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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Stop the war! End the occupation!

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

The guns blaze in the Middle East as Israeli warplanes pound Beirut and other towns across Lebanon while Palestinian guerrillas battle to drive the Zionists out of northern Gaza and Lebanese resistance fighters stave off the Israelis in southern Lebanon. At the United Nations People’s China has again called for an end to the fighting while a medical charity says Israel is trying to drive all the Palestinian Arabs out of the northern Gaza Strip.

Fu Cong, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations. has again urged Israel to stop weaponising humanitarian assistance, lift the blockade of Gaza and the restrictions on humanitarian access, and co-operate fully with the UN and other humanitarian agencies. “The harsh reality has proved that winning a war does not necessarily mean having peace, military might alone cannot guarantee lasting security, and the obsession with force only creates more killings and hatred,” Fu pointed out, urging Israel to cease all military operations in Gaza and put an end to the collective punishment of the people in Gaza.

Meanwhile the French Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medical charity, also known as Doctors Without Borders, says the Zionists have turned the northern Gaza Strip into a “lifeless desert”.

MSF said that the mass expulsion orders by the Israeli army in northern Gaza, which coincide with a new intense ground and aerial assault, are “causing the forced displacement of people… to make matters worse, no humanitarian supplies have been allowed to enter the area since October 1st”.

The Zionist regime announced earlier in the week one of its largest forced displacement orders since October last year to drive some 400,000 Palestinians out of 37 neighbourhoods across northern Gaza. The Israeli military also issued expulsion orders for the three main hospitals in the area, which were operating at minimal capacity.

“The latest move to forcefully and violently push thousands of people from northern Gaza to the south is turning the north into a lifeless desert, while aggravating the situation in the south, where more than one million people have already been squeezed into a small portion of the Gaza Strip and live in deplorable conditions,” said Sarah Vuylsteke, the MSF project co-ordinator in Gaza.

“Access to water, health-care, and safety is already almost non-existent, and the thought of more people fitting into this space is impossible to imagine,” she added. “People have been subjected to endless displacement and relentless bombing for the past 12 months. Enough is enough, this must stop now.”

Back in Israel protesters blocked the Begin-Kaplan intersection in Tel Aviv on Sunday morning to call on the Netanyahu government to negotiate to bring Hamas’s Israeli prisoners home. Speaking at the protest, Gal Goren, whose father was killed in last October’s Hamas offensive and whose mother Maya Goren’s body was recovered from Gaza, spoke at the protest, addressing far-right coalition members of the Israeli parliament who he said had been supposed to attend a later cancelled Knesset discussion on “victory”.

“We have been without strategy and direction for a year. Soldiers are falling for nothing. The evacuees can’t go back to their homes in the North or South. The hostages are being murdered, and the blood is on your hands. And you dare to yap about victory?” “It is unimaginable that tomorrow we will mark an entire year of captivity for the hostages,” the Women’s Protest movement who organised the demonstration, said. “It seems that bringing back the hostages, which was once a central goal, is not even on the cabinet’s table. Instead of bringing the hostages home in a deal and ending the war, the government and its head prefer to drag us all to political regional war.”