The past nine months of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza have spurred an unprecedented global awakening to the plight of the Palestinian people. At no point in the 76 years since the formation of the state of Israel and the unleashing of the Nakba has there been such sustained and open anger at Israel and such widespread solidarity with the Palestinians. The massive demonstrations in cities across the globe, the severing of diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv, the recalling of ambassadors, rulings from world courts against Israel, and mounting demands for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state—none of this would have taken place without the impetus of Hamas’s armed insurrection on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent war of annihilation in Gaza.
It has been revealed that the Ben Gurion Canal, which opens to the Red Sea from the Gaza-Ashkelon line, is behind Israel‘s genocide and dehumanization plan in Gaza. Within the scope of the plan, Israel aims to push Egypt further into a corner by eliminating Suez in the global trade and energy corridor and becoming a global trade and energy logistics center. Experts are of the opinion that this situation will shake the strategic-energy balance of China’s Belt and Road Project and the Mediterranean, along with the Strait of Hormuz, which is the transfer point of 30 percent of the world’s energy, and may trigger a global war.
Every day the Palestinian civilian death toll is rising dramatically as Israel continues with its genocidal bombing and ground invasion of Gaza, and as settler and military violence towards Palestinians in the West Bank intensifies. “It’s a closure, it’s a curfew, in many places in the West Bank,” Issa Amro says. “It’s not normal life these days. Soldiers are everywhere, settlers are everywhere, people are afraid to leave their homes, they don’t go to work, they don’t go to school, they don’t go to universities.” After losing touch with Issa during the day because he was escaping from settlers who were chasing him in Hebron, we managed to reconnect over the phone and record a nine minute conversation about the hell working people in Palestine are going through right now and what their fellow workers in the US and Canada can do to stop the slaughter. Issa Amro is a Palestinian human rights defender living in Hebron, in the Occupied West Bank. He is the co-founder and former coordinator of the grassroots group Youth Against Settlements. Days prior to this recording, Issa was evicted from his home in Hebron and tortured by Israeli troops.
Prefatory Note: A modified version of this interview conducted by Daniel Falcone, with a long introduction was published online in Truthout on October 29, 2023, The situation in Gaza and its increasingly regional implications grow more humanly distressing and politically menacing with each passing day. Israel has succeeded in influencing the Global West and its corporate main media platforms to accept two interpretations of events following the Oct 7 Hamas attack that are at best highly contentious and controversial and, in my understanding, deeply misleading and distorting: (1) that Hamas is nothing other than a group of terrorists engaged in barbaric crimes, and should be addressed in the same manner as ISIS and Al-Qaeda; (2) that it is legitimate in such a conflict to override normal rules of international law, even to the extent of engaging in genocidal means of ethnic cleansing.
Palestinian officials, U.N. experts, and even Israeli media say nearly 7,000 men, women, and children have been killed by Israel’s indiscriminate airstrikes and shelling.
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