Nine months into the continuous genocidal Israeli war on Gaza, Palestinians in the Strip continue to be resilient and steadfast despite the relentless bombing and tightening siege.
The immoral Israeli occupation state, backed by most of the Arab regimes, India and Western countries, has been using its filthy power and lethal force to commit crime after crime.
According to UN reports, nine out of every ten residents of Gaza are displaced. “We estimate that nine in every 10 people in the Gaza Strip have been internally displaced at least once, if not up to 10 times, unfortunately, since October,” a UN report said last week.
This is in addition to the ongoing targeting of children and women who are being killed or wounded every day due to the indiscriminate and intense Israeli bombing of densely populated areas and buildings —government or UNRWA facilities— used as refugee shelters. Everything is clear and detailed statistics exist everywhere.
More than 70 per cent of homes and almost all schools, mosques, universities, hospitals and healthcare facilities have been bombed and partially or completely destroyed. This is in addition to the severe shortage of food and water, as well as the lack of electricity, fuel, cooking gas and all the basics for a primitive life.
Garbage has accumulated in the streets and sewage is flowing through alleyways across the destroyed enclave, causing unprecedented levels of pollution and a health crisis.
In light of all of this, a BBC producer told me she was shocked that Gazans hadn’t taken to the street to put pressure on Hamas to step down in an effort to return to a pre-October reality. She said Palestinians had told her that the Israeli occupation state had been inflicting suffering on them since long before 7 October, reminding her that their suffering at the hand of Jewish gangs began even before the 1948 Nakba. Land theft, travel and movement restrictions, home demolitions, daily detentions, unjustified killing, raids of villages and cities and deprivation of the most basic rights has not stopped since then, they explained.
The people of Gaza have nothing to lose, they explained. They told her they prefer to die or be killed rather than continue subjugated by the Israeli occupation.
When she highlighted that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had chosen to live subjugated by Israel, they said even this hadn’t brought him peace as Palestinians in the occupied West Bank continue to live under a brutal military occupation.
They also highlighted the lives of Palestinian citizens in Israel who are treated as second class citizens and deprived of many of their rights. Even those who agreed to send their sons to serve in the Israeli occupation army continue to be treated in a degrading manner by the occupation authorities.
But Palestinians seek something else as well. A right guaranteed under all human rights laws and conventions; which is the right to live free and not under occupation.
Israeli analyst Alon Mizrahi said: “Anyone who does not admire the Palestinian people must be suffering from a mental disorder.”
Amy Ayalon, former chief of Israel’s Internal Intelligence Agency, Shin Bet, told Al Jazeera that if he was a Palestinian, he “would fight against Israel in order to achieve [his] liberty.”
-Motasem A Dalloul is MEMO’s correspondent in the Gaza Strip.
