“There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel,” Gallant said. “Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
President Isaac Herzog said militants and civilians in Gaza would be treated alike. “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said. “This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved — it’s absolutely not true … and we will fight until we break their backbone.”
Netanyahu has been equally explicit, comparing Hamas to “Amalek”, a tribe in the Bible which the Israelites were told to eradicate. He blames Hamas for all civilian casualties.
Other ministers have urged Gaza’s total destruction — one proposed dropping a nuclear bomb — and expulsion of its people, as in the 1948 “Nakba” when several hundred thousand Palestinians were ethnically cleansed as part of Israel’s independence war.
International justice
Whether Israel’s Gaza onslaught amounts to genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity, or very possibly all three, is for international courts to decide.
What matters now is stopping the killing in a ruined land that has lost its schools, homes, hospitals, roads, power and water plants, farms, places of worship and historical heritage. That is a moral issue for all of us, and most pertinently for Israel and its Western allies, principally the United States, which supplies most of the weapons used against Gaza.
U.S. complicity is beyond doubt. Many European and other countries, by their silence in face of the carnage, or their failure to take action, are also to blame.
Leaders in some of these nations are only now chiding Israel more strongly. Spain’s prime minister has called it a genocidal state. There is talk in European and other capitals of sanctions targeting Israeli leaders, a ban on arms shipments or trade penalties.
But no measures likely to push Netanyahu to alter course have been adopted. His eyes are fixed on the United States, the only nation that could swiftly halt the Gaza debacle — by halting or suspending the $3.8 billion it gives Israel each year in mostly military aid, along with extra arms shipments worth billions of dollars since the current war began.
Quantifying the horror
Cold statistics mask the individual suffering of Gazans, but tell part of the story.
More than 54,000 people, including more than 16,000 children, have been killed since the war began, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures considered reliable by the United Nations, or 2.5% of the population — equivalent to 8.5 million Americans.
This number does not count many thousands whose bodies may still lie under the rubble, or who died weakened by hunger, preventable diseases and failing health care. It includes more than 1,400 health workers and more than 200 journalists and media workers.
United Nations officials say more than 90% of homes have been destroyed or damaged, along with 94% of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, with only some still struggling to function. Gaza has the world’s highest number of child amputees per capita.
According to Hans Laerke, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Gaza is also the only territory in the world where “100% of the population is threatened with famine” despite Israel’s denial of any humanitarian blockade.
Abetting a genocide
The horrors endured by Palestinians have been documented by local journalists (Israel has banned all international reporters from Gaza), U.N. officials, Palestinian and foreign doctors and aid workers, as well as locally shot videos and photos.
Foreign physicians with long experience of many countries ravaged by war say conditions they witnessed in Gaza are worse than anything they have ever encountered.
“I have worked in conflict zones from Afghanistan to Ukraine,” said U.S. paediatrician Seema Jilani, after an assignment in the southern city of Rafah for the International Rescue Committee. “But nothing could have prepared me for a Gaza emergency room.”
No one can plausibly claim “we did not know” what was, and is, going on.
Yet world powers have largely stood by as massacres unfold in Gaza. They have kept equally silent as Israel batters parts of Lebanon at will despite a ceasefire with Hezbollah militants agreed in November. Israel has also grabbed more land in Syria and bombed hundreds of targets there since Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell in December.
A diplomatic debacle
U.S. President Donald Trump, like President Joe Biden before him, has backed Israel to the hilt. Not even images of emaciated children in Gaza have prompted a change of heart.
Trump’s own contempt for international law and his plan for the removal of Gazans to allow for a fantasy reconstruction on the toxic ruins of their land has only emboldened far-right Israeli leaders with ambitions to “purify”, annex and resettle Gaza, and to do likewise in the West Bank, where half a million Israeli settlers already live.
Israel’s actions, under permissive Western eyes, are shredding a longstanding international consensus on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – an idea incompatible with an ever-expanding Israeli grip on the West Bank and Gaza.
After French President Emmanuel Macron called for recognition of a Palestinian state, Defence Minister Israel Katz responded with brutal clarity.
“They will recognise a Palestinian state on paper — and we will build the Jewish-Israeli state on the ground,” he said in the West Bank on May 29 at one of 22 new settlements just approved by the Israeli government.
Can peace be given a chance?
Western outrage at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has no echo when it comes to Israel which for decades has defied U.N. resolutions and violated international law.
The fate of Gaza may prove a final blow to the rules of international conduct and treatment of civilians agreed after the Second World War — a system already frayed by the Cold War and more recently the illegal U.S.-British invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Crushing the Palestinian people will not make Israel any safer in the long run. Only a true peace settlement on a basis of mutual respect and equality can do that.
If Western nations ever get around to imposing sanctions on Israel and its leaders, they should do so to promote the Jewish state’s real interests which they claim to have at heart — as a stepping stone to such a peace between human beings.
The German-born Jewish-American philosopher and political scientist Hannah Arendt foretold the consequences for a society unable to perceive others as human.
“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism,” she wrote.
Questions to consider:
1. Is it justified, or wise, for a state to take revenge on its enemies?
2. Do people everywhere have the right to resist occupation?
3. How should we react when a possible genocide is taking place?
