kinimatoramaημερολόγιο από/για το κίνημα

SECOND URGENT CALL FOR IMMEDIATE SOLIDARITY ACTIONS FOR PALESTINE

Resistance is important to say "no". Resistance is important to oppose injustice. And to try to mitigate it, even if only partially. If they thought they would gather us in refugee camps, under harsh and difficult conditions, to subjugate us, they were wrong. We managed to come together and resist through the womb of suffering.

Fighter in Jenin refugee camp, in the occupied West Bank

With this call, we do not disregard or exaggerate the actions of other assemblies, groups, initiatives, etc. It goes without saying that they will continue to maintain their autonomy. The sole purpose is to accelerate the process of carrying out direct mass and dynamic actions, if this becomes possible. We therefore invite the people who are interested to participate as individuals so that decisions can be taken quickly under whatever common name is accepted, for example, "Palestine Solidarity Initiative", which will exist for as long as those who respond see fit. For this reason, we will propose to those who respond some concrete actions of solidarity with Palestine for the coming days.

If there is one region on earth where the classic and widely accepted slogan "The passion for freedom is stronger than all cells" is currently stamping its mark on history in a terrifying way, it cannot be other than Palestine. A prison with millions of trapped people, dissected into smaller scattered prisons, with countless densely populated cells in fertile valleys and barren land. As we read the tragic stories coming out of Palestine, we get the impression that the life of a Palestinian unfolds as a paradox - a delicate balance between enduring suffering and embodying steadfast resistance.

For more than four months now, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Wild West have been military, political and economic accomplices of the genocidal state of "Israel" against historic Palestine, not to mention the past 100 years or so. So far, the Israeli army has murdered more than 30,000 Palestinians, including over 13,000 children, with the actual number being much higher, as thousands of people are thought to be "missing" when in fact they are buried under rubble or completely dismembered and unidentifiable. We repeat, word for word, over thirteen thousand children.

In the Gaza Strip, where almost half the population is under 18 years old, doctors are using a new acronym for children: the WCNSF (Wounded Child No Surviving Family). If our homeland is our childhood, for most Palestinian children there is no childhood, they are born and die as adults:

I. eliminates entire genealogical lines. It displaces again and again millions of civilians, subjects them to collective starvation and keeps them on the verge of forced transfer to Sinai. The destruction it has caused is greater than the leveling of Aleppo, Syria between 2012 and 2016, Mariupol, Ukraine, or, by analogy, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. Even after the decision of the International Court of Justice, to which South Africa appealed and which ruled that it was "reasonable" to consider whether I. was committing genocide, it did not hesitate to go on to kill an additional 2,655 civilians.

The Zionism of I., which as a 'European state' participates exceptionally in all political, economic and cultural events of the EU, is an ideology of white supremacy with delusional beliefs in superiority which justifies apartheid, settler colonialism and genocide. It wages endless wars and murders people in the name of self-defence or under the pretext of fighting 'terrorism'. In recent years, the 'amazing' triptych of cooperation has been added: Greece-Cyprus-I.

In December 2023, the Israeli army designated Al-Mawashi as one of the only "safe zones" in the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people fled there finding only a strip of barren land with no food, water or sanitation. Now the Israeli army is also attacking the so-called 'safe zones'.

Let us just consider that 1.5 million people are literally crammed into the southernmost part of the city of Rafah, on the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt, in an area the size of Athens airport. And this area, which the Israeli government has falsely declared 'safe', is being bombed daily with hundreds of tons of bombs. The famine in Gaza, created by Israeli state policy even before the war, is so severe that it is tantamount to starvation. In their desperation, people have resorted to eating fodder, but now even that has been exhausted. And, as the I. escalates its attacks on Rafah, there is no end in sight. Soon, the lives of one in fifty people in Gaza will be snuffed out.

The unimaginable scale of the massacre of 1.5% of the population in Gaza makes it impossible to understand it through the stories of individual victims. The cold raw numbers also mask hundreds of disappeared families, many of whom were completely erased, wiped off the face of the earth. In the shadow of these numbers are more than 70,000 traumatized people, thousands of whom will remain paralyzed for the rest of their lives. The medical system in Gaza has been overwhelmed. The medical system in Gaza has been almost completely destroyed - life-saving amputations are performed without anaesthetic.

Being a Palestinian means passing through a checkpoint without knowing whether you will be pulled out and arrested, it means mob violence by settlers, it means being thrown in jail and suffering all kinds of torture without knowing why or for how long, it means a military raid in the middle of the night. It means all this and worse, day after day, throughout a lifetime, across generations.

A few days ago, two Palestinians from the village of Juhor Al-Dik decided to return to their homes, setting out from the Nusayrat refugee camp and carrying white flags in their hands. When they reached the bridge in central Gaza, an Israeli sniper murdered them. They did not realize that their village had been completely wiped out. They had left it with about 3,000 inhabitants. Most of its inhabitants were refugees from 1948 from other parts of Palestine. All the houses in the village were destroyed except one, half destroyed, which was used by the soldiers as an observation post.

What holocaust and what anti-Semitism? "Israelization", a high-tech industry of production and extraction of death, is spreading rapidly throughout the so-called Western world: military equipment, surveillance and monitoring systems, training and education of the use of weapons of mass destruction, special suppression and extermination units, mass electronic population control.

Since its inception, I.'s prime ministers have not left dictatorship after dictatorship across the world that they have not supplied with weapons or supported in all possible ways, including that of the 1967 colonels in Greece. In fact, recently its president, Isaac Herzog, participated in cordially talking to all the fascist bastards of the EU at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, without any problem.

This is the prevailing trend in Israeli political thought and practice on both the right and the so-called left. It is what led to the massive dispossession of Palestinians that preceded the formation of the state, the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba in 1948 and the various forms of apartheid and military rule since then.

Within Israeli society, there is no significant movement against genocide. The protest movements that do exist are of negligible size and influence, or are mainly concerned with demanding a hostage exchange agreement, or focus on internal Israeli issues, such as elections for the usual rotation of bad cop and good cop.

The tiny isolated islands of resistance to the assault on Palestine and the broader aspects of Israeli sovereignty are so small that they pose no real threat. The idea that a movement against colonialism and for the liberation of the Palestinians exists within Israeli society is an illusion.

As far as we are concerned, the so-called unaffiliated "world of struggle" from below, from the anarchist or "antagonistic" space, did not have to agree with the demand of the 1973 Polytechnic uprising for democracy to find themselves in the occupation. Nor did they have to agree with the African National Congress (ANC) and leader Nelson Mandela to oppose the apartheid regime in South Africa.

We wonder where are the lawyers, doctors, journalists, rescuers and so many other social and professional groups to articulate a word and/or organise a protest against an unprecedented 21st century massacre? Why this silence?

For us the big picture is neither Hamas nor Islamic Jihad nor Fatah nor the other armed resistance organisations. Loyalty to a religion or a political programme alone cannot sustain for so many years patience, perseverance and admirable bravery in a population of some 7 million. But hope for freedom, land, justice and dignity can. Nothing about the future is clear, including the direction the Palestinian movement for liberation will take.

That is for the Palestinians to decide. It is rather obvious that those who oppose colonialism should not enjoy the privileges it provides. The road to liberation has no certainties, but those who wish to help open it also have the responsibility of seeking ways to do so. To overcome the limits of forced national identity that exist and to eliminate the limits of colonialism.

SUMMARY OF LATEST UPDATES

- Senator Lindsey Graham: "We are in a religious war here. I am with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourselves. Level the place."

Congressman Max Miller: "They [Palestine] are a territory that's about to probably get eviscerated and go away here shortly, as we're going to turn that into a parking lot."

Congressman Brian Mast: "There are very few innocent Palestinian civilians."

Presidential candidate Nikki Haley: "Finish them. Finish them."

Florida state legislator Michelle Salzman when asked how many Palestinians need to be killed: "All of them".

Republican US Congressman Andy Ogles was confronted by activists calling for a ceasefire, and a woman was telling him about the footage of Palestinian children killed by "Israel". He responded, "I think we should kill them all if that makes you feel better - everybody."

President Joe Biden: "I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I'm sure innocents have been killed, and it's the price of waging a war." [It is rather obvious that the main "target" is the USA embassy in Athens.]

- Rejecting a UN Security Council (UNSC) ceasefire resolution for the third time, USA, with the abstention of UK and the support by 13 of the UNSC's 15 members, shows approval of starvation as a mean of war. The message given today to "Israel" with this veto is that it can continue to get away with mass murders and catastrophic attacks by air, sea and land. As the US argues on "Israel's" behalf in front of the International Court of Justice, which is considering the legality of "Israel's" occupation of the Palestinian territories, Washington has long shielded its Middle East ally from accountability while stating that it opposes permanent occupation. Since "Israel's" occupation in 1967, the US has talked out of both sides of its mouth - on the one hand affirming that Israel has a duty to withdraw from the territories, and on the other hand, facilitating Israel's settler-colonial expansion, increasing its settlement enterprise, increasing the number of its settlements.

- The suspension of the World Food Program's delivery of food aid to the northern Gaza Strip is a dangerous development that will exacerbate the humanitarian suffering of the nearly 750,000 Palestinian people under the suffocating blockade imposed by the criminal Israeli army and the fascist israelis attacking trucks trying to enter the Gaza Strip. Northern Gaza residents eat animal feed and grass for three weeks. Others collect spilled flour from the ground. This situation is already resulting in the death of children, elderly, and patients due to hunger. Protests took to the streets of Jabalia in northern Gaza last night, demanding the world to allow trucks carrying aid to enter Gaza, and also children demonstrations were held in various sites in Gaza Strip.

- Yesterday's (21 Febr.) events in "Israel" underscore the widespread rejection of Palestinian rights and self-determination across the political spectrum and population, as the Israeli Parliament, with an overwhelming majority of 99 out of 120 members, both from coalition and opposition parties, adopted resolutions rejecting international mandates on permanent settlements with Palestinians, insisting instead on direct negotiations without preconditions, and opposing unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state.

- At least 12 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli army bombardment of the Nuseirat refugee camp and the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City. In Zeitoun, medical sources told that journalist Ihab Nasrallah and his wife were murdered after being targeted by Israeli forces. Their three children were also badly burned. In Nuseirat, in central Gaza, air strikes on the home of the al-Daalis family murdered 10 people and wounded dozens of others, who were taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in neighbouring Deir el-Balah. Fighting has been raging in recent days in the central Gaza Strip, an area the Israeli army once said had been cleared of major Hamas military infrastructure. Two days before, the Israeli army told all residents of the Zeitoun and Turkmen neighbourhoods of Gaza City to urgently move to al-Mawasi in the south of the Gaza Strip, calling the town a "humanitarian zone".

- "Israel's" Prison Service announces that the disabled Palestinian abductee Khaled Shaweesh (53 years old) was sent to Assaf Harofeh hospital last night due to "a serious condition" before he "died". This brings the death toll among Palestinian abductees in Israeli jails to eleven since the start of the genocidal war. Shaweesh was serving a jail time of 11 life sentences. "Israel" continues to hold the dead bodies of 19 abductees, one of whom died in 1980. Moreover, in israeli prisons and military camps, nearly 10,000 Palestinians, men, women and children are detained under "Guantanamo" style tortures, rapes, no sleep, no food, no water, no communication and continuous humiliation.

- Palestinian fighters of the Islamic Jihad group say they destroyed multiple groups of Israeli soldiers and vehicles in the middle of Gaza City's Zeitoun neighbourhood with 60-calibre mortar shells. In a second mortar attack on Israeli soldiers and vehicles, the Quds Brigades say they carried out strikes near the Eastern Cemetery in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip.

- Hamas's military wing, Qassam Brigades has said its fighters shelled the military carrier with a Al-Yassin 105 anti-tank rounds, west of the al-Amal neighbourhood in Khan Younis, south of the besieged Gaza Strip. Earlier, the Brigades said that its fighters were able to target a group of Israeli soldiers barricaded inside a house in the same neighbourhood.

- Khan Younis' besieged Nasser Medical Complex has become "place of death". Eight patients at Nasser Hospital have died after generators shut off due to lack of fuel. Medical teams are unable to provide care to patients due to a lack of oxygen and medical supplies. While 45 patients were transferred to other hospitals, Israeli forces are delaying the evacuation of another 110. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said the Israeli military bombed a shelter hosting its staff in al-Mawasi near Khan Younis in southern Gaza, considered a "safe zone".

- Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis is under Israeli siege for 30 consecutive days. The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) is warning of the dire situation at al-Amal Hospital due to the ongoing siege and targeting by the Israeli occupation, calling on the international community to take immediate action to protect the hospital and to lift the imposed siege before it is too late and the hospital is forced out of service.

- "Israel" destroyed approximately one million square meters of roads and streets since the start of the genocidal war, turning Gaza into a devastated city living a real catastrophe. Around 3600 traffic signs and boards, 260 thousand linear meters of frontage stones and sidewalks, and 160 thousand linear meters of lighting lines and lanterns were also destroyed.

- Israeli authorities have set up a checkpoint for Palestinians at Damascus Gate in occupied East Jerusalem, a central entry point for Palestinians trying to reach the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, while Israelis bypassed the security check. Since October 7, the check points, gates and military control towers all over occupied West Bank have reached the number of nearly 700.

- Mohammed Abdulsalam, the Yemeni group's Houthi spokesman, says the US decision to block the UN Security Council resolution that would have called for ending the war on Gaza shows Washington's unwashable shame against its falsified claims of upholding human values. "The repeated waving of the American veto constitutes an all-out aggression against humanity and a declaration of open war against the people of the region, not just Palestinians," Abdulsalam added. The Houthis have fired two antiship ballistic missiles at a Greek-flagged, US-owned ship two days earlier. [Well done guys, these ships are very often a watery grave for maritime workers] A US-led coalition has been bombing Houthi targets in Yemen in response to the group's attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea. The Houthis say their military operations against Israel-linked ships will continue until the war on Gaza ends.

- The Lebanese group Hezbollah has said it fired Katyusha rockets towards the northern Israeli town of Matzuva in response to Israel's targeting of civilians in Lebanon and in support of Palestinians in Gaza. Separately, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that rocket siren sounds were heard in northern Israel. The group's chief Hassan Nasrallah vowed in a recent speech that "Israel" would pay "with blood" for killing Lebanese civilians in its attacks on south Lebanon villages and towns.

- Syrian media say Israeli missiles struck Damascus and confirmed that two people were murdered inside an apartment. The strike damaged the fourth floor of a 10-storey building, shattered window glass on nearby buildings, and damaged dozens of cars parked in the area. An empty parked bus for the nearby Al-Bawader School was also damaged, and people were seen rushing to the school to collect their children. Several Israeli missiles have hit the Kafr Sousa district in Syria's capital Damascus. The neighbourhood is known to host several security agencies and was targeted in an Israeli attack in February last year that killed Iranian military experts. Since the start of the year, 13 Israeli attacks took place on Syrian territory: eight air strikes and five rocket attacks by ground forces. The attacks destroyed nearly 31 targets and left 31 fighters dead and 13 others injured. Eight civilians, including a woman, were also murdered in the Israeli strikes this year.

Rafah

- With an Israeli ground invasion looming and the majority of Gaza's population crammed into the southern city, fears are mounting Rafah could soon turn into a mass graveyard.

Rafah was already overcrowded before the war with a population of approximately 280,000. Now that number has ballooned, with up to 1.5 million displaced Palestinians crammed within the governorate's 63 square kilometres of space.

Palestinians in Rafah are living in overcrowded apartments or makeshift camps built with flimsy materials unable to stand the stressors of winter. With shelters at maximum capacity, hundreds are sleeping on the street. They lack clean water. Disease is rampant. And starvation is imminent as most survive on bird seed and rotting food. Civilians flocked to Rafah because that's where aid groups are concentrated, but that assistance may cease to exist as Israeli rocket fire rains down on the area. More than 100 were killed only on Monday 19th of February in overnight Israeli airstrikes.

Where will 1.5 million people go when the Israeli tanks arrive? Rafah, Gaza's southernmost city, was meant to be a safe zone as Israel pushed Palestinians further and further down the Strip. Israel even declared the city as such, but now Netanyahu says Rafah is the last Hamas stronghold and storming it is key for "Israel's victory".

He claims that Hamas feeds through tunnels between Rafah and Egypt, but the Egyptians, with the help of the United States and under the supervision of "Israel", have already destroyed the tunnels and built a mammoth apparatus of walls, wires, and electronic devices that makes it impossible for any weapons to enter into Gaza. Mainstream media outlets' investigations found most of resistance's weaponry isn't from smuggling, but rather recycled from unexploded missiles fired into Gaza by "Israel" as well as arms from Israeli military bases.

After spending four months urging people to run away south with the hope of pushing them into the Sinai desert, the Israeli government is making the same faulse and ridiculous claims that the problem is now Rafah. With an unclear agenda and alliances breaking down, Israeli ambitions may not be in eliminating Hamas, but rather in its own founding ideology. Because of the absence of any other strategic objective that's been defined, people have to look at the objectives of Zionism. Maximum land with minimum Palestinians and maintaining a regime of Jewish supremacy and apartheid.

One million women and girls displaced in Gaza: UN Women

The UN entity for gender equality and women's empowerment is calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. It stated that of the one million women and girls displaced in Gaza, half of them are now in Rafah, the enclave's southernmost point.

The Israeli military is preparing a ground assault on the governorate, which is currently home to about 1.5 million Palestinians who have been forced there by relentless Israeli bombing in the north. Despite being designated a so-called "safe zone", Rafah has been routinely targeted by deadly Israeli air attacks.

- Since October 7, at least 29,313 Palestinians have been murdered and 69,333 injured in Israeli attacks on Palestine, but in reality the deaths are much more higher, as there are dead people still under the rubbles or have been completely dismembermed or/and burnt and cannot be recognized.

Ocuppied West Bank

- Raids across the occupied West Bank by the Israeli military have continued. Jenin raid began with attack from Israeli helicopter, something we have not yet seen in the occupied West Bank throughout this war. Additional raids were continued also in Nablus and Ramallah and several children have been arrested. A 15-year-old Palestinian boy, Fadi Suleiman, was murdered by Israel forces in the occupied West Bank town of Azzun. The boy succumbed to his wounds at the hospital after he was shot in the chest.

- 25-year-old Aref Marwan Aref Ali was murdered during Israeli forces' raid of the Jenin refugee camp. Earlier, the Israeli military was shooting in Jenin and destroying infrastructure with several dozen military vehicles, along with bulldozers tearing up the ground on their way in. It also said earlier it targeted a "terrorist cell" with an air strike in Jenin, killing three people. Palestinian armed groups had responded by using explosive devices against Israeli military vehicles.

- Since October 7, at least 400 Palestinians were murdered by the Israeli military across the occupied West Bank and nearly 7,100 people arrested.