The war in Gaza is in its eighth month. To provide some personal context– it’s about a week and a couple days younger than my tenure at the 91性息港 and Rocky View Weekly.
I remember when the war started last October, when Hamas militants stormed across the Gazan border and killed 1,200 Israeli’s and took about 250 hostages. American politicians, invoking the time-honored tradition of making everything about themselves, compared October 7th to Israel’s 9/11.
Since then, there has been nothing but horrid bloodshed, almost all being waged– either accidentally or by design– against the Palestinian people.
The Gaza Health Ministry has stated that the death toll in the tiny Gaza strip is at 36,096. Images and videos of Israel lobbing missiles into some of the most densely populated urban neighbourhoods in the world can be seen on the news or social media almost daily.
On Monday night, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 37 people, most of them sheltered in tents outside the southern Gaza city of Rafah. On Sunday, a series of airstrikes on the same area triggered a fire in a camp for displaced Palestinians, killing 45 people.
Western governments (the United States) continue to back Israel militarily and diplomatically, providing cover on the international stage while pretending to finger wag at the Netanyahu regime’s uber excessive use of wanton deadly force against civilians.
“The White House has urged Israel against sending forces into Rafah without a clear plan to evacuate civilians safely because the war has already left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead. About a million refugees have settled in Rafah after fleeing fighting in northern Gaza,” reads an article in The Hill Times.
Evacuate to where?
When the war started Israel said they were fighting to extinguish Hamas, and since Hamas operates in Gaza the Israeli military had to enter Gaza to find and fight Hamas. The fighting has caused nearly two million people to be displaced and over 80 per cent of the Palestinians living in Gaza are now homeless.
The situation in Gaza has become far more than dire. Thousands of civilians are dying and certainly more will die before war’s end. Millions are homeless and will most likely be permanently displaced.
Israel has promised to continue fighting, but where does it end? Most likely with the millions of Palestinians still alive are pushed into the Mediterranean Sea.
