On the morning of 14 November, under the grotesque banner ‘Operation Pillar of Defence’, Israel launched yet another barbaric attack on the Gaza Strip. Its opening act was the assassination of Ahmad Al Jaabari, the head of Hamas’s military wing, the Izzedin Al Qassam Brigades, with a missile attack on the car in which he was travelling. Within the first five days of this onslaught the Israeli military claimed it had carried out 1,350 attacks on ‘terror’ targets: these attacks had claimed the lives of over 80 Palestinians including 11 members of the Al Dalou family, four of them children, massacred when a bomb flattened their house in Gaza City on Sunday 18 November. Over 700 were wounded in the same period, the overwhelming majority of the victims being Palestinian civilians As of the end of 20 November, the seventh day of the onslaught, 140 Palestinians have been killed (compared to five Israelis) and over 900 wounded. There is as yet no sign of agreement on a cease-fire.
The justification given by the Israelis for their onslaught was a need to prevent a continuous rain of rockets from Gaza from falling on their towns near the border bringing terror to their citizens. Everything the Israeli government says is either a lie or a deception. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) which documents Israeli attacks and incursions into Gaza showed that Israeli forces had killed at least nine Palestinians in the first two weeks of November, four of them children and injured 52 including 12 children. Rocket fire from Gaza into Israel increased as a direct response to these attacks: it was legitimate self-defence. On 13 November, Egypt brokered a ceasefire accepted by Hamas. However, the Zionists trashed it the next day: with a general election pending in January 2013, the Netanyahu government wanted to score some political points.
Since Operation Cast Lead, the last full scale Israeli onslaught on Gaza in 2008/09 which killed approximately 1,400 Palestinians, Israel has continued its blockade and repression. It has murdered 271 Palestinians during this period, and Israeli incursions occur on an almost daily basis. Gaza is one of the most densely-populated areas in the world with unemployment rates of over 33% and with around 80% of the population depending in one way or another on food aid. The responsibility for these barbaric conditions lies with the continued Israeli blockade of Gaza, fully supported and financed by the imperialist powers of Britain, the US and the EU.
On 12 November, as Egypt brokered the failed truce, US National Security Advisor Tom Donilon hosted a high-powered Israeli delegation led by Yaakov Amidror, Chairman of Israel’s National Security Council, and National Security Advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu. In the statement issued after the talks the US confirmed once again its ‘unshakeable commitment’ to Israeli security. It is evident that Obama and the US government gave the go ahead for the Israeli onslaught at that meeting. On 20 November the US blocked a statement from the UN Security Council calling for an end to the escalating conflict in Gaza on the grounds that it did not address the root cause of the problem, Hamas rocket fire into Israel.
As the assault began, British Foreign Secretary William Hague nauseatingly repeated the Israeli justification for its murderous actions. ‘Hamas bears principal responsibility for the current crisis. I utterly condemn rocket attacks from Gaza into southern Israel by Hamas and other armed groups.’ No condemnation ever passed his lips of the Israeli killing of 13-year-old Ahmed Abu Daqqa while playing football on 8 November near Khan Younis, or of the death of four young men, two under 18, by Israeli shell fire on 10 November. Labour shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander also blamed Hamas, condemning ‘the recent rocket attacks into southern Israel that have led to this latest response.’
The Israeli military machine are using F16 fighter bombers, Apache helicopter gunships, unmanned drones, tank fire and shelling from gunboats in the Mediterranean to pound targets in Gaza. The majority of the mounting numbers of wounded and injured were taken to the Al Shifa hospital in Gaza City which was already suffering from a lack of drugs and basic medical equipment due to the ongoing Israeli blockade. The Ministry of Health in Gaza said it had run out of 192 essential drugs, including 40% of the essential medicines list, and held zero stocks of 586 medical disposables – items such as dressings and syringes. These account for 65% of the essential list. To free up beds and scarce equipment as they were overwhelmed with casualties, all hospitals in Gaza have cancelled routine surgery and discharged less urgent patients. Others have been moved by ambulance to hospitals in Egypt with a few urgent cases allowed into Israel.
To compound the problem, 11 of the 21 World Health Organisation (WHO) medical clinics in Gaza have been closed because they are in areas targeted by Israeli air strikes. Tony Laurance, the head of WHO in Gaza and the West Bank, said the Palestinian Authority was $400m overspent and there were general drug and medical equipment shortages across Palestine, but conditions were clearly much worse in Gaza. In response the WHO was launching an appeal for $10m to fund care for the next three month:
‘Our biggest concern is the shortage of supplies…The shortages are affecting ordinary patients, too. There are lots with heart problems and cancer. We need ranitidine for ulcers and bicarbonate solution for kidney dialysis. These patients face a double disadvantage of having to move out to make room for the casualties and being unable to get their drugs.’
As Israel gears up for a possible ground invasion they have targeted buildings hosting media outlets: Sky News, Al Arabiya, Russia Today, Al Quds TV and Al Aqsa TV, were all in buildings hit by missile fire. On 20 November, two cameramen for Al Aqsa TV were killed when the marked car in which they were they were travelling was hit by a missile in Gaza City, and the Director of Al Quds educational radio was killed when his car was destroyed in Central Gaza. The Associated Press and Al Jazeera offices were hit in an airstrike in the early morning of 21 November. Mada, a Palestinian journalists’ rights group, declared that Israel is ‘trying to silence the press in Gaza’ and that it, ‘strongly condemns the…direct targeting of a number of journalists and media outlets’.
In Britain, the media have confirmed once more their overwhelming pro-Zionist bias, echoing every condemnation of Hamas. The BBC has been particularly craven. It never mentioned any of the Zionist violence that preceded the onslaught – the deaths Ahmed Abu Daqqa or of the four young people on 10 November. It did not mention Hamas’ agreement to a truce on 12 November. It could not even bring itself to report the murder of the 11-month-old child of its own picture editor, Jihad Mishawari, in a Zionist missile attack on 14 November. Instead it focuses on Hamas rocket attacks and rates the deaths of three Israelis as far more newsworthy than the deaths of dozens of Palestinians. It is the mouthpiece of British imperialism.
The Zionists have clearly been rattled by the response of Hamas and the other resistance groups and the number of rockets that have been fired from Gaza since the onslaught began. Despite the installation of the US-funded Iron Dome anti-missile system, rockets fired from Gaza have reached Tel Aviv and settlements near Jerusalem. Israeli media reports that Iron Dome is only 54% effective. Hamas has also claimed to have shot down an Israeli drone, and has fired rockets at Israeli gunships in the Mediterranean. The continued launching of rockets from Gaza in the face of the Israeli onslaught has given many Palestinian people confidence and added strength to resist. Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal declared on 19 November that if Israel wanted a ceasefire it would have to make the first steps as Hamas would not make any concessions: ‘The people of Gaza are not asking for an end of the war, they are asking for their rights, they are asking that Israel end its assassinations and its raids and lift the blockade of Gaza’.
At the same time Netanyahu’s supporters are calling for an all out offensive to destroy Hamas and the resistance. The mayor of Beersheba in the south of Israel declared ‘the southern council heads and residents would like to remind the Israeli government that the key goal of Operation Pillar of Defence is to stop the rocket fire once and for all. If we fail to do so, it will be a historic missed opportunity.’ Other leading figures in Israel have expressed their racist contempt for the Palestinians and demanded that the war aims of Israel should be the destruction of Gaza. Interior Minister Eli Yishai was quoted as saying:
‘…the goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages…only then will Israel be calm for forty years…we must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages, destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water’.
Gilad Sharon, son of war criminal Ariel Sharon, wrote in the Jerusalem Post that
‘We need to flatten entire areas in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza…the Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima, the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough so they hit Nagasaki too’.
Militant demonstrations have broken out across the West Bank to protest at the onslaught on Gaza. On Saturday 17 November a protester was killed by Israeli forces near Ramallah and another was shot and killed two days later in Hebron. Although aimed at the Israeli occupying forces, the demonstrations are also being confronted by the security forces of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Shawan Jabarin the director of Al Haq, a Palestinian human rights group has said that ‘the Palestinian police have become a guard for Israel’s interests’ and that they have prevented demonstrators from reaching Israeli checkpoints in places like Jenin.
Abbas and the PA are impotent in the face of the imperialist-backed Israeli onslaught. They are tied into a strategy of security cooperation with Israel as part of the Oslo Accords. He and his allies are incapable of being part of the resistance since their class interests depend on a continuing alliance with Israel. Their present political strategy is centered on their attempt at the UN to get the status of Palestine upgraded to that of ‘non member state’. Abbas has declared that he will submit a resolution to the General Assembly at the end of November. He faces opposition from Israel, the US and Britain, but he has no real alternative than to progress down this route if he is to maintain any credibility with any section of the Palestinian people.
Abbas’ craven capitulation to the interests of Israel and imperialism was graphically demonstrated by his appearance on Israeli TV in early November during which he all but abandoned one of the historic central demands of the Palestinian resistance, the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their family homes inside what is now Israel. When asked if the PA considered towns in Galilee to be part of Palestine Abbas replied.
‘I want to see Safad [the town he was born in] it’s my right to see it but not to live there…I am a refugee but I am living in Ramallah, I believe that the West Bank and Gaza are Palestine and the other parts are Israel’.
Just to make sure the Zionists knew on whose side of the fence he added,
‘As far as I am here in this office, there will be no third armed intifada, never. We don’t want to use terror. We don’t want to use forces. We don’t want to use weapons. We want to use diplomacy. We want to use politics. We want to use negotiations. We want to use peaceful resistance. That’s it.’
Abbas, the PA and their security forces are in the words of the director of Al-Haq, ‘a guard for Israel’s interests’ and will have to be confronted and defeated in the fight against the Israeli occupation and its blitzkrieg tactics in Gaza.
