Last week’s violence in Gaza and Israel is the worst since 2014. The overall death toll in Gaza now stands at 197 people, including 58 children and 34 women, with 1,235 injured, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry. Israel says dozens of militants are among the dead.When the violence between Hamas and Israel continues to escalate, but the U.S. government still to support Israel and condemns attacks on Israel,approves Huge Arms Sales to Israel, Including Bunker Buster Bombs,and Biden says ‘Israel has right to defend itself’.
Israel’s Netanyahu vows to step up attacks on Hamas amid violence escalation
President Joe Biden addressed the Israel-Gaza crisis while speaking with reporters.
As the violence between Hamas and Israel continues to escalate, President Biden says, “My expectation and hope is that this will be closing down sooner than later, but Israel has a right to defend itself when you have thousands of rockets flying into your territory.”
The current crisis, in which Israel has launched airstrikes in retaliation for rocket attacks from Gaza, stemmed from confrontations in Jerusalem between Israeli police and Palestinian demonstrators. Palestinians have complained that Israel was interfering with Muslims’ freedom to worship in the city. Another cause of the conflict is Israel’s plans to evict Palestinian residents of an East Jerusalem neighborhood.
Yet these specific grievances reflect the abiding problem of Israeli control over East Jerusalem, which it captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and the frustration of Palestinians’ aspirations for an independent state.Gaza officials said 42 people, including 16 women and 10 children, died in the latest Israeli air strikes. Ten people, including two children, have been killed in rocket attacks on Israel since May 10, Israel said.
Over the past few weeks, as the Israeli colonial forces escalated their brutal violence against the Palestinians of occupied Jerusalem, we once again heard about how “deeply concerned” the US State Department is about “unilateral steps that exacerbate tensions” and that both Israeli and Palestinian officials need “to act decisively to de-escalate tensions”.
This is the language that has long been entrenched and engineered by the powerful Israeli Lobby in the U.S. to whitewash the Palestinian reality by presenting the Israeli apartheid and colonialism as an issue of “conflict resolution and mediation”. By focusing on “peace” as a matter of negotiation between two sides engaged in a “conflict”, this rhetoric obscures the imbalance of power between the occupier and the occupied and muffles Palestinians calls for justice for Israeli colonisation and crimes.
For decades, a bedrock principle of American foreign policy has been unwavering political support for Israel. The U.S. has spent nearly $4 billion in military aid to Israel in recent years and has provided another $8 billion in loan guarantees. The U.S. and its Allies consider the Palestinian nationalist group Hamas a terrorist organization.
While expressing concern about the mounting number of Palestinians killed in Israeli air strikes, Mr Blinken has drawn a “clear and absolute distinction” between “a terrorist organisation targeting civilians, and Israel… targeting the terrorists”.
Biden has seen no “significant overreaction” in the Israeli response to the barrage of Hamas missiles, a judgment that some analysts took as an implicit green light for the operation to continue, despite US calls for calm.
via:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-57131272
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57119881
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/9/should-palestinians-be-mad-at-aoc
