ONE of the fifteen public hospitals located on the Gaza Strip and managed by the United Nations Relief and Works (UN-RWA) was bombed by Israel. The video footage of the chaos showed a 19 year old Palestinian lying on a makeshift tent-bed with an IV drip burning to death, helpless all around him.
Its been one year to the alleged ‘Hamas kidnapping’ but 76 years of Israel’s genocide on the people of Palestine. Amid the siege laid by Israel through their invasion and illegal military occupation, they continue the bombardment of Gaza with food and medicine now dangerously low and running out. By blockading all access into the area, an estimated 2.15 million Palestinians or 96% of the population are at risk of starving to death.
A genocide and a humanitarian crisis constituted primarily by a single country while the rest of the world looks on. There have been no impactful sanctions put on Israel either, quite the opposite in fact, the largest cumulative recipient of USA foreign aid since its founding is Israel with about a budget (adjusted for today’s inflation) of $310 billion dollars. Officially the USA grants just $3.8 billion worth of military aid a year to Israel. They are equipped with guided-missile carriers and F-35 fighters, the infamous Iron Dome and allegedly possess weapons of mass destruction, most notably, nuclear bombs.
Israel has even shown unprecedented warfare tactics when they planted explosives in the batteries of handheld pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies that they exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria. They claim their intent was to kill Hezbollah soldiers, instead they killed innocent hospital workers and on-call emergency officers. The implication that they had the control to blow up an every-day use electronic device on command in different countries shows that nobody is safe from Israel.
While dialogue may seem like an option, the only solution is to blockade and cut off all access to Israel. Their agenda to invade and claim Palestinian land as their own and the backing of an entire military-industry complex shows they have no plan of stopping and clearly have survived this long to know that the world will not do anything to hinder their illegal-occupation.
This is not a war, this is genocide – Israel targets schools with nearly 90% of schools in Gaza destroyed and no universities left standing; they target medical workers and hospitals with an estimated 31 out of 36 hospitals damaged or destroyed as per the Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG-ECHO); they target civilians, women and children, elderly and the disabled; they have air-strikes on residential buildings and carpet bomb residential zones. The oldest and one of the current refugee crisis in the world is of the Palestinian people, which began on 1st June, 1946 with those who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of Israel.
There is all kinds of evidence of them committing a genocide in Palestine/Gaza, yet they have barely received a meaningful blowback from the world. The EU and UN have ‘shown concern’ and called for an end to the ‘crisis’, with their workers being unfortunate targets in ‘conflict zones’ by Israel. The World Bodies and different international organisations have even pledged humanitarian aid – only for Israel to blockade access to a humanitarian crisis they are insinuating. Gaza is truly burning alive – I hope we see the end of Israel in our lifetime.
—The writer is Lawyer, Businessman.
(shahnoor101@hotmail.com)
