IT will live in history: the Jabalia death march. As reported by Al Jazeera, the fleeing Palestinians were carrying white flags while going through checkpoints, but the Israeli bombardment continued. Correctly did Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi tell US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that what was going on in Gaza was “ethnic cleansing”, while the Jewish Voice for Peace has compared it to the Holocaust and asked the American administration to halt arms supplies to Israel.

This paper’s issue of Oct 23, 2024, is archival material and tells us more about the misery of the Palestinian people than all words put together. The picture on the front page shows the wreckage of a house. In the background are masses of people forcefully displaced from their north Gaza homes as Israeli planes had rained bombs. They have had no food and water for weeks.

Unless I missed it in the voluminous literature on the Der Führer era, I do not think the Luftwaffe ever rained bombs on fleeing Jewish people. The time-yellowed 1,400 pages of John Toland’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Adolf Hitler contain every act of bestiality perpetrated on the Jews by the Nazi regime but it mentions no such horrifying drama, which I am sure must have satisfied the sadistic instincts of racists like Yoav Gallant in the Benjamin Netanyahu cabinet.

The north Gaza trauma coincided with Israel’s latest choice of a war theatre — Lebanon. Such is Israel’s fixation with showing off its military power that it used no less than 100 jets on tiny Lebanon. The targets hit included a hospital named after one of Lebanon’s most popular prime ministers, Rafic Hariri. This was not a mistake. As I wrote in one of my pieces, it is Israel’s official policy to hit hospitals and places of worship to tell the world it doesn’t care about what the world thinks of its crimes, with the categorical support it enjoys from Western powers. (In Nuseirat in northern Gaza, Israeli forces hit a school, killing 17 people, including children. Instead of expressing regret it said it was a Hamas command and control centre which was previously a school!)

What are the prospects of peace in the region?

One can estimate the number of civilian casualties in Beirut when four apartment buildings bustling with men, women and children were flattened.

While Lebanon was in the throes of a bloodbath, the issue for the US was to make a comment that would not annoy Israel. So American envoy Amos Hochstein made a ‘safe’ statement, saying Washington was trying to end the war in Lebanon “as soon as possible”, stressing that the US was seeking a lasting resolution to the crisis.

A true indication of civilian casualties in Lebanon came from Tyre, a Unesco World Heritage site. Normally it has a population of 50,000. However, following the mass exodus in the wake of the Israeli attack on Sept 23, less than 14,000 people were reportedly left in the city.

Yet, despite the thinning of the population, casualties were still high as revealed by Tyre’s disaster management spokesman: “Seven buildings were levelled and more than 400 apartments in their vicinity damaged.” Four streets, he said were “completely blocked by debris”.

On the very first day of the blitz, codenamed ‘Northern Arrows’, 558 people, including 50 children and 94 women, were killed while 50,000 fled to Syria. No wonder Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati called the Israeli attack “a war of destruction”. However, so thorough is the Zionist control of the international media that on Oct 24, when I googled to check casualties in Tyre what I got was this: “There were no re­­ports of casualties in Tyre, where the Is­­raeli military had issued evacuation warnings ahead of the strikes.”

What are the prospects of peace in the region?

According to Da­­niel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, there is little possibility of peace in Palestine. According to him: “The game plan — sadly declared openly and publicly by Israel’s leaders from the get-go — was an intensification and continuation of the displacement and the denial of Palestinian rights that has gone on for decades, but in a far more gruesome way.”

He told Al Jazeera: “We are at a new place in the north of Gaza where the intention is apparently to entirely depopulate that area using war crimes of starvation, of allowing disease to spread; even the prevention of polio could not be continued.”

According to him, Israeli authorities are implementing the ‘General’s Plan’ aimed at starving, bombing, and forcibly extracting civilians out of the north of the Gaza Strip.

Postscript: Z.A. Bhutto once remarked only Islam can give peace to the holy land because it is the only religion which recognises the rights of the three communities to Jerusalem.

The writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman.

Published in Dawn, November 3rd, 2024