Gaza crisis The moral vacuum - Aftab Ahmad Malik

Two years ago, I struggled to write an article describing the horrors of Israel’s unsuccessful invasion of Lebanon which resulted in a thousand people dead, mostly civilians. How, I wondered naively, could the world sit back and allow this to occur? Two years previously, I had asked the same question when Israel invaded Jenin and then Rafah. The UN Human Rights Commission had condemned Israel for the “mass killings” of Palestinians and for “gross violations” of humanitarian law in Jenin. Amnesty International declared that Israel’s actions in Rafah constituted “a form of collective punishment.” Condemnation by human rights organisations is not something new to Israel. In 2000, the UN Human Rights Commission found Israel guilty of “systematic killing of civilians and children”, “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”. With a bitter twist of irony, a “crime against humanity” is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people and from where the concept originates.