DC Edit | Israel versus Hamas: A challenge for civilisation

Israel has sent elite troops, infantry and tanks into Gaza and is fighting fierce street battles in northern Gaza since Saturday night even as the territory, specifically Gaza City, is being pounded from air and sea. Seeing an existential threat in a war-like situation since the brutal incursion into southern Israel by the terrorist forces of Hamas on October 7, the country is justifying its ground offensive in Gaza as the second stage of its war against Hamas.

Much of the world will see Israeli air, sea, and land strikes on Gaza City as a disproportionate response. But Israel is clearly not going to bother about the niceties of optics. The United Nations, in passing a nonbinding resolution calling for a ceasefire, appeared to ignore one side of the picture as there was no mention of the brutality of Hamas in killing 1,400 people in Israel while raping, even beheading senior citizens, women, children, and babies too.

India chose to abstain from the UN vote on Gaza though it supports from outside any call for a ceasefire and humanitarian efforts to save the ordinary Palestinian citizens from suffering as collateral damage in the crossfire between Hamas and Israel. A domestic political debate is raging over this stand on the grounds that an entire people are being blockaded and “annihilated” as 2.3 million find themselves amid a war.

The United Nations Secretary-General may have spoken of the genesis of the problem going back 75 years in the region, but the countries sponsoring and supporting the UN resolution did not go back even a few weeks to take in what happened this month for this conflagration to be taking place before calling for a humanitarian truce.

There is no justification for terror and its subhuman violence just as there can be no justification for a full-scale invasion of a land even if its government sponsors cross-border terror as Hamas has done since it gained political power in 2006, to run the government in the Gaza Strip, but eliminating members of its poll opponent Fatah.  

The violent history of the Middle East that goes back more than 75 years, however, leaves no room for the ineluctable logic of peace that its greatest apostle Mahatma Gandhi preached in non-violence long before Israel was carved out of the land which the British vacated.

There is little doubt that Israel will expand this land war with the objective of dismantling the terror infrastructure of Hamas, its warren of tunnels in an underground city known as ‘Gaza Metro’ and its government which gets funds from international sources. They have long gone past any arguments against an excessive response to a terror attack that other nations have also withstood but desisted from an invasion.

The death toll from Israeli bombings on Gaza put out daily by the Hamas health ministry may not be considered 100 per cent accurate, but a deadly dimension to the loss of human lives is that over half of them are said to be those of women and children.

This is building into a civilisational challenge as both sides seem oblivious of killing innocent civilians, a huge proportion of whom are the elderly, women, and children — and all of them have nothing to do with the uncertainty of life in the region and the finality of death.