Israel swapped the blood of the paschal lamb this Passover for the blood of Palestinians but there was no staying of the Angel of Death.
Twenty-one young unarmed Gazans were murdered by Israeli Terrorist Force snipers and over 1,400 injured.
No further evidence for Israel’s status as a murderous, rogue, apartheid state need be adduced.
And what was the crime of these young people? They joined an estimated 30,000 Palestinians in a nonviolent March of Return, which aimed to set up a few camps several hundred meters from the militarised fence surrounding the Gaza Strip.
Their goal was to protest their incarceration in the world’s largest open-air prison as well as the massive confiscation of their ancestral land – after all, 70 per cent of Gaza’s population are 1948 refugees whose families had owned land in what became Israel.
As a serial violator of international law, Israel ignores the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and General Assembly (UNGA) Resolutions 2535 and 3236, which assert the inalienable right of Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return.
Greg Shupak writes: ‘Israeli violence is not defensive; it’s the forceful maintenance of an ethno-state premised upon ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Suggesting that events in Palestine can be understood in terms of “Israel’s right to defend itself” obscures that under international law Palestinians have a right to return to the land from which Israel has evicted them and to liberate themselves from colonial domination, a right that includes the use of armed struggle.’
Gareth W R Smith, Palestine Liberation Centre, Byron Bay
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
