Article 6(b) of the 1945 Charter of the International Military Tribunal, later enshrined in the Fourth Geneva Convention, classifies the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian targets, including hospitals, as a war crime. Yet Israel has subjected Gaza to intense bombardment since the Hamas assault on its territory on 7th October, killed more than 1,400 people, with 200 others taken hostage.
It was the darkest day in the history of the Jewish state, which has spent a quarter of a century embroiled in conflict with Palestinians, discriminating against them and occupying their lands, while also building a fearsome war machine.
We mourn the Jewish victims of Hamas’s barbaric attack on southern Israel, as we grieve for the 3,000 people killed so far by the Israel Defence Forces’ retaliation.
Even before the strike on a hospital in Gaza city, on 17th October, that killed at least 300 people, the enclave and its two and a half million inhabitants were already trapped in a humanitarian crisis.
The barbaric treatment of the people of Palestine is a crime against humanity that dates back to the founding of the state of Israel, in 1948, when three quarters of a million Palestinians were expelled from their homes.
The intervening decades of conflict in Palestine have only taught Arabs and Israelis to dehumanise each other – and it is almost inevitable that the gruesome events of the past 10 days will make matters worse. The Israeli government is extreme and racist. Its leader Benjamin Netanyahu has brought the country to the brink of civil war by unleashing anti-democratic policies to serve his own narrow interests.
At the same time the Palestinian Authority, in the West Bank, lacks credibility, while Hamas is a murderous terrorist organisation driven by a fundamentalist ideology that is a travesty of Islam. For too long, the international community, and particularly the United States, has just ignored the Palestinian issue.
As long as Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian West Bank (and indirectly of Gaza) continues on its self-destructive course, there will be more innocent victims on both sides, for which there is no justification unless one thinks that an Israeli version of apartheid, is worth living and dying for.
The only answer is a peace settlement that would give the people of Israel and Palestine what most of them want – a life without war or discrimination or threat.
Stop the Israel-Hamas war now.
Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim/Unsplash
Alliance for Green Socialism 