The terror attack Israel unleashed on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Saturday continued on Sunday claiming the lives of some 290 men, women and children, and injuring at least 600 others. As usual, it has disregarded a UN Security Council plea, made in a press statement on Sunday, to the "parties to stop immediately all military activities", also telling Israel to allow the passage of humanitarian supplies through its various checkpoints to the besieged Palestinians.
Instead, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak threatened to "expand and deepen" the bombing raids, and even to send in ground forces. The pretext for this latest atrocity and display of defiance of international opinion is Hamas fighters' firing of rockets into Israel.
The fact of the matter is that these rockets are being fired for many years, rarely doing harm to Israeli lives; the main purpose being to remind the enemy that it cannot usurp Palestinian lands and yet live in peace. The Israeli government seems to have picked the present moment for the attack for two reasons: one is the upcoming election.
Notably, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a frontrunner for the premiership, had recently promised the voters that if returned to power she would oust the Hamas from control of Gaza. The strategy is to exert maximum pressure on the Gaza citizens by strangulating their economy through border closures, turning the territory into a virtual prison for its 1.5 million citizens.
The bombings are meant to further force the Gaza Palestinians to think that they had made a mistake in electing Hamas to lead them. The second reason, of course, is to obtain these objectives before the most pro-Israeli American administration ever ends it term come January 20.
Unsurprisingly, President Bush's man at the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, unabashedly defended Israel's blatant aggression in his comments after the UNSC passed a unanimous statement to ask for an end to violence. Said he "Israel has the right of self-defence, and nothing in this press statement should be read as anything but that."
Apparently, before Bush leaves office next month, he wants to ensure that anti-American feelings, generated by his eight years of an arrogant pursuit of unilateralism and senseless wars, remain strong, and Americans do not stop pondering the question, "Why do they hate us?"
As more than 50,000 protesters took to the street in Egypt, and thousands others in Amman, hundreds even in Dubai, Libyan President Muammer Gaddafi, broke his long silence to give a voice to the prevailing sentiment. The Arab rulers, he averred, should be ashamed of themselves. "They're trading on the name of the Palestinian cause with their cowardly, weak and defeatist stands."
As per the US Ambassador's twisted logic the "way forward" is for the Palestinians to stop rocket attacks into Israel. It ignores the vital detail that Israel is in occupation of Palestinian lands in violation of UN Security Council resolutions, in particular 242 which requires it to vacate all Arab lands it occupied through an act of war in 1967.
More to the point, that the UN Charter allows people the right to resist occupation. The violence will continue as long as the occupation remains. Palestinians have shown time and again that Israeli savagery, even as extreme as the Jenin massacre of April 2002, will not deter them from resisting occupation. Israel cannot live in peace as long as it refuses to end occupation.
Having been pushed to the wall, Hamas has declared it would hit back with "martyr operations" - stopped since January 2005. That can still be stopped if only the new US administration shows an inclination to work towards a fair peace settlement.