Statement for Sanctions Kill Campaign, October 19, 2023
The blockade and total sanctions on Gaza’s population have continued for 16 years and are a seamless part of the larger US imperial project. Now, U.S. sanctions on over 40 countries, including Gaza, have reached their criminal conclusion in Israel’s attack on 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza.
With the U.S. and its NATO allies in full support, the Zionists have denied water, food, medical supplies, and electricity to the whole population. This war crime of collective punishment in its most extreme form is a calculated genocide of an entire people.
Questionable and unsubstantiated atrocity stories dominate the corporate media to justify the Apartheid state and its reign of mass deaths from bombs in Gaza along with targeted assassinations and land theft of Palestinians in the West Bank.
Zionist forces and their U.S. partners are enraged that their aura of invincibility has been shattered by the world’s most besieged people. Their response is a terror campaign. An armada of U.S. warships and thousands of Marines are being rushed off the coast of blockaded Gaza where they also threaten Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Massive arms shipments are being sent to Israel.
The Israeli military demands that Palestinians flee and then they bomb the only evacuation routes of defenseless civilians. Targets include destruction of Gaza’s major hospital with 500 deaths. This is a desperate effort to complete the crime of the Nakba, the driving out of the indigenous Palestinian population in 1948.
We caution against a false equivalency that likens the massively armed Israeli state with the desperation of an impoverished people attempting to break a stranglehold.
The Palestinians have resisted a brutal colonial occupation that has stolen their land, sought to destroy their culture, and created the locked concentration camp which is today’s Gaza. Their “right to resist” colonial occupation is guaranteed in the UN Charter and in international law and is supported by the peoples of the world.
Voices speaking for the human rights of Palestinians are being silenced, censored and criminalized. It is the responsibility of all of us to oppose these war crimes.
End the Blockade!
End the Occupation!
End U.S. Aid to Israel!
*Featured Image: Buildings are reduced to rubble after Israeli airstrikes in the Jabalia camp for Palestinian refugees in Gaza City, in this photo taken October 11, 2023. Israel declared war on Hamas on October 8 after the Islamist group’s shock cross-border assault. AFP