Although a cease-fire has now been declared, Israel has rained bombs on Palestinians for 11 straight days, killing at least 231 people, including 65 children, and wounding over 1,700 people.
More than 1,300 housing units have been completely demolished or severely damaged, leaving about 60,000 people homeless.
Israel bombed a covid testing center, schools, medical clinics, hospitals, sewage systems, water supplies, media offices, a bookstore and publisher, a medical supply warehouse, and an ice cream factory.
Israeli authorities say 12 people have been killed inside Israel from rockets fired from Hamas in Gaza.
As the bombs were still falling on Palestinian families, Biden continued to repeat the mantra that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Is that what it’s called when Israel bombs families and schools and hospitals and water supplies? Defending itself?
For more than 50 years, the U.S. has been the main supplier of weapons to Israel, averaging about $3.8 billion per year in military funding. And over the past 11 days, the Biden administration blocked four statements in the United Nations calling for a ceasefire. At the same time, the Biden administration — while Israel murdered Palestinians — approved the sale of an additional $735 million in weapons to Israel.
And now, finally, on Thursday May 20, Biden has announced that a ceasefire agreement has been reached — arriving only hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries too late. And with another massive arms sale, the U.S. is simply giving the green light for Israel to do this again soon. This so-called cease fire may have put a temporary pause on Israeli bombs, but it does nothing to reduce the ongoing brutality of occupation or the devastation Palestinians have endured.
Nothing has changed between the U.S and Israel. This ceasefire was called not by the goodwill of the Biden administration towards Palestinians — not at all. This ceasefire came from the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who took to the streets over the past several days, and the millions of people who joined them around the world.
This latest U.S.-backed slaughter of Palestinians is a reminder of the urgent need for working people and the oppressed from around the world to take the lead in changing the world — there is no time to wait.
