THE United Nations (UN)-designated International Day for Solidarity with Palestinian People came and went last Wednesday, November 29, largely ignored by the international media houses covering Israel’s War on Gaza.
By then, the war had already cost over 15,000 Palestinian lives following the bold October 7 attack by Hamas that took 1,146 Israeli citizens and 390 soldiers’ lives — according to latest revised Israel Defense Force (IDF) figures.

According to the UN’s website, the International Day is observed each year “in accordance with General Assembly mandates” and the date was chosen “because of its meaning and significance to the Palestinian people.”
On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 (II), also known as the Partition Resolution, “as it provided for the establishment in Palestine” of a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State”, with Jerusalem as a corpus separatum under a special international regime.”

But the UN’s website also notes that “of the two states to be created under this resolution, only one, Israel, has so far come into being….”
And it adds, “The Palestinian people, who now number more than eight million, live primarily in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967, including East Jerusalem, in Israel, in neighbouring Arab States and in refugee camps in the region.”

The solidarity day, it further explains, “traditionally provides an opportunity for the international community to focus its attention on the fact that the question of Palestine remains unresolved and that the Palestinian people have yet to attain their inalienable rights as defined by the General Assembly — namely, the right to self-determination without external interference, the right to national independence and sovereignty and the right to return to their homes and property, from which they have been displaced…”

What the day also actually observes is that for over 75 years, millions of Palestinians have been subject to Apartheid treatment in their own land (as with Zimbabwe and South Africa before liberation), their homes and land progressively and aggressively occupied, under force, by Jews claiming Palestine to be their Holy Land.
Up to October 7, the 2.3 million citizens of Gaza had, for over 56 years, been actual prisoners in their own homes, fenced by the IDF into a 105-square-mile (365 square-kilometer) strip between Israel, Egypt and sea, citizens without a state, unable to leave without Israel’s permission.

Three weeks later, as the rest of the world observed their International Solidarity Day, Palestinians were at the beginning of the end of a four-day ‘pause’, but only after Gaza had already been reduced to ruins, with 6,150 children and 4,000 women killed and 4,700 women killed, over 1,800 children among the 7,000 Palestinians missing – and another 7,000 Palestinian men, women and children in Israeli prisons.

While solidarity demonstrations took place on that day in time-zones as far apart as South Africa, Norway and Bangladesh, 1.8 million Palestinians were herded like sheep into Southern Gaza; and half the population (1.3 million) were cramped into 156 UN schools-turned-humanitarian shelters for scared and injured families whose homes were bombed while they slept.
South Africa’s parliament voted to sever diplomatic and economic ties with Israel and the Palestinian flag was raised at city hall in Oslo, the mayor of Norway’s capital calling on the world not to forget the over-5,000 children by-then killed in Gaza.

Qatar led tough international negotiations for the four-day truce that was extended once and families of Israeli captives and their supporters marched by thousands from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, to press the Benjamin Netanyahu administration to stop the bombing, which had already taken the lives of 60 un-named Israeli captives.
But Netanyahu and his War Cabinet saw any ‘pause’ in the pummeling of Gaza as a weakness that would benefit Hamas and reluctantly agreed, under pressure at home and abroad — but only after destroying most of Gaza’s hospitals and rendering the rest inoperable, reducing most residential buildings to rubble, cutting water, electricity, fuel and food supplies and leaving nowhere safe in Gaza.

But with the world enraged by the number of killings of children, women and elderly citizens by the IDF in pursuit of the impossible mission of ‘obliterating Hamas’ and as more nations press for an eventual permanent ceasefire, the minute the so-called ‘humanitarian pause’ ended, Israel resumed its bombing, killing over 700 Palestinians in the first 24 hours.
Western leaders and foreign ministers representing most of the nations that arm Israel (USA, UK, Germany and France included) flocked to Doha this week to try to convince Israel to stop the resumed bombing campaign, while Muslim and Middle East foreign ministers went to Beijing, where China, as current President of the UN Security Council, joined them in calling on the world to press harder for a real ceasefire and for related UN Resolutions to be respected and implemented.

The US, UK, France and other staunch Western backers were caught between the embarrassment of Israel behaving like a spoilt child turned bad-boy and supporting its ‘right’ to raze Gaza to the ground and continue killing Palestinians like flies, in the name of self-defence.
Before and after Palestinian Solidarity Day, no less than US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, warned Israel that at its current rate, it may win this fight but it’ll lost the ultimate ‘strategic battle’ – and that, after former US 5-Star General David Petraeus also warned Israel that the more Palestinians die, the more ‘bad guys’ will be created.

Meanwhile, one day after Israel resumed its bombardment of Gaza, it was revealed that, thus far, the US had supplied 15,000 bombs, 57,000 artillery shells and 100 ‘Buster Bombers’ to Israel to help ‘defend’ itself.
And after only two months (60 days) 7,117 Palestinians are dead, including 9,885 women and children and the killing has widened to the West Bank and Occupied Jerusalem, assuring Palestinians — and the world – that after 46 consecutive observances, now more than ever, Every Day is Palestine Solidarity Day.