A silent protest was held in Nicosia late on Thursday for journalists recently killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza whilst on duty.
The demonstrators, from various organisations including CY Movement to Gaza, United for Palestine Nicosia, Anatropi and AFOA, held placards with photographs of the killed journalists.
Mathew Stavrinides, on behalf of Genocide-Free Cyprus (GFC), told the Cyprus News Agency that “Israel continues to slaughter the truth, continues to target journalists who are on the ground in Gaza, exposing Israel’s war crimes and genocide”.
Referring to Israel’s stance, he said “they silence them, target them and justify this as silly military operations against Hamas or whatever else. All this is propaganda at the end of the day. This is just a reason to justify war crimes. They try to use any excuse to silence the truth and, so far, they have killed hundreds of Palestinian journalists”.
He spoke of “complicity by the Government” in Cyprus “and the media” “because they don’t discuss enough the events unfolding, because for some reason we give the Israeli version of the story much more clearly than anyone else’s, including Palestinians who are in Cyprus”.
“We are here to show that the Palestinian movement in Cyprus is not going anywhere, even in the difficult moments of summer,” he said.
“We will not accept our Government continuing to be connected politically, economically, militarily, with a criminal state that is under investigation by the ICC, whose leaders have ICC arrest warrants against them for war crimes and crimes against humanity,” he stated.
“Unfortunately, things in Gaza are not improving. They are getting worse. Palestinians are starving day by day. Journalists continue to be targeted and the world remains complicit simply watching the atrocities,” Stavrinides noted.
“When children are slaughtered, when people are mutilated and there is no anaesthesia for their treatment, this is not war. This is genocide. It is time for our Government to start calling it genocide and not just conflict, so it can justify its ties with Israel,” he emphasised.
He argued that Cyprus plays a role in what is happening “whether it is arms transfers through the ports or the use of British bases as a springboard for UK, US and other NATO operations in the region that help Israel’s colonial regime”.
(information from CNA)
