Rocket launched from Gaza during the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. Photo: Resumen Lainoamericano/File photo.
By Atilio A. Boron – Oct 8, 2023
The events that are shaking Israel and Palestine today, with a tragic toll of civilian casualties, cause pain and compassion and, unfortunately, are not surprising. The attacks launched by Hamas from Gaza are the response to the terrorist policy of conquest and territorial dispossession that the Israeli regime, with the complicity of the United States and its unworthy European vassals, has perpetrated against the Palestinian people for decades, in open violation of countless bilateral agreements and United Nations resolutions.
The current crisis could hardly be interpreted or evaluated ignoring the brutal and systematic violation of human rights that the Palestinian nation has been suffering at the hands of its Israeli oppressors for decades: the oppression, imprisonment, or murder of its men and women, including children.
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Occupied territories
The magnitude of these crimes can be gauged from the following data provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHOA). In the territories occupied—in reality, invaded—by Israel, the armed forces of that country caused the death of 6,407 Palestinians between January 1, 2008, and September 19, 2023, while 152,560 suffered wounds and injuries of varying severity. In contrast, Israeli casualties during the same period were 308 and 6,307, respectively. The gigantic asymmetry between the dead and wounded on both sides speaks eloquently of the scope of this genocide practiced by Tel Aviv.
The current crisis, the umpteenth, has had, like all those that preceded it, a long gestation period. The scope of the Israeli aggression on the occupied territories and especially Gaza is of an exorbitant cruelty and inhumanity, and sufficiently well known to exempt us from exposing them in this paper.
Gaza has been defined as the largest open-air prison in the world. In the West Bank, the aforementioned UN organization reports in another report that the year 2023 was the bloodiest in the long history of the Israeli occupation: 36 children were killed in the period ending August 31.
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Settlers
The provocations of the misnamed Israeli Defense Forces go hand in hand with many others carried out by the settlers who, with the complicity of the Israeli government, have turned into death squads that take upon themselves the task of subduing by means of terror the original inhabitants of the lands they are stealing.
This violence, which is now registering a new outbreak, has characterized the entire history of Palestine from the moment its people were deprived of the sacred right to national self-determination. In this world, immersed in the vertigo of the irreversible decline of the exhausted post-war world order, the question of the formation of the Palestinian state must be resolved, settling a debt that is already 75 years old. Without this, violence will only grow and become increasingly brutal.
