DC Edit | Genocide? World Helpless as Israel Seeks to Destroy Gaza
It has become a war of choice that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging, unmindful of hostages’ tormented families, protests spreading in his own country and loss of European allies who are lining up to recognise a Palestinian state, so too Canada and Australia
In its most comprehensive findings yet about Israel’s conduct in the conflict, a South African judge-led United Nations Commission investigating the war in Gaza has concluded that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians. This is the strongest condemnation yet of Israeli actions that have followed in retaliation against a Hamas-led attack on civilians on October 7, 2023.
The report of genocide comes even as Israel launched a ground offensive on Tuesday aimed at decimating the Hamas but which, in effect, is a war against around a million Palestinian people who may to move out of Gaza City. The inhumanity of the situation is appalling as the Palestinians who, as pawns in Israel’s war against the Hamas, have faced death, maiming, famine and destruction for close to two years.
Desperate Palestinians have nowhere to go after having moved around to live in tents ever since the bombing of Gaza City began with Israel then aiming its bombs and missile power against most urban centres in the Gaza Strip, some of which face desertification now with the razing of all residential structures with controlled detonations.
Southern pockets have been designated as safe zones, but they are already teeming with displaced Palestinians who are also facing starvation as aid struggles to get through with Israel controlling all its movement. In short, it is living hell for a whole people who are being pummelled for Hamas thought to be still holding about 20 Israeli hostages even as peace talks keep repeatedly breaking down.
The action on the Gaza Strip may have begun as revenge against a savage attack in an intrusion by Hamas that also represents a great failure of Israeli intelligence. Now it has become a war of choice that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging, unmindful of hostages’ tormented families, protests spreading in his own country and loss of European allies who are lining up to recognise a Palestinian state, so too Canada and Australia.
With a nudge and a wink from his staunch ally in the White House, despite Israel’s strike against the peace negotiating team of the Hamas in Qatar — a valuable ally of the US whose royal house even presented a $400 million jet to Donald Trump — Netanyahu has escalated vengeance into an all-out destruction of Gaza City. A mild rap on the knuckles for the missile attack in Doha was all Netanyahu had to endure as he unleashed his ground offensive that had been on the anvil for some time.
Netanyahu is running the ground offensive not because he believes he can realistically force Hamas to surrender to military might but because he sees this as his passport to political survival along with the hawkish far right parties that are in a coalition which is hoping to stay in power till the polls next year.
International condemnation, including India expressing concerns over invasion of Qatar’s sovereignty, has meant little, and it least bothers him that the latest stage of the war against Hamas has no real attainable objective as the release of the last remaining hostages can come only in a peace deal. Having pledged that there will be no Palestinian state, Netanyahu appears determined to leave no inhabitable spaces in the Gaza Strip. This is Netanyahu’s war, and he is determined to fight on even as a hapless world watches.