Palestinian BDS National Committee issues "Urgent Action Alert" following attack on Rafah

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) have issued an "Urgent Action Alert" following a deadly attack in the southern Gaza strip on Sunday where Israeli warplanes assailed Rafah, a city where 1.4 million Palestinians are sheltering. Israeli airstrikes blitzed a supposed "safe area" where forcibly displaced Palestinians took shelter in plastic tents, setting the entire area aflame, murdering at least 40 and injuring hundreds more, many of them women and children.

Former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness discussed this latest massacre, calling it “the crime of crimes,” and lambasted Israel’s blatant disregard for the Genocide Convention. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the deadly attack a “tragic incident” that his government is “investigating." Meanwhile, the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah - recently one of few still operating in Gaza - has been rendered non-operational, according to its director, due to intentional attacks by Israeli forces on the hospital’s staff and the surrounding area.

BDS reprimanded Western powers such as the US and Europe - who fund and send many of the munitions and weapons of war to their Israeli ally - saying, "The Western dominated international system continues to allow Israel to inflict horror after horror, massacre after massacre on Palestinians, with zero accountability. Not just throughout more than 7 months of the world’s first live streamed genocide, but for 76 years."

Yesterday, they called on the people to heighten their boycotts and protests: "Only more people power will lead to wider boycotts, divestment and lawful sanctions to force the US-Israeli genocidal axis to stop and to ultimately help us dismantle the underlying regime of oppression."

They laid out seven steps in a course of action to put an end to the "US-Israeli genocidal axis," which are as follows:

1. Mobilize to pressure your government and parliament to immediately impose a #MilitaryEmbargo on Israel, as called for by the UN Human Rights Council and dozens of UN human rights experts. This should include the sale and transfer of weapons, military equipment and dual-use technology, cutting of military funding in the case of the US, and a ban on importing Israeli arms and spyware and on joint military and security projects.
2. Join groups, particularly workers’ unions, in peacefully disrupting the transport of weapons, weapon parts, and other military equipment to Israel, including in transit states.
3. Act against the companies profiting from Israel’s genocide and apartheid.
4. Wherever possible, join demonstrations in your country calling for: Ceasefire NOW! Lift the Siege NOW! #MilitaryEmbargo.
5. Organize or join groups organizing peaceful disruptions, sit-ins, occupations targeting complicit governments’ offices, MPs, complicit public and private institutions, or complicit companies targeted by BDS campaigns.
6. Raise awareness around you about Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid and support your community/center/workplace/trade union/organization to declare themselves an Apartheid Free Zone (AFZ). A toolkit and a checklist are available.
7. If not done yet, convince your city council/trade union/cultural and academic institution to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and lifting the siege and to cut existing complicit ties with apartheid Israel, its complicit institutions, and companies enabling its genocide and underlying apartheid.

Please see here for more information. 

BDS is a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. According to their website, the organisation "upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity."