By Dave Stockton
On Monday 28 October the Israeli Knesset voted, by 92 MKs to just 10 against, to ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), founded in 1948 during the Nakba.
Now with a second Nakba underway, the Israeli opposition, the so-called liberal Zionists, led by Benny Gantz’s centrist National Unity party also voted for this cruel measure. This confirms the criminal character of the entire Israeli regime.
There are supposedly 90 days until it comes into force, when it will lead to the closure of Unrwa’s premises in the entire occupied Palestinian territory—including the West Bank and East Jerusalem. If it does, 2.9 million Palestinians in some 30 refugee camps will no longer have schools, medical services, waste collection, clean water supplies and other municipal services, such as they still have.
Unrwa has over 13,000 employees who will lose their jobs; 233 have already been killed. Two-thirds of the agency’s facilities in Gaza have been seriously damaged or destroyed since the war began. Many of those that have acted as shelters from intense bombardment have been deliberately targeted.
At least 28 people have been killed and 54 injured in two Israeli air strikes by F-16s on a school sheltering displaced families in the central Gaza Strip. Two rooms, where food aid was being stored and distributed, were hit.
Genocide
Israel has given the 400,000 people left in northern Gaza, many with ill or elderly relatives, 10 days to move to the south. Giora Eiland, author of the infamous General’s Plan, warns, ‘after that time, all this area will become to be a military zone. And all the Hamas people, whether some of them are fighters, some of them are civilians… will have two choices, either to surrender or to starve.’ The army is blocking all supplies of food, water and other necessities of life from going in.
It is now clear beyond denial that Israel is engaged in the annihilation or expulsion of the population of Gaza and the destruction of Palestinian communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem too. It is also clearing southern Lebanon as a buffer zone, with one million of its people driven northwards.
In Britain, the European Union and the USA, we have to do everything in our power to force our governments—who are continuing to arm and abet the perpetrators—to call a halt to the full scale genocide underway.
Our trade unions, who have the power if they would only use it, must make it clear to governments that they will not tolerate any further arms supplies, economic links or diplomatic cover for the murderous Zionist state. And they should do so in the only language they understand—strike action that says workers won’t be complicit in the genocide.
