Condemn with full force the ongoing genocidal war of the US-Israel against the Palestinian people. Over the past two weeks, this war has intensified with the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza in an attempt to pulverize it and drive out its population.

The state of Israel has brought the decades-long genocide of the Palestinian people to a new level of depravity with the aim of driving them away completely from their homeland.

Thousands of bombs have been dropped on Gaza, the most densely populated parcel of land in the world. Bombs are used indiscriminately against the civilian population and infrastructure, including homes and apartments, schools, hospitals, churches, and health facilities, commercial buildings and business and media offices. The bombing destroyed water and electricity utilities and strained food and fuel supplies.

In two weeks, at least 4,100 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, including more than 1,400 children, while more than a million have been displaced and suffer from hunger and fear. The massacre of more than 600 Palestinians by Israel’s bombardment of a hospital in the northern part of Gaza where thousands were under siege and receiving treatment was the singlemost horrific act.

More than two million Palestinians are crammed into Gaza, a tiny corner of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Israel surrounds it with high walls, and all access are controlled by the Israel Defense Force. About three million Palestinians live in communities in the West Bank, a territory under the control of Israeli forces, alongside the Palestinian Authority that was set up under US-brokered agreements.

The brazen bombing of Gaza is a reminder of the brutal history of oppression suffered by the Palestinians. The land of Palestine was colonized by the United Kingdom in 1917. Since the UK declared that year its plan to build a “Jewish nation” on the land of Palestine, there has been no let up to the oppression and expulsion of the Palestinians. It was carried out in the name of Zionism, the official ideology of the state of Israel, which is committed to the extermination of the Palestinian people. This oppression culminated in 1948 in what was called Al Nakba or The Catastrophe.

US imperialism must be strongly condemned for its blatant support for the genocide carried out by the Israeli government. The US continues to defend Israel’s grave crimes and violations of international humanitarian law. The US government plans to give $10 billion to Zionist Israel, more than its annual $7 billion military aid, the largest in the world, in exchange for Israel serving as a bastion of US imperialism in the Middle East.

As a people who suffered colonial occupation and oppression for hundreds of years, the Filipino people are acutely keen to the suffering of the Palestinian people and their desire to regain true freedom to their homeland.

The Palestinian people and the Filipino people are bound by their struggles against their common enemy—US imperialism, the power behind the atrocities and oppression which they both suffer. Both the state of Israel, which oppresses the Palestinians, and the reactionary state in the Philippines, which oppresses the Filipino people, rely on the US and are submissive to their imperialist master.

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza City is patterned after the indiscriminate bombing of the US in Afghanistan and Syria “against terrorists”. In the same way, the AFP carried out the pulverization of Marawi in 2017, and carries out indiscriminate bombing in different parts of the Philippine countryside. Arms manufacturers from the US and Israel supply planes, bombs, drones and other equipment to the AFP in its bombing and campaign of armed suppression under the guise of “counterinsurgency.”

The armed offensives initiated by the Hamas group on October 7 in Gaza against the Israeli military forces saw the renewed eruption of the Palestinian people’s anger against the wanton oppression and suppression under the Zionist state of Israel.

The armed resistance of the Palestinians is called “terrorism” by Israel and the US (as well as the Marcos government), just as the imperialists condemn all armed revolutionary movements in the Philippines, India, Turkey and other countries. But as shown by the genocide of the Palestinian people, the real terrorist is the state of Israel, with the full support of US imperialism, the number one terrorist in the world. The Filipino people are also suffering from state terrorism, with the armed forces deliberately targeting unarmed civilians to intimidate them and suppress their resistance.

In the face of the national oppression suffered by the Palestinian people and the Filipino people, both have the right to bear arms and pursue the path of armed resistance. The history of the struggle of the Palestinian people, similar to the history of the struggle of the Filipino people for national liberation, is a history of armed resistance. They wage a war with a small and weak force, against a large and powerful force. Both are wars of the people that are necessary and just, supported by broad democratic forces, and bound to achieve victory.