2009 be like South Africa’s 1960 Sharpeville
massacre, in which white apartheid police opened fire on unarmed Black
protesters, triggering a movement that brought down apartheid. Let the 2021
massacre in Gaza be the beginning of a new, more democratic Middle East, with a
secular, democratic state of Palestine that treats all its citizens equally,
regardless of religion, race, and gender." Haldar Eid
Gaza Fights for Freedom
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