On 30 March every year since 1967, Palestinians and their supporters worldwide commemorate Land Day. The day has come to symbolise the struggle of the Palestinian people for their legitimate rights to their own land, homes and property – to their entire homeland.
This year, the 48th commemoration is not like any one before despite that the delimma is present since ages, but it is different with the Palestinians in Gaza are being killed and starved on a daily basis in defence of their land against the brutal Israeli military aggression over almost six months.
During this course of time, the Gaza enclave has been systematically destroyed. Civilian infrastructure has been targeted by Israeli forces, including homes, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches and governmental and non-government institutions. UNRWA buildings have also been under attack. Gaza is uninhabitable in every practical sense of the word.
175 days since the outbreak of the Israeli war of genocide against Gaza people, the enclave has witnessed the dropping of over 70,000 tons of explosives by the Israeli killing machines on the heads of people living in the most densely populated area in the world.
The Israeli army has executed 2,888 massacres, resulting in the killing and missing of 39,623 Palestinians, including 32,623 martyrs who were reported in hospitals, and another 7000 Palestinians who are still missed under the rubble or reported abducted by the army.
In spite of the widespread wave of killing and displacement across the enclave for 2.3 million Palestinians, Gaza people are defying the claims of early Zionist leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir that the old will die and the young will forget about the 1948 Nakba. Gazans are the ones who are being tortured, killed and maimed, but they still shake the ground under the feet of the Israeli army in defence of their land in Sheikh Redwan, Jabalia, Shuja’yya, Al-Bureij, Kahn Younis, Beit Lahyia and other areas, where the freedom fighters stood firmly by heroic acts they done in the face of the Israeli tyrants.
Land Day commemoration was recorded in the Palestinian calender on 30 March 1976 when the Israeli occupation forces seized thousands of acres of private and communal land within the areas in 1948-occupied Palestine which still had a Palestinian majority population.
A general strike was organised then and people took the streets from the Galilee to the Negev. Confrontations broke out as a result, claiming the lives of ten Palestinians, while hundreds were injured or arrested after coming under Israeli security forces’ assault.
Land Day is thus regarded as a crucial event in the Palestine-Israel land issue and in the relationship between the occupation state and its Palestinian citizens.
Since 1948, successive Israeli governments have issued several laws in attempts to legitimise its control over the occupied Palestinian territories, including the Absentee Law and the Land Law, which have allowed the apartheid state to control more than one million dunums of the most fertile Palestinian land and limit Arab demographic continuity between the Palestinian territories occupied in 1948 and those occupied in 1967.
On Land Day 2024, Millions of people are standing up for Palestinian rights, justice and freedom in a combined struggle against the Zionist regime, the ideology which underpins the occupation state. The struggle against racist Zionism is the epitome of the struggle against racism around the entire world.
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