Gaza waits for an end but the world merely watches

If there is one conflict which has virtually brought the entire world to its knees as it watches helplessly the pummeling into submission of the hapless Palestinians, it is the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.

On Sunday, the debilitating war entered the seventh month and the figures of death and devastation are appalling to say the least.

As many as 33,137 people have died so far in the conflict which has also left 456 in the West Bank dead.

What is even more heart-rending is the fact that 13,000 of them are children who have been caught in the conflict for no fault of theirs.

Journalists have also suffered the brutality of the war with as many as 95 of them getting killed as they went about performing their duties braving the rain of bullets and bombs.

The damage to infrastructure is total; Sixty per cent of the houses are gone and 90 per cent of school buildings have been turned into rubble. All kids are out of school.

Since the war broke out on October 7 after a Hamas attack on Israel, a majority of the population in Gaza has been displaced with many of them packed into refugee camps not knowing when they will be return to their home and if it will ever happen.

Food is becoming scarcer with each passing day with the United Nations warning of famine if something is not done urgently to bring the curtains down on this horrible conflict.

And why has the world community including the UN and the super powers become so lamefooted in convincing the aggressor, Israel to come to its senses and force it to stop its brutal acts in Gaza?

A ‘game of vetos’ is on in the all-powerful UN Security Council where long-feuding powers, the US and Russia have ensured that peace proposals never get through.

Fervent efforts by other nations to broker peace have therefore failed and all that has been happening is a trickle of aid into the battle-torn land where chilling visuals of the bodies of tiny, shrouded bodies of babies have yet failed to awaken the conscience of the world.

Gaza is a reminder to every human living through these torturous times that we are fast losing our sense of humanness as each nation gets into its protective shell, wary of inviting the fury of war.

The Middle-East conflict and the other war raging on the other side of the globe – in Ukraine - are proof enough that the collective human will which once brought dictators to their knees and ensured massive relief efforts in times of calamities, has all but lost its clout.

It has also become obvious that Israel will not stop pounding Gaza with its deadly arsenal unless its pillar of support and main arms supplier, the US takes a rigid and uncompromising stand that enough is enough and the bombing of a hapless population must stop.

Caught in an election year, it remains to be seen if the current US president will go to the extent of annoying the powerful Jewish lobby in his country despite the fact that the war has alienated a huge section of the peace-loving US citizenry.

‘No man is an island, entire of itself;’ wrote John Donne years ago. ‘… Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

Worthy words worth remembering as the war enters a decisive phase and threatens to spin out of control and spill into the neighbourhood.

It is now or never for the world community for if it does not act now, history will recall with disdain a generation which hardly listened to the agonising voices for help even as the bombs rained down mercilessly on them.