UPDATE - Gazans stage general strike to commemorate Nakba

ADDS CASUALTIES, TWO REPORTERS' NAMES

By Nour Abu Aisha, Mustafa Haboush and Hidaya al-Saidi

GAZA, Palestine (AA) - The Israeli army on Wednesday attacked a Palestinian rally in the eastern Gaza strip leaving 65 Palestinians wounded, the Gaza-based Palestinian health ministry announced.

“Some 65 people, including three paramedics and a civilian defense worker, were wounded by Israeli occupation forces during their participation in the march,” the health ministry said.

The wounded included 22 children and five women.

Sixteen were wounded by live bullets, another 14 by metal bullets, four by shrapnel, 12 because of the explosion of teargas bombs, four suffered suffocation for inhaling teargas and another 15 were wounded for different reasons, the ministry noted.

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip staged a general strike Wednesday to mark “The Catastrophe,” or in Arabic, Nakba Day, which commemorates the 1948 expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes by invading Zionist forces in historical Palestine.

Government institutions and shops shut their doors in line with a call by the National Authority for Breaking the Siege -- composed of several Gaza-based resistance factions -- to stage a general strike.

The authority also urged Palestinians to mark the occasion by taking part in planned demonstrations in Gaza as a part of anti-occupation protests that began last year.

It also warned “the Israeli enemy” against “committing follies against peaceful demonstrators."

The Palestine-Israel conflict dates back to 1917 when the British government, in the now-famous Balfour Declaration, called for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

Since March of last year, Palestinians have been holding weekly rallies along the Gaza-Israel buffer zone to demand the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in historical Palestine from which they were driven in 1948 to make way for the new state of Israel.

They also demand an end to Israel’s 12-year blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has gutted the coastal enclave’s economy and deprived its roughly two million inhabitants of many basic commodities.

Since the protests began more than one year ago, nearly 270 Palestinian demonstrators have been killed -- and thousands more injured -- by Israeli troops deployed near the buffer zone.