The assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin on 22 March marks a new stage in the Zionist terror campaign against the Palestinian people. The spiritual leader of Hamas was a 67-year-old quadriplegic in deteriorating health. He had refused to hide from the Zionists despite an unsuccessful assassination attempt last year, and continued to maintain a very public routine including morning prayers at the mosque near his home. The missiles which ended his life killed seven others, including three bystanders running to his aid. ROBERT CLOUGH reports.
Yassin’s death came days after he had said Hamas would halt attacks on Israel ‘for an extended period of time’ if Israel carried through ‘a full and genuine withdrawal from the Gaza strip.’ Hamas would however wait to see if the Gaza withdrawal was followed by a similar West Bank withdrawal. Huge demonstrations took place throughout Palestine in protest at the murder: 200,000 attended his funeral in Gaza. Hamas said that ‘Sharon has opened the gates of hell and nothing will stop us from cutting off his head.’
Israel had renewed its threats to kill Yassin after he defended a suicide attack in mid-January which killed three soldiers and a security guard. He said then that Palestinians were being forced ‘to choose between annihilation and defending ourselves’ and that ‘we see the world is just watching passively while Israel is slaughtering us and demolishing our homes. Hence we have no choice but to defend ourselves.’ Continuing, he said that Zionist leaders ‘think that every problem can be resolved with violence and that they could scare us. We are under occupation, and we demand freedom. Give us our freedom and we will stop.’ The Zionists have already said that his successor as Hamas leader, Abdul Aziz Rantisisi is a target for assassination. Forty years ago, the Zionists gave the Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann a trial. But these racists have a quite different standard for Yassin and the Palestinian people: they make no pretence of conforming to international law in their dealings with people they regard as less than human.
US National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice pointedly refused to condemn the killing: like Britain, the US has branded Hamas a terrorist organisation and banned it. Later statements back-pedalled and offered some criticism. Other Western leaders also shed crocodile tears. Jack Straw called the assassination ‘unacceptable’ and ‘unjustified’ and ‘very unlikely to achieve its objective’. UN General Secretary Kofi Annan called it unlawful. The French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin said it would ‘only fuel the cycle of violence.’ But what is this ‘cycle of violence’? In FRFI 177, we reported that in 2003, 882 Palestinians including 117 children were killed through Zionist military action compared to 91 Israeli dead. Between 1 January and 22 March this year, 167 Palestinians have been killed – but only 36 Israelis, almost all of them in just four suicide attacks. More and more Palestinians have been murdered each month: 30 died in January, 58 in February, and 79 in the first three weeks of March. Zionist actions during March include:
• On 7 March, an invasion of Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps in Gaza left 15 dead, four children amongst them. Apache helicopters, tanks and armoured personnel carriers were used in an effort to shed as much Palestinian blood as possible whilst escaping world condemnation.
• The next day, two Palestinians were killed, both with the same name of Khalid Madi: one a 15-year-old killed working his family’s farm in Gaza; the other a Salfit grocer. The Israeli army claimed that it was not even sure the shootings took place let alone that two Palestinians had been killed.
• On International Women’s Day, 8 March, an Israeli army sniper in Jenin shot dead 23-year-old mother of three Dalal Al-Sabbagh as she sought to get her children away from a window where they were gathered looking at troops further down her street.
On 25 March, a motion to the UN Security Council condemning the Yassin assassination fell when the US once again used its veto. Britain abstained, underlining its continued support for the racist Zionist state.
The murder of Yassin has to be seen in the context of Sharon’s declared aim of unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza (see FRFI 177). It is no part of Sharon’s plan to allow Gaza a functioning administrative apparatus, or basic economic infrastructure, or any political leadership. Gaza is to be reduced to utter dependency through constant armoured incursions, assassinations, house demolitions and land destruction. It is to be driven back to the stone age. The Zionists continue to cleanse Rafah at the southern end of Gaza on the Egyptian border. Since the start of the Intifada, they have destroyed 1,650 buildings in the camp, making 16,000 homeless. Invasions are now almost weekly and almost always result in destruction of Palestinian homes. The unemployment rate in Rafah is 80% and 75% of its population live on less than US$2 per day, the UN poverty line. The unemployment rate in the rest of Gaza is between 60 and 70%, and at least 60% are on the poverty line. According to the Commons International Development Committee, malnutrition rates in the Gaza and parts of the West Bank are as bad as those in sub-Saharan Africa; the committee says that Israeli measures are ‘destroying the Palestinian economy and creating widespread poverty’.
The Zionists have ratcheted up their racist rhetoric to accompany their onslaught against the Palestinians. On army radio, Zionist defence minister Ze’ev Boim wondered recently ‘What is it with Islam in general and the Palestinians in particular? Is it some sort of cultural deficiency? Is it a genetic defect? There is something incomprehensible in their continuing murderous behaviour.’ Likud Knesset member Jehiel Haza responded ‘There is something in their blood. It is genetic. I never conducted any research on this but there is no other explanation. You can’t trust an Arab even after 40 years in the grave.’ This is the racist culture that British Labour defends.
Sharon has promised more attacks on Palestinian political leaders. He can weather the criticism of the European Union, and he is banking on there being little opposition to his terror campaign from President Bush. In this he will be comforted that the likely Democrat contender for the presidency, John Kerry, has declared some solidly Zionist credentials which include now support for the construction of the apartheid wall. The Palestinian people are dangerously isolated: it is up to anti-imperialists in Britain to get out on the streets and actively oppose the Zionist terrorist campaign and British collusion with it.
The myth of child suicide bombers
On 24 March, Zionist TV crews broadcast pictures of a child they claimed the Israeli army had intercepted on a suicide mission. Initially the army said he was only 10 years old; later they revised this upwards to 14. In fact, as The Independent revealed, Husam Abduh is 16. Khalid Amayreh, a respected Palestinian journalist reporting for Al Jazeera, has found evidence that the whole event was a set-up. There is a question as to how TV cameras came to be at the checkpoint where Abduh was seized. Then there are his responses to interrogation: he said he wanted to reach paradise to ‘meet the 72 virgins there’, a statement which so completely conforms to racist stereotypes of Islam that it is suspicious in itself. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have very clear policies against the use of children as suicide bombers.
The human cost of the Intifada
Since the start of the Intifada on 28 September 2000:
• 2,934 Palestinians have been killed, of whom 550 have been children under the age of 18, with 360 aged 15 or under;
• 38,500 Palestinians have been seriously injured, more than a quarter of whom have been children;
• 2,500 people have been permanently disabled;
• 25 medical personnel have been killed whilst on duty and 12 journalists;
• 308 have died in assassination attacks, 152 of them bystanders;
• 103 have died because ambulances carrying them for medical treatment have been delayed at one of the 750 checkpoints in the Occupied Territories.
(Palestine Monitor, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and other sources)
Israel’s apartheid wall
The International Court of Justice sat for three days from 23 February to decide on the legality of Israel’s apartheid wall. Last December, the UN General Assembly voted to ask the court to give a ruling on the matter. 93 states voted in favour. Following the reference, 31 states joined with Israel in presenting submissions asking the court to reject the petition. Britain was amongst them; junior foreign minister Lady Symons explained to the Jewish Chronicle that the hearing would ‘serve to politicise the court in a way for which it was not designed’.
Demonstrations in Palestine against the wall have been brutally attacked. On 25 February, Israeli soldiers used tear gas and live rounds on a protest at Beit Seira south of Ramallah. A later demonstration in Biddu against the wall was fired on; many were shot and four were killed, one from the effects of tear gas. On 9 March, the army signed an order for the confiscation of 11,000 dunums of predominantly agricultural land around the village of Beit Hanina north of Jerusalem – this approximates to four square miles.
If completed, the wall will de facto annex 50% of the West Bank to Israel. 16% of West Bank Palestinians – 400,000 in all – will be living in these annexed areas, and will face expulsion. The wall’s total length will be 730km; its construction requires the confiscation of thousands of acres of Palestinian lands with devastating economic consequences for the population.
Jimmy German
FRFI 178 April / May 2004
