National protests calling for an end to the bombing and siege of Gaza to be held tomorrow in Cardiff and London.
“We are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide” – Scholars
Protests have erupted across the world, including mass mobilisations in the Middle East being likened to the Arab Spring.
By SC Cook. Cover image, hundreds protest in Swansea, via Swansea Community for Palestine
As Palestinians in Gaza continue to face daily bombardment from Israel, with no escape and images of the horror spread across the world, more people are taking to the streets in protest.
A national mobilisation will take place in Cardiff on Saturday 21st October, assembling at 12 noon outside Cardiff City Hall and marching on The Senedd. People from across Wales are being urged to join the march which has been called by The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Muslim Council of Wales and others.
It comes after over 800 scholars signed an open letter warning of a genocide being committed by the Israeli state.
Welsh health workers plan to form their own block of the protest, in solidarity with their counterparts in Gaza who are working in intolerable conditions.
Not only are Gazan medics having to treat increasing numbers of patients whose injuries include loss of limbs and shrapnel wounds from constant air raids, they are doing so with a lack of vital electricity and fuel due to the Israeli siege of the coastal strip.
They are seeing patients dying not just due to bombs, but also as life support machines shut down.
Israel has bombed several hospitals, and last week ordered the evacuation of 22 health settings that were treating around 2,000 patients. But with nowhere to go and moving patients impossible, many have been sitting targets housing not just vulnerable patients but those already seeking refuge.
This was the backdrop to the devastating attack on the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, which killed at least 500 people and which two days earlier had received warning of an attack by the Israeli military.
Speaking in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, surrounded by dead bodies, a British Palestinian surgeon, Ghassan Abu-Sittah, described the apocalyptic scene.
After the ceiling of his operating room collapsed, he moved to the emergency room where he could see “bodies of children piled up, both dead, not moving and wounded.”
Helping move people to the ambulance near the car park, he says there were “body parts everywhere.”
He said the courtyard was full of families who had sought refuge inside the hospital, thinking it was a safe haven. “It is these very same families who are now dead or critically wounded as a result of this attack,” he said before delivering a withering attack on those responsible.
“This is a war crime that the world has seen coming,” Abu-Sittah said. “Israel has been warning the entire world that it was going to attack Palestinian hospitals and it did exactly that. Every Western politician who has declared unconditional support for Israel…has the blood of these children on their hands.”
Following the hospital attack, protests and vigils were held in both Cardiff and Swansea, after both cities had already seen several hundreds march in the preceding days.
Spontaneous protests also erupted across the Middle East, including in the occupied West Bank and Jordan, where the Israeli embassy was partially set on fire.
As soon as outrage began to spread across the world, Israel tried to distance itself from the bombing and blame a misfiring rocket from Palestinian fighters, but its case quickly unravelled, see bottom.
The situation has only highlighted the situation now facing the people of Gaza, whose entire existence is under threat.
As well as the Middle East, mass protests were also seen in America and Europe, including in Athens and Paris this week, despite Emmanuel Macron attempting to ban the demonstration as part of a continent-wide crackdown on Palestine solidarity.
But since Israel started its latest offensive, which surpasses anything seen before in terms of its brutality, the need for the Palestine solidarity movement has never been greater.
Protests are already having an effect, and those in the Arab world, including in neighbouring Egypt, Jordan and Yemen, have seriously weakened US authority and made an Israeli ground invasion less likely.
Some are even talking about the biggest mass mobilisation in the region since the Arab spring in 2011 / 12.
Even before the hospital bombing on Tuesday evening, the UN said that at least 4,200 Palestinians had been killed in just 10 days, with over one million people displaced and large areas in the Gaza Strip reduced to rubble. Over 10,000 have been injured.
The current assault began on Oct 7th and came after Hamas made an unprecedented incursion into Israeli territory, destroying part of the border fence and entering several towns and villages, where both civilians and military personnel were killed. Children and young people were among the dead.
In total, around 1400 Israelis- both civilian and military -were killed in the attack and subsequent battle, as well as 1500 Palestinians who were either part of the Hamas operation or had joined in from nearby, having seen that the unthinkable had happened and the prison wall had been breached.
Over 100 hostages were taken and the attack has had a huge impact on Israeli society, both in terms of the loss of life but also the internal displacement and the political crisis for Netanyahu, who Israelis overwhelmingly blame for the attack and want out of office.
As a result of the humiliation and crisis brought upon the security state, Israel is inflicting collective punishment on the more than 2 millions Palestinians in Gaza.
It is among the darkest moments in an occupation and siege lasting generations.
As well as over 4,000 dead, more than 1,000 children have been killed, as well as at least 11 Palestinian journalists, 28 medical staff, and 14 UN staff. Almost 800 scholars have signed an open letter warning of a genocide in Gaza.
“As scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies,” they write, “we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Israeli defence officials have not hidden their intentions to inflict maximum suffering on the people of Gaza, with one referring to civilians in the strip as “human animals” and President Benjamin Netanyahu describing Palestinians as “the children of darkness.”
Schools, universities and hospitals have not been spared from the bombing. Israel cut off supplies of food, water, fuel and electricity over a week ago. UN officials have warned of disease spreading among children due to contaminated water.
This week Al Jazeera reported that over 100 families had fled five residential towers before they were flattened by Israel. They are now on the streets, with UN schools, universities and wedding halls at capacity.
On Thursday evening, Israel bombed a Greek Orthodox Church that had been sheltering refugees. The ministry said a large number of people had been killed in the church, which was the oldest in Gaza.
These are war crimes committed on a daily basis, but Western leaders are more concerned with attacking protesters who are raising the alarm than they are at stopping a genocide.
In the West Bank too, at least 75 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops or settlers since October 7, according to ministry figures.
This is the backdrop to this weekend’s protests, which as well Cardiff will also take place in London, where some 150,000 amassed last weekend.
The event will be the Welsh capital’s second major demonstration in as many weeks.
Speaking to voice.wales at the march last week, Alaa Khundakji, a Welsh Palestinian and NHS worker who has family in Gaza, said she was marching “because the Palestinians need a voice to be able to talk about all these injustices that have been going on for 75 years.”
She described the media and political reaction in Britain as intimidating. “It’s really upsetting how one-sided it is, the way Palestinian are dehumanised in the media.”
“You don’t feel like you can speak out safely as much as you did before,” she said “That’s what’s scary about it.”
She was speaking as the UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, sought to define the Palestinian flag as a hate symbol and protesters have been attacked by both her government and major newspapers alike.
Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ has been reaffirmed relentlessly by British politicians in both the Tory government and the Labour opposition. The hell that now exists for the people of Gaza is the consequence of this unwavering support.
Despite the stifling political atmosphere in Britain, however, opposition to what Israel is doing in Gaza has grown.
Many in Labour see Keir Starmer’s failure to even call for a ceasefire, even as a huge majority of the British public back the idea, as the final straw.
Several Labour councillors have resigned in disgust as well as leading party activists, including the Executive Committee of Ceredigion Constituency Labour Party.
The outcry has forced Starmer to backtrack from his previous position. He is also aware of a clear public mood that is not in Israel’s favour, reflected in the refusal of The Senedd and the English Football Association, among others, to fly the Israeli flag. There is clearly the space for a Palestine solidarity movement to broaden and deepen.
Trade unions have been urged to play a more active role in stopping the bombing, after some who have vocally backed Palestine have been less visible in the past two weeks.
Speaking to Tribune Magazine, Muhammad Aruri, who serves as the head of legal for the General Union of Palestinian Workers, provided a distressing update on the situation in Gaza for union members there. Aruri disclosed that Israeli forces have apprehended thousands of Gazan workers holding valid work permits for employment in Israel.
Speaking to reporter Taj Ali, Aruri made the call to unions who in the past had shown their support “Please show solidarity with our workers. Support us in our time of need,” he said.
Unite the Union – the UK’s largest trade union, has been criticised by some of its own members on social media for not outright condemning the Israeli bombing in a statement released earlier this week.
“Unite the Union ought to do better, produce a statement that reflects the pro-Palestine policy of the union and encourage its members to be out on the national demonstration on Saturday,” one member wrote on the X platform.
The group Workers in Palestine, a coalition of Palestinian trade unions, has put out a global solidarity call for unions to refuse to handle Israeli arms and build active opposition to arms trading with Israel.
Taking up the call, a group of Unite members have written an open letter calling for their union to take a stronger position against the war being waged on the people of Gaza.
“What we are seeing before us is a total massacre of civilians, with more than 1,030 children killed since October 7th,” they write. “As trade unionists we must always stand on the side of justice, both in word and in deed.”
Senior trade union figures with ASLEF, the RMT and the NEU have said they will address the London rally tomorrow.
For more information on the Cardiff protest, see Cardiff Palestine Solidarity Campaign
The hospital attack and a history of disinformation
The health ministry in Gaza said the blast at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza was caused by an Israeli air raid, with a senior health official revealing in a press conference that the hospital had already been hit with two warning shots from Israel over the weekend.
Holding up images of the damage caused, Yousef Abu Al-Rish said that an Israeli army officer called the hospital director a day earlier and asked for the evacuation of the facility.
Outside the hospital, standing amongst the dead, a British Palestinian surgeon described the true horror of the bombing. He said how, contrary to some reports suggesting the building was not damaged, the ceiling of his operating room collapsed.
Israel has sought to deny responsibility, even though in a now deleted social media post moments after the explosion, a key adviser to Benjamin Natanyahu announced that Israeli Air Forces had struck a hospital in Gaza.
Even reporters with news agencies sympathetic towards Israel – including the BBC and CNN – admitted that a Palestinian rocket would not be able to cause such levels of destruction or loss of life.
Channel 4 news investigated a recording that had been offered by the Israeli military that they said showed two Hamas operatives discussing a failed missile launch, thus proving the IDF right. But two language experts brought in by the channel said the recording had to be a fake, due to the accent and dialect.
The report also said that Israel’s claim that the rocket had come from a nearby cemetery also had to be false.
Equally, Al Jazeera conclusively broke down the Israeli claim that a video showed a misfiring rocket go on to hit the hospital, saying the videos and time stamps did not back this up.
Some, including the BBC, have said that the crater left did not appear to be the result of a certain type of Israeli bomb, but Channel 4 said more evidence was needed to assess this claim and did not rule out other types of weapons used by Israel regardless.
An audio recording of the blast also appears to prove the case that it was more likely an Israeli strike, as well as health workers describing the sound of the bomb before it hit.
But western leaders and media outlets have responded overwhelmingly by taking Israel’s denials at face value, despite the state’s long history of lying about the atrocities they have committed.
Such was the case with the execution of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who Israel initially denied killing but was later found out to have done so.
And just last week, an aid convoy was bombed in Gaza, killing 70 and wounding 200. Israel initially denied involvement, but the Financial Times concluded that, “Analysis of the video footage rules out most explanations aside from an Israeli strike.”
There are many more examples that could be given, including the Welsh filmmaker Dominic Miller who was killed by the IDF whilst shooting a documentary in Gaza in 2003. The IDF initially denied killing Miller, but a coroner in London found the bullets that killed him were those used by the Israeli military.
