'Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation. Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing.'
Activists are gathering in London today – February 15 – to protest Donald Trump’s ‘grotesque’ plan to ‘take over’ the Gaza strip and forcibly remove the Palestinian population of more than two million.
Trump recently announced he wants the US to take over the Gaza Strip, send the Palestinians elsewhere, and redevelop the land as the “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
The plan was announced alongside Trump’s ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said it was “worth listening carefully to this idea.”
The protest is being organised by a coalition of pro-Palestine and anti-war groups, including the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Palestinian Forum in Britain, Stop the War Coalition, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Muslim Association of Britain, and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The protesters are marching from Whitehall to the US Embassy to send a message to the UK government and Trump – “freedom for Palestine, no to ethnic cleansing, stop arming Israel.”
A joint statement from the organising groups condemns Trump’s remarks as a revelation of Israel’s long-standing plan for ethnic cleansing. It reads: “The grotesque statements by US President Donald Trump – that the US will ‘take over’ the Gaza Strip and forcibly remove the Palestinian population of more than 2 million – have exposed the long-standing Israeli plan for ethnic cleansing. For more than a year, Israel and its supporters have denied that the true aim of the genocidal assault on Gaza has been the destruction of the Palestinian population, and denial of all of their rights including the right to self-determination. Backed and supported by the USA for its own imperial interests, that objective is now explicit.”
The protest follows comments by United Nation’s top investigator on human rights in Palestine, who said Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza is illegal under international law and “amounts to ethnic cleansing.”
In an interview with Politico, Navi Pillay, chair of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said:
“Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation. Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing.
“There is no way under the law that Trump could carry out the threat to dislocate Palestinians from their land,” Pillay continued.
Image credit: PSC – X screen grab
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