Once again, the world watches silently as the Israeli Defence Forces march into Gaza and massacre the Palestinians, ostensibly to protect their people from the senseless Hamas shelling. US President Barack Obama has expressed support for the Israeli action because the latter ‘has a right to defend its citizens’ and that it is Hamas which is ‘putting their people at risk’ by provoking Israel.

The fact is that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and its military operations predates the existence of Hamas. Though the latter came to power in 2006 through an internationally supervised election that the US and Israel refused to honour, Palestinian resistance started in 1948.

For the last seven years, Gaza’s 1.7 million Palestinian inhabitants have been under an Israeli blockade that has shut down all contacts with the world through land, sea or air.

Gaza became a death camp, literary a prison where movement through the only Egyptian or Israeli border crossings were halted, even for the most essential need. The sick and the elderly who wanted to leave Gaza could not do so. And during this period, it has been under Israeli military bombardment in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2012 and now.

The UN has described the humanitarian situation in Gaza as disastrous; on a knife-edge. The Israelis do not allow in supply of fuel, shutting down power supplies and brutally keeping the world’s most densely populated city in darkness. Essential services in hospitals collapsed. Medicines and food supplies are not allowed in either, with thousands of infants dying as a result. The water and sewage system collapsed due to lack of power; residents turned to untreated water, and drain off the sewage into the streets or sea. Gaza became a filthy concentration camp!

The blockade also strangled Gaza economically. Farmers could not engage in productive work for lack of inputs and due to limited access to their farms. Fishermen were blocked from accessing the sea. Exports plummeted at first, and collapsed. Building construction materials is not allowed into the territory, even for use by international organisations.

In effect, the blockade subjects the residents to a painful, slow genocide. The residents turned to digging tunnels beneath the border with Egypt to access essential food, medicine and building materials. These tunnels were shut down by Egypt in June 2013.

Brought to its knees, Hamas transferred power to the pro-Western Palestinian government in the West Bank through a government of national unity pact signed in April this year. The pact provides that Hamas will recognise the existence of Israel, adhere to past agreements with Israel and commit itself to non-violence.

The payoff would be the lifting of the blockade but Israel opposed this Palestinian unity, with the connivance of the US, and has worked hard to undermine the pact and ensured the status quo remains. To the two countries, Hamas is a terrorist group and cannot be part of the Palestinian government. This is the genesis of the current conflict.

Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories over the past 60 years has generated hundreds of UN resolutions that are routinely ignored by Israel. The collective punishment of Gazans and the perpetual massacre by a merciless regime does not prick the collective conscience of the international community fatigued by the US double standards on the Middle East. Israel has the most deadly military machine on the planet that it uses at will on the defenseless Palestinians. In an attempt to avoid offending Israelis, Western media reports on the conflict as if two powerful nations are fighting!

Israel was created after the Holocaust in 1948, on Palestinian territory. It is ironic that a nation that was itself created through a long armed resistance can continue to inflict a similar long and horrendous massacre on its hosts.

It is imperative that Israel frees the Palestinians from the illegal occupation and allows them to live in peace as neighbours in a two-state solution. The US and Israel must eschew state violence and pursue the path of a just peace.