Innocent people suffering worst state terrorism by Israel
Zubair Qureshi
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the National Press Club on Monday to demand an end to the ongoing aggression by the occupying Israeli forces against the innocent Palestinians.
The protest, co-organized by Awami Workers Party, Women Democratic Front, the Progressive Students Federation and civil society organizations and activists, called for immediate action by the Pakistani government and international community to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing attack in Gaza and forced evictions in East Jerusalem.
They said that the only solution to the long-running conflict lay in a complete end to the Israeli occupation and the granting of full freedom and equal citizenship of the Palestinians.
At least 192 people, including 58 children and 34 women, have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the latest violence began a week ago.
Speaking on the occasion, filmmaker Samar Minallah said that the recent round of violence against civilians in Gaza had once again exposed the brutality of the Israeli occupation and the hypocrisy of Western powers.
She said it was shameful how the mainstream corporate Western media was presenting a one-sided view of the atrocities that blamed Palestinians from the suffering visited upon them for decades.
She said that while western media outlets continued to describe Israeli war crimes as ‘clashes’, the world was increasingly beginning to wake up to the the colonial occupation, systemic oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by Israel.
WDF Islamabad President Huda Bhurghri said that the moral bankruptcy of Western states and their institutions is laid bare by the relentless bombing of residential buildings in Gaza, the third most densely populated area in the world, where 42% of the people are between the ages of 0-14 years.
However, she said, the visible increase in support for the just Palestinian cause across the globe was evidence that the tide is turning against the inhumane brutalization of Palestinians and those complicit in the slaughter of unarmed civilians by an occupying military force.
Addressing the gathering, AWP federal leader Aasim Sajjad Akhtar said that Israel was the last major outpost of European settler-colonialism in the world, which followed the same brutal practices and was kept in place by the same imperialist forces.
He said the battle for Palestinian freedom was not a religious war, as demonstrated by the shameful unconditional recognition of Israel by oil-rich ‘Muslim’ Gulf states, but a fight for the recognition of the basic human freedom and dignity of Palestinians and all oppressed peoples of the world.
He said that the nature of the struggle necessitated an internationalist response by all freedom-loving people around the world.
He said that reconciliation in the occupied territories would only be possible if there was an acknowledgement of Israeli crimes and equal citizenship for the Palestinians under a one-state solution.
Lawyer Humaira Masihuddin for Pakistanis to support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement to target companies and organizations that were economically involved in the occupied territories in order to end international economic support for Israel’s occupation.
She also demanded that the government lobby with other Muslim countries to build international support in order to bring an end the terror endured by the Palestinians.
