Prime Minister Netanyahu claims: “We didn’t want this war.” Ofer Cassif, an Israeli Jewish Knesset member with the Hadash-Ta’al coalition, charged that with the Netanyahu government: “Israel wanted this violence.”
Daniel Levy, president of the U.S. Middle East Project and former Israeli negotiator and adviser to the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, said on Al Jazeera English: “One trembles at what is happening in Gaza. …. This is precisely what got us here. … History didn’t begin three days ago. … Who are these 2.2 million inhabitants of Gaza? Why are 70 percent of them refugees?” [See Al Jazeera livestreams in Arabic and English.]
Palestinian Center for Human Rights reports: “The population is being urged, by means of random texts, to evacuate their homes, heightening fear, terror and panic among the civilian population whilst warplanes hover constantly. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, between 7 October and as of 3 p.m. on 9 October 2023, 560 Palestinians have been killed, and 2,900 have been injured. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, resulting in the displacement of thousands of civilians. Water and electricity supplies continue to be cut off.”
REFAAT ALAREER, refatr17@gmail.com, @itranslate123
Alareer is the co-editor of Gaza Unsilenced. His writings have appeared in the New York Times.
ABBA SOLOMON, abbasolomon@gmail.com, www.threads.net/@abba.a.solomon
Solomon is author of two books on Zionism, The Miasma of Unity: Jews and Israel and The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech “The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews.”
Solomon commented, “The cruel outrages of the raid from Gaza will be exceeded by the Israeli siege and attacks on the 2 million impoverished civilians of Gaza, the majority of whom are exiles from communities a few miles away in the State of Israel.
“If Israel had fulfilled the conditions it undertook at its 1949 admission to the United Nations, that ‘refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date,’ the Gaza Strip would not exist today as a ghetto of suffering and source of terror.
“Amnesia of how this situation evolved leaves western publics reacting to the grotesque violence of the raid, with no acknowledgement of the 75 years of degradation, dispossession, and dishonesty that built to this moment.”
