Islamabad – The stars no longer portray the Gaza night sky, but show fire. The entire neighborhood is consumed by bombs. The hospital is in abandoned and transformed into a mass grave where no one can come to helplessly wait for the injured treatment. Parents have the cold meat of martial teacher children.
The reporter mutters his final words and communication dies. Food convoys are suspended, and people are doing everything they can to survive by eating breadcrumbs while tackling hunger in Gaza.
In the face of that, Israel says the bomb is directed at extremists, but the truth is not. Schools, mosques, apartment buildings and refugee camps are fussing along with the death toll of citizens that have become out of control. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed, according to statistics from the Gaza Ministry of Health. Independent estimates the figures are around 80,000. This was demonstrated through classified Israeli military statistics recently published in the news, revealing that 83% of Israeli deaths are civilians. This is not a war with an open border, but a expunge of the homes of all the families.
This is a foreseen misfortune, predicted not by the Palestinians, but by the person who operated Israeli security equipment.
In 2012, Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh released a film called The Gate Keepers. This is a rare documentary that interviews six former heads of Israeli internal security service Shin Bet. These men were not the enemy of the nation. They function at the heart of their security policy and deal with extremists. They were involved in decades of labor developing Israeli security policies. And when these were long-standing opinions, they were not justified by them, but condemned.
Amiayalon, head of Sinbet between 1996 and 2000, predicted that the ruins of Gaza were still on fire, sadly, and that was true. He simply said, “We win every battle, but we lose the war.” He said the immeasurable military muscles used by Israel, its blockade and its runways cannot provide permanent security. Other voices, including Yaakov Peri, argue that decades of relentless military rule did not break the cycle of violence. With each new operation, you’ll be deeply driven by that cycle. Every house that has been destroyed incites fresh opposition, and every life lost brings us closer to a world where only one vocabulary remains.
Sinbet officials who served in the 1980s and 1990s went further, including Abraham Shalom, who led the agency. Israel is a savage, he said. “We have grown inhumanely. We have grown inhumanely to ourselves. We are now Germans in more ways.” Such a statement by one of the top brass in Israel’s security hierarchy was shocking. It was one of the rare events of cruel and straightforward honesty, and one of the confessions that should have swayed the souls of Israeli policymakers and the foreigners beside them. However, this surprising note was very explicit and unanswered, but not ignored.
These six gatekeepers have released the truth that Israelis only comment in the back room. The war in Gaza had nothing to do with anxiety other than power struggles. Decades of intense military operations, targeted assassinations, checkpoints and blockades have not brought about sustainable security. Rather, such policies deny the Palestinians the fundamental respect of humanity. They evacuated their families and increased the anguish of the Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israelites remain in a clear, endless cycle of violence, resistance and retribution.
Now their attention is settled in the fragments of Gaza. The Israeli government is supported by Western support and even abandons the appearance of pursuing peace. It turned starvation into policy, bombing bombing into normal activities, and making Palestine’s survival a negotiable item.
Hunger is now transformed into a weapon of war. More than half a million Palestinians are at risk of starvation, and one in six under the age of five now suffers from acute malnutrition. The state in northern Gaza has already moved to starvation. At least 281 people are starving in hospitals with babies and babies among those who have died from naked ribs penetrating through paper-thin skin. Thousands of people raided rescuers hoping to be given packets of flour or a bottle of clean water. In a shocking case, 33 Palestinians died near a food truck trying to support their families.
This has been called “human failures” by the UN Secretary-General. However, failure can be found at a deeper level through the failure of a global order that supports immunity for leadership, diplomacy, and justice.
Based on the words spoken by former Singh Bet chief Yaakov Peri, the gatekeeper, said it was not the only way for the military to achieve peace. He says that the only effective path to lasting security is dialogue and negotiation, not the use of force from rivals. But today I can no longer speak. Israel is no longer trying to negotiate. You are trying to control it. Voices of moderation were suppressed, challenged, sued and appealed by the US and the international community to exercise restraint. By doing this, Israel ignored the advice of its own security agency experts, spurring human disasters.
The tunnels were destroyed, the homes were demolished, and the entire neighborhood was removed, but Israel is less secure than before. It exchanged militarism, justice with vengeance, and morality with humanity for domination.
In the documentary, another former director of Singh Bett, Kermi Giron says there is no morality in occupation. Exclusively, it’s all about control. His words oppose the current reality of the world, where children are looking at helpless, dying children, hurt as parents munch on the tile rond and watch the doctor perform the amputation without anesthesia.
In Tehran, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg, and many other cities where millions of people live, Gaza is no longer a field of fighting, but a crime scene. The anger is strengthened by the silence of Western governments, which are being strengthened by soft media reporting and diplomatic neglect.
Not only should gatekeepers be quiet, we shouldn’t. Their words show how this massacre didn’t have to happen. Policies based on occupation and power will fall into their own evil. They also offer the ultimate lesson that no matter how powerful a nation is, it cannot create long-lasting peace in the graves of its children.
It’s time to call for basic fairness. Even former Israeli security equipment masters have admitted that the manifestation of constant violence only leads to destruction. Therefore, there is no justification why the world should remain silent.
Muhammad Akumal Khan is a Pakistani journalist and foreign analyst.