End the slaughter in Gaza - the Guyana Government must call for a ceasefire

After more than 12,000 deaths, more than 5,000 being children and 3,000 women, with 3,700 missing, there is no end in sight to the Gaza slaughter. Israel’s war on Gaza’s dwellings, more than forty percent of which is now rubble, now extended to its hospitals where surgeries are carried out without anesthetic, and premature children are dying because of non-functioning incubators, Israel’s war on Gaza has no end in sight. Having displaced 1.6 million Gazans by bombing and ordering northern Gazans to move to south Gaza, Israel says that it will now extend its bombing campaign in southern Gaza. Racing to the south to avoid bombs, the fate of both northern and southern Gazans is now dismal. And as if the bombs were not enough, Gazans now face starvation, according to the United Nations. Part of the headline of a New York Times article describes northern as “Ruins, Wreckage and Darkness.” It would have been more accurate if the description was “Ruins, Wreckage, Death and Darkness.”

This level of mindless death and destruction visited upon Gaza by Israel cannot have as its declared objective merely the destruction of Hamas which carried out the massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7 and the kidnapping of 240, among whom are young children and old people. There has to be more to it. Even if one believes the dubious Israeli and American narrative that

Hamas hides behind civilians as human shields, not a single Hamas fighter or fighter’s body, or fighter’s name has been produced who has been released. No human shields have been produced and no command centre has yet been exposed anywhere, including from underneath the Al Shifa Hospital, as claimed.

The objective of the Israeli war on Gazans appears to be mass murder in an extension of the periodic pogroms referred to by Israelis as “mowing the lawn” – the killing of thousands of Gazan men, women and children every few years in bombings to keep them in line. It appears that collective punishment by the vengeful slaughter of 50,000 or so Gazans is the price being exacted by Israel against the innocent population of Gaza for Hamas’s brutal and horrifying massacre of 1,200 Israelis. Maybe there are other objectives such as the depopulation of northern Gaza to create a buffer zone. Israel’s apparent initial objective of driving Gazans into Egypt, making them refugees once again, appears to have failed.

Hamas won elections in Palestine - Gaza and the West Bank – in 2006, which were pronounced as free and fair by former President Carter. The democratic choice of the Palestinian people was rejected by the United States and Israel, even as Hamas was preparing to accept the existence of Israel and a two-state solution. Hamas was in effect deposed and a blockade imposed around Gaza in 2007. Nothing can get in, or get out, of Gaza, without Israel’s permission. In this concentration camp there is 46 percent unemployment, and a poverty rate of 61 percent. With this sentence of life imprisonment, with the end of the possibility of a two-state solution, with the Abraham Accords under which the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain recognized Israel, with the pending agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel whereby Saudi Arabia would recognize Israel, with the (This column is reproduced with permission from Ralph Ramkarran’s blog, www.conversationstree.gy)