THE besieged people of Gaza were eagerly looking out for succour from the international community at least during Christmas and New Year, the traditional season of goodwill. The residents, wilting under the merciless blockade imposed by Israel since June 2007, were fast running out of essential supplies. Israel had used the six-month-long truce with the Hamas-led administration to further tighten the screws on the enclave. Many commentators compare the Gaza invasion to the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis in 1942-43.
Israels military intentions became clear in November when its army mounted armed incursions into Gaza and began targeting Palestinians for assassinations. When the Hamas-led militants in Gaza retaliated by firing a few rockets, Israel got the flimsy pretext it needed to mount a full-scale invasion on a defenceless people.
Starting from December 27, the full might of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) under the code name Operation Cast Lead was on display against the one and a half million people on the Gaza Strip, more than half of them children. The overwhelming majority of its victims so far have been civilians; Israeli jets and tanks have targeted civilian centres with impunity.
On January 6, Israeli shells hit a United Nations-run school that was sheltering mostly women and children. More than 46 of them were killed and another 50 were injured, most of them seriously. John Ging, a senior U.N. official in Gaza, told the media that the bomb that hit the school was a precision-guided one. He said the Israeli military had been given the precise coordinates of the school by the U.N. Ging said no place was safe in Gaza for civilians. Everyone here is traumatised and terrorised, he told the media.
Up until the second week of the war more than 750 Palestinians were killed and thousands injured. This is the highest Palestinian toll in four decades of occupation, and the figure is expected to be much bigger when a ceasefire is finally called. The few hospitals in Gaza, already under strain on account of the blockade, have not been able to cope with the tragedy. Israeli helicopter gunships have gone to the extent of targeting ambulances carrying the injured. Ehab Mahbub, a Palestinian doctor, was killed when his ambulance was hit by an Israeli missile. The appeals for blood are getting more and more desperate.
Karen Abu Zayed, the Commissioner for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said the need for aid has never been so acute. The media, both Israeli and international, have been kept out of Gaza despite an Israeli Supreme Court directive to the government to allow the media to cover the unfolding human catastrophe. The United States and other Western countries, which otherwise are great votaries of free media, have not been complaining too much about this.
Before the invasion, a spokesman for the UNRWA described the humanitarian situation in Gaza as disastrous and said the agency was unable to get medical supplies into Gaza for more than a year because of Israels blockade of the border crossings.
In 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court, behaving as an appendage of the state, ruled that the government was authorised to limit the supply of electricity, petrol and diesel to Gaza since these diminished quantities sufficiently meet humanitarian needs. The Supreme Court also sanctioned collective punishment for the hapless people almost a year ago. Collective punishment is prohibited under international law. If the residents of the Gaza Strip deserve to be punished because of the Qassam rockets, then maybe all Israelis need to be punished because of the occupation, prominent Israeli commentator Gideon Levy wrote in a recent article. The Jewish state, with the tacit support of sections of the Palestinian Authority and neighbouring Arab states, tried first to starve Gazans into submission. They had hoped that the population would rise in revolt and throw out the Hamas-led government. When that blueprint did not materialise, Israel prepared for a military assault to get rid of Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza. These are the only groups that are keeping the flag of resistance still flying in the occupied territories. A senior Israeli army officer told The New York Times that the purpose of the invasion was to make Hamas either lose their will or lose their weapons.
The U.N. has also not covered itself in glory as Israel keeps on violating all established international norms with impunity. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has not explicitly condemned the targeting of civilian neighbourhoods. The Security Council has failed even to come out with a statement mildly censoring Israel. Instead, the U.N. has played into Israels hands by calling for restraint on both sides. In doing so, it has put Israel, which has the most powerful army in the region, and the Hamas militia, which operates under the jackboot of the occupation, on the same footing.
As Hannan Ashrawi, Palestinian political activist and member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, (PLO) said, the international community should have realised a long time ago that it is the Israeli occupation and the continuous brutalisation of Palestinians that is the root cause of the conflict. In the past seven years, more than 5,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army. The Israeli toll during the same period was 14 civilians, killed mainly by rocket fire. On the first day of the Israeli death from above campaign, more than 300 Palestinian civilians were killed. The Israeli army announced that it had dropped 100 tonnes of bombs in the first nine hours of the operation.
Professor Richard Falk, the U.N. rapporteur to the occupied territories, said in the first week of January that the Israeli attack on Gaza represented a severe and massive violation of international humanitarian law as defined by the Geneva Conventions regarding the obligations of an occupying power and the requirements of the laws of war.
The eminent American expert on international law also noted that Israel had ignored recent Hamas initiatives to re-establish the military truce after it expired on December 26. According to Falk, the Israeli military invasion and the catastrophic human toll it has caused challenge those countries that have been and remain complicit, either directly or indirectly, in Israels violation of international law.
This complicity, said Falk, extended to those countries knowingly providing military equipment for these illegal attacks. The U.S. is no doubt the main provider of arms for the Zionist state, but some other countries, such as India, are also filling its coffers, helping it to spread terror in the region. Israel is all set to supplant Russia as the biggest supplier of arms to India. In November, just as Israel was getting ready to invade Gaza, a high-level Indian delegation was in Tel Aviv to firm up multi-billion-dollar defence contracts. It is well known that Mossad and the Israeli state-controlled armaments industry have a big stake in all these defence deals.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) and other Left parties have appealed to the Indian government to at least snap defence links with Israel in the wake of the Gaza invasion. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has shown the way to world leaders by expelling Israels Ambassador to his country. In a televised address, he compared Israels invasion of Gaza to the holocaust against Jews during the Second World War. He said the President of Israel and the President of the U.S. should be taken together to the International Criminal Court. How sad that Israel continues to act as the assassins arm of the Yankee Empire, Chavez said.
After flattening Gaza with bombs and missiles fired from their planes and helicopter gunships, Israel sent its elite troops, backed by heavy armour, into the territory. It dropped 1,000-kg bombs to flatten entire neighbourhoods and to prepare the ground for the advance of its troops.
The frontal combat started in the first week of January and involved street fighting, in which Resistance fighters led by Hamas were able to stand their ground. In response to the Israeli invasion, the Resistance has been able to increase the range and sophistication of its rockets fired from Gaza. The defiant rocket attacks continued despite Israeli forces slicing Gaza into three parts and focussing their attacks on tunnels and buildings used by Hamas fighters. More Israeli towns are now within the range of Resistance fighters. In two weeks of fighting, Hamas lost some of its leaders. Sheikh Nizar Rayyan, a senior leader, and nine members of his family were killed when an Israeli bomb hit his home in the Jabaliya camp, one of the most densely populated refugee camps in Gaza. Most of the government buildings in Gaza have been targeted. Buildings housing the Ministries of Education, Labour, Housing, Foreign Affairs and Transport have been destroyed. Israeli planes have dropped huge bombs on the Parliament building, the Law Ministry headquarters and the university. The Israeli government claimed that the buildings were a critical component of the terrorist infrastructure.
The Hamas leadership has vowed to give a fitting reply to the IDF. Since 2007, in anticipation of an all-out Israeli assault, Hamas has transformed its armed wing the 16,500-strong al Qassam Brigade, into a well-disciplined fighting force. They have been specialising in urban warfare. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, speaking from an undisclosed location in Gaza in the first week of January, said the Israeli attacks should stop before any truce proposals could be considered. In a televised speech to Palestinians, Haniyeh said there should be an unconditional end to the Israeli aggression. He also insisted that the Israeli blockade must be lifted and all the border crossings must be opened because the siege is the source of all Gazas problems.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Hizbollah of Lebanon, said in a televised address immediately after the Israeli assault began that Israel would not succeed in Gaza. He observed that Israel had not declared any specific goals for Operation Cast Lead because it will not be able to achieve them. He compared the events with the 2006 war in Lebanon. The players are the same, the battle is the same and the result will be the same, he said. In an unprecedented move, Nasrallah made a call to the Egyptian people and the armed forces to use their influence to force their government to open the Rafah crossing so that the Israeli blockade on Gaza could be ended. We say to the Egyptian regime, if you do not open the Rafah border, then you are partners in the crime, he said in his speech.
In Lebanon, Hizbollah fighters could hide in the hills and the forests while staging their guerilla strikes and rocket attacks against the Israeli invading force. Gaza is only 45 km long and on an average only 6 km wide, and therefore not suitable for the kind of war the Hizbollah fought. But so long as Hamas remains standing, it can justifiably claim victory against an enemy armed to the teeth with the most sophisticated American-supplied weaponry. Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, speaking after a meeting of Arab Foreign Ministers, said the myth that the Israeli army is invincible has become a thing of the past.
After the attack on the U.N. school building, the efforts to bring about a ceasefire have intensified. A joint French-Egyptian initiative, which calls on Israel to withdraw and Hamas to stop firing rockets, has been supported by the U.S. in the U.N. Security Council. United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has, however, not called for a halt to the Israeli military operations even after the wilful targeting of the U.N. school. Both Israeli and Hamas leaderships have said they are studying the French-Egyptian proposals seriously.
The Israeli government announced on January 7 that the military would stop shooting for three hours every day to allow essential humanitarian supplies into Gaza. But the Israeli army also stated that it would respond immediately to any provocations. As of the second week of January, the Israeli establishment has indicated that it wants to continue the military offensive despite demands from the international community for an immediate ceasefire. Meanwhile, the defiant Hamas rocket-fire continues, underlining the fact that the Israeli war machine has not been able to achieve its stated goal of disarming Hamas fighters so far.
COMMents
COMMents
SHARE