Madness

So far, Israel has:

• bombed 3 UN schools being used as refugee centres, killing dozens of civilians. An entire family of seven children perished in one of the raids. The UN had given the Israeli army the GPS coordinates of the schools and told them they were being used as refugee centres, after the Israelis themselves had told these people to leave their homes.

• shot at a UN convoy, bringing aid to Palestinian civilians. The driver of a lorry was killed.

• interfered with Red Cross workers trying to help victims of the violence. In one now notorious incident, the Israeli army left several Palestinian children inside a house to starve at the side of their mothers’ corpses. When the Red Cross wanted to search for further victims in the bombed out houses, they were told to leave the area by the Israeli army.

And today, reports reach the world that Israel evacuated around 110 civilians to a building on the 4th of January, and then proceeded to bomb it the next day. 30 people were killed, including a 5 month old baby.

The UN security council accepted a resolution today, calling for a lasting solution to the conflict and unfettered access to the wounded for relief workers. The US actually abstained from the vote. I suppose we should be grateful they didn’t veto it.

It didn’t really matter in the end, of course, because both Israel and Hamas blew off the resolution.

The scale of the Israeli disregard for international law does at least seem to have invoked the ire of at least some at the UN and all of those engaged in helping the victims of the conflict. There are now calls to investigate whether Israel is guilty of war crimes (yeah, I wonder), but let’s not cheer too soon. No-one who cares currently has the political clout to actually make such an investigation go ahead and western reporters still aren’t allowed into Gaza.

While I’m venting my spleen, I mustn’t fail to recognise the cowardly inaction of the Dutch government, who have so far defended Israel with the usual has-the-right-to-defend-itself nonsense, which is intended — and serves — to distract and deflect attention from the atrocities being perpetrated. A lot of people understandably find the notion of self-defence a reasonable one, but what is happening today in Gaza has little to do with defence. Clearly, in the eyes of Israel, the only good Palestinian is a dead one.