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The Congress of the South African Trade Unions (COSATU) extends its solidarity to the people of Palestine as we commemorate the 73rd Anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, also known as “the Palestinian Catastrophe”, which is marked on the 15th of May.

 The Nakba is a continual systematic crime of ethnic cleansing, committed by Zionist militias in the 1880s and later in 1948 by the state of Israel against the indigenous Palestinian people to establish a supremacist settler colony. The Zionist project of establishing a homeland in Palestine succeeded in 1948 and has been ongoing to date, translating to the continual displacement and human rights abuses and violations of the Palestinians. 73 years on, Israel is still relentless in its systematic acts of exterminating the physical, geographical, and political existence of the people of Palestine.

 Israel has rendered Gaza; a small landmass inhabited by millions of Palestinians, unconducive for the survival of the people of Palestine as they are continually deprived of food, water, medicine, and electricity. In recent times, the Israeli government has used the Covid-19 pandemic as a way of aiding their genocidal project by stopping the shipment of Covid-19 vaccines to the Gaza strip.

 This year’s 15th of May Nakba commemoration comes amid a series of planned airstrikes and rocket attacks waged against the Palestinian people, by Israeli forces - that have left over 192 people (and counting) dead and many more people injured. COSATU acknowledges this ethnic cleansing that took place in 1948 and continues to stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine!! The only way we can redeem the blood of those who are barbarically killed since the 1948 Nakba is to make sure that their surviving families live in a just society where all citizens are equal regardless of gender, colour, race, ethnicity, sexual background, or religion.

 COSATU condemns these acts of genocide and therefore calls for an end to Israel’s impunity and its systematic crimes against humanity. The federation furthermore calls on the South African government to cut all diplomatic and economic ties with apartheid Israel.

 COSATU vows to continue putting pressure on all governments until human dignity, political, and economic are restored to the people of Palestine.

How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of vicious cruelty?

We shall not rest until the people of Palestine are free!

Issued by COSATU