Children are being bombed out of life. Women and old are being killed. Residential buildings, mosques, churches, and hospitals are being reduced to rubble. Ambulances carrying the dead and injured have been targeted. Electricity and water supply have been cut off. Gaza is living and dying in darkness. Israel has laid a total seize on Gaza and using all its firepower to turn it into dust.
More than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed, many of them are children. There is a fear that those surviving the Israeli murderous campaign will die of hunger. The World Food Program (WFP) has called the situation in Gaza devastating: “We’re seeing shortages of fuel, of water [and] electricity. We are seeing our shelters that are overcrowded. We don’t have capacity.”
WFP’s Palestine country director, Samer Abdeljaber, has warned of an impending mass starvation, “The bakeries are not going to be able to provide food for tomorrow. So tomorrow is going to be a very difficult situation for the people in the shelters and the people outside the shelters.”
The world is watching silently as Israel violates all international norms. No horror has been expressed after the news emerged that Israel is using white phosphorus, which is outlawed by the UN convention. The US has rushed its secretary of state Anthony Blinken to Tel Aviv to express solidarity with Israel. He sought to legitimise the murder of the civilians of Gaza by Israel by claiming that Hamas was using people as human shields and suggesting that Israel had no option but to break this shield, which would require the mass killing of the people of Gaza.
As I write this piece, bombs are raining on Gaza. The number of the killed and maimed must have increased manyfold by the time you read this article. But the world governments have not expressed any horror. They have not asked Israel to follow the international norms. They have not asked for a ceasefire. They have not even asked Israel to restore the supply of water and electricity to Gaza.
A building in Gaza after Israel launch airstrikes following Hamas surprise attack. Photo: X/@UNRWA
When Gaza is being flattened out of existence, the US President seems to provide an excuse for it by talking about the horror he felt after being told about the beheading of children by the Hamas militants. His own office later denied that he had personally seen those pictures. It was like creating a ground for the assault that Israel has mounted on Gaza.
Will the civilised world ever condemn Israel?
What Hamas did last Saturday was inexcusable. One could understand as even many Israeli writers and ex-army people from Israel have said that decades of the total seize and daily humiliation of nearly 2 million people would have led to a violent eruption of this kind. They said that the hubris of the Israeli establishment was responsible for the death and destruction that Hamas had caused. By its surprise attack, Hamas has stunned the world and Israel which boasted of an impregnable iron dome and an unbeatable intelligence system. All claims of the invincibility of Israel were belied.
Is this what Hamas wanted to achieve? One tangible gain according to it would be forcing Israel to release Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the Israeli people it has captured in its attack on Israel. But did it not know how Israel would respond to it? That it had no capacity to defend the people it claimed to be acting for? If Hamas is a leader of its people, what precautions had been taken before enacting that audacious multi-pronged attack on the people of Israel?
Did it not know that the images of defenceless civilians being killed and taken hostage would turn public opinion against it? Not that it has done anything substantial for the Palestinian people but even strategically it was idiotic to push oneself in a corner and lose all sympathy.
Trial of destruction in Gaza after Israel’s offensive following Hamas rocket attacks. Photo: X/@UNRWA
The act of Hamas is indefensible. It was a callous and irresponsible act of violence that would in the long run achieve little and which was bound to cause misery to the people of Gaza.
But those who have longer memories question the sincerity of the expression of revulsion by the international community after the Hams attack. The world has been watching the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) personnel arresting and killing the Gaza people on a daily basis. Without any provocation. The world knows well that the government of Israel is aiding and supporting the settlers who are evicting Palestinians from their homes and stealing their land. It knows that Gaza has been turned into an open-air jail and Palestinian people have been forced to live in sub-human conditions for nearly five decades. We know that the Palestinians are being turned into second-class people in Israel. We are aware of the attempts to capture the mosque Al Aqsa. We know that in Jerusalem itself Palestinians are being evicted from their houses. How can one expect the civilised world to tolerate all this?
We know however that this very civilised world literally expelled the Jews from Europe and hosted the Nazis after the holocaust for their national and strategic interests, to use them to fulfill its geo-political objective. So, to expect a moral response to the seven-decade-long oppression of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel will only disappoint us.
We, the people, should not, however, join hands with our governments. Nor should we succumb to the logic of violence. All of us need to understand that in the name of collective punishment, we destroy individuals. Hamas killed individuals, destroyed relationships, and their dreams. What Israel has been doing, and now with the excuse of revenge, doing it much more lethally in destroying individuals even if they can be called Palestinian. No one, in the name of whichever cause, national or religious should be allowed to do that. God or nature created us as individuals. So, this individuality cannot be allowed to be sacrificed in the name of a collective cause, however great it might sound. Nothing is more sacred than the life of an individual.
In the context of the last seven days, we can say that Hamas violated this basic principle. But the larger and much longer context of the last decades of continuous violation of it by Israel cannot be put aside. Without the Israeli terror, the terror of Hamas would not have existed. If the world wants Hamas to be irrelevant, it’ll have to first discipline its pampered Israel which has been acting like a bully for the last seven decades.
