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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Israeli atrocities in Gaza: Palestinians demand answers!

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

Palestinian guerrillas are fighting on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza to fend off Israeli troops and settler gunmen while the Lebanese resistance fires drones at Israeli military bases in Acre on the Mediterranean coast. The Yemen Houthi government say their missile teams hit three more Israeli and American cargo vessels attempting to enter the Red Sea and the Israelis say they’re “moving ahead” with their plans to storm Rafah, the key Palestinian city in the south of the Gaza Strip. Palestinian solidarity protests are sweeping Amer- ica as students take over campuses throughout the United States to call on the Biden administration to end its support for Israeli aggression and the Palestinians are demanding answers following the discovery of mass graves at a hospital recently occupied by the Zionists in Khan Yunis.

The United Nations has called for an independent probe into the discovery of hundreds of bodies in mass graves in the ruins of the Nasser Medical Complex that was sacked by the Israelis when they occupied Khan Yunis earlier in the month. Three separate mass graves containing 392 bodies show signs of executions and people being buried alive, Gaza’s civil defence agency says. Some of the bodies were naked, with their hands tied behind their backs – a sign that they had possibly been tortured before being executed.

Ravina Shamdasani, the spokeswoman for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said “we are horrified also by the destruction of Al-Nasser Medical Complex and Al-Shifa Medical Complex and the reports of the discovery of mass graves in and around facilities. And we call for independent, effective, transparent investigations into the deaths. Given the prevailing climate of impunity, this should include international investigators. Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law. And let’s be clear: the intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others who are hors de combat is a war crime”.

Little do the Israelis care safe in the knowledge that they’ve got the backing of US imperialism. It’s clear that the Biden administration has little or no interest in ending the conflict except on Israel’s terms – complete Palestinian surrender. But though the Biden clique can safely brush aside world public opinion and even the views of their own NATO allies it’s not so easy to ignore the mounting anger on the street – especially in election year.

Waves of students are defying the police and continuing their protests and occupations to demand no more American support for Israel’s genocidal war.

Students have established a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University calling on the university to divest from companies that have ties to the Zionist regime. Forty-seven students were arrested at Yale when the police moved to break-up a peaceful sit-in while protests continue at many other seats of learning including Michigan, Columbia University and NYU in New York.

Google have sacked 50 workers, most of them from its Manhattan offices, who peacefully sat in against the firm’s big tech contract with the Israeli armed forces and in New York police arrested over 300 Jewish activists who took part in a massive outdoor Passover Seder near the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to call on the Biden government to stop funding Israel’s assault on Gaza.

The Zionists have spread death and destruction throughout the Gaza Strip killing over 34,000 Palestinian Arabs and wounded 77,000 more. Most of their victims were defenceless women and children – some 72 per cent in fact. But the Zionist entity has failed to crush the resistance, free the Israeli prisoners or drive the Palestinian population out into neighbouring Egypt to clear the land for Zionist settlement. And the resistance fights on with deadly blows against the Israeli invaders.