© NCSU Student Media 2009
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Today is the 18th day of the illegal and savage Israeli military campaign on the innocent civilian population of Gaza.
According to the few reporters who have somehow managed to get around the incomprehensible Israeli block of international news coverage on the atrocities being committed in Gaza, a staggering 45 to 50 percent of the injured, and 25 to 30 percent of those killed, are women and children, who should be spared given their non-combatant status.
Hospitals are running frighteningly low on doctors and medical supplies, and whatever few supplies remain are stored in warehouses that are too dangerous to approach. The United Nations, among many other donor countries and NGOs, in an attempt to relieve the humanitarian crisis, sent vessels loaded with various supplies to the affected areas. Unfortunately, the supplies never actually reached their targets because of confrontation with Israeli naval ships in international waters.
What all of this means is that the already fragile and weak situation in Gaza is quickly deteriorating, and efforts by the international community to relieve the crisis have proven to be futile. And to make matters worse, the United States Congress has just last week passed resolutions basically granting a blank check and reaffirming America’s unconditional support to Israel, regardless of its actions and contrary to the national interests of the United States.
The reason for this campaign that Israeli officials have been feeding the media is that they are combatting terrorists, namely Hamas, and that this particular campaign is an extension of the Global War on Terror. It is with this rhetoric that Israel seeks to appeal to the sentiments of the American people.
The problem here, however, is that Hamas militants comprise a very small percentage of the large numbers of people who have been targeted and killed in this campaign. I use the word “targeted” for a reason, for I fail to see the rationale behind bombing entire neighborhoods, mosques and UN-sanctioned schools if the real motive is to crack down on Hamas leadership.
What we are currently seeing in the Middle East is an illegal, systematic and collective punishment of thousands of civilians for the few scattered rockets fired by Hamas into Israel that caused neither significant damage to infrastructure nor claimed the lives of any more than three nonmilitary Israeli citizens. And while I stand strongly against the murder of any civilian of any nationality, the response by Israel of these few rocket fires is both wholly disproportional and morally corrupt.
All this time, Israeli officials repeat over and over again that it is Hamas that is the real cause of this conflict, and they, Israelis, are not to blame for the massive loss of lives. What Israel doesn’t seem to understand here, interestingly, is the most basic concept of human nature – namely, self-preservation, for if a raging criminal broke into my home and shot my parents and siblings dead, I doubt that a single person would see fault in my complete incrimination of the shooter himself, rather than of some sort of larger social construct that somehow pushed that criminal to pull the trigger.
In other words, Israel is the one pulling the trigger and killing nearly 1,000 innocent people in Gaza, not Hamas. And insofar as Israel continues to do so, the international community will blame no other entity for these crimes than Israel itself.
As far as I’m concerned, the current crisis in Gaza extends much farther beyond the politics and history of the now 62 year-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This is strictly a humanitarian crisis that all people, everywhere, must not only condemn but also immediately press their governments to call for a cease-fire so that no more innocent blood will be shed.