As Israel continues its attacks on Gaza, and Gazan resistance fighters retaliate, the death toll continues to rise; Israeli rhetoric grows more hawkish; the US stands solidly by Israel’s side.
Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza on are the worst the enclave has seen since 2014, when Israeli forces killed 2,200 Palestinians, and Palestinian resistance fighters killed 72 Israelis. One recent Israeli strike alone made about 80 families homeless. As the deaths, injuries, and damage climb, Palestinian resistance groups launch rockets into Israel.
Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 20 Palestinians in Gaza today, the violence coming on the heels of a crackdown on Jerusalem’s Palestinians in which hundreds have been hospitalized.
In a move widely recognized as illegal under international law, Israel has forbidden all fishing in the waters off Gaza. Israel’s blame-the-victim rationale for the ban is to punish Palestinian protest against Israel’s now 14-year-old, illegal blockade of the enclave. Palestinian resistance groups launched several dozen small, homemade projectiles toward Israel in recent days – projectiles that rarely cause injury. In the 1990s, the Oslo Accords set the Gazan fishing zone at 20 miles, but Israel has unilaterally moved the boundary again and again as a form of collective punishment that impoverishes and starves the Palestinian population.
AP claims a Gazan rocket broke a weeks-long “cross border calm,” even though Israeli forces had fired missiles into Gaza, shot at Gazans, and invaded Gaza numerous times in the preceding weeks – read the details…
An explosive Israeli drone, caught in Gazan fishermen’s net, proves it once again: “fishing while Palestinian” can be lethal.
Mary Hughes Thompson, 87, died on February 5, 2021, in Los Angeles, California. Mary was one of the founders of the flotilla movement, and was dedicated to justice in Palestine… see plans to build a playground in Gaza in her honor, tributes from around the world, and two videos about her….
This winter is expected to be even tougher than usual, as Covid lockdown restrictions push yet more people into poverty. More than half the population already lived in poverty as the economy has suffered from the blockade on Gaza and repeated Israeli military operations that have cost the territory nearly $17 billion dollars in the decade from 2007-2017…
News reports about Israeli actions in the Palestinian Territories December 14-17, 2020… Israeli forces shoot teenagers, abduct civilians, destroy property, etc
The forces of occupation are stationed on the periphery but that does not mean they leave Gaza’s inhabitants alone. For years, Israeli troops have laid waste to Gaza’s farmland, using bulldozers, tanks, and toxic chemicals.