Gaza truce efforts
GLOBAL efforts to seal a ceasefire in Gaza are still doomed to fail amid eight days of Israeli rocket attacks on Gaza’s civilian areas have led to over 100 deaths majority among them were children. Moreover, Israel has signaled a readiness to expand the war.
Delegates from the two sides have met in Cairo to stop the killings and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has arrive to broker a deal but the United Nations has done nothing to put an end to them. Instead all that the diplomats at the UN Security Council have only drafted a statement sent to their respective foreign offices, while the international media continues to publish graphic scenes of the death and destruction inflicted on the innocent Palestinians.
No doubt ceasefire will sooner or later come into effect but the question is how long Israel will launch its attacks.
For how long peacemakers, from the US secretary general to the re-elected president of the superpower US really, making an effort to solve the problem forever. They can put out the fire by tackling the flames instead of going to the source of the blaze. The issue is the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination; the issue is the continued occupation of the Palestinian people’s ancestral land by settlers; the issue is how to end the occupation of the Arab lands and give to the people of Palestine a state of their own, with Jerusalem, now under Israeli occupation, as its capital. The UN has passed at least two landmark resolutions - 242 and 338 - calling for Israel’s withdrawal from Palestinian territories and at least two American presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, had rejected it. The 1978-79 Camp David agreement made Israel withdraw from the Sinai while the 1993 Declaration of Principles laid down a timetable for the Israeli withdrawal. But, after the man who signed it for Israel, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered, successive Israeli governments have reneged on it. Since then, there has been a stalemate, and Israel continues to build new settlements on the West Bank to alter the occupied territory’s demographic character. As experience shows, a ceasefire serves temporarily as it doesn’t root out the cause of the conflict that has continued for decades.