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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

No arms for Israel! Stop the War now!

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

Street battles rage throughout the Gaza Strip as Palestinian militiamen fend off the Israeli invaders who have killed over 27,000 Palestinians and damaged or destroyed at least half of all the buildings in the Palestinian Arab enclave. Israel hits militia camps in Syria and Lebanon, and Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance movement, responds with rocket attacks on Zionist settlements. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank take up the gun to halt a new wave of Zionist settler violence as the Houthi Yemeni government steps up its blockade of Israeli shipping in the Red Sea.

Now other Arab partisans are joining the fight. On Monday two rockets fell near a US military base controlling oil fields in American-occupied northern Syria, just a day after an Arab resistance drone attack killed three US troops and injured 25 others at another US base in Jordan, near the border with Syria.

Human rights campaigners have welcomed the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) decision ordering Israel to take “all measures within its power” to prevent acts that could amount to genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and Hamas is studying new cease-fire proposals brokered by Qatar and Egypt. But in Tel Aviv the Zionist leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, says the war will continue until “total victory”.

The International Court stopped short of explicitly demanding a ceasefire. But it acknowledged there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and refused to dismiss the case brought by South Africa. And there are renewed calls to suspend imperialist arms supplies to Israel that amount to complicity and violate international law.

Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General António Guterres is meeting with key donors to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, after the Americans and their lackeys halted funding for the agency after Israel accused 12 UNRWA employees of helping Hamas stage the 7th October attack. UNRWA has fired nine staffers in response to the allegations and the matter is being investigated. But the UN say the Israelis have not directly shared any evidence to substantiate their claims.

UNRWA say the Israelis have attacked its facilities in Gaza at least 260 times, killing at least 360 Palestinians since 7th October. And at least 20 aid organisations, including ActionAid, Oxfam and Save the Children, have condemned the decision to suspend funding, warning it could lead to a “complete collapse” of the humanitarian response in Gaza.

In Israel, tens of thousands took to the streets across the country on Saturday to demand the release of hostages, end the fighting and hold fresh elections to get rid of Netanyahu. A former head of the Shin Bet security service told a local rally that: “After 113 days of fighting, 1,400 dead and murdered and more than 1,600 wounded, it’s time we move to conclusions. It is not possible for the IDF [Israeli army] to wage war on four fronts at the same time. Our dependence on the US is absolute.” Carmi Gillon said: “Every Israeli citizen will bear this mark on their conscience if the hostages, alive or dead, do not return home. My conclusion is that the prime minister does not want the end of the war and therefore will prevent the return of the hostages in any way. We have no faith in the government that brought us to the brink of destruction. We demand elections now!”

Omri Evron, a leading member of the Communist Party of Israel, who helped to organise the anti-war protests, said: “The killing of thousands and thousands of Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are innocent civilians, is not only reprehensible, it does not serve the security of the people of Israel. It does not bring us security, it only ensures the next massacre, the next cycle of violence,” he said. “Currently, they [the protestors] are chanting ‘refuse to kill, refuse to fight, refuse to murder’ – this is our call.”