the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 28, 2024
This article is translated from the October 24 issue, #2934 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
On October 18, the Israeli army shot dead Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ military chief in Gaza, boasting that it had “eliminated the mastermind of the October 7 attacks.”
That it took an ultra-equipped Israeli army over a year to kill Sinwar, the methodical destruction of all Gaza’s buildings and a deadly siege on the enclave’s inhabitants, indicates Hamas’ resilience and the fact that it enjoys at least some support among the Palestinian population. For the past year, the elimination of Sinwar has been presented by Netanyahu and his government as the main justification for the massacre of Gazans. But it has not put an end to the war.
Israeli leaders are continuing their military operations, both in Gaza and Lebanon. They do not even pretend to want to resume the negotiations interrupted since the summer. For the eleventh time in a year, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has traveled to the Middle East to once again call for “a diplomatic solution” ... while weakly threatening to reduce military support for Israel, something the U.S. has never done, quite the contrary, whatever the crimes of Netanyahu and his generals.
The Israeli army has resumed the shelling of the northern Gaza Strip, already carried out a year ago, where 400,000 people are trying to survive on limited and intermittent supplies. Nearly 400 people have been killed, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, and thousands more have flocked to the makeshift hospitals that continue to operate in precarious conditions, often without water or electricity. Humanitarian convoys, which are in short supply, are blocked by Israel. In particular, the Israeli army is besieging the Jabaliya camp, home to many descendants of the 1948 Palestinian refugees. Representatives of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that managed health, supplies and schooling in the refugee camps before October 7, denounce the “indescribable horrors” they have seen in Jabaliya.
In Lebanon, bombing raids continue, targeting almost every region of the country, many districts of Beirut and not only Hezbollah strongholds. More than a million people, out of a total Lebanese population of some 4 million, have been displaced under pressure from the Israeli army. That’s in addition to Syrian refugees who have fled the civil war in their country, and all have to find food and shelter in a country already in crisis, plagued by inflation.
Most of the refugees come from southern Lebanon, where the Israeli army has destroyed numerous villages close to the border, including Christian-majority villages unlikely to be harboring Hezbollah troops. This systematic destruction, coupled with constant pressure on UNIFIL troops to abandon their observer positions, suggests that the Israeli army wants to carve out a no-man’s-land, a buffer zone, occupying a wide strip along its border.
Supported at all costs by American imperialism, whose dogs of war they are in the region, and having verified that Iran is doing everything in its power to avoid going directly to war, and for the time being without any massive internal opposition from their own population, the Israeli leaders have a free hand to continue their dirty war.