Activists gather in Wimbledon for Gaza vigil
By Aurielle Glanville
A vigil for Gaza was held outside Wimbledon Quarter, Wimbledon, on Sunday.
There was a baby Jesus surrounded by rubble and a placard that read, “Did you know that the birthplace of Jesus (Bethlehem) is in Palestine?”.
There was also a Christmas tree with photographs of children who have died since October 7, on it, that invited people to hang a bauble and make a wish for Gaza.
Since last October, at least 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 20,000 of whom children, have been killed by Israel in war crimes that the International Court of Justice has ruled as “plausible genocide”.
It’s a severe undercount, as thousands are thought to be buried under the rubble and unaccounted for. The Lancet estimates 186,000 are dead.
Around 70 per cent of Gaza has been severely damaged or completely destroyed by Israel, and its health system obliterated, according to Oxfam, which also says the daily death rate is higher than any other 21st Century conflict.
The UN says 1.9million people are displaced, which is 85 per cent of the population.
Famine has spread throughout Gaza because Israel has blocked 85 per cent of required food aid into it, causing half a million to be at risk of starvation according to IPC data.
Domenic Teuma, organiser, said: “This vigil is to remember the last 14 months, to keep the memory alive and to be on the right side of humanity and to speak to people directly. There were so many people who joined us on the day.”
To join Merton Friends of Palestine and take action go to – linktr.ee/mertonfop
Pictured top: Merton Palestine Solidarity Campaign members and supporters, outside Wimbledon Quarter, Wimbledon (Picture: Aurielle Glanville)
So Humiliated our government is participating in a year and more of Genocide.
Well done to these kind people at Christmas, thanks for reporting.
Thank you Auriel Glanville for writing this article and thank you Claudia Lee at South London Press for publishing it. This has been quite a sombre vigil for us, considering that the hopes we had a year ago for this Chritmas, to celebrate the end of the horrific suffering of our fellow human beings in Gaza have been dashed. We certainly didn’t expect that we would witness this whole new level of suffering a year ago. We promise to our Palestinian friends that we will keep going, we will keep telling all our neighbours about your plight, until we may all celebrate a happy Christmas together.
Well done Guys!!
My wish for 2025 is for this Genocide to end and bring a free Palestine with peace and happiness for it’s people. 🇵🇸🫒
Heartbreaking to learn about the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civillians slaughtered in the plausible genoicide in Gaza by the Israeli war machine.
Every day Israel kill young teens, children, toddlers and even newly born infants with impunity.
The evidence is on our smart phones of children savagely incinerated ripped apart, shredded to pieces by US, German and UK-supplied planes and bombs.
Utterly disgusting that our national leaders Starmer and his sidekick Lammy are disgracefully making UK complicit in this plausible genoicide committed by Israel.. No shame or moral integrity !!
What would baby Jesus and blessed mother Mary think, seeing so many dead and maimed children ?
Heartbreaking to learn about the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civillians slaughtered in the plausible genoicide in Gaza by the Israeli war machine.
Every day Israel kill young teens, children, toddlers and even newly born infants with impunity.
The evidence is on our smart phones of children savagely incinerated ripped apart, shredded to pieces by US, German and UK-supplied planes and bombs.
Utterly disgusting that our national leaders Starmer and his sidekick Lammy are disgracefully making UK complicit in this plausible genoicide committed by Israel.. No shame or moral integrity !!
What would baby Jesus and blessed mother Mary think, seeing so many dead and maimed children ?
Glad to see a news publication telling the facts about Gaza for a change. All the major human rights org (Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, etc), the UN, the world’s top human rights experts and even Israel’s own top Holocaust scholars say that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide. Yet our government keeps arming Israel, thereby enabling Israel to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, for which there has been arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Israel’s Prime Minister. Our politicians, along with mainstream media, won’t stop gaslighting the public that there’s not a genocide being committed against the indigenous people of that region, the Palestinians, so much so it is starting to feels racist, especially when so much support has been shown for Ukranians under Russian occupation but none for Palestinians under decades of Israeli occupation.
Thank you South London Press for your excellent coverage of Merton Friends of Palestine’s vigil around the baby Jesus in the rubble putting the present horrific situation in Gaza in its historic context when Herod ordered the murder of all children under the age of two in the vicinity of Bethlehem.
Good to see you reporting on this properly rather than censoring info about Zionist Israel’s genocide in Gaza with US, UK, EU support including, criminally, military. Doing a better job than the UK mainstream media that covers for our war criminal so-called “leaders”, thus becoming complicit in their genocide.
It’s good to see people and press around the country waking up to the genocide and illegal actions of a colonial apartheid pariah occupation state. Well done London News Online for taking an honest stance, when other news outlets sugar coat colonialism, ethno-supremacy and genocide. Well done to the people and community this took place in.
It is brilliant to see Merton Friends of Palestine drawing much needed attention to the Gaza genocide, but it’s outrageous that it’s still necessary, 15 months later. Our leaders continue to fall into line behind the US as they allow Israel to leap over every red line America pretend to hold. The pretence of our nation’s belief in human rights law has been laid bare, with no apparent shame. It appears some lives are, appallingly, considered of more value than others.