Israel threatens Gaza with all-out attack

By Sara Flounders

The Israeli siege of Gaza is an international crime of collective punishment on an entire population. It is a crime carried out with the full support and authorization of Washington.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had rejected overtures by Hamas, the militant Islamic group that is the elected government in Gaza, for discussions about even a temporary cease-fire. (New York Times, Dec. 24)

Now there are increasing calls within Israel, including from the head of the Israeli military, for a full-scale invasion of besieged and isolated Gaza.

Conditions today in Gaza are desperate; Israel severely restricts and in some cases even denies the entrance of even basic food, fuel and electricity. Water filters, water pumps and bottled water are barred. The most basic supplies, from soap to batteries for hearing aids, are prohibited. No spare parts of any kind are permitted. Even desperately needed incubators for babies or dialysis equipment cannot be repaired or replaced.

In the cold and crowded wards of Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, the dispensary is out of 85 essential medicines and is close to using up almost 150 others.

There are rolling blackouts across the Strip. Previously Gaza barely functioned on 80,000 gallons of diesel fuel a day. But now Israel has reduced this to less than a third. Less than 24,000 gallons of diesel fuel a day are allowed in.

Without fuel and functioning pumps, even the pumping of raw sewage has become a major sanitation threat. Garbage heaps rot in the streets and in vacant lots due to the shortages of fuel to operate garbage trucks.

Practically all businesses are closed and their workers laid off for lack of raw materials. With all supplies severely restricted, inflation is spiraling to five and 10 times the prices of a year ago.

Travel into and out of Gaza is banned. Even severely sick patients cannot leave Gaza for treatment in hospitals in Israel, Egypt, Jordan or any other country. Health clinics, lacking supplies, are shutting down.

Previously 900 trucks a day entered Gaza. Now Israel has reduced the number to 15 trucks a day. A short list of about half a dozen basic articles is allowed in.

Gaza is a mere 25 miles long and only 6 miles wide. It is one of the poorest and most densely populated areas of the world. Most of the population are refugees who were expelled from their land by Zionist forces. They are destitute and have relied for decades on U.N. relief supplies and remittances from Palestinians working abroad for the most basic necessities. Now even these sources are being choked off.

But Gaza has always been a center of the most militant resistance to the Zionist state. Both the first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, 20 years ago and the Intifada that started in 2000 began in Gaza.

Because of unrelenting Palestinian attacks on Zionist settlers in 2005, Israel was forced to withdraw from Gaza 8,000 of its colonizers, who had for 37 years seized the best land and available water.

But after withdrawing the settlers, Israel refused to allow a Palestinian state of any kind to function. Gaza, with a population of 1.5 million people, was turned into an even more rigidly controlled giant concentration camp.

Israel destroyed the airport and blocked the building of a harbor. All connections with the outside world were cut; even the sea lanes and fishing boats were blocked. The long-promised “safe passage” road between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank was sealed. All crossings in and out of the Strip are under total Israeli control.

Previously, tens of thousands of workers from Gaza crossed into Israel as low-paid day laborers. Now even this bare-survival employment is terminated.

The more onerous that the repression and lockdown became, the more the Palestinian population responded with resistance. In 2006 in democratic elections, Hamas overwhelmingly won the popular vote.

The U.S. and Israeli response to the democratic election of Hamas was collective punishment of the entire population. Supplies were even more restricted, U.N. refugee aid curtailed, charities were shut down and even the Palestinians’ own tax revenues were withheld so that teachers, administrators and health staff could not be paid.

Despite desperate conditions of siege and almost total blockade, resistance continues.

Unequal and overwhelming force

Maintaining resistance in the face of the onerous siege has the overwhelming support of the population. The Palestinian resistance lacks jet aircraft, helicopters, radar, anti-aircraft batteries, tanks, electronic surveillance, satellite reconnaissance or any of the other sophisticated high-tech equipment that the Pentagon has endlessly supplied to Israel.

Yet not a day passes that Qassam rocket barrages are not fired at Israel. These rockets and grenades are machine-tooled by hand in garages or smuggled through tunnels. The southern Israeli town of Sderot is the closest target, but rockets are fired all along the borders of Gaza. For months more than 10 rockets or mortars have been fired from Gaza each day.

Despite the totally unequal struggle and the conditions of almost total deprivation, resistance fighters in Gaza have managed to accumulate primitive weapons and basic explosives. They are smuggled into the Strip through the many tunnels under its border with Egypt. The endless digging of miles of tunnels is itself an enormous accomplishment.

The unequal and overwhelming Israeli force versus the fierce Palestinian resistance can be seen in just one week of attacks.

According to the Palestinian Web news service Electronic Intifada, on Dec. 20, on the eve of the celebration of Eid al-Adha, a special Israeli unit sneaked into the Palestinian village of al-Msadar in the middle area of Gaza from the eastern border fence. Once there, Israeli soldiers stormed six tall buildings and held their inhabitants. They set up sniper nests. By early morning an Israeli Occupation Forces unit, reinforced by four armored bulldozers and 10 tanks, took positions in the area. Meanwhile, the IOF launched air strikes and artillery attacks, killing both civilians and fighters who responded to the attack.

Two days earlier an IOF spy drone had fired two missiles into one of the most densely populated areas in Gaza, killing four people whom Israel claimed were militants near the at-Touba mosque in Jabaliya refugee camp

On the same day, an IOF fighter jet fired

a missile that hit a car on Said Aal-Aas Street in the al-Nasir neighborhood of Gaza City. Two people in the car were killed.

A day earlier, on Dec. 17, the IOF fired two ground-to-ground missiles at four people in a field located in the al-Zaytoun neighborhood in the south of Gaza City. The four were killed.

In the West Bank, Israeli forces also continue to stage attacks, kidnappings and missile strikes. The entire West Bank, the other small fragment of Palestinian land occupied by Israel since 1967, has been carved into numerous tiny pieces, surrounded by 30 walls and hundreds of Israeli Defense Forces police checkpoints.

Full invasion of Gaza threatened

IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi declared in mid-December that the Israeli Army should enter the Gaza Strip in a large-scale military operation.

In past decades Israeli forces have invaded Gaza many times at a cost of thousands of Palestinian lives and massive destruction in efforts to smash the resistance. But what is now causing apprehension and great concern in Israel is that its forces will pay a price. In the past year Palestinian mines, and possibly anti-tank missiles, have been able to penetrate Israeli’s heavily armored 60-ton Merkava Mark-3 tanks. On Dec. 12 an Israeli tank was hit while on a raid inside Gaza.

The ability of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon to destroy Israeli tanks and shoot down its helicopters, along with the ability of Iraqi fighters to destroy U.S. tanks, means that the IDF is no longer invulnerable. When Israel invaded Lebanon last August, it suffered a stunning defeat. Despite massive bombardment of the entire country and dropping more than 1 million deadly cluster bombs, its high-tech, massively armed military was unable to hold even a mile of land inside the Lebanese border.

Out of fear that Hamas forces in Gaza might have obtained anti-aircraft missiles, the Israeli Air Force now uses only helicopters equipped with anti-missile defenses when flying over the Strip.

The problem for U.S. and Zionist forces is that they have been unable to defeat the will and determination of the Palestinian people to fight for full self-determination and the right of all Palestinian people to return to their land.

U.S. diplomatic and political maneuvers

Unable to crush the Palestinian spirit with hunger, isolation and blockade, Washington is giving full support to political and diplomatic measures that would create an apartheid state.

The greatest attention has been paid to dividing the Palestinian movement with repression, mass imprisonment and torture of those who are determined to stand for their full rights. This is matched with empty promises to those willing to conciliate.

At an orchestrated photo-op in Annapolis, Md., in late November to supposedly discuss “peace and a Palestinian Homeland,” Hamas, the democratically elected Palestinian government, was not invited. Israel has refused any discussion or negotiation with Hamas forces.

Before their holiday recess, both houses of the U.S. Congress agreed to withhold $100 million in financial assistance to Egypt, demanding that Egypt first take further steps to repress Palestinians who smuggle supplies and weapons into Gaza via a network of tunnels along the Egyptian border and clamp down on Gaza in other ways.

This heavy-handed pressure tactic is the first time that U.S. aid to Egypt—provided since the 1979 Egypt-Israel Camp David peace agreement—has been threatened and significantly reduced.

Now several thousand Palestinian pilgrims are stranded in Egypt. The Egyptian government has refused to let them return to the Hamas-controlled border city of Rafah in Gaza directly through Egypt.

The Gaza residents arrived in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula the last week in December after completing the Hajj in Mecca. They had left Gaza via Egypt on their way to the Hajj. But Israel is demanding that the pilgrims pass through an Israeli-controlled crossing on their way back to Gaza so that Israeli forces can stop and interrogate suspected militants and their sympathizers.

In 2008 it is important that the world movement stand with and give full attention to the Palestinian struggle. The onerous conditions of starvation and isolation of Gaza can only be broken by world solidarity.

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