A silent protest took place in Nicosia on Thursday for the journalists that were killed during Israeli strikes in Gaza recently.

The protesters, coming from various organisations, including CY Movement to Gaza, United for Palestine Nicosia, Anatropi and AFOA, held placards with the images of the killed journalists.

Matthew Stavrinides on behalf of Genocide-Free Cyprus (GFC) told the Cyprus News Agency (CNA) that ‘’Israel has continued to slaughter the truth, has continued to target journalists who are on the ground in Gaza, exposing Israel’s war crimes and genocide.’’

Referring to Israel’s stance, he said that ‘’they have been silencing them, they’ve been targeting them and they’ve been justifying this as stupid military operations against Hamas or whatever. It’s all propaganda at the end of the day. This is just a reason to justify war crimes. They’re trying to use any excuse in the book to silence the truth and, so far, they’ve killed hundreds of Palestinian journalists,’’ he noted.

He criticized the Cyprus government’s and media stance “for not discussing the events that unfold enough, because for some reason we are giving the Israeli side of the story much more clearly than anyone else’s, including Palestinian voices who are in Cyprus fighting on the streets.’’ 

‘’We’re here to show that the Palestinian movement in Cyprus is not going anywhere, even during the difficult times in the summer’’, he noted.

‘’We will not accept our government to continue to be tied politically, economically, militarily, with a criminal state under investigation by the ICC, whose leaders have ICC arrest warrants against them for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Christodoulides government is complicit in silencing dissent on our government’s own complicity,’’ he said.

‘’Unfortunately, things in Gaza are not getting better. They’re getting worse. The Palestinians are starving by the day. Journalists continue to be targeted, and the world remains complicit just watching the horrors,’’ Stavrinides noted.

‘’When you have children slaughtered, when you have people amputated through bones and no anaesthesia for their treatments, this is not a war. This is a genocide. It’s time for our government to start calling it the genocide and not just a conflict, so they can excuse their ties with Israel,’’ he said.

Stavrinides also claimed that ‘’Cyprus is much more central to the genocide than people think, whether it’s from weapons transfers through the ports or the British bases being used as just a launchpad for UK, US and other NATO operations in the region that aid Israel’s settler colonial regime.’’

Source: Parikiaki.com