FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts: Susan Abulhawa: +1.267.391.5386 Suzanne Adely: +1.773.510.7446
VFP member Danny O’Brien, VFP Board member Gerry Condon, and VFP Advisory Board member, journalist Chris Hedges, are among an international delegation of writers, lawyers, journalists, activists, students, and organizers who arrived in Cairo, Egypt this week with the goal of reaching the Rafah border crossing with Gaza. VFP Advisory Board member, retired Colonel Ann Wright, was refused entry into Egypt.
Their goal is to exert pressure to open the border for the immediate entry and sustained flow of urgent humanitarian aid—food, water, fuel, and medical aid to 2.3 million Palestinians facing starvation and death as genocidal Israeli airstrikes continuously pound defenseless civilians.
In response to the Palestinian and Arab calls for civil society to challenge Israel’s deadly occupation by heading immediately towards the Egyptian-Palestinian crossing to bring urgent humanitarian relief to 2.3 million people, we have just submitted a request to the Egyptian authorities for permission to travel to Rafah.
Israel’s wanton bombing has killed over 11,000 people, a shocking number of whom are children who were gruesomely buried alive in their bombed homes or had their bodies shredded by these bombs. Thousands more remain unreachable under the rubble, and over 27,000 are injured. Water, food, fuel, and medical supplies have been cut off, with only a trickle of aid trucks making it through the Rafah crossing.
The healthcare sector has completely collapsed, either through direct Israeli bombing or from lack of medicine and electricity to treat patients. Israel’s targeting of civilians includes destruction of more than 50 percent of homes in Gaza, nearly all bakeries, water treatment plants, schools, clinics, and other infrastructures for life.
As Palestinians in Gaza teeter on the brink of death, without sustenance or shelter, we call for an immediate end to Israel’s barbaric bombing and invasion of Gaza. We call on the world to intervene in any and every capacity to end the ongoing genocidal attacks against a defenseless civilian society, which has been unrelentingly terrorized for 35 days.
We urge all peoples and governments to act urgently to end this horror. There are hundreds of aid trucks currently parked in the desert waiting to enter the Rafah crossing. We demand they be allowed to reach Palestinians whose needs are dire and desperate.
Stop Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza Now! Open the Rafah border Now!
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Participating organizations:
National Lawyers Guild
Veterans For Peace
International Action Center
US Peace Council
Black Alliance for Peace
Samidoun
International Association of Democratic Lawyers
Workers World Party
Sanctions Kill
Palestine Writes
United National Antiwar Coalition
Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees
Philly Palestine Coalition
Free Julian Assange Committee