Some hope surfaced when a limited hostage deal was announced that would involve a four-day pause in fighting, the first cessation since Israel launched its air and ground invasion on Gaza following the Hamas atrocities.
LONDON
Emotions ran high in Committee Room 5 of the Palace of Westminster last Monday. In the home of the UK Parliament, Israeli parents of children who had been taken hostage by Hamas terrorists were invited to tell their stories. With a voice choked with passion and tears flooding down her cheeks, Orit Meir told us how her son Almog had been attending the Nova music festival in Re’im, close to the border with Gaza, when a group from the Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas made a surprise attack, killing 364 young people and wounding many more. Almog was one of at least 40 hostages from the festival taken back into Gaza, where he is languishing along with about 240 others seized during the attack on that fateful day, 7 October. “The last I heard from my son was a phone call at about 3pm telling me that there were gunmen rampaging over the site shooting and capturing his friends”, Orit said. “The terrorists later sent me a video of Almog tied up in a basement looking terrified. I don’t know whether he is alive or dead and the silence is so painful”, she sobbed.
Another speaker, Doron Libshtein, told us that his brother, Ofir, was murdered by Hamas during a raid on his village of Kfar Aza, in the Negev desert adjacent to the Gaza-Israel border. Doron’s nephew and two other members of his family were also murdered during the raid along with many other villagers.
Ofir and his relatives were among 1,200 Israelis killed that day, as scores of Hamas gunmen swept through Israeli towns and military bases near the border, opening fire on people in their homes and on the streets. According to survivors, the attackers indiscriminately shot dead elderly women and young children alike, before setting bodies and dwellings on fire. The vast majority of those murdered were Israeli civilians, but among the numbers were many foreigners, including 31 US and 39 French citizens plus those with dual nationalities.
Some hope surfaced on Wednesday when a limited hostage deal was announced that would involve a four-day pause in fighting, the first cessation since Israel launched its air and ground invasion on Gaza following the Hamas atrocities. At least fifty women and children of those taken hostage by the terrorists on 7 October will be released during that period, along with one hundred and fifty Palestinian women and teenagers currently held in Israeli prisons, also called hostages by the Palestinian authorities. On Friday, Hamas freed the first 13 Israeli hostages together with 12 Thai nationals in the captive exchange deal.
Of critical importance to those two million or so Palestinians trapped in Gaza without food or drinking water will be Israel’s agreement for hundreds of trucks to enter the Strip through the sole Egyptian border crossing of Rafah. Conditions for the Palestinians in Gaza are said to be horrendous and inhumane. In an interview on the BBC last week, Tom White, Director of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRA), said that an average of 47 trucks a day had entered Gaza through Rafah so far this month, but they needed a bare minimum of 150 trucks to meet even basic needs. UNRA hoped to use the four-day pause to carry out two critical activities. The most important is to gain access and provide humanitarian aid to populations that they haven’t been able to get access to so far in the war, particularly in the north of Gaza where the fighting has been intense. UNRA also wants to use the opportunity to repair some of the infrastructure, particularly critical water lines that were damaged and impossible to mend while the conflict was raging.
“Conditions in the UNRA installations where people are sheltering are desperate”, said White. “Shelters in the south of Gaza that normally house a thousand people a day, which we calculated in war might accommodate up to fifteen hundred, are now housing six thousand people. Women and children are sleeping tightly packed in each room, while the men are sleeping outside in the open areas, even when it’s raining. Some 125 people share one toilet and 700 share a single shower. Living conditions are tough and becoming dangerous. UNRA has already seen a significant rise in skin diseases, such as scabies. Of particular concern is a huge rise in watery diarrhoea, the result of lack of safe drinking water.”
Tom White also confirmed that one hundred and eight UNRA staff have been killed so far in the seven-week war while trying to help the Palestinian refugees. Among these were doctors, teachers, nurses, and sanitation workers from all walks of society. So “we are all grieving”, he said. “Every Palestinian we look after has lost a family member. Gaza is a society that is grieving right now and it will take decades for the mental scars to heal”.
Although the four-day pause appears to be holding, Israel threatens afterwards to continue to pummel Gaza from the air, targeting refugee camps and even hospital areas where they suspect the militants may be hiding. Currently the death toll among Palestinians is reported to be 14,856, of whom 6,150 are children and 4,018 are women. In some cases whole families have been wiped out. On a visit to London on Wednesday, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki reported that dozens of members of the same family had been killed in the Jabalia refugee camp in Northern Gaza just hours after the announcement of the truce. “Only this morning, 52 members of the Qadoura family were wiped out, from grandfather to grandchildren”, he said. “I have their names”. While al-Maliki was speaking, in Khan Younis, an area in south Gaza considered to be a “safe place” to flee to from the north but which continues to be bombarded by the Israelis, the bodies of more than one hundred Palestinians were buried in a mass grave.
As the world watches with horror at the devastation caused by Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his cabinet appear to be unaware that by striking Gaza with one of the most intensive air campaigns since World War II and creating so many casualties, martyrs in the eyes of Palestinians, they are playing squarely into Hamas’s hands. Hamas was founded with the goal of eradicating Israel, but as it is not capable of doing that militarily, it wields terrorism to gain attention and allies. Hamas has used the deaths of both Israelis and Palestinian civilians to promote its political agenda, and in many ways it has succeeded. Its strategic aim on 7 October was to provoke Israel into a counterproductive overreaction, duly delivered by the Israeli Defence Forces in a bludgeoning response which has inflamed public opinion in the region against Israel, exactly as Hamas wanted. It has not gone unnoticed in Arab countries that so far, Israel has killed ten Palestinians for every one Israeli murdered by Hamas on 7 October.
It’s difficult, of course, for Israeli leaders to show restraint because their constituents are furious, both with the attack and the failure of Israeli intelligence to prevent it. The words and faces of the Israeli parents in Committee Room 5 on Monday left no one present in any doubt. Netanyahu’s cabinet is dominated by hardliners who do not seem bothered by the humanitarian cost of their response which is angering so many of Israel’s neighbours. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, for example, declared that his country was fighting “human animals” and would act accordingly, echoing a predecessor who in 1983 boasted that “once Israelis settled the land, all the Palestinians will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle”. As a result, the war is blindly following an aggressive path with no apparent strategy for how and when the fighting should end or how long-term peace can be achieved.
The best and perhaps only way for Israel to defeat Hamas is to regain the moral high ground by moderating the use of force and developing the much promised two-state solution. In doing so, Israel will cut off Hamas’s ability to draw support in the region and incite further violence. Benjamin Netanyahu will also discover something he ought to have already understood: there is no military solution to the Palestinian conflict.
For as long as Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ultra-right wing cabinet remain in power, all that Israel will achieve is the certainty of a “forever war” in the region. In the words of the 18 century French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, what Netanyahu is doing “is more than a crime, it’s a mistake”. Unless Netanyahu recognises his mistake, this will not be the beginning of the end of the war; it may not even be the end of the beginning.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.