March of Great Return

Three more Palestinians were killed and 611 wounded last Friday, when tens of thousands of Gazans continued their largely non-violent protests at the Gaza-Israel border.
Yet as the casualty count keeps climbing – nearly 45 dead and over 5,500 wounded – the deafening silence also continues. Tellingly, many of those who long chastised Palestinians for using armed resistance against the Israeli occupation are nowhere to be found, while children, journalists, women and men are all targeted by hundreds of Israeli snipers who dot the Gaza border.

After Yaser Murtaja, Ahmed Abu Hussein, another Gazan photojournalist‎, who was seriously injured last Friday while documenting the March of Return, succumbed to injuries Wednesday afternoon, Gaza’s Health Ministry has said.
Hussein‎ was stationed at a permissible distance from the border fence when an Israeli sniper shot the 24-year-old journalist in the stomach, causing grave injuries.
Hussein‎ was working as a photojournalist for Gaza’s Al-Shaab radio station and wore a protective vest marked “Press” at the protest on April 13, witnesses said, according to Reuters.

According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), the Palestinian death toll since March 30, 2018 “has risen to 33, including 4 children and 1 photojournalist, and the number of those wounded has risen to 2,436, including 410 children, 66 women, 22 journalists and 9 paramedics.”
There have been no Israeli casualties.

GAZA — (Analysis) As the U.S., U.K. and France bomb Syria, claiming to support its people but in reality adding misery to a country that has had more than its fair share of violence, the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is almost completely ignored by the international community. This is because the perpetrator of this seven-decade-long disaster is Apartheid Israel.  

Write down: I, Uri Avnery, soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, hereby dissociate myself from the army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief.
We don’t belong to the same army, or to the same state. We hardly belong to the same human race.
Is my government committing “war crimes” along the border of the Gaza Strip?
I don’t know. I am not a jurist.

LONDON — Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing leader of the British Labour Party, has shown that his long-time support of the rights of the Palestinian people remains unwavering, especially given the stream of reports of atrocities committed by apartheid Israel against the dispossessed people of Palestine residing on the Gaza Strip.

While the world condemns Israel’s use of lethal force, Israeli politicians and policy makers defend soldiers’ cheering of shooting unarmed Palestinians.
A video showing Israeli occupation soldiers shoot an unarmed Palestinian inside Gaza, near the border fence, and later cheering emerged through social media Monday.

In early 2010, one of Washington DC’s most prestigious think tanks was holding a seminar on the Middle East which included a discussion of Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 assault on Gaza which killed about 1,300 Palestinians. When the death toll was mentioned, one expert on the panel smiled enigmatically and intoned: “It’s unfortunate, but every once in a while you have to mow the lawn.”

Thousands of protesters returned to the border last Friday, burning great heaps of tyres to produce a black smokescreen which they hoped would hide them from Israeli snipers. Gaza’s health ministry has said that five people were killed and 1,070 people were wounded on Friday, including 293 by live fire.

GAZA — Tens of thousands of residents in the besieged Gaza Strip plan on returning to the Israeli-controlled border Friday in defiance of menacing promises from Tel Aviv to use massive and disproportionate force. The event will occur exactly one week after the Israelis massacred 17 unarmed demonstrators with live ammunition on Palestinian Land Day.
The protest is the latest in a six-week-long set of nonviolent protests meant to commemorate the continuing dispossession of the Palestinian people and the absorption of ancestral Palestinian land by the country now known as Israel.