AA Edit | Hamas must be eradicated, but protect Gaza's civilians

The Israeli defence forces seem all set to invade the Gaza Strip and take over Gaza City for its operation against Hamas on its deepest home turf. The biggest humanitarian crisis since Biblical times may be in the offing as around at least 1.1 million Palestinians have been asked to move south of Wadi Gaza, vacating parts of Gaza City where the Israelis will obviously go for the tunnels and the underground city that the Hamas network has built, besides taking on the terrorists of Hamas.

Already starved of water, electricity, food supplies, medicines, healthcare as well as access to cemeteries rendered unsafe by the Israeli bombing campaign running into dropping tons of heavy explosives numbering in thousands of bombs, the Palestinians are being rendered homeless in their own land.

Do they deserve to be punished in this manner — literally dehumanised — is a moral question that an Israel, stung by an attack of unprecedented ferocity and barbarity on their soil by Hamas, has no time for now. It may have been nearly universally agreed that Hamas may warrant punishment for inviting these reprisals after carrying out the daring attacks that set Israel on this path of revenge.

The exigencies of trying to extinguish the Hamas terror threat might be so compelling as to take everyone’s sight off the larger question of there being no real peace for Israel or its nearest neighbours unless and until the Palestinians get a homeland much as the Jews did after the British left the territory in the wake of World War-II 75 years ago.

The calls for a ceasefire that are being heard are themselves being drowned out by the support for Israeli action despite the huge scope being created for collateral damage in terms of innocent Palestinians dying during reoccupation through an invasion and possible street fighting between the Israeli forces and Hamas.  

That the Palestinian Authority has not been forgotten at such a time was stressed when the US Secretary of State Antony R. Blinken met Mahmoud Abbas on his visits around Tel Aviv. The Indian response to the events beginning last weekend, was understandably heavily empathetic for the human losses, including the murder of babies shown in graphic photographs to a sceptical world by Israel, but was later expanded to say that the just cause of a homeland for the Palestinians has not been lost sight of.

The Indian policy of stepping in to get its citizens out of conflict zones is being pursued with alacrity in the case of the Israel-Hamas war, too, with the first chartered flight carrying 212 passengers from the Ben Gurion airport landing in New Delhi. India has invariably been the first to plan to evacuate its citizens who feel insecure as it did in the large Operation Ganga, featuring the use of IAF transport planes as well, out of Ukraine last year. With 18,000 Indians said to be in Israel, there is a lot more to do for civilian aircraft in this case.

As Israel appears ready to go beyond its 16-year blockade of Gaza Strip and wage a ground war with a brief occupation to displace Hamas, the world must wake up to an unsatisfactory situation in which an organisation steeped in terrorist goals can administer a region for so long. A major change may be called for to set up a proper government for a pulverised Gaza Strip, however distant such a day of reckoning seems right now with a potential ground war in the offing.