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+ Six thousand bombs dropped on Gaza in just six days
+ International community fast asleep
By Asim Qadeer Rana
Israel dropped six thousand bombs weighing four thousand tons in just six days on Gaza killing thousands of people as fears of a humanitarian disaster in the besieged Palestinian enclave mount. Israel has imposed a complete siege of Gaza, cutting access to food, water, medicines, and fuel, as its forces prepare for a possible ground assault.
Officials in Gaza said the dead included children, women, and healthcare workers. One day alone saw the killing of 150 people. The incessant bombing, forcing three lakh thirty-eight thousand Palestinians to flee their homes and take shelter, has destroyed entire neighborhoods in Gaza home to 2.3 million people, half of them children.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the death toll in the occupied West Bank has also surged while more than hundreds of people have been injured.
International law prohibits states from any military occupation, however temporary. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 37/43 also reaffirms that people struggling for independence and liberation from colonial rule have the right to do so using all available means, including armed struggle.
For decades, Israel, aided and abetted by the American empire, has sought to erase Palestine politically from the map. Palestinians have recorded all the killings, the torture, and the abuse. They cataloged the stolen homes, lands, and other vital resources. They documented how Israeli state violence deprives them of their freedom.
How did the leading members of the international community respond to all this evidence of Israel’s relentless brutality? They responded with something much worse than silence. They voiced their support, repeatedly and loudly, for Israel. They aided and abetted Israel’s colonial oppression and encouraged it to intensify its efforts to expel Palestinians from their remaining lands and erase Palestine from history and global politics.
The deadly siege that has been imposed on Gaza since 2007 supported by the European Union and the United States along with recurrent genocidal wars launched by Israel is an attempt to make the Palestinians of Gaza disappear albeit slowly and painfully.
These awful scenes of massacre did not burst forth automatically. They happened in the background of an unstoppable growth in tension over recent months or arguably decades: in early 2023, there was sustained escalation in state violence against Palestinians, with 200 killed in the West Bank alone.
All this guaranteed the growing certainty of a hotheaded response from the Palestinian side. Statements in recent days from the GCC, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab world held Israel’s authorities responsible for creating this situation by depriving Palestinian people of their legitimate rights and systematic provocations against their holy sites.
Western leaders privately scornful of Netanyahu’s blanket embrace of the extreme right however went to back Israel’s absolute right to defend itself, offering a blank slate of liberty for whatever acts of collective punishment Israel lets loose, including a ground invasion.
This unnecessary Western lenience has contributed to bringing us to where we are today: offering Israel infinite military support to maintain the occupation, ignoring decades of human rights abuses and war crimes, and diplomatic language that portrayed Palestinian lives as unessential.
This provided perfect diplomatic cover for 70 years of ruthless occupation, and pitiless gulping of Palestinian territories. Militant West Bank settlers this year embarked on an unmatched drive to dehumanize and dislocate Arab farmers, with a valued 140 sq. km of Palestinian lands seized in recent months.
As millions of people poured into the streets around the world, in support of the Palestinian people as the Israel Defense Force pounded Gaza non-stop, the Western powers, led by the US, have come to show their inexorable support for the cruel apartheid state of Israel.
For the shameless supporters of the Zionist state, no excuse is required to defend Israeli violence, its decades-long ruthlessness, ferociousness, and barbarity against the Palestinian people and their neighbors anywhere. Anyone challenging the Israeli narratives or daring to speak out for the victims of apartheid can customarily face censure.
Even before the Hamas attack on October 7, tens of thousands of Palestinians underwent slaughter with the money and weapons pouring from the US and the European Union. The trigger-happy Israel Defence Force slaughtered more than 200 unarmed Palestinians this year alone before the surprise attack came from Hamas.
Elderly women were mercilessly beaten. Palestinians, including children, women, and elders were crushed with bombs dropped from the air; tanks and bulldozers demolished homes; water, electricity, and food were cut off; and armed Jewish settlers destroyed Palestinian properties.
The whole Gaza Strip underwent cut off from the rest of the world by air, sea, and land, making it the largest concentration camp in our time. Where was the outcry from the Western leaders then? Do Palestinian lives matter? Surely, not to them. They never did, neither now nor before.
Since October 7, thousands of Palestinian civilians, nearly a third of them children suffered killings and wounds, and hundreds of residential homes, scores of hospitals, clinics, and mosques were destroyed in a savage orgy of genocide.
More than a million residents of Gaza suffered displacement and were forced to leave their homes. Rafah, the only border crossing that remained partially open to the Gaza Strip, was closed after damage caused by Israeli airstrikes.
Israeli public officials have openly advocated for another Nakba, the term for the events of 1947–1949 when over 770,000 Palestinians faced ouster from their homes and lands during the hostilities that led to the establishment of the state of Israel. The Naksa, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, displaced 350,000 Palestinians.
Continued military operations by Israel have gone well beyond the limits of international law. The international community must stop these egregious violations of international law now before the reappearance of tragic history.
