October 16th, 2023

(1)
　　
　　The Netanyahu-led government of Israel is ready to command its hundred thousand troops and tanks to rush into the Gaza Strip, where 2.2 million people are living. This murderous regime is about to launch another massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, which has already been destroyed by successive air raids since October 8th.
　　Israeli forces issued an order to 1.1 million people living in the northern area of the Strip. It said, ‘Evacuate to the southern area, otherwise you’ll be seen as Hamas combatants.’ They showed ‘evacuation routes’. But this is only a trick by which Zionists try to dodge worldwide condemnations that press them to ‘save citizens from the humanitarian crisis’. Look! Israel’s crafty forces are shooting missiles at people passing along the specified route. It is impossible, in the first place, for a million people, including elders, sick persons and mothers caring infants, to evacuate immediately. The so-called ‘evacuation order’ is an ultimatum or a declaration of genocide against Palestinians issued by the Zionist regime of Israel.
　　Shaken by the dauntless cross-border attacks of Hamas, a Muslim organization in Palestine (October 7th), Zionist Netanyahu has launched a massacre of people in Gaza, screaming, ‘We’ll annihilate Hamas’. This is an attempt to exterminate the self-governing Palestinian territory of Gaza itself as a strong foothold of Palestinian resistance against the Zionist state, together with all the people living there. This is a crazy genocide and nothing else. Don’t let him do that!
　　In the early morning of October 7th, Hamas and other Palestinian armed forces launched more than three thousand rocket bombs all at once into Israeli territories. They destroyed the Netanyahu-built, 60-km long wall for the ‘open-air prison’, which has confined Palestinians for years, together with its observation posts and high-tech surveillance systems. By blasting holes in the wall and destroying the ‘eyes’ of Israeli military and security forces, Hamas commanded more than a thousand militias to rush into Israeli territories. They occupied local police offices and assaulted Israeli military fortresses. Armed Palestinian militias thus continued to battle with Israeli forces for four days.
　　This large-scale offensive frenzied the Zionist government, which was unable to perceive or even expect it beforehand. This government thus launched fiercer aerial attacks on Gaza. Saying ‘We are at war’, Netanyahu has besieged Gaza with a large army by mobilizing more than 360 thousand reserves. He has cut off the supplies of water, electricity, foods and fuels, which are essential for residents to survive there. Netanyahu is really imposing deaths on Palestinians. Further, the Israeli army is concentrating its bombings on UN facilities and UN-run schools and hospitals, to which people are evacuating for safety. Thus, under the command of Netanyahu, Israeli forces have already murdered thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
　　Denounce Israel’s all-out offensive on Gaza! Never tolerate this genocide of Palestinians.
　　
(2)
　　
　　In the middle of the cross-border offensive on October 7th, Hamas militias assaulted not only Israeli soldiers, but also many civilians. At the site of a music festival, they killed many civilians, took a number of people, including women and kids, as hostages and returned to Gaza. Hamas deliberately adopted this hostage-taking tactics in order to take back more than five thousand Palestinians unjustifiably jailed by the Israeli police as political prisoners. (The Hamas leadership announced the number of the hostages is from 200 to 250.) The news is also circulated that Hamas militias assaulted two kibbutzim, murdered agricultural workers and posted on the Web a movie that showed militias beheading the workers. But some analysts of the Middle Eastern situations say that this movie is a fake. Probably the Israeli authorities circulated such a fake movie in order to depict Hamas as savage terrorists.
　　Even though Hamas announced that was for the ‘Palestinian cause’, the act of indiscriminately killing innocent people must be regarded as one that retards the organizing of working people as a class, so that we cannot justify them as far as such an act is concerned.
　　But we say in the first place: what has driven Hamas into such a fierce battle is the extreme brutalities of the Zionist state of Israel, which has been massacring Palestinians like worms, and the crimes of imperialist rulers, who have openly supported and defended Israel. Palestinians in Gaza have been confined within the ‘open-air prison’ for sixteen years. Every time they resisted, they were repressed and mercilessly murdered by Zionist troops and police. The latest cross-border battle of Hamas is nothing but an armed uprising of Palestinians driven by their growing anger at Zionist brutalities.
　　Since the beginning of this century, Israel has repeatedly launched its military attacks on Gaza, sinking Palestinians in seas of blood. Every time Palestinian people rose in anti-Zionist fight, the Zionist state immediately launched far fiercer air raids ‘in retaliation’, massacring people and imposing food and energy blockades. In May this year, far right Zionists overran the Al-Aqsa Mosque, an Islamic holy place, where Palestinians who attempted to protest it were murdered by Israeli security forces. In the West Bank of the Jordan River, armed Zionists have continually intruded into the Palestinian areas in the name of ‘settlement’, expelling Palestinians and murdering them with guns and clubs. That is an armed occupation with the name of ‘settlement’. Because of this violent ‘settlement’, the areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority have been trimmed one after another.
　　Notwithstanding this, imperialist state rulers in America and Europe have tolerated and accepted all the brutalities of the Zionist state, including violent repression and murders, although ‘human rights and democracy’ is their catchphrase.
　　What’s more, Arab state rulers, who have been supposed to support the ‘independence of a Palestinian state’ under the banner of the ‘Arab cause’, are now compromising and colluding with Israel, dazzled by its advanced technologies and money. Egypt and Jordan already have diplomatic relations with Israel, which were followed by the UAE and Bahrein; and, at last, even Saudi Arabia, which proclaims itself as the ‘leader of the Arab world’, has started ‘negotiations for diplomatic relations’. The Hamas leadership, based in Gaza, is bitterly indignant at those Arab rulers for their betrayals. They have pent up a sense of crisis that, if things go on like this, Palestinians may be abandoned by the rest of the world, with the road to an independent Palestinian state perishing.
　　That is why people in Gaza, together with Hamas as their leadership, rose in fierce fight back. They had been enduring desperate situations and quaking in fury for a long time. ‘It would be better to go out and meet them than just sitting here waiting to die’ must be their resolve. The working class and the toiling masses all over the world must squarely face the life-or-death uprising of Palestinians as their out-cry from the depth of grief, as their appeal for the world not to forget Palestinians - even though their battle is accompanied by mistakes - and resolutely stand up in fight.
　　
(3)
　　
　　Workers, students and toiling people all over the world!
　　The Zionist power of Israel is about to command its land forces to rush in to Gaza. There’s no time to lose. Here in Japan, we will create struggles under the banner: Don’t allow the Netanyahu government to launch genocide against Palestinian people! Denounce the brutal massacres!
　　The Biden-led US administration has deployed its two aircraft carrier groups to the Mediterranean, thus giving military support to the Zionist state. Biden is stepping up military intimidation against Iran, which he regards as a strong backer for Hamas. Don’t allow US imperialism to launch a military intervention!
　　We appeal to Muslim people around the Middle East and the whole Islamic world, and to all the toiling people of the world. Rise in a fight to stop the Israeli army’s attacks on Gaza!
　　This October marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Fourth Middle East War (in October, 1973), when Egypt and Syria launched an armed offensive with the aim of regaining the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Hights from the occupier Israel. On this anniversary, Hamas carried out an armed battle against the Zionist power. This in itself bespeaks their revolt against Arab rulers, most of whom have abandoned the ‘Arab cause’ and approached the Zionist regime. Denounce Arab rulers for colluding with the Zionist regime that is continuing to massacre Palestinians.
　　We appeal to the working people in Israel. Stop the Netanyahu government from continuing the war of genocide against Palestinians! Rise in a battle to topple this government!
　　We must fight at the same time to further develop the Ukraine antiwar struggle in Japan.
　　It is a year and eight months since Putin’s Russia started aggression against Ukraine. The battle of Ukrainian people to drive back the invading Russian army from the land of Ukraine is now faced with grave difficulties.
　　In the United States, the Trump-led Republicans are pressing the Biden-led Democratic administration to cut off the military aid for Ukraine. Under this pressure, Biden is surely moving to reduce, or end, the military supports to Ukraine under the pretext of ‘increasing military aid for Israel’.
　　Perceiving this move of the US, Russian ruler Vladimir Putin is gloating and said ‘Ukraine would die in a week if Western military aid stops.’
　　Ukrainian people’s fight to crush the Russian aggression is now facing a critical juncture. Along with struggles against Israel’s aggression against Palestine, we must fight all-out for a world-wide upsurge in the Ukraine antiwar struggle.
　　Workers, students and toiling people all over the world!
　　At this very moment in time, the Netanyahu-led Israeli government is continuing to massacre Palestinians. Don’t allow this Zionist regime to continue genocide. Let us create antiwar struggles all over the world!

(Quoted from the JRCL-RMF weekly, Kaihoh, No. 2791)