International Solidarity Movement - Page 19 - Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom.

Worldwide Pressure Escalates with Global Strike for Gaza

Striking Palestinians across the occupied West Bank have been joined by millions in countries across the world for the Global Strike for Gaza, which was announced by a coalition of major Palestinian factions. The cadence of the strike declarations accelerated rapidly throughout the day in demand of an immediate ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Gaza.

The global strike action was coordinated in response to the dashing of efforts toward an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. Comfortably seated with his arm stretched high, US Ambassador Alternate Representative of the US for Special Political Affairs in the United Nations Robert A. Wood lit a fire of rage and condemnation across every continent following his signaling that the United States would use its veto power to kill a UN resolution, supported almost thoroughly through the UN security council, to block an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.

Entire nations shut down. A strike was born.

Sign on shop in Jordan announcing closure due to strike. Photo Credit: (MEE/Mohammad Ersan)

Occupied West Bank:

Across the territory, shops fell silent. Schools remained closed. Government offices shut down. Masses gathered in Ramallah’s Al-Manara Square for what was, by many accounts, the largest crowd gathered in protest in the area in some time. Palestinian children made art work and protestors carried a banner naming Gaza’s martyrs while large protests occurred simultaneously in al Khalil. Shops in occupied East Jerusalem remained shuttered through the day as the global strike action flashed across the planet with several countries joining in nationwide efforts to deal economic blows to the heart of the powers who profit from the continuation of occupation force’s genocide in Gaza.

Silence in the streets of Nablus. Photo Credit: [Zain Jaafar/AFP]

Lebanon:

Secretary-general of Lebanon’s Council of Ministers, Mahmoud Mekkiya delivered the announcement to the nation; all governments and national institutions would be shuttered in solidarity with the global call out. In reports out of major Lebanese cities, “workers downed tools” and the call for global strike was supported in calls for nationwide solidarity by the ministers of education and culture and several heads of finance. People across Lebanon engaged in the strike in solidarity with Gaza as well as southern Lebanese villages which have also been impacted in occupation forces bombardment.

Jordan:

Streets were bare across Jordan as a stunning show of solidarity surged through “the transportation sector, aviation, trade, banks, ports, as well as schools and universities.” Thousands gathered in the streets of Amman and across Jordan in massive protests. Handmade signs announcing solidarity strikes were placed across hundreds of shops as the nation grinded to a halt in a powerful cry to end the continued atrocities being committed in Gaza.

Photo Credit: English News.cn (Photo by Mohammad Abu Ghosh/Xinhua)

Turkey:

In observation of the strike, the country saw abandoned streets throughout the day, with images circulating across social media of empty streets and gated shops in the typically bustling city of Istanbul.

Photo Credit: Palestine Online @OnlinePalEng

While many countries held full nationwide shutdowns in honor of the strike call, others which did not, saw massive protests in major cities across the world. Entire communities vocally joined the strike in solidarity. #StrikeForGaza was trending across social media, businesses announced individual shutdowns, millions across the world did not report to work or school and millions more refused all financial transactions for the day, no physical purchases, no shopping, no online orders. Boycott actions are a powerful tool to cost companies standing on the side of genocide, occupation and apartheid millions of dollars in profit. Momentum continues to build for an end to the bombardment which has now claimed nearly 20,000 lives. Thousands of the missing lie among the rubble.

One day prior to the global strike, the world marked the 75th anniversary of International Human Rights Day as the bombs continued to fall on Gaza.

One war in Gaza and another in the West Bank

by Diana Khwaelid

7 December 2023 | International Solidarity Movement | Tulkarem

The fire of the war between Hamas and Israel since October 7 has not only burned the civilian population of Gaza. Palestinian civilians in the West Bank have tasted their share of it, too.
On December 7, the Israeli occupation forces once again stormed the city of Tulkarem. They did so late at night, with dozens of military vehicles, including the D9 bulldozers that have been used by the Israeli army to destroy roads, streets and infrastructure in all previous incursions to Tulkarem camp, Nur Shams camp, Jenin camp and Balata camp.

The Israeli occupation forces (IOF) surrounded the Thabet Thabet Government Hospital in the city and obstructed the movement of ambulances. Ambulances were stopped and inspected after they managed to reach some of the injured Palestinians.

The IOF also stormed the Tulkarem refugee camp in the city, destroying the main street of the camp. But in this latest incursion, it was the population of the Nur Shams refugee camp — located three kilometers east of Tulkarem — that suffered the heaviest damage.

The Israeli occupation forces smashed the main entrance to the Nur Shams refugee camp for the seventh time this year. Eyewitnesses said that the occupation forces used bulldozers to destroy the infrastructure and roads in camp, including the main roads in the Al-Damaj neighborhood.

Vital civilian infrastructure, such water networks and sewerage were destroyed, as roads and streets became a dangerous zone for all residents of the camp, including women and children.

The IOF did not spare schools either. The main entrance to the UNRWA school in the camp was also destroyed, while another school saw its wall partially demolished.

In the meanwhile, residents of the Tulkarem camp buried the body of the martyr father Ayman Anbar, 47-year-old, who was wounded by a live bullet shot by an Israeli soldier during the second-last raid of the camp, which took place on November 14th. Abu Lamin stayed in the intensive care unit at the Nablus specialized hospital for almost three weeks before succumbing to the wounds. He leaves behind his wife and family, including Lamis, his 8-year-old daughter.

Lamis Anbar was joined by residents of the Tulkarem camp in mourning her father’s body and saying one last goodbye.

According to the latest statistics by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the number of Palestinian martyrs since the beginning of this year has reached 18,019, while 55,069 Palestinians have been injured and 9,029 arrested.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the number of martyrs of the West Bank since October 7th has reached 274.

The city of Tulkarm has recorded 44 Palestinian martyrs since October 7th

Dissonance in Jerusalem

Jerusalem was originally split in two in 1948, the year of The Nakba, when Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from much of their ancestral land and the State of Israel was created, stealing pieces of the city for the settlement of newly arriving Jewish people. That original land grab has since grown through an illegal annexation and ongoing occupation of east Jerusalem. The Old City, the location of numerous holy sites relevant to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, is surrounded by an Ottoman aged wall that is often put to its use in constraining entry into the Old City by the Israeli Army and police. Al-Aqsa stands tenuously on the inside of the wall, while many of its worshipers live on the other side. The sentiment is that extremist, right wing, Jewish Israelis, and their empire, want to demolish the mosque and build a temple in its place.

Map of Old City of Jerusalem, from Jerusalem Story

As we walked down the warmly lit Via Dolorosa on December 8th, we buzzed with anticipation and shared stories of miracles in our own lives, sprinkled with small Arabic lessons; katir, a lot, sa’a ki, yummy, ektalal, occupation. Tears streamed down my face as I touched the ancient stones and walked along the same path of the infamous martyr. I used the ends of my head scarf to wipe my cheeks and tuck myself underneath its warmth. My body was tense with anticipation of hundreds of right wing, jewish extremists charging towards Al-Aqsa, a literal, and symbol of, land they wish to digest.

By the end of the last prayer for the day, around 6:30pm, the streets were empty aside from a few families still briskly walking to get home. It was clear that tonight was not the night to be alone outside the mosque. We encountered a family of 3 carrying copious amounts of oranges in a baby stroller and by hand. One of us offered to help and we were quickly swept back to their house through alleyways and over barricades. The Matriarch of the family peeled oranges and her daughter poured coffee as she explained how she tries to go every Friday to pray, but is always turned away by the Israeli military. She shook her head and closed her eyes as she recounted the tear gas they sprayed while she attempted to pray. I asked if she continues to go, even though she has been denied and she proudly replied “yes, of course”. We parted with sentiments of strength, gratitude, and sumud (resilience).

As we left the forcibly silent Muslim quarter, we were bombarded by celebration, carelessness, and isolation just a few blocks over in a Jewish Neighborhood. People danced in the streets and young men laughed as they walked with assault rifles slung around their necks.

Young men walking through West Jerusalem. Credit: ISM

We all clenched our jaws, silenced our Arabic lessons, and I lowered my scarf to reveal my curls in a hopes to blend in until we swiftly arrived at our home base, astonished by the dissonance; just down the road, their neighbors, were confined to their homes for fear of destruction and extermination.

I was surprised by my shock. Living in the US supplies countless moments of dissonance among neighbors. From the Delmar Divide in St Louis to Skid Row to Chelsea’s 10th ave in NY, we watch as people are displaced, sanctioned, and murdered and their neighbors, with windows facing theirs, feast and dance on the graves of the community they pushed out. I had the same feeling of disappointment and anger walking through that Jewish neighborhood as I do when I walk to visit friends along the Delmar Divide and remember the names of the families that once lived on the south side of the street.

On Monday December 11th there is a call to action for everyone to stop, a total strike. For everyone, around the world to be faced with the stagnation of a mandated ceasefire and to feel the destruction of an entire people. To turn that rage into action.

Genocide in Gaza: Mass Civilian Death, Mass Displacement & Infectious Disease

10 December 2023 | International Solidarity Movement | Gaza Strip

“We are nearing the point of no return.”

These were the words spoken by nephrologist Dr. Ben Thomson during yesterday’s press conference on ‘urgent healthcare catastrophe in Gaza’ and the public health disaster advancing into its 63rd day in the besieged and bombarded Gaza Strip. With those introductory words, Dr. Thomson announced the breadth of the situation: “Of the 35 hospitals in Gaza, 26 are non functional. 9 remain only partially functional but are operating at more than double their capacity with critical shortages and are providing shelter to thousands of internally displaced people.” Civilians in the north are now cut off from access to emergency medical transport due to the targeted destruction of 100 Red Crescent ambulances, the bombing of ambulance convoys and the strangling cutoff of fuel. At least 364 attacks on healthcare services have been recorded in the occupied Palestinian territory since 7 October 2023.

With tens of thousands of Palestinians wounded and thousands more missing and presumed buried alive in the topsoil of rubble that now marks Gaza’s landscape, many who may be crying out for rescue are left to die. Infrastructure in Gaza hasn’t failed. It has been purposefully destroyed. From ambulances to medical schools, to the region’s only mental health hospital, to the arrests and unknown whereabouts of dozens of doctors and senior medical staff, the targets were executed with precision by occupation forces whose actions are, as noted in the conference, at the “raised risk of atrocity crimes” and in violation of various humanitarian laws and war crimes. Included in the missing medical staff is Al Shifa Hospital Director, Dr Muhammad Abu Salmiya, who was abducted on November 23rd while facilitating the forced evacuation of the hospital. Various rights agencies have expressed concern for the well-being of the doctor who had, until his abduction by occupation forces, been regularly updating the world on the situation in and around the hospital; on the injured, on the dead.

Al Shifa Hospital Director Dr Muhammad Abu Salmiya’s whereabouts remain unknown. Photo Credit: AFP Archive

Gaza’s Health Ministry noted on Saturday, December 9th, that 17,487 Palestinians have been massacred, with over 70 percent of the dead being women and children. But that death toll rises by the minute and with thousands missing and the occupation forces targeting and criminalizing the most basic of civic processes occurring across Gaza’s five districts, maintaining count of the deaths has become impossible. And what the occupation army hasn’t destroyed with bombs and guns, it works to achieve through circulating false narratives echoed by world media which doubt reports from Gaza’s health and public officials which are updating the world on the ongoing genocide of the over 2.2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

On December 8th, shocking images out of the Beit Lahia neighbourhood in northern Gaza depicted the scene of the stripping and abduction of displaced Palestinian civilians from a raided UN school, which included a student, a local shop-owner and a well known journalist. As the world reacted with rightful rage to the horrific acts of the occupation army, an Israeli Occupation Forces spokesperson dismissed inquiries by linking civilians with Hamas, a continued tactic reflecting their view that all Palestinian bodies are inherently ‘terrorist’.

Photo Credit: NBC News / Palestinians in Northern Gaza are stripped and abducted by occupation forces.

The UN school housing the displaced was just one of numerous facilities across the terrorized Strip sheltering the over 1.7 million displaced through the relentless bombardment. According to the latest numbers on the ground, occupation forces have decimated Gaza’s residential infrastructure including 300,000 housing units, representing over half of the homes in Gaza as noted in the following graphic.

Reported by Al Jazeera. Sourced from OCHA Government Media Office in Gaza 04/12/2023

Occupation forces are demanding the mass-displaced squeeze into an area consisting of sand dunes, void of a shred of humanitarian infrastructure, in the southwest region of Al-Mawasi. News from this ‘safe zone’ reveals the horrors of the area, insufficient food, insufficient shelter and a non-reliable water source, equivalent to the occupation army offering Palestinians a slower death which will be introduced through starvation, thirst and infectious disease. Current conditions across Gaza are devoid of sanitation measures as infectious disease begins to take hold in heavily crowded conditions with the bodies of murdered civilians lying in the streets. As reported by the World Food Programme, the situation is dire across the Gaza Strip at large with widespread food and water insecurity including “extremely alarming” consumption gaps experienced by soaring proportions of the population across the Northern and Southern governorates.

Tens of thousands of cases of diarrheal disease have been reported across Gaza with Palestinian children comprising over half of that statistic. Days ago, OCHA released a statement announcing a Hepatitis outbreak in UNRWA shelters which are operating at several times their capacity. As the days pass, illness and deaths from infectious disease are feared to dramatically increase. This signals a multi-system failure of the most basic tenets of humanitarian response to civilians and children caught in conflict: the provision of food, clean water, and medication and protection from hostilities.

In tandem with the dropping of bombs come heart-breaking reports of children crushed in the rubble, entire families gone and, just days ago, the murder of a beloved Palestinian professor. In an instant, explosive flash, We Are Not Numbers co-founder, poet and academic Refaat Alareer’s life was violently ended in an occupation air strike which killed numerous members of his family, including four of his nieces. In the chaos of occupation forces’ bombardment and unpausing of the ‘temporary ceasefire,’ Alareer was vocal against the hostilities and senseless slaughter of civilians.

Palestinian Poet Refaat Alareer. Photo Source: Middle East Eye

Lying among the tangled wreckage across the Gaza strip are the remains of 104 Mosques and numerous Churches which have been targeted by occupation airstrikes, even as a flow of IOF-taken video of their opening of a Synagogue inside of a stolen building in Gaza circulates through social media, one of the many instances of racial incitement and antagonism that have been pouring out of the embattled enclave. The sight of the breathtaking, medieval Great Omari Mosque in Gaza had become an iconic one, and which now also tragically lies among the wreckage with its surviving minaret standing before it. And the majestic Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church, built around 1150, was notably the oldest Church still in use in Gaza and one which was sheltering displaced Palestinian Muslims and Christians during the bombardment, 16 of whose lives were ended within its destroyed walls.

The lives of 63 journalists have thus far been stolen through this conflict. 133 UN aid workers. Over 250 health workers. The numbers increase by the day. And with Israeli authorities vowing to continue this horrific aggression for two more months, the reports will continue to flash before the eyes of the world who are witnessing the living nightmare that Gaza’s population is trapped within. Among the casualties and death and destruction, justice too, lies buried in the rubble.

Israeli settlers/soldiers abduct a Palestinian, destroy and steal property in Khallet Al-Dabaa

8 December 2023 | International Solidarity Movement | Masafer Yatta, Occupied West Bank

In the morning of December 8th, around 50 soldiers/settlers, most of whom wore masks, invaded the Palestinian village of Khallet Al-Dabaa, in Masafer Yatta, and violently attacked 5 people. The aggressors abducted Salah, a Palestinian man, father of 4 young children. They also ransacked and seriously damaged some houses and the elementary school of the village, destroying doors, windows and furniture. The soldiers/settlers stole 6000 shekels ($1600), and various property such as power drills, jackets, flashlights, binoculars. They also tore bags of food, stepped on bread and vegetables.

The soldiers/settlers then blocked the road to a nearby village and prevented an ambulance from reaching a diabetic 84-year-old Palestinian who needed urgent medical attention.

The 84-year-old Palestinian man passed out during the confrontation, while the head of the village council, Muhammad Rabai, who had called the ambulance, was arrested by the Israeli soldiers/settlers.

It was unclear whether the aggressors, who arrived in civilian vehicles, were settlers, Israeli army soldiers, or a group composed of both.

Palestinians in Masafer Yatta have been reporting that it is currently almost impossible to distinguish between army and groups of settlers, as the latter roam the area heavily armed, wearing Israeli army uniforms and balaklavas, and accompanied by soldiers.

During the attack, eyewitnesses recognized a particularly violent settler, going by the name of Eitan Yardeni, who resides in the illegal Israeli outpost of Havat Ma’on.

Colonial attacks and ethnic cleansing in Masafer Yatta

In the 1980s, Israeli authorities designated a part of Masafer Yatta as ’Firing Zone 918’, a closed military zone. This zone includes the land where Khallet Al-Dabaa is located. Since this declaration, residents have been at risk of forced eviction, house demolitions, and forcible transfer. One of the houses that was damaged during the December 8th attack has been demolished and rebuilt 5 times in the past.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), around 1,150 Palestinians lived in the firing zone in 2022, including 569 children.

In the past weeks, residents of Masafer Yatta have reported violent and continuous raids by armed settlers and Israeli soldiers, who assault and abduct Palestinians, destroy critical infrastrcutre in the villages such as power grids and water tanks, and steal property and livestock.

Palestinians have also been left homeless following demolitions by army bulldozers in several villages including Deirat, Umm Lasafa and Umm Qissa.

In October, Palestinians from the village of Khirbet Zanuta were forcibly displaced after armed settlers threatened them that they had 24 hours to leave their homes, before the settlers would come back and “kill everyone”.