Media politicization of the situation in Gaza has drawn much attention away from the current humanitarian crisis. As a human being, I feel an urgency to step away from the politics and address what should be obvious – the devaluation of human life and the degradation of human rights.
At the time of writing this column, 975 Palestinians and 12 Israelis have been killed with more than 4,500 Palestinians injured since Israel began its Gaza offensive on Dec. 27th. Of the hundreds of Palestinian casualties, women and children have constituted over 400. Tens of thousands of Gazans have been displaced from their homes, yet they cannot leave the open air prison that Gaza has become.
Israel’s siege on Gaza actually began on Nov. 5, 2008 when Israel broke a ceasefire agreement by killing six Hamas gunmen in the Gaza strip. Since then, their defiance of international human rights laws has been astounding. After the truce collapsed, the Israeli government put an even tighter grip on the entry of food and supplies, including medicine, into Gaza, where stocks of food, fuel, electricity, medicine were already very low due to an 18-month long blockade.
This collective punishment of a civilian population is a flagrant violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Article 33 of the convention specifically prohibits this type of collective punishment by stating that no person “be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed.” Although Israel has justified the siege of Gaza under the pretence of attacking militants living among civilians, the presence of militants within a civilian population should not deprive that population of their protected status. Therefore this assault upon the Gazan population under the guise of targeting militants is, in fact, a war crime.
This is a war against civilians, not Hamas, and their goal is to defeat the will and the resistance of the Palestinian people so that they will surrender and succumb to what Israel wants through its iron wall tactics. According to UN estimates, one million Gazans are currently living without electricity and 750,000 without water. The difficulty in getting UN staff in and out of combat zones has prompted the UN Relief and Works Agency “to put into effect a suspension of staff movement throughout the Gaza Strip.” This decision came after UN relief workers came under attack by Israeli forces.
Human Rights Watch has confirmed the use of phosphorous bombs by the Israeli Defense Force. These bombs are a direct violation of the Geneva Treaty of 1980 which prohibits the use of white phosphorous in civilian areas. According to military experts, the possibility of phosphorous bombs being used as precision weapons is impossible in a highly dense area such as the Gaza strip, guaranteeing that civilians will fall victim to these dangerous weapons.
In spite of this, it took a staggering 18 days of this massacre for the president of the UN General Assembly to condemn Israel’s killings of Palestinians in its Gaza offensive as a “genocide.” I call on Northwestern students to question the selectiveness of the response of the international community and to educate themselves about this crisis.
DANA SHABEEBWeinberg juniorCo- president, Muslim-cultural Students Association
