The letters in support of MP Bob Blackman’s and Conservative Friends of Israel’s (CFI) insensitive relationship-building visit to Israel and its military facilities, (highlighted in Charlotte Kelly’s excellent letter last month), reveal an ignorance of the true facts that underlie the genocidal carnage inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli government.

Despite the horrendous war crimes, deliberate mass killings and gratuitous widespread devastation shown daily on TV and social media that speak for themselves, the delusional distortions — the result of Israeli propaganda that has been promoted incessantly by the Israel lobby in the UK and US, and propagated by our Conservative government and the 80 per cent of its MPs who belong to CFI — has given Israel a feeling of complete impunity to persist in its defiance of international law and the Geneva Convention.

Under international law, Israel’s 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza has not ended its military occupation of the territory because Gaza remains under the “effective control” of Israel.
The demonisation of Hamas as ‘terrorists’, when they are the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people, who are resisting the terrible eight-year long illegal siege of Gaza, (their right under Article 51 of the Geneva Convention which Israel has refused to lift), has resulted in the breakdown of each of the ceasefires.

Israel has used indiscriminate bombing of civilians by saying Hamas is using them as human shields, or that rockets are being fired from homes, mosques, schools and hospitals.

This has been disproved by the people themselves and media correspondents on the ground, who are shocked by the scale of destruction.

Israel wants information about its high crimes against peace suppressed and has denied Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) entry into Gaza.

Contrary to the widespread accusation that ‘Hamas started this’, it is Israel that has provoked each of the Gaza wars in 2006, 2008/9, 2012 and this one by assassinating Hamas leaders, random killings of Palestinians, and breaking agreed ceasefires and agreements to lift the blockades.

The disproportionate casualties and destruction are evidence that the Hamas rockets, described as ‘enhanced homemade fireworks’ — which mostly land on empty ground — cannot compare to the excessively heavy bombing and use of artillery in a densely-crowded enclave with nowhere for civilians to run to.

With every border closed and being shelled from land, sea and sky, using thousands of tonnes of explosives that have been compared in weight to Hiroshima, has resulted to date, in 2,150 Palestinians killed — with more than 500 victims children — and 10,000 injured.

Whole families have been murdered with thousands of homes destroyed, including schools, hospitals, mosques, civic buildings and infrastructure like power, sewage and water plants 
causing a huge humanitarian disaster.

While it is regrettable that Israelis suffer the psychological fear of ‘the rockets’ and four civilian deaths, it simply cannot compare to the crimes against humanity being perpetrated on the Palestinians over decades in the brutal occupation of the West Bank and the inhuman Gaza siege. 
The rockets will stop when the blockades are lifted and the occupation ended so that real justice, and not double standards prevail.

In the meantime, while the UK and US keep supplying arms to Israel, which are used as collective punishment against Palestinians, they allegedly become complicit in these war crimes.

The UN Security Council must act immediately to end this calamity. It must now apply a complete arms embargo, including strong and effective sanctions, also applied by civil society, until Israel observes international law and ends the occupation and siege of Gaza.

Abe Hayeem

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