Editorial | Gaza and elsewhere

It ought to no longer be possible for the world, especially the major powers of the West, to deny or blind their moral conscience to the humanitarian outrage, by whatever name it is called, being perpetrated by Israel against the people of Gaza.

Neither must they accept, nor be assuaged by, the cynical actions of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to allow minuscule amounts of food into Gaza while the larger starvation project remains in place, and as Israel accelerates the programme of Palestinian displacement by making it impossible for Gazans to exist in the territory.

The right of Palestinians to an independent state, in the context of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, must be respected. Annexation of Gaza and/or the rest of the Palestinian territories must not be allowed.

In that regard, Britain, France and Canada must move beyond the threats of “concrete actions” against Mr Netanyahu over his policies and insist that he ends forthwith the blockade of the territory and allow the United Nations agencies to resume the distribution of food, water, medicine and other essential, live-saving material to Gazans.

At the same time, the West must demand, on the threat of real sanctions, an end to the indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza. It is long past time for tepid and flaccid statements by Western leaders about the intolerability of the situation, which it has been sending for a very long time, while allowing Mr Netanyahu to behave with impunity.

Caribbean countries, too, including Jamaica, cannot be silent on this crisis.

COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT

There is no question that Hamas’ October 2023 assault in southern Israel, in which it killed over 1,200 people (mostly civilians) and took around 250 hostages, was itself a moral outrage. Israel’s right to respond and pursue the degradation of Hamas was widely accepted.

However, what Mr Netanyahu and Israel’s right-wing government have done over the past 22 months is way beyond legitimate self-defence, or what is necessary to achieve political goals, with massive infliction of collective punishment.

Gaza is a flat and narrow strip of land, 25 miles long and seven and half miles wide at its widest point. It has an area of 365 square miles. Before the war, 2.3 million were crammed into the territory.

Since the war, most buildings in Gaza – homes, schools, hospitals – and other critical infrastructure have been flattened. The Hamas authorities say the known deaths number nearly 54,000, although the real number is estimated at over 61,000, with thousands of bodies buried under rubble. More than 21,000 have been wounded.

Israel tightly controlled the flow of food and other aid into Gaza, until it blocked the UN-led distribution system, claiming initially that UN agencies were infiltrated by Hamas, and, more recently, that the Islamist fighters stole/controlled aid. Israel wanted to put in place a system of its own choosing, which would limit the supply of food and other necessities, including water and fuel.

With aid into Gaza halted, global agencies warned of imminent starvation. Earlier this month, a group of UN human-rights experts called on states to press Israel to end the violence “or bear witness to the annihilation of the Palestinian people in Gaza”.

This was followed by an appeal by Tom Fletcher, the UN’s human-rights chief, for the Security Council to “act decisively to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international human-rights law”. Amnesty International had previously used similar language to describe the situation.

ABSENCE OF MORAL OUTRAGE

It is against this backdrop of pressure that the leaders of Britain, France and Canada issued their public joint statement, while the United States apparently raised concerns behind the scenes.

Mr Netanyahu signalled an intention of making minor concessions. He would continue with his move, he said, “to take control of all of the Gaza Strip”, while allowing limited supply of food into Gaza to prevent the situation reaching “a point of starvation, for practical and diplomatic reasons”.

Those reasons were that he had been told by Israel’s “closest friends in the world” they could not “handle pictures of mass starvation”.

In other words, while Mr Netanyahu would, it seems, be unbothered by pushing the Palestinians to famine, his allies in the West would not tolerate the optics of mass hunger and the consequences thereof. It is the inconvenience of the camera and the global communications technologies.

In a way, Mr Netanyahu’s cynicism and what he claimed to be the attitude of his international backers, is echoed in Sudan and other war theatres of Africa, where the atrocities and hunger occur off camera. There is an absence of moral outrage.

It is noted, though, that the cameras need not be rolling or the images of mass starvation necessary from Ukraine for the West to be stirred by a sustained, collective moral outrage stemming from Russia’s invasion of that country.

Now that the plight of Gazans has seeped into the consciousness of Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney et al, we hope that it remains – and spreads to Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere.