The occupation continues to steal and plunder our natural resources

Our people’s resistance continues in the face of colonialism, siege, and imperialist exploitation

We call on our Palestinian people and the all free people of the world to confront Zionist and foreign companies exploiting Palestinian gas

The racist Zionist settler colonial project continues its frenzied campaigns targeting our Palestinian people throughout our occupied land from the river to the sea, just as the Zionist enemy continues, at the same pace, to steal and plunder our people’s wealth of resources — water, gas and oil — from our land and our occupied sea for decades. This plunder has taken place in the presence of and in full view of the so-called “international community,” while the aggression and siege imposed on our people in the Gaza Strip for 16 years continues. Meanwhile, the Zionist project and its allies seek to propose “measures to ease the siege” in order to avoid permanently breaking the siege and putting an end to the policy of collective punishment that is imposed constantly upon our Palestinian people.

The masses of the Gaza Strip came out a few days ago to affirm the rights of the Palestinian people to their natural resources in all of Palestine, specifically with regard to the natural gas deposits off the Gaza Sea and in order to inaugurate a sea corridor to end the comprehensive blockade imposed for the sixteenth consecutive year. The masses of our people also expressed their deep awareness of their rights, calling all to account before their Palestinian, Arab and international responsibilities at the political, legal and human levels to put an end to the siege and plunder of Palestinian resources.

It is the right of the Palestinian people to extract natural gas from our gas fields confiscated by the occupation and the countries and companies complicit in this looting and our right to demand the operation of a sea port as Gaza’s gateway to the world, and our right to invest our national capabilities in order to strengthen our national economy. These are natural and legitimate achievements that enjoy a popular consensus and the support of all forces of the Palestinian and Arab resistance and national and popular bodies and institutions. Indeed, these are only a small part of our full rights to our land and our resources throughout Palestine, from the river to the sea.

However, these Palestinian rights to the sea of Gaza — simple as they are — will not be obtained by our people except through resistance and the unified popular force that supports it and extracts those rights through a persistent and protracted program of struggle that takes the battle with the Zionist enemy to higher levels on the Arab and international levels and pushes it toward all fields of struggle. It is clear that the goal of this struggle is to directly extract our rights on a strategic level, so our rights and resources do not remain up for grabs for the enemy and its partners. This Palestinian right must be extracted without any political concessions to the occupier.

In this context, we affirm the following: 

First: We urge the development of united popular action in the homeland and the diaspora in order to break the naval and land blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip for over 16 years, and we reject the policy of extortion carried out by the occupation and are committed to exposing it before international public opinion. This is a Palestinian national mission on a unified level, and it cannot remain a mission limited to our besieged people in the Gaza Strip.

In this regard, we call to consider Saturday and Sunday 1 and 2 October as the days to launch the first activities of an ongoing Palestinian, Arab, Islamic and international campaign entitled Breaking the Siege and Recovering Our Stolen National Wealth.

Second : We affirm the right of the Palestinian, Lebanese and Arab armed resistance, and indeed, their sacred duty, to defend our people, their rights, their resources and their wealth with all means, tools and options available to them.

The natural right of our Palestinian people to exercise all forms of resistance in their national liberation struggle is derived from the justice of the cause and the many sacrifices of the resistance and its popular incubator, with suffering in the squares, streets and prisons. The occupier must not be allowed to continue its policies of starvation and economic siege amid official international and Arab silence and complicity, and the battle to recover our stolen Palestinian and Arab resources must not be separated from the national and social liberation struggle for our strategic goals of liberation and return.

Third: The Palestinian gas fields, which are located 36 kilometers in our waters, were discovered at the end of the 1990s, and the construction on the field began in 2000 by the British Petroleum Company. These fields were robbed of their resources by the armed Zionist occupation forces. In this context, we call on all the solidarity organizationss, boycott movements and supporters of Palestine around the world to expose the crimes of the Israeli occupation, the Zionist project and the international corporations involved in these crimes of theft, plunder and looting of Palestinian resources, as well as all those complicit through their silence and submission to this exploitation.

Fourth : Some of the Palestinian gas fields have natural gas quantities estimated at about 3 billion cubic meters. Once again, the systematic Israeli policy of the theft of Palestinian land and resources was manifested in the depletion of the border gas field in the Gaza Sea called Marine 2. The policy of Israeli exploitation and theft of our natural resources has led to the accumulation of wealth and profits from our stolen resources, and confronting that theft must be an inseparable part of our ongoing struggle to recover our national wealth and resources, complete the battle for Palestinian national sovereignty and complete the tasks of comprehensive liberation for the Gaza Strip and the entire land of Palestine, from the river to the sea.

Fifth: We highly value all Palestinian and Arab efforts to confront the gas deals concluded by some regimes with the Zionist entity. We also value and appreciate the international boycott campaigns to isolate the Israeli entity and bring an end to these gas deals and the importation of looted Palestinian gas in Europe and elsewhere. We urge the development of broad Arab action to confront normalization and bring an end to these shameful deals that come at the expense of our national rights. We must not be lenient about the Zionist theft of the wealth and resources of Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. These are vital resources that the occupier uses to enhance the strength of its economy, army and institutions, in order to rain fire upon our people with every new war and aggression.

Finally..

We consider the British, European, U.S. and other international corporations cooperating with the Zionist occupation in plundering the wealth of our people to be full partners in these crimes. These companies and the countries that benefit from their plunder bear direct responsibility for the theft of Palestinian, Lebanese and Arab wealth and set themselves as enemies of our Palestinian people and Arab nation and our legitimate rights.

We urge the masses and vanguards of our Palestinian and Lebanese people and the entire Arab nation, and all of the liberation movements and boycott campaigns in the world to hold accountable those corporations and organizations colluding with the occupation entity to steal our national wealth and justify the continuation of the brutal, unjust siege that must be broken and defeated, once and for all.

The Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement

19 September 2022