A combined Israeli air and ground attack on sealed-off Gaza killed at least 126 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more in a week-long operation started in late February. At least half the casualties were civilians, and nearly a third were children.
Palestinian fighters have no weapons to match the U.S.-supplied F-16 jets, Apache helicopters, tanks and other high-tech weaponry. Despite the imbalance, Palestinian resistance to the armored infantry incursion into northern Gaza was fierce. According to the Israeli media, two Israeli soldiers were killed and many others wounded.
Hundreds of Palestinians were
killed or wounded during an Israeli
assault against Gaza.
In response to the bloody attack on Gaza, a lone Palestinian, Alaa Abu Dheim, killed eight Israelis and wounded dozens more inside a Jerusalem seminary on March 6. He was shot and killed on the scene.
The Mercaz Harav seminary has served for many years as a headquarters of the racist settlement movement. It is the birthplace of the fascistic Gush Emunim, the armed settler movement that seeks the expulsion of all Palestinians from Palestine. One of the Gush Emunim’s heroes is Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians in the Mosque of Ibrahim in Hebron in 1994.
The family of Abu Dheim said that they had no knowledge of his planned attack, but were not surprised, as he had been transfixed recently by the bloodshed in Gaza.
“He told me he wasn’t able to sleep because of the grief,” said Iman Abu Dheim, his sister. (Al Jazeera, Mar. 7, 2008)
Despite the vastly greater number of Palestinian casualties, President George W. Bush and the leading Democratic and Republican presidential candidates predictably backed Israel’s actions, expressing personal condolences to the families of Israelis killed and condemning the Palestinians.
Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’
Presidential candidates John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all proclaimed their support for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” U.S. and Israeli leaders have attempted to justify the mass assault on civilian areas by the fact that Palestinian fighters have been firing rockets into southern Israel, hitting the cities of Sderot and Ashquelon.
They fail to mention another fact: Israel has been blockading Gaza for more than two years. In January, the blockade was made complete, causing immense suffering in the small and densely populated region.
On March 6, British aid agencies in Gaza said that this has caused “the worst humanitarian crisis for the Palestinians since 1967,” when Gaza was conquered by Israel. Furthermore, the report stated that the crisis is steadily worsening. (BBC, Mar. 6, 2008) Child malnutrition and general poverty has reached the highest levels on record.
The impoverished Gaza population already was suffering from shortages of food, medicine, fuel and other basic goods before the tightened blockade stopped all shipments into or out of Gaza.
The great majority of Gaza residents are from refugee families, driven out of other parts of Palestine when the state of Israel was created in 1948. Deprived of their land, more than 70 percent of Gaza’s population is dependent on international agencies for food.
As a La Riva/Puryear Party for Socialism and Liberation presidential campaign statement in late January put it: “The Israeli government claims that it took action because of Palestinian rocket attacks. This is merely a pretext. On Dec. 23, 2007, Israel rejected Hamas’s call for a ceasefire. Since then, Israeli air and ground attacks have killed dozens of Palestinians and wounded hundreds more in Gaza, most of them civilians. In 2007, 373 Palestinians were killed in Gaza and the West Bank, compared to just 13 Israeli deaths.
“The Israeli blockade is a blatant violation of international law. Article 33 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention reads, in part: ‘No protected person [civilian] may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.’
“Collective punishment is a war crime. Imposing a blockade on the population in Gaza is undeniably a form of collective punishment. The U.S. government, which gives billions of dollars in military and economic aid to Israel every year, shares the guilt for this war crime.
“The La Riva/Puryear presidential campaign demands an immediate lifting of the Israeli blockade, an end to U.S. aid to Israel and self-determination for the Palestinian people.”
