The death and destruction that Israel has rained down on Gaza since 7 October, the deliberate targeting of residential areas, of hospitals, mosques and schools, is the latest and most brutal attempt at the destruction and ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Since the 2006 election victory of Hamas, the Israeli state, supported by the US, Britain and the EU, has been determined to make the Palestinian people pay for their continued resistance to the Zionist state.
Gaza is a strip of land approximately 25 miles long and five miles wide. Before the latest barbaric onslaught it had a population of around 2.3 million, the vast majority of whom are descendants of refugees forced from their homes in 1948 by the Zionist terror squads. More than half of the population are under 18 years old.
In his book Gaza: An inquest into its martyrdom, Norman Finkelstein documented the history of Zionist terrorism in Gaza from 1948 up to and including the so-called Operation Protective Edge in 2014 (see our review on www.frfi.org.uk). The book details the death and destruction meted out by Israel in both the 2008/09 Operation Cast Lead and the 2014 Operation Protective Edge, exposing the hypocrisy of the UN, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in covering up for Israel’s war crimes.
After the 1967 war Israel occupied Gaza, built a number of colonial settlements and kept it under tight military control until 2005 when it pulled out its settlers and troops, beginning the economic blockade, continuously tightened ever since. In 2006, in a rejection of the rampant corruption of the Palestinian Authority (PA) Hamas won a majority in the Palestinian elections that were described by former US President Jimmy Carter as ‘completely honest and fair’. The response of Israel, supported by the US, Britain and the EU was to impose even tougher economic sanctions on Gaza.
In 2007, Hamas defeated a coup attempt by elements of Fatah in Gaza which had been instigated by the PA in alliance with the Zionist state, Britain and the US. The Zionists tightened the screw even further. According to a United Nations study, by January 2008 electricity was being provided for less than eight hours a day, water supplies connected only once a week with 80% unfit for human consumption, food security and medical supplies were at an all-time low.
At least 158 non-combatants had already been killed in Israeli military strikes during 2008 by the time Operation Cast Lead was launched on 27 December. The Zionist onslaught killed over 1,400 Palestinians, 80% of whom were civilians, including 350 children. Almost half of Gaza’s 122 health facilities, including 15 hospitals, were damaged or demolished, and 16 medical personnel were killed. The two top floors of Al Quds Hospital were destroyed, Al Wafa and the European Hospitals in Khan Younis were hit by tank shells, missiles and thousands of bullets. Zionist forces razed or damaged 58,000 homes, 280 schools and six university buildings. Factories, agricultural centres, electrical, water and sewage facilities were also targeted. Tsipi Livni, then Israeli Foreign Minister, later declared that Cast Lead had ‘restored Israel’s deterrence… Hamas now understands that when you fire on Israel’s citizens it responds by going wild – and this is a good thing… Israel demonstrated real hooliganism’.
In 2009, the Goldstone Report was published as the culmination of a UN Human Rights Council ‘fact finding mission’ to investigate violations of human rights during Cast Lead. Goldstone was a former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and a Zionist, but his report, Finkelstein writes, was ‘a searing indictment not just of Cast Lead but also of the ongoing Israeli occupation’. The report found that much of the destruction carried out by Israel had been premeditated, and concluded that the Israeli assault constituted ‘a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability’. These were war crimes.
As expected, the report prompted a torrent of abuse across the Zionist political spectrum as well as defenders of the Zionist state internationally. The US under President Obama led the attack, while the PA refused to push the issue within UN bodies. Then on 1 April 2011, Goldstone distanced himself from the report he had written. The consequence of his action became evident in 2014 when no major human rights organisation was prepared to point the finger at Israel for the crimes that it committed under Operation Protective Edge.
Protective Edge was launched by Israel on 8 July 2014 and lasted 51 days, leaving more than 1,500 civilians dead, including 550 children. Israel fired 20,000 high explosive artillery shells, 14,500 tank shells, 6,000 missiles and 3,500 naval shells into Gaza during this period, destroying 18,000 homes. The President of the International Committee of the Red Cross is quoted after touring Gaza: ‘I’ve never seen such massive destruction before.’
Since 2014 the Zionist state has launched other military operations in Gaza, most notably in May 2021 when over 250 Palestinians were killed after the resistance in Gaza responded to Zionist attacks on worshippers at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Three years beforehand, activists organised the peaceful Great March of Return where thousands of people marched every Friday near to the Gazan border fences demanding the right for refugees to return to Palestine. 30,000 people supported the first demonstration on 30 March 2018; Israeli border guards used live ammunition and killed 15 demonstrators. By the end of 2018 at least 183 demonstrators had been shot and killed and over 9,000 injured.
The Palestinian people of Gaza have a long history of resistance to the Zionist occupation; this latest barbaric onslaught indicates Zionist intentions to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population.
Bob Shepherd
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 297 December 2023/January 2024
