For more than 10 weeks, Palestinians have gathered in protest every Friday at the border of Gaza and Israel. Called by organisers the Great March of Return, the mobilisations have demanded an end to the crippling Israeli-Egyptian economic blockade of the Gaza Strip and that families expelled for generations from their homelands be allowed to return.
In response, the Israeli military has unleashed waves of violence on unarmed demonstrators. At least 110 have been killed and more than 12,000 wounded since the protests began on 30 March, the bloodiest day occurring on 14 May – a day called the Nakba (catastrophe) in memory of the original ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, when the state of Israel was formed.
Toufic Haddad, an activist, academic and author of Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory, spoke to Omar Hassan about the meaning of the protests – and what next in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine.
Read the article in Red Flag.