Israel-Hamas conflict may widen in the Middle East – Updated Thurs. 19th

The strongest neutral voice appealing for restraint on both sides amidst the highly biased international clamour over the crisis in Israel and Gaza has been that of Antonio Guterres.

The United Nations secretary- general and former Portuguese prime minister was quick to call on the Hamas militants to immediately release the Israeli hostages they seized, and to ask the Israeli government to allow rapid and impeded access to humanitarian aid to Gaza’s 2.2 million civilian citizens. He warned that the conflict could turn into a much wider war. “We are on the verge of the abyss in the Middle East,” he said.

A horrific event on Tuesday this week – an explosion at a hospital in Gaza that reportedly killed about 500 people – has made Guterres’ warning all the more unnerving.  Israel insists the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian jihadist missile. Palestinian militants have blamed Israel for the explosion and sparked mass protests across all Arab countries.

President Joe Biden’s barely one-day visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday was essentially to show staunch support for the Israel’s efforts to eliminate Hamas. Britain’s Prime Minister Richie Sunak arrived in Tel Aviv on Thursday also to express solidarity.  

Political leaders in the Western World have condemned Hamas militants as “terrorists” while standing firmly by their “ally”, Israel, despite the killing of many hundreds of Gaza civilians, including babies, schoolchildren and women.

The United States has sent military equipment and massive naval aircraft carrier power to help the Israeli war effort.

Palestinian militants on the border in Lebanon have started exchanging fire with Israel. Iran and Syria have become a veiled threat in support of Hamas, the group that rules Gaza.

 Russia’s Vladimir Putin has met with China’s Xi Jinping and both are refusing to condemn Hamas. They say there is no justification for Israel’s blockade of essential supplies or planned incursion.

At the start of the conflict on October 7, Hamas militants deliberately killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, including young people. Israel responded with relentless bombing of crowded homes in Gaza, the most densely populated place in the world.

Within little more than a week of its initial strike, Hamas had killed about 1,400 Israelis. More than 2,700 Palestinians had been killed in retaliatory airstrikes. Many thousands more have been killed or severely injured.

Even some Western leaders were critical when the Israeli government demanded that everyone in northern Gaza move to the south and that patients and medical staff be evacuated from Gaza hospitals. 

The Israelis blocked all essential supplies – food, clean water, electricity, fuel and medicines – going into Gaza while they continued their bombing and prepared for a mass land invasion in an attempt to annihilate Hamas.

The only escape route for fleeing Palestinians was into neighbouring Egypt, but that has still not been fully opened.

The almost unimaginable brutality of this sudden, unexpected war has led a former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, to reiterate that peace between Israelis and Palestinians will only be brought about with a two-state solution.

Guterres agrees and he and his senior UN colleagues want Israel to now reverse course, otherwise the evacuation demands could “transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.”

In his latest statement Guterres has said:” The most recent violence does not come in a vacuum, but grows out of a long-standing conflict, with a 50-year long occupation and no political end in sight.”