In a week, it will be one year since Hamas launched its heinous attack on Israel, butchering people and seizing hostages in the biggest surprise offensive since Yom Kippur on October 6th 1973 when the Egyptian and Syrian armies launched their war to recapture territory lost in 1967.
The scale of the Hamas attack on October 7th and the secrecy that attended it were beyond comprehension. Thousands of rockets bombarded Israel and thousands of Gazans penetrated over 100 points in what is described as the Gaza Envelope to carry out this mass carnage against Israelis. At the end of the attacks over 1,000 people including children had been killed mercilessly and around 250 hostages taken. That Israel had been taken completely by surprise will go down in history as the grossest failure of its intelligence agencies: Mossad, Aman and Shin Bet and PM Netanyahu is ultimately accountable.
If the proximate cause of the Hamas attack was to interdict the normalising of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which event would have further undermined prospects for a Palestinian state, its underpinnings lay in the historic grievances by the people of Palestine against the Israeli state for the decades of displacement from their lands and the killings and brutality meted out to them in the occupied territories and refugees camps.
Hamas and the Gazans must have known that October 7th would have had unimaginable consequences and it did. Day after day for almost a year, Israel in its crusade to crush Hamas militants and terrorists has carried out monstrous assaults on all parts of Gaza. More than 41,000 men, women and children, the large majority of them civilians, have been bombed and maimed out of existence. Nothing has been spared by the Israeli Defence Force under the instruction of Mr Netanyahu and his government. Hospitals, schools, refugee camps, temporary shelters, food kitchens have all been targeted in this cruel retribution. Each day brought its own horror whether it was the man who ventured out to register the birth of his twins only to return home to find them dead from a missile attack or the dust-covered children writhing in pain after losing limbs to bombs. Gazans were bombed from one end of the Gaza Strip to other and had to relocate many times, starvation set in, disease was rife, sanitation non-existent. When hostilities are over, all of those guilty of war crimes must be held accountable and neither Israel nor Hamas must be able to whitewash what has occurred.
The savagery of the Israeli assault has replicated the human toll many times over what occurred on October 7th and it appears that Mr Netanyahu and his government are not finished as yet. A new front has been opened against Hezbollah with the hapless Lebanon and its people caught in the crosshairs of another explosives-laden Israeli assault. A mockery has been made of Hezbollah. First it was the booby-trapping of five thousand pagers which were detonated simultaneously followed a day after by handheld radios. Thousands of its militants were injured in these two acts. In between, senior commanders have been killed and on Friday the most grievous blow was struck, its longstanding leader Hassan Nasrallah and a senior member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard were killed by a bunker busting bomb. So dire was this attack that Tehran was said to have moved its leader Ayatollah Khamenei to safe surroundings – a recognition of the deep compromising that Israel achieved by killing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the Iranian capital in July.
The public understands that Israel’s goal in the opening of this new front is the return of 60,000 Israelis to parts of their country that have come under assault from Hezbollah rockets since last year. Those rockets exemplified solidarity with the Palestinian people. Already hundreds of Lebanese have been killed in the last few days of attacks by Israeli jets. Better sense must prevail and a ceasefire must be agreed.
One has lost track of how many time US Secretary of State Blinken has attempted his version of shuttle diplomacy in a bid for a ceasefire in Gaza and a broader peace. It has been a monumental failure. Washington should by now understand that Israel will not come to heel unless it is cut off from the weapons of destruction – like the bomb that pierced the bunker in Beirut killing Mr Nasrallah – which it has employed wantonly to devastate Gaza and now Lebanon. Hopefully, the new American administration will recognise that arming Israel’s thirst to bomb its enemies into submission must be brought to an end.
No matter the end game in Gaza and Lebanon and the exciting of proxies such as the Houthis in Yemen, the Israeli people and their leaders must come to understand that this year-long campaign has clearly achieved only one thing: the seeding of hate and desperation in Palestinian communities. Generations to come will harbour and cultivate this animosity for Israel and if October 7, 2023 was disastrous and bloody, its sequel will undoubtedly be played out maybe in three years, a decade or even longer. What will Israel do then?
On October 7th Israel will not be able to declare victory. It has suffered tremendous losses both in civilians and soldiers, it is deeply divided internally and it faces headwinds of various types. It is increasingly isolated in the ranks of the third world and losing the sympathies developed for it in the aftermath of the holocaust.
In an Op-Ed in the September 27th edition of Stabroek News, Israel’s Ambassador to CARICOM, Itai Bardov called for the UN Security Council to finally enforce Resolution 1701, which mandates the withdrawal of Hezbollah forces in Lebanon to north of the Litani River. The only reasonable way forward for Israel and the Palestinian people is a negotiated settlement along the contours of UN Security Council Resolution 242 to enable a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with dual control of Jerusalem. That is the only guaranteed pathway for peace. Killing thousands of civilians, assassinating maximum leaders and pulverizing towns provide only temporary respite for Israel and its people. A comprehensive settlement with the people of Palestine is required.
