Eric Ruder
Israel has focused its reign of terror on Gaza. While on March 21, Israel announced it had "thinned out its presence" in the Rafeh refugee camp — home to 90,000 Palestinians — it remained under heavy siege.
The Israel Defense Force was preparing to "create a new reality" — in the ominous words of Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz — along Gaza's border with Egypt. Since mid May, Israeli troops rampaged through Rafah, killing 32 Palestinians and demolishing at least 88 homes, which left more than 1000 Palestinians homeless.
"We started continuous air strikes", Mofaz told the Israeli cabinet on May 16. "We will deepen the fighting." Helicopters pounded other smaller Palestinian refugee camps along the border while troops used tanks and armored personnel carriers to cut off all roads into Rafah.
Even before Mofaz's announcement, Paul McCann, spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said that Israel's battering had turned Rafah into a "humanitarian catastrophe". McCann condemned Israel's assault on Rafah as an example of "collective punishment" against Palestinian civilians that violated international law.
Though Israel defended the demolitions and killings as a "legitimate defensive measure", the real reason for the assault was to seek revenge for the killing of 13 Israeli soldiers in three separate incidents during the prior week — Israel's worst military losses since it carried out the Jenin massacre two years ago. Two of the resistance operations destroyed Israeli troop carriers.
The escalation in Rafah promised by the Israeli military also serves as its answer to an Israeli demonstration of 100,000 in Tel Aviv calling for a withdrawal from Gaza — the largest such demonstration in years. When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's conservative Likud Party rejected Sharon's plan to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, the Israeli "peace" movement took up the demand and organised the protest — exposing how much ground the war criminal Sharon and his "left" opponents share.
Israel's destruction of Rafah is, in fact, part of the withdrawal plan, reinforcing Israel's control of a five-mile strip running between Gaza and Egypt dubbed the "Philadelphi route." The house demolitions are designed to widen this strip, which Israel will retain after its so-called withdrawal, so that Israeli forces can control all movement in and out of Gaza.
[Reprinted from Socialist Worker, the newspaper of the US International Socialist Organization. Visit .]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, May 26, 2004.
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