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WITH the Israeli Occupation Forces amassed in Gaza in greater numbers than ever before with a fresh reservists’ callout, an aid blockade that has extended beyond six weeks despite all international bodies pointing to hunger and starvation in the Strip, and an enhanced bombing campaign signalling stepped-up genocide, the military objective seems quite clear.
Israel says its operation is aimed at securing the release of the remaining hostages. However, few could put the truth more succinctly than Mark Seddon, who has been consistent in calling out the apartheid state for its Gaza genocide exactly for what it is on X: genocide, ethnic cleansing and unparalleled brutality in living memory.
“Only 8 hostages have been released by the Israelis [through military action]; 33 have been killed in their airstrikes, 148 have been released through negotiations. This is not about the hostages, it is about the annihilation of the Palestinians. When will the penny drop?”
The apocalyptic images emerging from Gaza are beyond words. No adjectives work, they are indescribable. After the Holocaust in which millions of Jews were killed in the most brutal ways, the world said: Never Again. Clearly, nobody meant it.
The penny may be dropping but it is already too late for 18,000 children, most of them below the age of 10.
Notwithstanding its lip service, the democratic West, together with its media, is beyond doubt on one side here, having stripped itself of its humanity, ‘objectivity’ and ‘values’.
The biggest success of the apartheid state is the demonisation of the Palestinians and the normalisation of their ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Whether a day’s death toll is 50, 75 or 100 it moves no one; or no one that counts anyway.
Who hasn’t seen the live images: the bloodied faces and often limbless, limp bodies of murdered children, of their seriously injured, grieving mothers, of the patients bombed and incinerated while immobilised in their hospital beds, and of the despondent healthcare staff picking them up themselves and fighting yet another day of a losing battle to save lives without even basic equipment and medicine, that is if they themselves survive the hellfire unleashed by drones.
The penny may be dropping but it is already too late for 18,000 children, most of them below the age of 10. Apart from the destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and civil infrastructure, and the restrictions on aid organisations, there is the barring of foreign journalists — who would have been more difficult to exterminate than the Gaza journalists all of whom were ‘Hamas’ — so that the outside world does not hear of the ethnic cleansing and mass murder, as that knowledge would eventually stir even the near-dead conscience of world governments.
Yes, I say governments because I seriously doubt that the average man or woman either in the West — whose governments endorse the Gaza genocide as a legitimate exercise by Israel to safeguard its right to self-defence — or in the despotic Arab world — whose leaders have turned their backs on the Palestinians — approve of it.
Despite draconian laws and powers being used by law-enforcement personnel from the US to Germany to the UK to crush/ discourage protesters, the images bear testimony, and protesters do surface in response to the call of their conscience. The Arab oppression is at another level and hence the silence on the streets.
Months and months of images of emaciated and starving children, and of bloodied families and independent estimates putting the number of those annihilated now running into six figures, are making Western leaders squirm in their seats.
Perhaps, their own hypocrisy is catching up with them as they constantly talk of ‘our values, humanity’ and then toss those out of the window in the case of the unarmed Palestinians. So, now Donald Trump, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron among others are expressing concern over the food/ aid blockade of Gaza.
The less said about the leaders of the Muslim world the better. Many of the most affluent, and thus, influential among them made a beeline to sign fat cheques unconditionally to earn the approval of the American president after welcoming him with fanfare. But predictably, they didn’t say much about the Gaza genocide.
Perhaps, the US and Israeli media leaks ahead of the presidential visits were meant to ease the conscience of the hosts and enable them to welcome Trump with open arms, as media reports suggested serious differences between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
But a picture of how diabolical plans are still in the pipeline to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians was provided by the US news network NBC. Even before Air Force One took off and was homeward-bound from the Gulf, NBC reported that it had learned of plans to relocate one million Palestinians to Libya alone from Gaza.
This US plan, confirmed to NBC by four different sources, included incentives to the country afflicted by extreme lawlessness after ‘nation-building’ by Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron. Billions of dollars of its assets frozen by the US would be released to it.
This must alarm European and Arab leaders alike. The Arabs ought to fear the street reaction to Nakba II, as even their iron hand may not be able to contain the outrage. European societies are already in upheaval due to the rise of the far right capitalising on fears of the continued arrivals of refugees particularly via Libyan shores.
They should fear what may happen if a million forcefully displaced Palestinians, angry and desperate, do not wish to remain in Libya, the stepping stone via the Mediterranean to Europe, and even a trickle starts arriving on the continent. Imagine the destabilisation the far right will instigate and stoke.
The handshakes of Trump and a battery of European leaders with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa who until recently led an Al Qaeda-aligned terror group and had a $10m bounty on his head, was evidence that the issue in Gaza may not be the ‘terror group’ Hamas but a commitment to the Greater Israel project. The West and the rest will have to decide whether it is worth it.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, May 18th, 2025
