Today marks 235 days since Israel launched its war against Gaza. After the horrific Israeli airstrike fireball that burnt people alive in their tents on Sunday, all eyes are now on the city of Rafah. I know Rafah; I used to hang out there regularly, especially with my friend Faiza and her family. They lived on the city outskirts, close to the border with Egypt, overlooking the mouths of numerous tunnels Gazans built to smuggle goods and people in and out of the Strip. I remember Faiza’s home had huge cracks ruptured down the walls, evidence of the how Israeli bombs to destroy the tunnels would literally shake these shoddy concrete houses almost to death.
Faiza’s home was destroyed months ago, at the beginning of the war. Now she and her two young kids, her elder brother and elderly parents are in a tent in the Tel al Sultan district; I haven’t heard from Faiza since last Thursday, I do not know if she and her family are amongst 45 people killed in the fire on Sunday, including people burnt alive. It is almost beyond imagination, to envisage a sitution of a military firebombing a so-called humanitarian safezone. But we have reached beyond what many of us presumed possible in this catastrophic slaughter.
No-one is winning this war: the 121 Israeli hostages still inside Gaza – though not confirmed still alive – include 19-year old Naama Levy (who was filmed being kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th, her hands bound) and 26-year old twins Gali and Ziv Berman. What they are living through if they are still living, haunts me. Netanyahu’s response, to flatten Gaza and claim he will destroy Hamas and release the hostages, has failed on all counts. Hamas’s political henchman the notoriously brutal Yahya Sinwar, is still very much alive and overseeing Hamas’s ceasefire demands.
More than thirty six thousand Palestinians have died inside Gaza in the last 235 days. Thousands are mained for life – I met several last week in Cairo, and will write about this later. I met other Palestinians so traumatised by what they witnessed inside Gaza they cannot leave the apartments where they now shelter in Cairo. Their stories and especially their voices, haunt me too.
The US reaction, that the attacks in Rafah don’t constitute a red line, and that it is monitoring Israel’s investigation into into what killed so many civilians, serves only to further diminish Joe Biden; his moral authority and leverage in this war is now bankrupt, as Israel’s Arab neighbours know too well.
Meanwhile, the Guardian newspapers new investigation into Netanyahu’s Government attempting to intimidate the International Criminal Court (ICC) exposes, if any further evidence was necessary, his obsession with his saving his own political skin and bullying international efforts to hold him to account. It was published in partnership with the Israeli magazines 972 and Local Call; bear in mind that Israeli NGOs who criticise the government are also deliberately targeted in Israel’s increasingly repressive political landscape.
Meanwhile, Israel’s chief allies, especially the US and the UK, might publically wring their hands over Rafah, but have lost their limited political leverage by continuing the flow of weapons into Israel. Neither Joe Biden nor Rishi Sunak has the vision, courage nor political wisdom to respond effectively to Netanyahu’s rampage through Gaza. Israel can only continue bombing civilians across Gaza if they continue receiving the weaponry, especially from the US, Germany and Italy.
As Norway’s CMI Institute writes, ‘Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis but a politically sanctioned attack on civilian infrastructure and people who, due to decades of occupation and blockade, are made unable to defend themselves …. [it] is not an ‘evacuation’ or ‘relocation’ but a forced and unlawful displacement of the Palestinian people’.
Though I have no personal faith in the long-dead ‘two-state solution,’ the few glimpses of political sanity we’ve seen include Spain, Ireland and Norway now recognising Palestine as a state. Meanwhile I hope that my friend Faiza and her family are alive in Rafah, and that somehow they will live to see the end of this chronic bloody injustice.
Cover image by Underdog Fox at Deviant Art
