Godfrey's Gospel: Israeli policy in Gaza only creating terrorists in waiting

I WATCHED the 1993 blockbuster Schindler’s List again last week. For those of you who don’t know what it is about, the film tells the story of a German industrialist who saved the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Second World War.

Today, it is estimated there are over 8,000 survivors and descendants of that ‘list’, many living in Israel, while there are an estimated 245,000 actual survivors of the Holocaust itself, again many of whom actually live in Israel.

I was shocked, saddened, disgusted – words cannot describe how I felt – when I saw a photo of a starving child in Gaza pleading for food. If that wasn’t enough, I saw an image of a father carrying his dead child, who weighed less than when it was born, not killed by a bomb or bullet, but allowed to starve to death.

Then we read of starving people being shot and killed as they try to get food for themselves and their families, only to be given the excuse that they were perceived to be a threat to the Israeli army.

Surely the descendants of that ‘list’ and survivors of the Holocaust and their families also saw the same images. You would think that while nothing excuses the killing of people enjoying a concert or just quietly going about their daily lives, it is also wrong to enclose 2.1 million people and then watch them starve to death, because that is exactly what is happening in Gaza today.

It has finally hit a tipping point. Reports of people dying from malnutrition are beginning to hit the headlines and anyone used to dealing with such matters will tell you that, first, there is a trickle of death, followed quickly by a flood.

What makes this all the more sickening is the fact that those starving people are within reach of a mountain of aid just parked up in trucks but not allowed in.

Even with a pause in hostilities, only a fraction of what is needed is getting through. At a minimum, it is estimated that over 500 trucks of aid are needed every day of the week if relief agencies are to get a handle on the situation. The food is there, but access is being denied.

I am not going to talk about the rights and wrongs or who did what in Gaza. We all know the latest war there was started because of the killing of 1,200 people by Hamas on 7 October 2023.

As with any conflict, there are injustices on both sides. The Palestinian and Israeli peoples have been at loggerheads with each other for decades – in fact, history shows us it goes back many hundreds of years, if not more. But in modern times, that part of the world has been a powder keg ever since the creation of the country we now call Israel in the late 1940s.

Since that fateful day in 2023 and the military onslaught unleased by the Israeli Defence Forces, almost 63,000 people have been killed in Gaza. Over 80% of those killed were civilians, of which half were women, children and the elderly.

We all know the only way to resolve conflict is by dialogue and compromise. Closer to home, we finally reached that conclusion in Northern Ireland thanks to the Good Friday Agreement, which brought what had become known as ‘The Troubles’ to an end.

But before that happened, over 3,600 people died, among them the 29 people, including a woman expecting twins, in the Omagh bombing on 15 August 1998.

The reason for this atrocity was a conscious attempt by some in the Republican movement to continue hostilities and who were directly opposed to the political strategy being pursued at that time. Thankfully, they didn’t succeed and peace did eventually come about, but to this day various agencies continue to work hard to ensure that part of Ireland doesn’t revert back to those dark days of the late 1960s and ̓70s, when night after night the lead story on news bulletins was the killing of a Catholic or Protestant.

If the Israeli authorities think that by starving an entire population or killing as many as they can and leaving that part of the world razed to the ground will eliminate the danger posed by Hamas, they should think again.

I was speaking to a former member of the Irish Army who served on a number of tours in Lebanon and he remarked that the reality is there is some ten-year-old who has seen members of his family either shot or starved to death who will be the future leader of Hamas or some other organisation whose only answer to the problems facing that part of the world is a bomb or bullet.

You could say there has been far too much talk and not enough action to bring relief to those starving people – and you would be right. Prior to the weekend, yet more ‘high level’ talks were taking place between US and Israeli politicians.

What’s needed now is food and water. Give that to the people of Gaza and stop the horror of famine. Then talk about meaningful solutions to problems in that part of the world, and not some nonsensical idea about turning it into the Riviera of the Middle East.