Fasting and starving in Gaza

The Israeli government’s lack of even an iota of humanity remains front and centre, as it continues its genocidal campaign in Gaza in the holy month of Ramazan. While not an absolute rule or law, history is laden with examples of armies declaring truces to mark holy occasions and, less often, even fraternising with each other, out of a sense of chivalry and respect. Unfortunately, the Israeli Defence Force has repeatedly shown itself to be nothing more than a genocidal death squad, lacking any semblance of chivalry or honour.

Israeli aggression has gotten to the point where even America, its all-weather ally, is wavering in its support, and other friendly governments are calling out Israeli war crimes and talking to leaders from the opposition and even the ruling party’s allies in the hopes of ‘encouraging’ change from within. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still not swayed. He knows that ending the war would mean the resumption of several corruption cases against him. It’s a matter of record that his lawyers have regularly been allowed to cite the ‘war’ as grounds for delaying hearings.

Despite 30,000 civilians deaths and other documented war crimes, including assault and abuse of medical workers, the US criticism is limited to setting curious red lines while blocking UN efforts to criticise Israel. Vetoing resolutions, US President Joe Biden’s government has set the city of Rafah as a ‘red line’ while at the same time guaranteeing Israel it will continue to supply the weapons. Rafah, incidentally, is a city to which Israel asked Palestinians to evacuate while the rest of the territory was being bombed out. The corraling of people into a possible death zone would be yet another example of the depth of planning that has gone into this genocidal campaign.

But the continuing failure of other Israeli political forces to end, or even pause the violence, raises questions of if there is even a credible alternative to Netanyahu, since all of his potential opponents seem to fully support his plans to bathe Palestine in blood.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 14^th, 2024.

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