As Palestinians have responded to Israel’s ever escalating brutality with a general strike and protests across dozens of cities and towns, challenging Israeli apartheid everywhere, effective and strategic solidarity is crucial.

Yesterday morning, apartheid Israel committed its worst atrocity since the beginning of the year. 

The Israeli military invaded Jenin refugee camp, using everything from bulldozers to missiles against the population in the densely populated area. In less than four hours, Israeli occupation forces shot dead nine Palestinians, while injuring over twenty others. Four of them are in critical condition. All injuries that the hospitals in Jenin treated were from bullets in the head and chest. Shots were intended to kill. Israeli military targeted at least one ambulance with live ammunition and launched teargas into a hospital. Almog Cohen, deputy minister to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, cheered on the massacre calling it “nice and professional work” and asked the soldiers to “keep killing them”. 

Palestinians are witnessing since the beginning of the year a dramatic escalation of the already well-known crimes of Israeli apartheid, including ethnic cleansing, home demolitions, killings, assaults, invasions and arrests. Since the start of 2023, Israel has killed a Palestinian every 21 hours. Out of the 30 Palestinians murdered, seven were children. 16 were from Jenin refugee camp. 

The horrific killings of yesterday were carried out under the rule of Israel’s most brazenly racist and fascistoid government, headed by long-term Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ministers and officials that openly celebrate and incite murder and hate crimes against Palestinians, and not only them. 

What Palestinians are enduring is the fruit and continuity of 75 years of Israeli apartheid, colonialism and military oppression. 

The people in Jenin refugee camp are the survivors and their descendants of the massacres of the ethnic cleansing of the 1948 Nakba. They are the survivors of the 2002 massacre that lasted for a full 2 weeks. Israeli military has been targeting them over and over again, in a futile attempt to break their steadfastness and determination to continue to stand up for their rights. 

This latest massacre is the logical consequence of international complicity and connivance. 

Every day that the international community grants Israel impunity, more Palestinian blood is shed. 

As Palestinians, we reject any further worn-out statements of concern and condemnation. They are nothing more than attempts to whitewash complicity. 

As we mourn our dead and organize, we call on the world to take action to hold apartheid Israel accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian people:

• Write to/call/meet your local and national representatives in city councils and parliaments and demand concrete action to end commercial, military, diplomatic and other ties of complicity with Israeli apartheid now. 
• Put pressure on your government to demand the UN re-activate its mechanism against apartheid and take concrete steps to dismantle Israeli apartheid, including an immediate military embargo on Israel.
• Join the BDS movement and its campaigns and mobilize your community, organization or institution.