Extract from ABC News
At this point in time, Gaza must surely be the most miserable place on earth.
But what does that actually mean?
It means that right now people are having major operations without painkillers and anaesthetics. Doctors say people are screaming with pain during operations.
It means that children cannot understand why their parents won't give them food. A heartbreaking video this week showed a mother as her child asks for food. The mother is so distraught she looks away so her child doesn't see her crying.
It means that hundreds of people may die under rubble. Gaza's rescue workers say they can't save everybody. How do you tell a trapped person there's nothing you can do?
Miserable means that 50,000 pregnant women do not know whether their babies will survive this war — with 5,000 due this month. With many hospitals having been damaged, where will they give birth?
It means running out of body bags and using ice-cream trucks as morgues.
Miserable are the lives of children in Gaza hanging in the balance as a public health catastrophe looms. Save the Children says Gaza's one million children have virtually no access to essential healthcare services after heavy bombardments for almost 14 days from October 7. The World Health Organisation has documented 59 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza, damaging 26 hospitals or healthcare facilities.
It means the fear children feel from more than 6,000 Israeli bombs over two weeks.
Imagine cutting Canberra in half and then putting roughly the population of Brisbane into it. Then dropping 6,000 bombs onto it — on average 16 bombs per square kilometre. That's the Gaza Strip right now.
Even before the war, Gaza was a grim place. On my first visit in 2009, I was shocked by how small children were because of malnutrition. A child psychologist told me she could not cope with the epidemic of mental illnesses from various wars.
I met her equivalent in Israel, a woman in Sderot who counselled children affected by rockets from Gaza. Traumatised children are traumatised children — Israeli or Palestinian.
I've covered three wars between Israel and Gaza. This one is my fourth.
A blast of abuse
During one war I saw what I believed was white phosphorous being dropped on Gaza. I couldn't believe that an army — "the most moral army in the world," Israeli officials kept telling me — would drop white phosphorous on such a crowded place. That would be a war crime.
I spoke to doctors in Gaza who insisted it was white phosphorous — they could tell from the burns it caused. The Israeli army "strenuously denied" this.
I received a blast of abuse. How could I even think something so bad about the Israeli army? This would be a war crime and the Israeli army would never commit war crimes. This was typical of the hostility of foreign journalists towards Israel.
A few months after the war, when the world had moved on, Israeli officials conceded that the army had used white phosphorous but only in "limited" quantities.
This week, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of again using white phosphorous in this war. The IDF has strenuously denied the claim, saying it is "unequivocally false". White phosphorus has an incendiary effect that causes a particularly bad burn to skin.
Gaza in relatively good times
The most miserable place on earth means being trapped physically and psychologically. Former UK prime minister David Cameron described Gaza as the world's largest open-air prison.
In those "good times" I visited a children's hospital. The doctors took me to see a baby in intensive care who only had a few days to live because Israel was not allowing a particular medicine in.
It was so difficult looking at this little boy, his heart beating furiously. He seemed to be fighting so hard to live.
Turkish authorities heard about the baby's plight and arranged for an ambulance to take him to Cairo then flew him to Turkey. He survived.
These were relatively good times in Gaza, during the blockade that Israel has had on Gaza for 16 years, along with Egypt.
Now, with Israel imposing a complete blockade, think of death, fear, no food, no water, no fuel, dropping more than 6,000 bombs — and then add to that an expected land invasion by the most powerful army in the Middle East.
That's today's Gaza, the most miserable place on earth.
Of course, none of this misery justifies the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel. None of it. But if we do not understand the pain and misery on both sides of this war then we cannot begin to think of how to help stop this never-ending cycle of pain and misery.
In Israel, fear is everywhere
And now let's look at life across the border, in Israel.
Two weeks ago, 260 people joined an open-air music festival in southern Israel. They'd pitched tents under the desert sky. Some rose early on Saturday, October 7, and some had been dancing all night.
At Tel Aviv airport I met a woman who had set up a tent with her husband. It was a perfect setting, she said, a time to enjoy music with her husband.
Early morning she heard rockets, then saw people running. She and her husband ran to a nearby ticket booth.
After she told me her story she broke down and hugged me. I could see as she cried her pain, this traumatised Israeli woman waiting at Tel Aviv airport to leave Israel indefinitely with her husband and child to try to get away from everything.
Fear is everywhere in Israel at the moment. Many Israelis have seen the photos of the two young people sitting in their car — burnt corpses. Their burnt faces look hauntingly to the sky.
Fear is the elderly man seen in a video shouting for mercy as he tries to hide inside his house. The Hamas gunman — terrorist — lifts his gun and shoots the man dead.
Fear is the look on the face of the young Israeli man lying on his side in a pit in Gaza. He looks at the camera, terror in his eyes.
Fear is the look on the face of the mother as she holds a picture of her daughter, pleading for her captors in Gaza to release her.
Fear, with complete puzzlement, is the look on the elderly woman as she sits next to her captor in Gaza. She's a trophy for Hamas. They even put a gun on her lap for a photo. A bit of entertainment.
Such is the fear in Israel that in one suburb of West Jerusalem residents are forming a paramilitary neighbourhood watch group for anyone with a gun.
Fear is the image of the children's bedroom
Fear is the Israeli I spoke to who lives a few kilometres from the border with Lebanon who now wonders whether the northern border is as vulnerable as the southern border.
Fear is the image — which will stay imprinted on this nation's memory — of the children's bedroom, covered in blood.
Fear is the way Israelis locked themselves into their homes on the Friday after the massacre, worried the so-called Day of Rage by the Arab world could mean infiltrators.
Fear is life in the south of Israel, where even days after the invasion, Hamas gunmen were still on the loose.
Fear is people in kibbutzim realising that Hamas was so well informed about them — evidence has emerged that in some cases Hamas knew details of the security operations of certain kibbutzim, even knowing how many entrances some had.
On the bodies of killed gunmen Israelis found the layouts of kibbutzim. "They knew everything," said one kibbutz member.
One attack plan, according to documents obtained by CNN, said the aim of Hamas was to "inflict the maximum possible human casualties". Their knowledge of the kibbutzim was "horribly accurate”, said one woman.
The dreadful cycle claims more victims
Both sides are in fear and pain. Yet again, the dreadful cycle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claims more victims.
Pain is how an Israeli family would have felt this week when the devastating news came through that their 12-year-old — an autistic girl — and her 80-year-old grandmother had been found dead in Israel.
More life-long pain. On both sides.
For those in this forever war, emotions are too high to discuss solutions. The Israelis want revenge for the October 7 massacre. Palestinians want revenge for the killing of thousands of civilians in Gaza.
Many Israelis would argue that it's a good thing that Gaza is suffering so badly — now they know how it feels. Many Palestinians would argue that they are being collectively punished — that Israelis must suffer again for this suffering.
Surely this cannot go on for another 50 years? For the sake of both sides we need to think of solutions.
Many Israelis argue that any peace agreement is now impossible: War is now the permanent new normal.
Many Palestinians would argue that any peace agreement is now impossible: Why would you make a deal with your occupier who has suppressed you for decades and now killed thousands of civilians in bombings?
If these two peoples don't learn to share this neighbourhood, so much more pain and fear is certain.
This new war has revived interest among some prominent politicians in the two-state solution — where Palestinians would have their own state, alongside Israel. This is what the United Nations recommended in its resolution of 1947 which decreed that a Jewish state would be formed alongside an Arab state. Australia was a key supporter of that resolution.
Since this new war began, US President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong have all referred to the two-state model as a solution to this conflict. Senator Wong said for Israelis peace would be enhanced by “a negotiated two-state solution, in which Israel and a future Palestinian state coexist, in peace and security, within internationally recognised borders".
Prominent Jewish American journalist Tom Friedman also evoked the two-state solution. Writing in The New York Times this week, he urged the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to couple a ground invasion of Gaza — and the aim of destroying Hamas — with a commitment to a two-state solution: that is, to agree to a Palestinian state.
And Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a pro-Israel lobby group in the US, said he thought a two-state solution was also the only answer — that such an option would mean people on both sides had something to live for, rather than something to die for.
Former US army chief General David Petraeus this week cautioned: "Vengeance is not a strategy." And President Biden urged Israelis: "Don't be consumed by rage."
The idea of being able to kill Hamas is as unrealistic as it would have been to kill the Irish Republican Army or the African National Congress. Both these groups were also considered terrorist organisations — until they sat down at a negotiating table and made peace.
Of course, the British government could not sit down with the IRA while they were bombing civilians in London. But London realised that to stop the bombing of civilians in London they needed to sit down with the IRA.
If the Israeli army goes into Gaza it will have a dual mission: to rescue the 212 hostages the Israel military said they had confirmed were still in Gaza on Sunday and to "destroy Hamas". But Hamas is as much an idea as an organisation. There are many other groups that could take its place. In Gaza, I discovered nine Salafist groups who see Hamas as too moderate: Jaysh al-Ummah (Army of the Nation); Jaljalat (Rolling Thunder); Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam); Ansar al-Sunnah (Loyal Followers of Sunnah); Jund Ansar Allah (Soldiers of the Followers of Allah); the al-Tawhid Brigades (the One God Brigades); the al-Haman Mohammed Bin Maslamah Brigades; the Mujahideen Shura Council (the Defenders of God Council); and Ahrar al-Watan (the Free of the Homeland).
What sustains the business model of all these groups is Israel's occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. But the occupation is opposed not just by these groups but much of the international community and some Israelis.
Australia, for example, is opposed to the occupation. If a country supports the two-state solution — as Australia does — it is opposed to the occupation. Palestinians cannot have their own country unless the occupation finishes.
The cost of occupation
The underlying grievance for Palestinians is Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. It took me some years living in Israel to understand what occupation actually meant for Palestinians. One thing that helped me to understand it was the vulnerability of Palestinian children in the West Bank.
I visited the Israeli military court in the West Bank where children aged 12 and over are put on trial. I sat in on some of the trials, in which Israeli soldiers are the judges. For many Palestinians, what they dread is Israeli soldiers knocking on their doors at night to take away their boys (always boys).
The soldiers typically say that the boy is suspected of being a security threat. The boys will then end up on trial some time later, and usually are convicted. The charge most commonly is throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.
If they plead guilty, they get three months in prison. If they contest the charge, they often spend eight or nine months in jail, so their lawyers urge them to plead guilty.
The real fear came from parents who told me that when their children were taken by soldiers they did not know where they were taken.
Many of Israel's national religious community regard even the notion of occupation with contempt — they say that Judea and Samaria (their term for the West Bank) was "given to us by God". End of story.
But that is not the end of the story. There are groups in Israel which challenge this view.
One of those is the Gisha Legal Centre, which spent three years pursuing a document from the Israeli army showing how the army had studied the minimum number of calories per person they would need to allow into Gaza to keep people in Gaza hungry without dying. The army said the "calories plan" was never activated.
Haaretz newspaper's Gideon Levy wrote:
Who came up with the idea of calculating the caloric intake for 1.5 million people under siege? What train of thought even gives Israel the right to enter the mouths and invade the stomachs of the people living under its jackboots? So now it's not just their bedrooms that are brutally broken into every night; now it's also their digestive system. Even after the writing of this document, Israel continued to brazenly claim that the occupation of Gaza had ended. The very fact that such a document was composed, whether it was used or not, points to a satanic way of thinking. But the reason that army didn't want this document made public had nothing to do with its diabolical content. Nor did it fear a public storm, which it knew wasn't likely to happen in a country afflicted with blindness. The reason the Israel Defence Forces was reluctant to publicise this document was because it would make Israel look even worse in world opinion than it already does.
Will Israelis realise that the cost they are paying to occupy and blockade more than five million Palestinians is now too high?
Will Palestinians realise the cost they are paying by allowing Hamas to have any sort of leadership position is now too high?
For the sake of their children, many believe that both sides should be looking for a political rather than a military solution.
This tragedy cannot go on.
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