Israel Is Bombing Gaza – This Must Stop Now

Rasa - The racist rulers of Israel are carrying out massive war crimes in Gaza again. They say they are "fighting terrorism," but they are waging war on the entire Palestinian population in Gaza.

News ID: 437966

Date: 30 May 2018 - 22:35

RNA - Israel has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinian protesters along the Gaza border since July 8, including women and children. And the US is backing these crimes. The US has even gone to the United Nations Security Council to defend Israel’s new bombing campaign. Just like Tel Aviv, Washington claims the Israeli military is targeting bases belonging to Palestinian resistance movements, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, inside the Gaza Strip. However, as the Tel Aviv regime continues its aggression, Palestinians are only responding to the attacks by shelling Israeli-occupied towns. Hamas has defended mortar attacks on Israel, saying, "What the resistance carried out this morning comes within the framework of the natural right to defend our people."

Tensions have been running high along the Gaza fence since March 30, which marked the start of a series of protests, dubbed “The Great March of Return,” demanding the right to return for those driven out of their homeland. The Gaza clashes reached their peak on May 14, the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Nakba Day (the Day of Catastrophe), which coincided this year with the US embassy relocation from Tel Aviv to the occupied Jerusalem al-Quds. To be precise, this has not been a coincidence, but a premiditated move to show maximum contempt for the Palestinians by giving them an experience similar to the events on NakbaDay some 70 years ago when Israel seized their land by force and through undeterred genocide and massacre.

All this is happening because the US is also backing Israel at the UN Security Council for what it claims to be Palestinian aggression against Israel. For instance, the American ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, says the UN should focus on recent mortar attacks fired from Gaza into Israel, and not the other way around.

Moreover, the UN investigations never extend to Israeli officials or senior military commanders when such fighting begin and end. And even if a resolution is issued against Israel, no one has the power at the UN to hold anyone accountable for the actions that lead to the bombing of Gaza and for many other similar bombings, with an accumulated death toll in the hundreds.

The same whitewash mechanism is at play in the arguments of US ambassador to the UN. Here, too, the main concern of Haley and other American authorities is to create the false appearance of a victim, allegedly striving for truth, with the investigations merely serving as a façade.

Accountability is needed not only to bring justice to the victims and their families in Gaza. It is needed to forestall similar actions in the future. When nothing is investigated, when Israelis insistently claim that everything is legal, when the results of their atrocities during “the Great March of Return” are ignored, it opens the door to an even darker future.

As is, Israel and the United States are committing worst human rights violations in occupied Palestine. International community has failed to pressurize Israel to stop these atrocities. The United Nations must intervene and take concrete steps to solve Palestine dispute in accordance with the will of the people of Palestine. By backing Israel militarily and diplomatically at the UN, the US is complicit in Israeli crimes as well. The Security Council and the UN must pressurize Israel to stop bombing Gaza and condemn the US government for supporting it.

For more than ten years, Israel has locked down nearly two million Palestinians in Gaza. Israel cut off contact between Gaza and the outside world. You can't visit there. People can't leave. Israel starves people and keeps them from growing food or fishing. Israel has systematically destroyed people's access to drinkable water and reliable electricity. And we all know how they were driven from their homes by the massacres and terror carried out by Israel in 1948 and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

According to Fars News Agancy, in summation, the essence of what is going on in Gaza is not a "conflict between Jews and Muslims." Israel is a product of and sponsored by American imperialism. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are not the cause of this new bombing campaign and massacre. To break through and bring forward another way demands the US oppose Israeli bombing now, and this requires international pressures on Washington.

Standing with the Palestinian people against this genocidal assault is a part of bringing forward a real change at the UN. It is part of the world community’s responsibility to support the Palestinians who only want to return to their homeland. It’s not too much to ask.

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