Does Anyone Care When Arabs Kill Palestinians?

Western media make much of crimes allegedly committed by Israel against Palestinians. Yet when Arab regimes torture or kill Palestinians, or when armies and militias in war-torn Syria slaughter them by the hundreds, the response is largely silence—including on the part of the Palestinian Authority. Khaled Abu Toameh writes:

[A]ccording to a report published this week by the Working Group for Palestinians in Syria, 2,596 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of the conflict in that country in 2011. But this is a news item that has hardly found its way into mainstream media in the West. Even Arab media outlets have almost entirely ignored the report. . . .

The reason for this apathy, of course, is clear. The Palestinians in Syria were killed by Arabs and not as a result of the conflict with Israel. Journalists covering the Middle East do not believe that this is an important story because of the absence of any Israeli role in the killings. . . .

That Palestinians are being killed by Arabs does not seem to bother even the Palestinian Authority, whose leaders are busy these days threatening to file “war crimes” charges against Israel with the International Criminal Court. As far as the Palestinian Authority is concerned—and the media, the EU, the UN, and human-rights groups—the only “war crimes” are being committed by Israelis.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: Human Rights, Media, Palestinian refugees, Palestinians, Syrian civil war

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF