Despite a supposed ceasefire, Israel is raining bombs on the Gaza open air prison.
Less than a month ago, Gaza experienced 11 days of a brutal Israeli offensive that murdered 200 people, including dozens of children. They demolished hundreds of buildings, including hospitals and Covid test centers. Thousands of people lost their homes. And now the bombing has begun again.
Last month, the attacks were was met with heroic Palestinian resistance, including a general strike, as well as mass mobilizations around the world.
Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip on Tuesday is a clear break in the ceasefire agreed to on May 21. It continues the destruction of Gaza that has just begun to rebuild. There is no peace in a brutal apartheid regime.
Just in the last week, Israeli forces have murdered five people, including a 15 year old boy— Mohammad Said Hamayel, who was murdered while protesting an illegal Jewish settlement. Over the past month, Israeli police have arrested 2,000 people in an attempt to stop the uprisings against the occupation. “Israel is criminalizing our right to say we’re Palestinian, our right to say we want to live in our homes in dignity, our right to be free,” says Mariam Barghouti, a Palestinian writer and researcher.
These attacks occured three days after ultra-right-wing politician Naftali Bennett came to power, alongside sectors of the center-left and Arab parties. The current airstrike is just a taste of the terror Bennett plans to unleash on Palestine. Supposedly, the dropping of these bombs is due to Palestinians launching 20 incendiary balloons from the Gaza Strip. But we know that it is an attempted show of Zionist strength.
On Tuesday, the Israeli government also approved the Zionist “Flag March for Jerusalem Day.” This year the Flag March was postponed twice to avoid increased tensions as Israel carried out its military offensive in the Gaza Strip. It was finally allowed to occur, and thousands of ultra-nationalist Zionists attended. They commemorated the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1967 after the Six-Day War that unified Jerusalem under Israeli control. They chanted “Death to Arabs” as the Zionists paraded through the streets.
Meanwhile, police repressed Palestinian protesters near the Old City’s Damascus Gate. Israeli troops shot tear gas through the narrow streets of the Arab sector to prevent any counter-protests from approaching that sector of the Old City.
The Israeli government provided some 2,000 cops to escort the Zionist protest. Additionally, police increased their presence in mixed Jewish and Arab towns in Israel, after the wave of attacks by Israeli religious nationalists against Palestinians showing solidarity with residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and Gaza. 33 Palestinians were injured by Israeli forces.
Bennet will begin to govern in a more convulsive country, revived by a renewed Palestinian resistance that is fighting a life and death struggle for their survival. The new President is hell bent on crushing this resistance. He already said that he would not “retreat a single millimeter from Judea and Samaria [the Israeli name for the West Bank]” where the settlements are located.
We stand in solidarity the Palestinian people and support all forms of their self defense. It is essential that we fight to immediately stop all aid to the Zionist state of Israel from the United States. Just because Palestine is no longer in the news every day is no reason to let up. We fight until Palestine is free, from the river to the sea.
