Brave Pakistan army

We have seen, over and over again ceasefires dissipate in the dust of renewed bombings. Here are three basic human rights which must not be neglected if there is to be any hope for a just and sustainable peace. The newly brokered truce between Israel and the Palestinians will be meaningless if it is not built solidly upon human rights, which must be at the heart of any attempt to stop the cycle of war crimes and other gross violations recurring incessantly. Without such a foundation, Palestinians and Israelis will continue to suffer. 

In 50 days of conflict, more than 2,100 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians. Nearly 500 of them were children. Many, perhaps most, of them were killed unlawfully, in attacks that violated international humanitarian law (the laws of war). Israel has levelled houses and bombed and shelled built up residential areas, apparently targeting militants, as though civilian lives and homes were irrelevant. At the same time, of the 70 killed on the Israeli side, six have been civilians, including one child. These civilians were killed by Palestinian armed groups firing indiscriminate rockets and other weapons into civilian areas, in violation of the laws of war.

If we want to understand this conflict we have to look at its background. For years Israel has imposed a blockade on Gaza, controlling the goods allowed to enter or leave the strip. After 2007 when Hamas gained control the Israeli blockade tightened to the point that it amounted to collective punishment. Enough has been allowed through for the Gazans to survive - but only just. 

The 1.8 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza suffer shortages in fuel and electricity; at least a third are without clean water because Israel has blocked entry of sufficient fuel and the spare parts to repair damaged sewage works. Fishermen are restricted to a three-mile zone (widening it is one of the measures mentioned in the terms of the ceasefire) and there have been heavy restrictions on the import of raw materials and cement. There are also bans on the export of farming produce. 

Israeli restrictions on movement have meant that even Palestinians needing urgent medical treatment outside the Gaza Strip have often been prevented from leaving. Some 80 percent of the population is now dependant on barely sufficient humanitarian aid. The blockade MUST be lifted and the passage of necessities and people allowed.

This is not only important for Gaza and Israel but also for the world. In this age of conflict, where the principle that civilians must be spared is at best callously disregarded and all too often deliberately flouted, we cannot allow the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity to go unpunished. During the latest conflict Israel did not allow Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch into Gaza; let us see if delegations from international human rights organisations are allowed to enter now that a truce is underway.

In July, the UN Human Rights Council set up a Commission of Inquiry to investigate all violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law. The purpose of this commission's investigation is to end impunity and ensure that those responsible are brought to justice. The commissioners should have the resources of experts, including military ones, and be allowed to go everywhere and see everything. 

If they had been implemented, the recommendations of the UN Fact-Finding Mission set up in the wake of the 2009 Gaza conflict might have prevented further unlawful killings and destruction in Gaza. When will international leaders learn sidelining human rights cannot bring about a just, sustainable peace? 

Let the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 after the horrors and genocide of the Second World War, still move us. In its preamble it said: "Disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind."

The whole system of international justice set up in the decades after World War II will become a dead letter if people's consciences are no longer outraged by the crimes committed in wartime as in peace. If violations of the laws of war are accepted by an international community which prefers to sweep the past under the carpet, in every war civilians will remain the first target and the next war in Gaza/Israel may well come soon and be even more deadly. It is now the time to put human rights at the heart of any peacemaking process. 

Twas not a famous victory — but that’s what the Palestinians of Gaza are celebrating. There was much shaking of heads in the international media when the fireworks burst over that shattered land on Tuesday night. After more than 2,100 dead — about 1,700 of them civilians — and 100,000 wounded, what did they have to crow about? An end to the killing? Peace? Well, no. In fact, Hamas — the vicious, horrible, terrorist Hamas with whom “we” (as in “the West”, Tony Blair, Israel, the US and all honourable men and women) cannot talk — has indeed won a victory.

Israel said it must be disarmed. It has not been disarmed. Israel said it must be smashed/destroyed/rooted out. It hasn’t been smashed/ destroyed/rooted out. The tunnels must all be destroyed, Israel proclaimed. But they haven’t been. All the rockets must be seized. But they haven’t been. So 65 Israeli soldiers died — for what? And from under the ground, quite literally, clambered on Tuesday the political leadership of Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) whose brothers were participating - much against the wishes of Israel, the US and Egypt - in the Cairo “peace” talks.

In Israel, significantly, there were no celebrations. The ever-so-right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu had once more over-egged its victory demands and ended up with another ceasefire as strong and as weak as the equally febrile truce that followed the 2009 Gaza war and the 2012 Gaza war. Physically, the Israelis had won; all those broken lives and all those smashed buildings and all that destroyed infrastructure do not suggest that the Palestinians have “prevailed” (to use a “Bushite” word). But strategically, the Palestinians have won. They are still in Gaza, Hamas is still in Gaza, and the coalition government of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas appears still to be a reality.

Many times has it been said that the founders of the Israeli state faced a problem: a land called Palestine. They dealt with that problem coldly, ruthlessly and efficiently. But now their problem is the Palestinians. Their land may have been taken for Israel, their surviving land may be eaten up by Israeli colonies; but the wretched Palestinians simply won’t go away. And killing them in large numbers — especially in front of the world’s television cameras — is getting to be a bit much, even for those who still shake in their boots at the mere whisper of the calumny “anti-Semitism”.

Israeli spokesmen even ended up comparing their actions to bloody Second World War RAF air raids, hardly a propaganda strike in the 21st century. But the world will reflect unhappily on other things. The Hamas spokesmen, for example, raving about the destruction of Israel and Zionism, their exaggerations as preposterous as the Israeli excuses. The greatest victory the world has ever seen, indeed! Hamas has achieved “more than any Arab army has ever achieved against Israel”. Indeed! Hezbollah drove the entire Israeli army out of Lebanon after an 18-year guerrilla war — with far more casualties on both sides than Hamas could ever imagine.

And then how quickly we have forgotten the Hamas killer squads who dispatched at least 21 “spies”, two of them women, in cold blood against the walls of Gaza over the past seven days. I notice that they do not appear in the total list of Palestinian dead. And I wonder why not. Were they to be treated by the Palestinians as even less human than the Israelis? Of course, they were. In a week in which Isis returned to its execution pit, Hamas showed that its old killer touch is also still intact. After three of its top military leaders were liquidated by the Israelis, what did we expect? But it’s interesting that not one Palestinian protested at this no-court-no-jury-no-human-rights “justice”. Nor did they protest at the execution of 17 “spies” in 2008-9 - forgotten today - and another six “spies” (also forgotten) in 2012.

And then we have the “military” casualties. Around 500 were Hamas fighters; back in the 2008-9 Gaza war, perhaps 200 fighters were killed. But in that earlier war, only six Israeli soldiers were killed. In this operation, however, 10 times as many Israeli soldiers died. In other words, Hamas — and, I suppose, Islamic Jihad — have learned how to fight. Hezbollah, the most efficient guerrilla army in the Middle East, certainly noticed this. And the Gaza rockets stretched across thousands of square miles of Israel, notwithstanding the “Iron Dome”. Once you had to live in Sderot to be in danger. Now you can find your flight cancelled at Ben Gurion airport.

Mahmoud Abbas, needless to say, is grovelling to the Egyptians and Americans in thankfulness for the truce. But in the new “joint” Palestinian government, Hamas is going to be telling Abbas how many “concessions” he can make. Far from isolating the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and sidelining Hamas by producing his own made-in-Cairo peace agreement for the Israelis and Americans — swiftly rejected by Hamas during the conflict — President Field Marshal al- Sisi of Egypt has been forced to acknowledge Hamas as the major Arab participant in the truce agreement. An odd thing, though. Right now, Egypt is bombing the Islamists of Libya, and the US is preparing to bomb the Islamists of Syria after bombing the Islamists of Iraq. But in Gaza, the Islamists have just won. This surely cannot last.

A UN report published yesterday said Israel’s nearly month-long offensive against Hamas had had a “catastrophic and tragic impact” on children in the area. The UN has repeatedly warned that Gaza is on the brink of a full-blown crisis and has warned that it is struggling to cope. The UN relief and works agency says at least 270,000 people are in shelter at around 90 of their centres across Gaza. Israeli shelling has destroyed or damaged 142 schools, 89 of which were UN run. Unicef has estimated that those children who have survived the conflict will be left with severe psychological difficulties and will require immediate psycho-social support. The organisation believes upwards of 373,000 children with have some kind of psychological trauma and many face an “extraordinarily bleak” future. ernille Ironside, head of the field office run by the UN children’s agency in Gaza said: "How do we expect parents and caregivers to care for their children and to raise them in a positive and nurturing way when they themselves are barely functioning as humans?"

"People have lost entire strands of their family in one blow. How can a society cope with this? This is a deep, deep, deep wound,"  

Palestinians sit next to their destroyed house after returning to the Shejaia neighbourhood, which witnesses said was heavily hit by Israeli shelling and air strikes during the Israeli offensive, in the east of Gaza City  . Israel pulled its ground forces out of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday and began a 72-hour truce with Hamas mediated by Egypt as a first step towards negotiations on a more enduring end to the month-old war. Gaza officials say the war has killed 1,834 Palestinians, most of them civilians. Israel says 64 of its soldiers and three civilians have been killed since fighting began on July 8, after a surge in Palestinian rocket launches. — REUTERS