by our Arab Affairs correspondent of NewWorker newspaper

Israel has launched a new genocidal offensive against the Palestinians carpet bombing Gaza and unleashing their settler militias to spread terror in the occupied West Bank. Many believe that Israel is about to launch new ground offensives in Gaza and the West Bank to drive the Palestinians out and prepare the land for future Zionist settlement.

Israeli troops are carrying out their largest military operation in the West Bank in decades.
Hundreds of Palestinian houses have been destroyed and around 40,000 Palestinian Arabs made homeless. More than 70 Palestinians have been killed since it began in late January and last week Zionist settlers brutally attacked Oscar-winning film director Hamdan Ballal in front
of his home in the Hebron hills in the West Bank. All of this is done with the blessing of the USA and the rest of the NATO pack.

Israel’s renewed offensive on the Gaza Strip continues relentlessly. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians have been slaughtered and more than 140,000 other displaced since last week. But the resistance is hitting back with rockets attacks on Zionist settlements in southern Israel. Yemen tightens its blockade on Israeli and imperialist shipping in the Red Sea and stepping up its ballistic missile attacks warning that Tel Aviv’s international airport is no longer safe for air traffic and that it will remain a target until the Israeli war on Gaza ends.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are now trapped in the rubble of what’s left of the Gaza Strip and in desperate need of aid and shelter. The UN’s humanitarian agency, OCHA, says “fleeing with only a few personal belongings, many people are now staying on the streets, in desperate need of food, drinking water, and shelter essentials”.

Food stocks in the Gaza Strip are dwindling and there are only five days of flour left to keep bakeries running as Israel’s nearly month-long blockade threatens to plunge the territory’s two
million people into hunger. And Gaza’s remaining water system is also in peril, and will completely collapse if fuel supplies run out, all but cutting off people’s access to clean water.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the ‘autonomous” Palestinian authority in the West Bank, condemned Israel for using access to water as a “tool of torture and displacement” to undermine development and entrench its occupation of the Palestinian territories. He called for an immediate ceasefire, unfettered aid access and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, while appealing for global support to establish a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

In Israel over 100,000 people took to the streets of Tel Aviv to protest against the war. Marchers demanded a deal to bring home the remaining Israeli captives and declared they won’t rest until Netanyahu is removed from office. Meanwhile opposition politicians and protest groups also slammed the decision of the Netanyahu government to resume its genocidal campaign particularly as it could risk the lives of the remaining Israeli prisoners held by the resistance in Gaza. The Democrats (Meretz and Labour parties) leader, Yair Golan, called for renewed protests and accused Netanyahu of “using the lives of our citizens and soldiers because he fears the public protests” while the communist-led Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) warned of the dangers and disastrous repercussions in the conflict arena, the countries of the region and the world.

Hadash and the Israeli communists said the attack and the forced displacement of Gaza residents is a crime against humanity and a serious violation of international law. “The fascist government has once again broken the ceasefire in the most appalling way, with air strikes that targeted refugee camps and other civilian locations, leading to the deaths of hundreds of people, including many children,” they said.