Latest reports coming out of Gaza are horrific, the slaughter of Palestinians in Shuja’iya (Sheyjayee). Even more than ever, we have to challenge the narrative that “Israelis” are the victims.
Palestinians have the right and obligation to resist. Resist this slaughter. Resist the siege. Resist the raping and stealing of their land. Resist their dispossession.
We’ve seen that the UN and like institutions are useless, a band-aid that doesn’t cover all the wound and doesn’t address the sickness. The UN is not only useless, it is complicit, from the beginning the dividing and stealing of Palestine. We’ve seen that the West and corrupt Arab states have never, and will never, support justice for Palestinians. Only regional allies like Syria, Hezbollah and Iran have truly offered support to Palestinians and Palestinian resistance.
With this latest massacre and latest war on Gaza, more than ever we need to recognize this support and the legitimate right to resist this brutal occupier and colonizer.
Despite the brutal assault on Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza – and throughout occupied Palestine and in exile – have continued to resist and to reject the occupier’s logic that through death and destruction they will force us to accept surrender and die quietly. The Palestinian people in Gaza are committed to resist the occupier by all means and never to give up that resistance until victory, despite the attempts of the occupier to separate our resistance from our people through deadly force.
Now, it is time to escalate the international resistance. The tanks are rolling into Gaza. The occupier’s embassies and consulates must not be allowed to operate as normal and engage in business as usual while its forces are conducting a murderous occupation.
U.S. imperial power must not continue uninterrupted around the world while it provides the economic, political and military support that runs the killing machine – in fact, the U.S. imperialists’ Congress have just passed a bill to provide more money and more funding to make the occupation’s killing machine even more lethal against the Palestinian and Arab people.
The war-profiteering corporations that are making a financial killing on the killing of our people must not continue to see nothing but benefit for their involvement in murder, torture, apartheid, racism and occupation.
It is time to not only continue to take the streets, but to escalate the struggle:
Friendly and progressive governments of the world must cut their ties with the occupation state, close its embassies and recall their ambassadors, fully isolate, boycott and reject the criminal apartheid racist illegitimate settler-colonial state that is massacring Palestinians.
The reactionary Arab regimes must no longer be permitted to engage in diplomatic relations with the occupation state and host its embassies and ambassadors while it is killing Palestinians. All occupation embassies in Arab nations must be shut – permanently.
And our call to the people of the world, the millions who have taken to the streets, who have raised the Palestinian flag alongside the sons and daughters of Palestine in exile and diaspora in every city and country of the world, we call upon you to:
- Occupy Israeli embassies and consulates – shut them down, close their doors, prevent them from engaging in business as usual. The occupation state must be entirely boycotted and isolated, and fully rejected as the illegitimate settler-colonial occupier that it is.
- Occupy U.S. embassies and consulates – U.S. imperialism is the principal sponsor of the killer occupation in Palestine and it must be held accountable by the people of the world for its crimes, not only in Palestine but throughout the world.
- Take the profits from the hands of the killer corporations – Already protesters are confronting these killer corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and G4S, facing arrest in U.S. cities such as Chicago. These corporations must face consequences – their operations interrupted and shut down. No more profits from Palestinian blood!
As the resistance in Palestine escalates, so must the resistance of the world. The occupation and its sponsors must not be permitted to continue their criminal slaughter of our people – now in its latest stage after over 66 years of murder, repression, occupation, apartheid, racism and dispossession – without consequence and without meaningful blows to their ability to function. It is time to shut them down, and for the resistance of the people of the world to be heard alongside the resistance of Palestine.
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ66iHMCQls]
Video footage of the aftermath of the massacre of Shuja’iyeh
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This latest attack brings the total number of Palestinians killed since Operation Protective Edge began on July 8, 2014 to more than 350. Over 63,173 are now living in UNRWA shelters across Gaza, nearly 10,000 more than the number of Palestinians made refugees after Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09. Medha
t Abbas, Director General of the Ministry of Health in Gaza said there are “at least 60 dead in Shuja’iyeh only, and hundreds wounded.” He added, “I don’t have the number now because there is no electricity, no nothing.” Dr. Abbas is directing services his ministry usually handles to the overloaded al-Shifa hospital. “The Israeli aggression against civilians should be stopped,” said al-Shifa’s hospital administrator Dr. Hasan Khalas who confirmed that 112 Palestinians were killed across Gaza last night.
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Inside were scenes of absolute devastation: entire buildings collapsed on themselves or strewn into the streets.Mangled trees were bent over, children’s shoes — a girl’s purple slipper, a boy’s blue flip-flop — mixed in with the rubble underfoot.And there were bodies lying in the streets.Some were burnt almost beyond recognition, whole appendages missing.One man in his houserobes was completely charred black except for his internal organs, which were starkly yellow against the coal colour of the rest of his body.The dead were young and old, with more than one lifeless child carried out by frantic ambulance workers.
Emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said at least 62 people had been killed in the neighborhood alone.
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Press TV report from Shuja’iya (Sheyjayee) [VIDEO]
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Shehab News Agency video footage of the carnage from Shuja’iya
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A Palestinian cameraman and a paramedic were also among dozens of people killed in Shujayeh on Sunday, medics said.”Cameraman Khaled Hammad and paramedic Fuad Jaber were killed in a strike on an ambulance, while they were trying to evacuate the wounded from Shujayeh,” Qudra told AFP.
“He wasn’t a fighter, he was a fighter for humanity,” wailed one relative of Jaber as the family buried him. “
Thousands of Palestinians, barefoot and in their pajamas, streamed out of Shujayeh after a night of non-stop Israeli bombing.
They described hours of terror, as tank shells slammed into homes, with no electricity and no way to escape.
They called ambulances, but there was no way for the vehicles to get in under the constant fire.
So in the end, thousands of desperate residents fled on foot at first light, walking two hours or more into Gaza City.
They left behind the bodies of the dead in the streets of their neighborhoods – in Nazzaz, in Shaaf and in other parts of this flashpoint area between Gaza City and the border.
Video given to Reuters by a local showed at least a dozen mangled corpses, including three children, lying in the rubble-filled streets.
As the ceasefire got under way, a convoy of ambulances entered Shujayeh, with medics seen picking up at least three dead bodies, including that of a man with his intestines hanging out and his head completely destroyed, an AFP correspondent reported.
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The noble Norwegian doctor, Mads Gilbert, wrote this from Gaza:
Dearest friends,
The last night was extreme. The “ground invasion” of Gaza resulted in scores and carloads with maimed, torn apart, bleeding, shivering, dying – all sorts of injured Palestinians, all ages, all civilians, all innocent.
The heroes in the ambulances and in all of Gaza’s hospitals are working 12-24 hour shifts, grey from fatigue and inhuman workloads (without payment all in Shifa for the last 4 months), they care, triage, try to understand the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing,bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS!
Now, once more treated like animals by “the most moral army in the world” (sic!).
My respect for the wounded is endless, in their contained determination in the midst of pain, agony and shock; my admiration for the staff and volunteers is endless, my closeness to the Palestinian “sumud” gives me strength, although in glimpses I just want to scream, hold someone tight, cry, smell the skin and hair of the warm child, covered in blood, protect ourselves in an endless embrace – but we cannot afford that, nor can they.
Ashy grey faces – Oh NO! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding, we still have lakes of blood on the floor in the ER, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out – oh – the cleaners, everywhere, swiftly shovelling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes,cannulas – the leftovers from death – all taken away … to be prepared again, to be repeated all over. More then 100 cases came to Shifa in the last 24 hrs. Enough for a large well trained hospital with everything, but here – almost nothing: no electricity, water, disposables, drugs, OR-tables, instruments, monitors – all rusted and as if taken from museums of yesterday’s hospitals. But they do not complain, these heroes. They get on with it, like warriors, head on, enormously resolute.
And as I write these words to you, alone, on a bed, my tears flow, the warm but useless tears of pain and grief, of anger and fear.
This is not happening!
An then, just now, the orchestra of the Israeli war-machine starts its gruesome symphony again, just now: salvos of artillery from the navy boats just down on the shores, the roaring F16, the sickening drones (Arabic ‘Zennanis’, the hummers), and the cluttering Apaches. So much made in and paid by the US.
Mr. Obama – do you have a heart?
I invite you – spend one night – just one night – with us in Shifa.
Disguised as a cleaner, maybe.
I am convinced, 100%, it would change history.
Nobody with a heart AND power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.
But the heartless and merciless have done their calculations and planned another “dahyia” onslaught on Gaza.
The rivers of blood will keep running the coming night. I can hear they have tuned their instruments of death.
Please. Do what you can. This, THIS cannot continue.
Mads Gilbert MD PhD
Professor and Clinical Head
Clinic of Emergency Medicine
University Hospital of North Norway
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CNN report on killing of children of the Saad family.
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The collective outrage incited by the current string of atrocities committed, by Israel against the Palestinian people, has extended as far as Kashmir and Beijing, as photos, footage and eyewitness reports continue to surface on the internet, gripping the international community in an unprecedented state of shock and horror….
The Gaza health ministry has confirmed the deaths of over 370 Palestinians so far in the besieged strip since Israel began its relentless assault on July 8. Among those killed, over 80 were aged 16 or younger.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
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