Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is correct to condemn Hamas killing Israeli civilians in its attacks on Israel this week.

The killing of civilians or taking them hostage is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and should be universally condemned.

However, the Labour government has been deathly silent on the war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians under Labour’s watch these past six years.

Under his prime ministerial watch this year, Chris Hipkins has looked the other way while Israel has built more illegal Israeli settlement homes on Palestinian land; killed more than 250 Palestinian civilians; supported Israeli settler pogroms against Palestinian towns and villages across the occupied West Bank and encouraged highly-provocative Israeli ministerial and settler incursions into the Al Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem.

Why does he only wake up when Israelis are killed? Why does he think Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives?

The Prime Minister’s pro-Israel stance is one-sided and blatantly racist.

New Zealand, along with other Western countries, bears heavy responsibility for the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis in recent days because we have never held Israel to account for its crimes against the Palestinian people.

We have given Israel a free pass to murder and abuse Palestinians and this led to the inevitable tragedy last weekend.

It is precisely the attitude of Western leaders such as our Prime Minister which has meant so many lives have been lost.

The Prime Minister has the blood of Palestinians and Israelis on his hands.

John Minto is national chair of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

The besieged Gaza Strip
The Palestinian enclave — home to about 2.3 million people — has been under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade since 2007, reports Al Jazeera.
More than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and thousands have taken shelter in UN schools as Israeli attacks intensify, forcing Palestinians to flee their homes.

Buildings, mosques and offices have been targeted as Netanyahu promised “mighty vengeance” for the deadly attacks that has sent shockwaves across Israel.

Harrowing images from inside Gaza have emerged with 19 members of a family killed when an air strike on Sunday hit their residential building. More than 60 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their homes currently in Israel.

Israel has maintained a land, sea and air blockade on Gaza since 2007, a year after Hamas was democratically elected into power. The voting came nearly two years after Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from the enclave.

The blockade gives Israel control of Gaza’s borders, and Egypt has stepped in to enforce the western border.

Israel has stated it has blocked the borders to protect its citizens from Hamas, but the act of collective punishment violates the Geneva Conventions and has long been considered illegal by groups including the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is correct to condemn Hamas killing Israeli civilians in its attacks on Israel this week.

The killing of civilians or taking them hostage is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and should be universally condemned.

However, the Labour government has been deathly silent on the war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians under Labour’s watch these past six years.

Under his prime ministerial watch this year, Chris Hipkins has looked the other way while Israel has built more illegal Israeli settlement homes on Palestinian land; killed more than 250 Palestinian civilians; supported Israeli settler pogroms against Palestinian towns and villages across the occupied West Bank and encouraged highly-provocative Israeli ministerial and settler incursions into the Al Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem.

Why does he only wake up when Israelis are killed? Why does he think Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives?

The Prime Minister’s pro-Israel stance is one-sided and blatantly racist.

New Zealand, along with other Western countries, bears heavy responsibility for the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis in recent days because we have never held Israel to account for its crimes against the Palestinian people.

We have given Israel a free pass to murder and abuse Palestinians and this led to the inevitable tragedy last weekend.

It is precisely the attitude of Western leaders such as our Prime Minister which has meant so many lives have been lost.

The Prime Minister has the blood of Palestinians and Israelis on his hands.

John Minto is national chair of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

The besieged Gaza Strip
The Palestinian enclave — home to about 2.3 million people — has been under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade since 2007, reports Al Jazeera.
More than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and thousands have taken shelter in UN schools as Israeli attacks intensify, forcing Palestinians to flee their homes.

Buildings, mosques and offices have been targeted as Netanyahu promised “mighty vengeance” for the deadly attacks that has sent shockwaves across Israel.

Harrowing images from inside Gaza have emerged with 19 members of a family killed when an air strike on Sunday hit their residential building. More than 60 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their homes currently in Israel.

Israel has maintained a land, sea and air blockade on Gaza since 2007, a year after Hamas was democratically elected into power. The voting came nearly two years after Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from the enclave.

The blockade gives Israel control of Gaza’s borders, and Egypt has stepped in to enforce the western border.

Israel has stated it has blocked the borders to protect its citizens from Hamas, but the act of collective punishment violates the Geneva Conventions and has long been considered illegal by groups including the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Almost 50 years to the day after the joint Egyptian-Syrian offensive that launched the 1973 October War, Israel has once again been caught with its pants down. On this occasion its briefs were dangling from its ankles as well.

Operation Al Aqsa Storm, as Hamas named its 7 October 2023 offensive into Israeli territory, represents an even greater Israeli failure.

Extensive and reasonably successful Egyptian and Syrian efforts to conceal their intentions, preparations, and capabilities notwithstanding, Israel in 1973 received multiple warnings about an impending Arab attack from, among others, King Hussein of Jordan, a high-level Egyptian agent, and several of its own intelligence officers.

Its primary failure was not ignorance, but the haughty dismissal of knowledge that contradicted preconceptions.

While hubris and complacency have been mainstays in Israel’s dealings with Arab military adversaries, on this occasion it additionally had no information about the impending operation.

This despite its world-leading surveillance and intelligence capabilities, and the reality that the Gaza Strip is not only miniscule in size but also the most intensively and intrusively surveilled territory and population on the planet, and one that has furthermore been under blockade for 17 years.

That Hamas and Islamic Jihad were under these circumstances able to plan and prepare an operation of such scale, scope, and sophistication, a process that will have consumed many months at the least, and will have required extensive communications among leaders, cadres, and operatives, is an astonishing achievement and testament to the legendary resourcefulness of Gaza’s Palestinians.

Launched in plain view
While we can at this point only speculate as to how Hamas managed to prepare and launch this offensive in plain view of Israel, the avoidance or effective encryption of electronic and digital communications will certainly have played an important role.

Similarly, Hamas has in recent years considerably improved its counter-intelligence capabilities to minimise infiltration, an essential feature given the nearly constant flow of Palestinians who transit through Israeli-controlled border crossings and are susceptible to recruitment by Israeli intelligence as conditions for access to health care, employment, and the like.

Rather than serving as Israel’s eyes and ears within the Gaza Strip, it seems likely at least some of these Palestinians conducted reconnaissance for Operation Al Aqsa Storm within Israel.

As for the weaponry used, much of it is either rudimentary or of local manufacture, making ingenious use of available materials such as paragliders, steel from a British ship that sunk off the Gaza coast decades ago to manufacture rocket tubes, and unexploded Israeli ordnance. More advanced capabilities will have been smuggled in, presumably with the assistance of Hizballah in Lebanon, perhaps with the cooperation of sympathetic or corrupt Egyptian border patrols.

The legendary corruption of Israel’s own border crossings with the Gaza Strip may also have played a role.

Committed to fighting the previous war, Israel constructed formidable underground obstacles to prevent Palestinian commandos from infiltrating Israel through their tunnel network. In response, Hamas and Islamic Jihad simply breached the weak points in the barriers surrounding the Gaza Strip, such as wire fences that relied on electronic monitoring rather than more sturdy concrete obstacles (some of which also appear to have been breached).

And a key objective of the initial Palestinian missile barrage, which targeted Israeli military airfields among other objectives, was to paralyze and thus delay Israel’s ability to rapidly respond.

Immediate objectives
Al Aqsa Storm’s immediate objectives were to infiltrate and seize key Israeli security installations, such as the Re’im military base which serves as the headquarters for the Gaza Division; kill or capture a significant number of Israeli soldiers; establish Palestinian territorial control over population centers within Israel’s boundaries for the first time since 1948; and present significantly improved Palestinian capabilities to the Israeli public and security establishment with a massive missile barrage at Israeli cities and the deployment of new infiltration and combat techniques.

While Israeli civilian casualties do not appear to have been an objective as such, it appears that many were killed, and others abducted. Additionally, there are reports of a massacre at a desert party.

In the event, the operation succeeded in nearly all respects, one suspects beyond the wildest expectations of those who planned and executed it. Dozens of Israeli soldiers, including a major general, were spirited into captivity inside the Gaza Strip.

Many more, including senior officers, were killed and wounded, and almost 24 hours after the operation commenced, Palestinian fighters remained ensconced in multiple locations and installations inside Israel.

Images of Israeli bulldozers and missiles deployed against the Israeli police headquarters in Sderot to dislodge Palestinian fighters within it will remain with us for some time, and as with the Egyptian military’s nearly effortless crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973, won’t be erased by subsequent developments.

A more difficult question concerns Hamas’s motives and broader aims. Seen from the movement’s perspective, Israel has simply gone too far, for too long.

Particularly under the stewardship of the Netanyahu government and its predecessor, escalation has been consistent and transformed into a strategy.

Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley, army-enabled attacks on villages throughout the West Bank by settler auxiliaries, and increasing incursions by prominent Israeli politicians and settler groups into the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem’s Old City have reached new heights, and done so in the explicit service of formal annexation.

Indeed, speaking last month to the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a map that showed both the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of Israel.

In the Gaza Strip, Israel has shown no inclination to lift or significantly relax the blockade, and treats Hamas as a force that can safely be ignored on the grounds that the movement cares about little else than maintaining its rule over the Gaza Strip.

Within Israel’s prisons, the situation of Palestinian detainees has been deteriorating by design. Yet every Israeli escalation has been normalised by Israel’s US and European partners, with each outrage met by little more than paeans to “shared values” and Israel’s “right to defend itself” and, under Washington’s leadership, a focus on an Israeli-Saudi agreement intended to render Palestine and the Palestinians irrelevant.

Within the region, a growing number of Arab states have in practice extended to Greater Israel a halal certificate, at Palestinian expense. Closer to home, Turkey has forced a number of Hamas leaders it previously hosted to leave the country, and Qatar has in recent months reduced the financial support it provides to Gaza in agreement with Israel, on the grounds that Hamas needs to find a more sustainable solution to its financial crisis.

So what is Operation Al Aqsa Storm meant to achieve? It appears that the movement concluded, some time ago, that a repeat of previous confrontations with Israel, such as during the 2021 Unity Intifada, the first that Hamas rather than Israel initiated, would be insufficient to break the logjam, and that only a spectacle on the scale of what we witnessed on October 7 would serve to concentrate minds in Israel and other relevant capitals.

In other words, the main objective would seem to be to render the status quo obsolete and put paid to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade, entirely or at least in its current form. Secondly, Hamas appears determined to free Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, and additionally use those it has captured and abducted as leverage in negotiations on other matters, including for example those relating to the Haram al-Sharif.

Insurmountable obstacles
It is highly unlikely that undermining Saudi-Israeli diplomacy formed an important motivation, because the proposed deal faces too many insurmountable obstacles in Washington and Israel, and both Hamas and its allies understand this.

Additionally, if Muhammad bin Salman is determined to proceed with such a deal, there’s no indication he would be deterred by a mound of Palestinian corpses any more than his Arab cohorts who preceded him, and in any case, could consummate any agreement after a decent interval.

This notwithstanding, embarrassing not Riyadh specifically but all regional capitals that maintain formal or informal relations with Israel is an added benefit for Hamas. Particularly so if mass demonstrations in the region in support of the Palestinians serve to remind its governments and the world at large that Palestine remains a live issue.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad can additionally be presumed to hope that their offensive fatally weakens the PA ensconced in Ramallah, thereby creating greater freedom of action for their movements in the West Bank.

The above notwithstanding, the timing of this operation is curious, because conventional wisdom held that Israel’s various adversaries were content with a strategy of managed escalation so as not to interrupt the growing polarisation and dysfunction within the Israeli political arena.

That Hamas nevertheless chose an unprecedented offensive at this moment may have been related to matters of operational security and fears of exposure, or an assessment that this was an opportune moment with Israel having prioritised sadism in the West Bank and reinforcement of its border with Lebanon, or indeed a revised assessment that exposing the colossal failure of Israel’s extremists and security establishment is the best way to weaken them.

It is inconceivable that Hamas would have embarked on an operation of this scale without also preparing for an unprecedented Israeli response. Together with Islamic Jihad and others, it will probably have prepared for massive Israeli incursions into the Gaza Strip launched for the purpose of significantly degrading their organisations and infrastructure, killing cadres and assassinating leaders it can locate, and leaving a massive trail of death and destruction.

Last stand thinking
Better a last stand than a slow death, the thinking apparently goes, particularly if that stand gives a renewed lease on life. Israel will presumably also conduct a massive sweep throughout the West Bank, crack down on Palestinians within Israel, and may also seek to abduct or liquidate Hamas leaders based abroad.

It’s a scenario based on the reasonable assumption that Israel remains unprepared to resume direct control of the entire territory for a protracted period of time. In other words, and as with previous assaults on the Gaza Strip, Israel’s objective may ultimately be to restore a version of the status quo that produced the present crisis.

Inflicting significant casualties in close-quarter combat, as the Palestinians succeeded in doing in 2014, could reduce the length and intensity of such incursions. The Palestinian organisations presumably know better than to believe that holding dozens of Israeli prisoners will provide them with a measure of protection from the authors of the Hannibal Doctrine, which considers a dead Israeli soldier preferable to a captive one.

It is an issue that can at most be used for psychological warfare.

A key question is whether Gaza’s militants will confront Israel only with their existing preparations, or whether Operation Al Aqsa Storm is part of a broader initiative by the self-styled Axis of Resistance, in which Hezbollah and perhaps others will join the fray if Israel crosses certain red lines to relieve the pressure on the Gaza Strip.

If Israel follows through on its demands of mass evacuations of densely populated Palestinian neighborhoods and proceeds with intensive carpet bombing to flatten them, causing mass casualties in the process, we may soon find out.

Mouin Rabbani has published and commented widely on Palestinian affairs, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the contemporary Middle East. He was previously senior analyst Middle East and special advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group, and head of political affairs with the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria. He is co-editor of Jadaliyya Ezine.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Hamas has responded to Israel’s escalating violence with an unprecedented attack. This is not a new tragedy; it is an extension of the same old cycle.

We grieve all the losses of this calamity, and we call on our government not to speak the same old words but to finally act.

To call today’s act “unprovoked” is wilful blindness. Choose your timeframe; choose your provocation.

Israel is carrying out the longest, now-illegal, now-apartheid occupation in modern history. Gaza has been illegally blockaded for 17 years, confining more than two million mostly civilian human beings in deteriorating conditions, subjecting them to repeated bombardments and ceaseless deprivation.

More than 200 Palestinians have been killed in 2023 so far, including four the other day. The latest of Israel’s settler-state pogroms in the West Bank took place in Huwara one day before Hamas’s action.

Hamas’s attack is a response to longterm and escalating, immediate violence.

The blockade wall that was breached is an illegal structure. A million children have been born behind that wall; did you expect them to sit quietly?

Wall deserves to fall
That wall deserves to fall — but we, here in Aotearoa and throughout the world, should have brought it down with diplomatic and economic and legal sanctions long before it came to this.

Now Hamas’s violent resistance has broken through the wall.

Palestinians have a legal right to armed resistance, but no one has a right to unlimited violence. There is no honour in attacking civilians in their homes or bombing Gazan apartment buildings.

It is a core principle of international humanitarian law that the violations of one armed group do not release another armed group from its constant obligation to uphold the rights of civilians. Armed groups are responsible to the law, to the idea of minimising the harm done in this world.

We who demand the protection of Palestinian civilians can best do that by calling for the protection of all civilians: human rights are either everyone’s rights or they are nothing.

If we lose sight of that, the world becomes even more dangerous — and Palestinians have always borne the brunt of that danger.

No military solution
There is no military solution. Solutions call for political will here, outside Israel/Palestine.

The rage and despair accumulated through generations and decades of brutality will not reset. Do not call for the return to the status quo ante because it was intolerable, unjust and illegal.

We, here in Aotearoa New Zealand, need to act on the basis of law and the equal rights of human beings to protection, to justice, to self-determination.

We call on our government to initiate, to pick up the phone and lead in mustering international action.

For anyone to be safe, Palestinians must be free and civilians must be protected.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The New Zealand government bears heavy responsibility for loss of life of Palestinians and Israelis in the latest fighting in Israel/Palestine and must revisit its policy, says the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national chair John Minto.

“Whatever the eventual outcome of the Hamas attacks on Israel today [Saturday], the New Zealand government bears heavy responsibility for the loss of life of Palestinians and Israelis,” he said in a statement.

“Like other Western countries, New Zealand has failed to hold Israel to account for its multiple crimes, including war crimes, against the Palestinian people, day after day, year after year and decade after decade.

“We have ignored human rights reports of Israel’s apartheid policies. Our government has been looking the other way.”

Hamas launched a large-scale military operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” against Israel, describing it as in response to the desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque and increased settler violence.

The group running the besieged Gaza Strip (population 2.1 million) said it had fired thousands of rockets and sent fighters into Israel. Early reports said at least 5 Israelis, had been killed, 35 people  taken captive and more than 500 had been wounded and taken to hospitals.

Repeated Israeli attacks
Minto described the Hamas attacks as “understandable”.

“Over recent months Western countries have turned a blind eye to the brutality of the Israeli army and settler groups engaging in repeated attacks on Palestinian towns and villages and the killing of civilians and children,” he said.

“The result is now playing out in more violence initiated by Israel’s brutal occupation — the longest military occupation in modern history. The occupation includes Israel’s 17-year-old blockade of the Gaza strip — the largest open-air prison in the world.”

Al Jazeera reports that almost 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli occupation forces so far this year.

“New Zealand must reassess its policy on the Middle East and demand Israel adopt a timetable to implement international law and United Nations resolutions.”

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished. Politically and otherwise,” declared Al Jazeera political analyst Marwan Bishara, who says Israel has never learnt from history of colonialism.

“His arrogance has finally caught with him. No matter how many Palestinians this corrupt opportunist kills before his final downfall, he will go down in utter humiliation.

“Israel gets a glimpse of the real future days after Netanyahu cavalierly showed us at the United Nations future maps of the new Middle East centered around Israel — with no Palestine existence.”

Israel launched air strikes on Gaza in retaliation in an operation called “Iron Swords”.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz