North America rallies to condemn Israeli massacres

Following are excerpts from a statement being circulated on the Al-Awda-News listserve.

Friday, June 16—
Emergency National Action—
Protest Israeli Massacres Of Palestinians
5 p.m. at Union Square Park South
[New York]

Rally in anger, in memory, in support of the Palestinian struggle to survive...

Friends and supporters of Justice in Palestine: Join Chicago, New York, Toron to, Montreal, San Francisco, Boston, and dozens of other cities in North America calling for a Day of Action in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their struggle against the Genocidal Apartheid Israeli State.

On June 13, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) committed a new extra-judicial execution in Gaza City, killing 11 Palestinians, including 9 civilian bystanders. The number of extra-judicial executions committed by IOF in the past four days has mounted to six, which have killed 18 Palestinians and wounded at least 40 others. These attacks [are] an implementation of decisions taken by Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz to escalate extra-judicial executions against Palestinian militants to stop launching locally made rockets at Israeli towns. Peretz has been also considering intensifying military operations in the Gaza Strip, whose victims are often unarmed civilians.

According to investigations conducted by PCHR [Palestinian Center for Human Rights], on June 13 an IOF aircraft launched one missile at a civilian vehicle traveling in al-Tuffah neighborhood in the northeast of Gaza City. Two members of the al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad, were in the car. The missile hit the car, killing the two: Hammouda al-Wadiya; and Shawqi al-Saiqali. Pales tinian civilians in the area gathered around the car and two paramedics from the nearby hospital came to provide medical aid.

Immediately, IOF aircrafts launched another missile at the car, killing nine civilians, including a man, his two children and the two paramedics. At least 30 other civilians, including a number of children, were wounded, 12 of them serious[ly].

On June 9, at least seven Palestinian civilians were killed when Israel Navy gunboats firing artillery shells hit a beach in the northern Gaza Strip. Some 40 others were wounded. Among the dead were three children.

As the European and U.S. governments demand the freezing of humanitarian assistance to the people of Palestine, Israel has continued its military attacks, arresting hundreds more civilians, destroying countless homes and property, expanding its illegal settlements and its Apartheid Wall, and imposing more than 500 checkpoints and roadblocks, seriously restricting freedom of movement and suffocating the economic and social life of the Palestinian people.

In the past week, Israeli forces have launched missile air strikes against “targets” in densely populated civilian areas of the occupied Palestinian territories, directly intended to kill Palestinian civilians, a policy that has continued unabated even though the democratically elected Hamas-led Palestinian government, and the vast majority of resistance organizations, have complied with a self-imposed unilateral truce against the Israelis for over a year.

Israel’s army also continues to restrict the movement of ambulances, and has even fired upon ambulances during the recent period, including shooting at one, which was carrying a woman in labor, on May 27, destroying the vehicle’s engine, and delaying the woman’s arrival at the hospital.

End the siege on Palestine now! End Israeli occupation now!