Sir,– There are good reasons to think that Israel’s horrific response to the barbaric atrocities inflicted on their citizens on October 7th by Hamas, which they are endeavouring to wipe out, will drive more Palestinians into the arms of that organisation, recognised as a terrorist group by the US, the EU and at least five other countries.
However, there is also reason to believe that the ordinary people of Palestine might welcome the demise of Hamas, which before the current war had inflicted a brutal campaign of intimidation and torture on them.
In 2009, Amnesty International reported that Hamas forces and militias in the Gaza Strip “have carried out a deadly campaign of abductions, deliberate and unlawful killings, torture and death threats against those they accuse of ‘collaborating’ with Israel, as well as opponents and critics”.
More recently, in July 2022, Human Rights Watch and Lawyers for Justice submitted their “grave concerns with respect to torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment and impunity for these grave abuses by government authorities in Palestine” to the Committee Against Torture in advance of its first review of the State of Palestine.
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It is high time that people are made aware of these incontrovertible facts, especially in light of the alarming increase in anti-Semitism and indeed Islamophobia, reported in the last month and condemned by the UN human rights chief. Meanwhile Amnesty International and Human Rights watch continue their objective work, currently directed at Israel’s extreme actions. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN MARTEN,
Skibbereen,
Co Cork.
Sir, – As the carnage, in the apparent name of self-defence, continues in Gaza, we are all asking what comes next when the guns fall silent?
The cliché of a “two-state solution” is again being trotted out by the world’s leading politicians without any notion whatsoever as to how this outcome could possibly be achieved.
It is patently obvious that those who peddle this solution have never visited the West Bank, an area of land that is currently home to over 750,000 Israelis living within illegal settlements on Palestinian land. A number that increases with every passing week.
Moreover, the entire West Bank has been divided up by the Israeli government so that, for example, there are a myriad of roads which Palestinians cannot use, various Palestinian cantons that are not connected to one another and where the fresh-water aquifers and all power lines are under complete Israeli control.
To put it simply, the amount of land that has been systematically expropriated by Israel, and all the while with the implicit consent of successive US administrations, means that we may have gone long past the point where a single, contiguous, independent Palestinian State could possibly exist. Moreover, the atrocities of October 7th, followed by the overwhelming disproportionate response by the Israeli military, will mean that, in this complete breakdown of any trust and diplomacy, such a solution has been pushed back decades. This of course suits the Israeli government perfectly well.
Ironically, these events may see greater calls for a one-state solution. A solution which Israel has always been set against may soon become inevitable as they help themselves to more and more Palestinian land once they have finished turning Gaza into a car park! – Yours, etc,
DEREK ROSS,
Templeogue,
Dublin 6W.
