The World Is Watching Silently As Israel Violates All International Norms Including Using White Phosphorus

By New Age Islam Staff Writer 16 October 2023 Israel Has Thrown All War Norms To The Wind, Says Delhi University Academic And Human Rights Defender Apoorvanand Main Points: 1. Israel has cut off water, food and medicine supply to Gaza. 2. It has reportedly used prohibited white phosphorous bombs against Palestinians. 3. Hamas has also left Palestinians at the mercy of Israel. 4. The international community has not condemned Israel for war crimes. 1. 5.Biden has justified Israel's crackdown on Gaza. ------ This article by Mr Apoorvanand is a reaction to the human catastrophe unfolding out of Hamas-Israel armed conflict. Mr Apoorvanand is a Professor at the Hindi Department, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi. He is also a regular columnist and political commentator. He is known for his frequent interventions in day-to-day politics. He holds both Israel and Hamas responsible for the tragedy because in India speaking in favour of a victimised Muslim community is seen as minority appeasement and is seen as favouring and supporting terrorists. So while speaking on the issue one has to maintain balance. The US does not care for such balance. It knows well that what Israel has done comes under war crimes. Israel has laid siege to the civilians of Gaza, is bombing civilians, hospitals, shelters and has even cut off water supply to UN shelter camps in Gaza. No country should support Hamas because it has been designated a terrorist organisation while the US openly supports Israel and even sends rockets and other war equipment to a war criminal. Hamas is responsible for provoking this confrontation but it is no match for a nuclear power Israel with US as its godfather. When Egypt did not allow the American citizens to cross its border from Gaza, Biden became restive to save its own citizens trapped in Gaza. Egypt has put the condition that it will allow the American citizens to cross over to Egypt only when Egypt is allowed to send relief material to Gaza through the same border route. The US has not agreed to the condition as of now. The US may leave American citizens to die but will not allow relief material reach Gaza. This is the same United States which cries hoarse over human rights violations in Islamic countries. There can not be a greater human rights violations than this being committed under the nose of the UN, the US and neighbouring Islamic countries. This war should also be seen as another plan to destroy Syria and topple Bashar al Asad as Israel attacked its airport in Damascus to drag it into the conflict. During 2014 the main thrust of the ISIS was on toppling Bashar al Asad and at one point of time, Saudi Arabia and the US had even decided to attack Syria but Putin's threat to attack Saudi Arabia in case of an attack on Syria averted the catastrophe. The US representative has visited Gulf countries perhaps to convince them to help open the Egypt border only to allow the Americans out of Gaza and secondly, convince them that it is a war of the Shias only, so if Syria is attacked during the conflagration, the Arabs should not be involved. He may also try to convince them that a strong Hamas, Syria and Hezbollah may only cause a threat to the Sunni countries in the long run and so cutting them to size is only in their own interests. That the ISIS has not given any call for jihad against Israel has again proved that the ISIS was another lapdog of Israel after Hamas went out of its control. It may be noted that Hamas was created by Israel to counter Yasir Arafat's Fateh but it has now turned the tables on Israel. During 2014, injured ISIS fighters were treated in hospitals in Israel. Islamic ulema who issued fatwa of jihad against Bashar al Asad have not issued fatwas of jihad against Israel because they apparently believe that it is a war of the Shias. The Sunni world has disgracefully remained silent spectators. Azerbaijan has even supported Israel though paper tiger, the Sick Man of Europe, Tayyip Erdogan had rushed to its military help and ISIS mercenaries during Azerbaijan's war with Christian majority Armenia two years ago. Today Erdogan is so helpless, he cannot even convince his NATO masters to allow him to send humanitarian aid to Gaza. However, Apoorvananda's article tries to look into the crisis from a realistic and objective point of view. ----- By Apoorvanand 14/OCT/2023 Children are being bombed out of life. Women and old are being killed. Residential buildings, mosques, churches, and hospitals are being reduced to rubble. Ambulances carrying the dead and injured have been targeted. Electricity and water supply have been cut off. Gaza is living and dying in darkness. Israel has laid a total seize on Gaza and using all its firepower to turn it into dust. More than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed, many of them are children. There is a fear that those surviving the Israeli murderous campaign will die of hunger. The World Food Program (WFP) has called the situation in Gaza devastating: “We’re seeing shortages of fuel, of water [and] electricity. We are seeing our shelters that are overcrowded. We don’t have capacity.” WFP’s Palestine country director, Samer Abdeljaber, has warned of an impending mass starvation, “The bakeries are not going to be able to provide food for tomorrow. So tomorrow is going to be a very difficult situation for the people in the shelters and the people outside the shelters.” The world is watching silently as Israel violates all international norms. No horror has been expressed after the news emerged that Israel is using white phosphorus, which is outlawed by the UN convention. The US has rushed its secretary of state Anthony Blinken to Tel Aviv to express solidarity with Israel. He sought to legitimise the murder of the civilians of Gaza by Israel by claiming that Hamas was using people as human shields and suggesting that Israel had no option but to break this shield, which would require the mass killing of the people of Gaza. As I write this piece, bombs are raining on Gaza. The number of the killed and maimed must have increased manyfold by the time you read this article. But the world governments have not expressed any horror. They have not asked Israel to follow the international norms. They have not asked for a ceasefire. They have not even asked Israel to restore the supply of water and electricity to Gaza. A building in Gaza after Israel launch airstrikes following Hamas surprise attack. Photo: X/@UNRWA ------ When Gaza is being flattened out of existence, the US President seems to provide an excuse for it by talking about the horror he felt after being told about the beheading of children by the Hamas militants. His own office later denied that he had personally seen those pictures. It was like creating a ground for the assault that Israel has mounted on Gaza. Will The Civilised World Ever Condemn Israel? What Hamas did last Saturday was inexcusable. One could understand as even many Israeli writers and ex-army people from Israel have said that decades of the total seize and daily humiliation of nearly 2 million people would have led to a violent eruption of this kind. They said that the hubris of the Israeli establishment was responsible for the death and destruction that Hamas had caused. By its surprise attack, Hamas has stunned the world and Israel which boasted of an impregnable iron dome and an unbeatable intelligence system. All claims of the invincibility of Israel were belied. Is this what Hamas wanted to achieve? One tangible gain according to it would be forcing Israel to release Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the Israeli people it has captured in its attack on Israel. But did it not know how Israel would respond to it? That it had no capacity to defend the people it claimed to be acting for? If Hamas is a leader of its people, what precautions had been taken before enacting that audacious multi-pronged attack on the people of Israel? Did it not know that the images of defenceless civilians being killed and taken hostage would turn public opinion against it? Not that it has done anything substantial for the Palestinian people but even strategically it was idiotic to push oneself in a corner and lose all sympathy. Trial of destruction in Gaza after Israel’s offensive following Hamas rocket attacks. Photo: X/@UNRWA ------ The act of Hamas is indefensible. It was a callous and irresponsible act of violence that would in the long run achieve little and which was bound to cause misery to the people of Gaza. But those who have longer memories question the sincerity of the expression of revulsion by the international community after the Hams attack. The world has been watching the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) personnel arresting and killing the Gaza people on a daily basis. Without any provocation. The world knows well that the government of Israel is aiding and supporting the settlers who are evicting Palestinians from their homes and stealing their land. It knows that Gaza has been turned into an open-air jail and Palestinian people have been forced to live in sub-human conditions for nearly five decades. We know that the Palestinians are being turned into second-class people in Israel. We are aware of the attempts to capture the mosque Al Aqsa. We know that in Jerusalem itself Palestinians are being evicted from their houses. How can one expect the civilised world to tolerate all this? We know however that this very civilised world literally expelled the Jews from Europe and hosted the Nazis after the holocaust for their national and strategic interests, to use them to fulfil its geo-political objective. So, to expect a moral response to the seven-decade-long oppression of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel will only disappoint us. We, the people, should not, however, join hands with our governments. Nor should we succumb to the logic of violence. All of us need to understand that in the name of collective punishment, we destroy individuals. Hamas killed individuals, destroyed relationships, and their dreams. What Israel has been doing, and now with the excuse of revenge, doing it much more lethally in destroying individuals even if they can be called Palestinian. No one, in the name of whichever cause, national or religious should be allowed to do that. God or nature created us as individuals. So, this individuality cannot be allowed to be sacrificed in the name of a collective cause, however great it might sound. Nothing is more sacred than the life of an individual. In the context of the last seven days, we can say that Hamas violated this basic principle. But the larger and much longer context of the last decades of continuous violation of it by Israel cannot be put aside. Without the Israeli terror, the terror of Hamas would not have existed. If the world wants Hamas to be irrelevant, it’ll have to first discipline its pampered Israel which has been acting like a bully for the last seven decades. Source: Without Israel's Oppression of Palestinians, Hamas Terrorism Would Have Never Existed URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/world-israel-violates-white-phosphorus/d/130907 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism