The focus of much of the rest of the world has shifted to civilian casualties in Gaza (Reuters)
After US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh on Sunday, both posted a similar photo but with contrasting descriptions.
Blinken said they talked about “Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel,” in his post on X, formerly Twitter. The prince said they were looking for ways “to stop the military operations that have claimed the lives of innocent people,” a reference to the Israeli bombing of Gaza.
The disconnect is not limited to the Saudis. Few governments in the region have publicly denounced the October 7 massacre of 1,300 Israelis by Hamas. Instead, the focus of much of the rest of the world has shifted to civilian casualties in Gaza, where daily Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 3,000 people. Even allies like the US and Britain have publicly called on Israel to protect non-combatants as the country prepares for a massive ground invasion.
Israeli officials can’t believe it. Every day since the attacks, they have taken foreign leaders and journalists to the unbearably grim murder scenes, collected testimonies from survivors and pieced together videos of gruesome beheadings and eye gouges, often gleefully recorded by the perpetrators.
The purpose of these presentations is to get the world to agree that Israel now not only has a license to destroy Hamas – designated a terrorist organization by the US and the European Union – but also has a collective responsibility to do so , just as the US has gained international support. after the September 11 attacks to eradicate Al-Qaeda and later against ISIS.
In Tel Aviv, Israel, people put up fliers and signs reporting missing persons
“There are no two sides to this conflict,” Lior Haiat, spokesperson for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said in a Zoom presentation with two survivors on Monday. “If someone is not with us today, he is standing with monsters who kill babies and old people. If you don’t stand against terror, you are part of the terror.”
For Israel, the mobilization of 360,000 soldiers and the demand that 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza move south within 24 hours, while the area was shelled from the air, are justified responses to unspeakable acts.
“Let me tell you, Mr. Secretary, this will be a long war and the price will be high,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned Blinken on Monday. “But we are going to win for Israel and the Jewish people, and for the values that both countries believe in.”
But elsewhere, Israel’s preparations are generating more anxiety than determination.
Even as US President Joe Biden has publicly sided with Israel’s position that Hamas should be completely eliminated, he has repeatedly called on the government to limit civilian casualties. “The vast majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas,” he said on Friday.
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly told Sky News: “It is in Israel’s interests to avoid civilian and Palestinian casualties because Hamas clearly wants to turn this into a wider Arab-Israeli war, or even a war between the Muslim world and the rest of the world. And none of us, including Israel, want that to be the case.”
In the Middle East, Hamas is not seen as a global terror force like ISIS and Al-Qaeda were. Instead, it is often portrayed as a terrible product of decades of oppression by Israel.
Officials across the region — in Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere — say their populations are restless as they watch Israel storm Gaza. Their citizens show a high level of support for Hamas, making it difficult for them to even condemn the October 7 attacks. They are putting pressure on the US for humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Israeli officials are annoyed by what they see as hypocritical readings.
“When the Americans went to Fallujah after September 11, they did not ask questions about Fallujah’s humanitarian needs,” Yaakov Amidror, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser a decade ago, said in a conversation with foreign journalists. “The best example is World War II, when the entire free world fought the German Nazis, and no one asked about the enemy’s humanitarian needs. It is a war against an enemy state.”
There is a sense in Israel that no matter what has happened before – settlement building, military incursions – history turned a new page on October 7 because of the level of brutality on display. The impact has been deeply personal in a small country where almost no one has been left untouched and where many come from countries of pogroms and the Holocaust.
The Israeli military on Monday brought a dozen foreign correspondents to a 42-minute compilation of the October 7 horrors, in which attackers stopped cars and shot passengers, cut up a corpse, set fire to a house and rested on a porch to drink water. The military’s chief spokesman, Admiral Daniel Hagari, said: “We see this as a war against humanity, not just Israel.”
In the coming days, visits from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and probably Biden are likely to delay Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The more time passes, the wider the gap is likely to become between Israel’s position and much of the rest of the world.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
