Mirjana Spoljaric’s words are prescient. ‘Gaza has become worse than hell on earth’ the President of the ICRC tells the BBC. World leaders ‘will be haunted’ by their collective lack of action to stem the bloodbath in Gaza, she says, because there is no justification for the Israeli government ‘stripping Palestinians of [their] human dignity’.
Back in October 2023, as this Israeli war on Gaza’s people was erupting (let’s be clear, this is not a war on a place but on an entire population) I wrote a blog predicting that world leaders would later wring their hands and smoothly admit they could have done more to stem the mass killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. I’m not sharing this with you to sound clever; it’s to clarify how depressingly predictable these betrayals have always been.
By October 2023, more than two and a half million Palestinians on the Gaza Strip had lived under Israeli siege for almost eighteen years, with all the cruelties wreaked by a full military siege. These included; permits for life-saving medical treatment in Israel being issued only if Gazan patients agreed to become informants, indiscriminate bombing of schools, and civilians’ homes, and assassinations in densely populated neighbourhoods, causing, in those familiar banal and callous words, collateral damage.
In the minute-by-minute news frenzy we live with these days, it is too easy to forget what Gazans survived in the hard years before this devastating iteration of war – and how little our leaders spoke out then too. This normalisation of the Israeli occupation is one of the main reasons the Israeli government arrogantly assumed its military strategy of delivering ‘security through force’ in Gaza, and the West Bank, was a success, regardless of Palestinian misery. Political henchmen like Netanyahu refuse to accept that military oppression is never a lasting solution, assuming they can simply up the scale of state violence.
And civilians always pay. Thanks to the barely believable courage of Palestinian journalists inside Gaza (three more of whom died this week, including Soliman Hajaj and Samir A Refai), we can now live-stream the horrendous stripping of peoples’ dignity that Mirjana speaks about. The Israeli army shooting people like animals as they queue for food to prevent their families starving, chaotic fights for food amongst desperate people. Families living in sodden tents, or sleeping out in bombed streets. Children dying of hunger.
Yet Prime Minister Starmer – who has already proved such a disappointment – doggedly resists calls to stop selling arms to Israel. Our leaders may recover enough moral integrity to regret their cowardice in the future, when what is left of Gaza has been crushed. But many of us are already haunted by what we see and what we know.
This is not to make this war about our collective angst; but to acknowledge how this senseless violence affects each of us even from afar, as well as the terrible toll on every Palestinian living in the diaspora. The so-called international community is a tree without roots, increasingly contaminated by economically-driven self-interest, of which weapons’ sales are a prime example.
The Israeli government publicly confirming it arms militias inside Gaza to fight Hamas confirms yet again what it thinks of international community condemnations.
Yehuda Shaul is the Israeli founder of Breaking the Silence, an organisation of IDF veterans who work to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine. He understands why Israel remains haunted by the Hamas massacre of October 2023 (you can hear him on a Guardian podcast here).
A veteran campaigner against IDF operations, Yehuda also faces down Israel’s catastrophic attacks, saying, ‘As a society we [have been] blind to what we are inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza.’ Yehuda, now head of the Israeli Centre for Public Affairs (OFEK) has a message our PM needs to hear. ‘Let me be blunt and very clear – we are not the victims of this war, it’s the Palestinian people of Gaza who are the victims of the brutality, and immorality… of the aggressiveness of the IDF behaviour and the decision not to end this war.’ He adds that, ‘people who claim to be friends of Israel need to be better friends, because allowing us to behave the way that we behave [in Gaza], that’s not friendship.’
Photo (from a previous war in Gaza) by Mohammed Zaanoun
