Israel is an apartheid state which now has got the license of murdering the people in Gaza at their will. Since Hamas's attack on Israel, it has closed supply of water, food, fuel and medicine to Gaza with the clear intention of eliminating a whole population from the face of the earth. Up to 30th October, there were already over 8,000 Palestinians killed including 3,000 children and 20,000 wounded and a third of the buildings in Gaza destroyed by the Israeli attack. This is not a war, but a Zionist mission of wiping the unarmed Palestinians off the earth by a most powerful military power in the world.

In the tragic plight of Gaza, parents have written names of their children on their hands and legs so that they could find out their bodies in the rubble after being killed or mutilated with Israeli bombs. It is unimaginable how heart-rending it is. The Israeli military ordered 22 hospitals in Gaza to be evacuated, which was nothing but a death sentence to patients in the hospitals according to the WHO. There are cancer patients and newborn babies in incubators along with those civilians who take shelter in hospitals. Yet Israeli bombs demolished the al-Ahli hospital with more than a thousand dead instantly. The Israeli government later denied their role in its destruction. They tried to cover up the most inhuman acts with blatant lies that it was the Hamas bomb that destroyed the hospital in Gaza.

The whole western world is in cahoots with the Israeli military aggression. It is so horrific that any pro-Palestinian who talks about it cannot do so but being emotional. On the other hand, most pro-Israeli persons talk like inanimate calculators in a robotic attitude. Israel is not only killing the Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank, they are also bombing their own people taken hostage by Hamas. The whole Israeli narrative is a western product of lies upon lies. Their narrative is quite alarming. Like the narrative of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam's hand manufactured for Iraq occupation, this has created the narrative of Israel's right to self-defense, as if it is Israel, not Palestine, which has been occupied, bombed, turned into a cage by some imperial power. So the 7th October attack has been projected as Israel's 9/11. In the same way, Hamas is being compared to ISIS. The unfounded story of 40 beheaded Israeli children are put forward time and again by the pro-Israeli western media.

In their well-designed narrative, 7th October is the beginning of everything now happening in Gaza. In the view of all pro-Israelis, internationally well-known journalist Piers Morgan among them, as if this was the Big Bang of Israel-Palestine crisis, and so there was nothing before that historical day. Yet, every knowledgeable person in the world knows well that the root of the crisis lies in the forceful settlement of Israelis in Palestine making about a million indigenous Palestinians homeless in 1948.

Taj Ali, a Tribune correspondent, wrote in Jacobin (Thousands of Palestinian Workers Have Gone Missing in Israel, 29 October 2023), 'There are few groups in history who have suffered as many waves of dispossession and displacement in such a short period as the Palestinian people. On May 15, 1948, over 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homeland and over 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed in what is known as the Nakba or "catastrophe."

Now the leaders of the western world together have voiced their support for Israeli killing of Palestinian people and children. Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron-all declared their unconditional support of whatever Israeli military does in the name of their self-defense. The bomb, therefore, that razed the Gaza hospital to the ground is made and supplied by the USA. Now they are ordering evacuation of al-Quds Hospital as a pre-bombing ritual of utter mockery. This would add to the list of many war crimes continually committed by the Israeli military with the US complicity.

After European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen shook hands with the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and voiced her unconditional support for his bloodthirsty campaign against the Palestinian people, DiEM25, an organization founded by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, posted: "She's unelected. She had no mandate from the EU's states to go to Israel. She never once called for restraint or respect for international law." (Jouke Huijzer, Europe's Blind Eye to Israel's War Crimes Shows the "Rules-Based Order" Is a Cruel Farce, Jacobin, 25 October 2023)

In an interview in Berlin on 8th October, Varoufakis refused to condemn either Hamas or the Israeli settlers committing atrocities across Israel-Palestine. He writes, "Instead, I condemned us, Europeans and Americans, as the true villains who, for decades, we stood idly by while the underlying cause of these atrocities, Apartheid, became a fait accompli."

After the Hamas attack on 7 October, Varoufakis's first comment on Twitter was: "The path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives - both Palestinian and Israeli - begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli Occupation and Apartheid."

United Nations secretary-general António Guterres said in a speech to the Security Council on 24 October that the Hamas's deadly attacks in Israel "did not happen in a vacuum". He explained the background, "The Palestinian people have been subjected to fifty-six years of suffocating occupation." And he said, therefore, "those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people."

Without removing the root cause of the Israel-Palestine crisis, no one can hope for a stable and sustaining peace in that region of the world. Ending the Jewish supremacy and the apartheid state of Israel as it was done in South Africa under the strong leadership of Nelson Mandela is the only option left in the hand of the world if it can still aspire to be called humanist in any sense at all.

The writer is Editor, Biggan O Sangskriti