Gaza's Descent Into Catastrophe Tests Europe's Conscience

[Celerity]

As Gaza endures unprecedented horror, Europe cannot longer stay inactive.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/gazas-descent-into-catastrophe-tests-europes-conscience





On 18 March, Benjamin Netanyahu broke a truce established in Gaza days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Within hours, bombings had killed more than 400 people. He was thus ensuring his political survival; continuing the war was the condition Bezalel Smotrich, his far-right partner, set for not overthrowing the government coalition. Since then, thousands more Palestinian civilians, predominantly women and children, have been killed, and the lives of the surviving hostages have been put in peril. A total blockade and widespread famine have catastrophically worsened an already dire humanitarian situation. Most buildings and infrastructure have been destroyed. The last water desalination plant is no longer operational.

The assessment is universally grim. The United Nations has warned that the situation in Gaza has deteriorated to its worst point since the start of the war. The aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières has described Gaza as a mass grave for thousands of Gazans but “also for those trying to help them”. Twelve of the largest international aid organisations have just launched a joint, desperate appeal. Yet, the pleas seem to go unanswered. Israel’s Defence Minister, Israel Katz, has reiterated in recent days that “no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza”. Meanwhile, Bezalel Smotrich echoed this sentiment, confirming that maximum pressure was being exerted to “evacuate people to the south and implement President Trump’s voluntary migration plan for the inhabitants of Gaza”. This plan, Israel Katz had already presented to the EU Council in early 2024 when he was foreign minister.

The Israeli army has seized half of the territory and placed two-thirds of Gaza under evacuation orders, effectively designating them as “no-go zones”, including the border town of Rafah. The aim, it appears, is to create the conditions for what would be the largest ethnic cleansing operation since the end of the Second World War. To claim that “not a single grain of wheat will enter Gaza” is a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. It is impossible not to see this as an intent to exterminate, which the International Criminal Court had already taken into consideration when issuing arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister. It is no less serious than that found in the past by international justice in Srebrenica and Rwanda.

Simultaneously, in the West Bank, the army is conducting its largest offensive in decades. More than 40,000 Palestinians have already been forcibly displaced from the north of the territory, in apparent preparation for plans pushed by far-right lawmakers to expand new settlements, which are illegal under international law. On 23 March, the government nevertheless granted legitimacy to 13 of these settlements. The fundamentalist far right hopes that Donald Trump will support its plans to annex part or all of the West Bank, a move that would effectively extinguish any remaining possibility of creating a Palestinian state.

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[AloeVera]

1. It's unbearable to even watch or think about.

Yet Palestinians continue to endure it.

I've lost faith in European nations to do the right thing. If they haven't by now, they've allowed themselves to become complicit. Hard to turn that ship around.

Was all that fine talk about human rights, equality, self-determination, two-state solution, no ethnic cleansing etc etc just empty talk covering up anti-Palestinian animus, even racism? Similar to what has happened in the U.S. ? I really wonder.