Twenty trucks of water, bread and medicine were finally allowed to cross into Gaza. This news was repeated yesterday in almost all the prestigious world news. What about twenty trucks for the two million or so Palestinians locked in Gaza in an action that brings to mind the sieges of fortresses in the Middle Ages? The hope is that the aid will continue and meet the existential needs of Gazans everywhere.
But alongside this faint hope, there is also the great fear that the announced entry of the Israeli army into Gaza will be the beginning of an urban war with many victims on both sides, but especially from the civilian population, especially children, elderly Palestinian women.
"Israel has suffered an inhumane attack and deserves the world's sympathy, but it should not be given a blank check to massacre civilians or deprive them of food, water and medicine," NYT columnist Nikola Kristof wrote yesterday.
I see that in our social networks there are not a few voices that justify the bloodshed of Palestinian civilians in the name of dismantling Hamas. Some consider this as a painful but necessary and therefore inevitable thing. Others sink deeper into the depths of cynicism and say that Palestinian civilians must pay for their leadership, sympathy and support.
Apparently they do not know that the Palestinians of Gaza have not had a chance to vote for 16 years. It is possible that some of them sympathize with the extremist line of Hamas. But it only produces extremism if you take 2 million or so people and lock them up in three hundred or so square kilometers, in "a prison under the open sky", as former President Carter described Gaza.
Let's assume that all the Palestinians of Gaza have sympathy for the extremism of Hamas and hatred for the Israelis, but what law and what morality of the democratic world gives you the right to kill another for his beliefs?
In addition, nearly half of Gaza's Palestinians are children, and local officials say that 1,500 children have been killed in the bombing so far and 1/3 of civilian housing has been destroyed. This is what they say to punish the children en masse for not choosing to be the children of other parents!
"The best answer in the face of this difficult situation - wrote Nikola Kristof in the article I quoted above - is to try to cling to our values even in the face of terrorist provocations. It means that regardless of the emotions of the moment, all lives have equal value.” And it concluded that in an effort to protect Israeli children, we must not allow the children of Gaza to be killed.