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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

New war fears on Lebanese front!

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

Palestinian guns blaze across the West Bank as street battles continue throughout the Gaza Strip and Israeli troops swing round to confront Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

This week the director of ambulance and emergency services in Gaza was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a health clinic in Gaza City. Hani al-Jafarawi, described as a “pillar” of Gaza’s health system, is reported to be the 500th medical worker killed by Israeli forces since 7th October. An Israeli soldier was killed and 17 others injured in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin and the American initiative to end the fighting, pushed through the United Nations as an Israeli “peace” plan, is faltering after Netanyahu says he’s only be willing to agree to a “partial” ceasefire deal that would not end the conflict.

Last weekend, some 150,000 people demonstrated against Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv amid growing fears that his hardline Zionist coalition is poised to open up a new front against the Arabs in Lebanon. Meanwhile the rift between Netanyahu and his top army leadership is deepening following the dissolution of the so-called “War Cabinet”, which was the main link between the executive and the Armed Forces.

Now another retired Israeli general has spoken out against escalation, saying an all-out war against Hezbollah would be “collective suicide” for Israel. Retired Major-General Itzhak Brik said: “If we look at what Hezbollah is doing to the Galilee in recent months – we find settlements crumbling, empty of people, on thousands of acres of burned land. Scenes that can be seen in Gaza are seen today in the North. The Iron Dome has been failing to stop the UAVs [drones], rockets, and missiles for months. We did not prepare ourselves for dozens of missiles every day let alone the thousands that we will have in the next war.”

On Channel 14, a far-right Israeli TV station, Netanyahu said that Israel was prepared to pause fighting in Gaza for a partial deal in exchange for the freedom of some of the hostages held by Hamas, while maintaining that the war will not end until Hamas is destroyed. But his rejection of any realistic hostage release deal with the Palestinian resistance has been slammed by the Israeli Hostages and Missing Families Forum. “We strongly condemn the prime minister’s statement in which he walked back from the Israeli proposal. This means he is abandoning 120 hostages and harms the moral duty of the state of Israel to its citizens,” the group that speaks for the Israeli prisoners said this week.

Meanwhile Colonel Jacques Baud, a former NATO analyst and Swiss intelligence officer, says Israel’s tactics in Gaza go against all the rules of counter-insurgency and can only be explained as a deliberate effort to “eliminate the Palestinians” altogether.

Speaking on the Russian media, Baud said that Israel is “not trying to solve the problem [of Hamas violence] on the political side, as we normally should for a counterinsurgency. They are doing it by brute force, meaning that they destroy people and that’s the name of the game.”

“The only explanation” for Israel’s refusal to entertain a political solution is not that “the Israelis are stupid and don’t know how to wage war,” Baud continued. “[It’s that] they’re doing this on purpose to eliminate the Palestinians.”

“Palestine will be exclusively Jewish, and that has always been their consistent policy,” he said. “They don’t dare do it in one shot. They are doing it in brutal sequences. The ultimate goal is to empty Palestine of Palestinians.”

While Netanyahu has never called for the wholesale de-population of Gaza, several prominent allies in his hard-line Zionist coalition have. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have both called for a tenfold reduction in Gaza’s population, while a policy document compiled by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence last year recommended that the enclave’s 2.3 million residents be driven into Egypt or sent to the West as refugees.