GAZA AND OTHER MATTERS

GAZA AND RELATED MATTERS

by Ron Walsh

Shortly after the genocidal massacre inflicted on Israel by Hamas on October 7th 2023, the prime minister of Qatar praised the actions of the terrorist group. Not to be left out, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres commented “It did not happen in a vacuum’’. A senior UN worker was appointed to investigate the attack, and with the help of over fifty hours of footage taken from the dead bodies of many Hamas fighters, plus photographs, together with the inspection of a number of attack sites, a report was issued five months later which contained the following; “What I witnessed in Israel were scenes of unspeakable violence perpetrated with shocking brutality..........It was a catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors’’.

The “horrors’’ included the discovery of a number of dead women tied to trees, who had been raped prior to being shot dead, and with cuts of wood or other objects inserted into their vaginas. That was only part of what was carried out on that infamous day. Shortly before October 7th a poll taken had shown that two-thirds of Israeli’s would accept a two-state-solution to the problem regarding Arab/Israeli co-existence. Another poll carried out during the summer of’24 showed that that figure had fallen to below 30%. Hardly surprising. Despite that, on April 29th of ‘25 the aforementioned Antonio Guterres was calling for the two-state-solution to be agreed upon “before its too late’’.

Of course its very much hoped that some solution will be agreed upon in the near future, but to do so would obviously require the complete removal of Hamas from the Gaza Strip, whether by Israeli’s IDF, UN forces, or NATO. Is it possible that a number of Arab states might decide to help? But Hamas will need to be removed from the scene one way or another. While Qatar is home to the vast majority of its leaders, where they live out their lives in extreme luxury, they could of course be relocated to Iran, a country who seeks the removal of the state of Israel from the world map, and who are paymasters to Hamas.

After winning the Palestinian elections in 2006 Hamas became the sole ruler in Gaza the following year, when it violently ousted all rivals. But even before October 7th there had been a certain amount of opposition to them, though much of it remained hidden for fears of reprisals. The actual percentage of Palestinians who would have no problem living alongside the Jews is simply unknown. Removing Hamas would help to unlock those figures.

On March 25th 2025 hundreds of anti-Hamas protesters marched through the town of Beit Lahia, with many holding banners proclaiming “Hamas out’’. On the previous day numerous rockets had been launched into Israel from the town, prompting the IDF to evacuate a large part of it in order to take out the culprits. Masked militants armed with guns and batons forcibly dispersed the marchers, assaulting many of them. Those protestors were very brave people, showing to the world that there is some hope for peace in the Middle-East. They were as brave as the thousands of Russian people who protested following the Putin-led invasion of Ukraine, and who no doubt have paid a high price for doing so.

Iran supports and finances up to twelve terrorist groups in the Middle-East, and are undoubtedly the biggest threat to peace in the region. As the Gaza war continues, not only does Hamas need to be dealt with but so do the other Iranian-backed groups, including Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and the Houthi’s in Yemen.

During the summer of 2024 President Higgins of Ireland wrote to the newly appointed President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, praising Iran’s role in the ‘’struggle for peace’’. If that wasn’t bad enough he also offered the ‘’condolences of the people of Ireland for the death of your predecessor, President Raisi’’. Raisi was widely known as ‘’The butcher of Tehran’’ because of the brutal torture and mass murder of political dissidents that had been overseen by him. His victims were numbered in the thousands, and included many children.

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Following the savage attack on Israel on October 7th, and ever-fearful of a renewed assault across its northern border by Hezbollah, for the first time in many years Jewish leaders feared that the country might actually be over-run. Obviously the immediate and direct threat was being orchestrated by Hamas, having an estimated 25,000 fighters inside the Gaza Strip. Obviously Israel’s goal was to eliminate them.

No war large or small has ever taken place anywhere in the world without many innocent civilians loosing their lives, either intentionally or otherwise. I have not written that as an excuse for the disproportionate number of civilians that have lost their lives in Gaza. During the 2nd World War as the Allied army pushed on from Normandy to Paris, and fighting the Nazi’s all the way for almost three months some 30,000 French civilians died in the cross-fire. Was that a war crime? In Japan the total loss of life turned out to be 2, 521,000, of which 672,000 were civilians, including 180,000 people wiped out by two atomic bombs. Another 100,000 died in Tokyo alone, the result of daylight bombing by the U.S. air force. War crimes? All those deaths had happened despite the protections offered by the early Hague and Geneva Conventions. Life is so precious.

Like most religions Islam is a misogynistic sexist one. Moderate Muslims say that the Koran is peaceful, and some translations do use more temperate language than others. On the other hand militant Muslims state that if non-believers fail to convert to Islam then they must be fought or killed. And therein lies the problem. In 1987 the then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir said that there is “a form of warfare against Israel, and against the Arabs who want to live in peace with us’’. Palestinian religious, academic and political elites teach an ideology of virulent hatred of the Jews, with their killing presented as a religious obligation; “Kill a Jew, and go to heaven’’.

Golda Meir was Israeli prime minister from 1969 until 1974. She made a statement one time that still reverberates up to the present day; “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us’’. It is the most honest statement ever issued by any Israeli leader, although many people will undoubtedly criticise it. No Arab leader has come anywhere close to being as honest about the situation. Which is a pity.

The civilian death toll in Gaza is disproportionately high as Israel continues its quest to wipe-out every Hamas fighter inside the Strip. (The Geneva Convention of 1949 does deal with proportionality in wars) While the number of deaths are supplied by the Hamas run health-ministry they are probable close enough to the true figure, which up to the present day (May 2025) stands at 52,000, inclusive of men, women and children. However the health-ministry never states the number of Hamas fighters killed in the figures they provide. Internationally the unconfirmed figure for Hamas deaths is said to be around 18,000, which leaves 34,000 civilian casualties. A dreadful statistic.

Golda Meir’s statement predicted such statistics arising while Israeli’s attempt to live normal lives, under the continuous threat against their very existence. Towards the end of 2024 Professor Salman al-Dayah, former dean of the sharia school at Islam University in Gaza, condemned Hamas for having failed in “keeping fighters away from the homes of defenceless civilians and their shelters’’. He had previously condemned the terrorist group for its October 7th attack, because of the likely consequences for Palestinians.

What the Professor may not have realised was that Hamas was quite happy with the rising civilian death-toll, with the October 7th architect Yaha Sinwar claiming that the loss of Palestinian civilians was a “necessary sacrifice’’ which would put international pressure on Israel. Sinwar became the Hamas leader in Gaza in 2017 where, following the October 7th attack, he spent most of his time hiding in underground tunnels connecting his home town of Khan Yunis with Rafah, sometimes in the company of his wife and children. After the death of Ismail Haniyeh he became the outright leader of Hamas, but was shot dead by the IDF three months later in October 2024. Following negotiations between Egypt, Qatar, Israel, and the US, Sinwar had turned down a number of the peace-deals that had been offered, which had included the release of Jewish prisoners held by Hamas. One of the deals had demanded the exile of Sinwar, Deif, and 4 other Hamas leaders from the Gaza Strip.

Sinwar had totally miscalculated the outcome of the October 7th attack, having assumed that the shock of a massive assault would cause Israel to collapse; that the Arab world would rise up in support; that Israel would not have the stomach to mount a large-scale sustained invasion; and that taking a large number of prisoners would force a stalemate.

Together with not accepting the fact that some 18,000 dead Hamas fighters make up the over-all casualty figure, it is generally not known that the vast majority of them live in Gaza alongside their wives and children, thus placing them in immediate danger. In July of 2024 an Israeli air strike took out Hezbollah’s top military commander Fuad Shukr in a suburb of the Lebanese capital Beirut, killing 3 others and injuring over 70. Israel held Shukr responsible for the rocket attack 3 days earlier on a soccer pitch in the Golan Heights, where 12 Israeli children had died.

Within hours of Shukr’s death yet another senior Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who lived in Qatar, was assassinated while in Tehran for the inauguration of the new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. During that same month a top Hamas leader who was living in Beirut was targeted by yet another air-strike which hit his apartment, killing himself, his daughter, and his son.

That particular July turned out to be a deadly month, with the head of Hamas’ armed wing Mohammed Delf killed in Gaza during another air-strike, where more than 100 were also killed, mainly civilians. Its not known if members of Delf’s family or other Hamas fighters were with him at the time. His death was not revealed by Hamas at the time, as it did not wish the world to know that he had been hiding-out in a tented camp populated mainly by civilians. While obviously accepting that Israel has every right to fight for its very existence by eliminating Hamas and other terrorist groups, it is also true to say that on many occasions not enough protection was given to members of the Palestinian civilian population.

Hamas took 251 prisoners into Gaza from Israel on October 7th, itself a war crime. CCTV footage from the al-Shifa hospital shows two of the captured Israeli’s being walked through its corridors later that same day, surrounded by Hamas gunmen and witnessed by a number of nurses. While Hamas continues to claim that it has no connection with any hospital, school or mosque, facts prove otherwise, and they are war-crimes. In 2015 Amnesty International reported that Hamas had used an outpatient clinic in that same hospital to interrogate and torture people suspected of collaborating with Israel, while in December 2024 a collection of rifles, hand-grenades, and other associated items were discovered inside a section of al-Shifa, with a tunnel-entrance also located inside its compound. In June 2024 the IDF rescued 4 of the captured Israeli prisoners from a densely populated refugee camp in northern Gaza. Who had been holding them.

One week after Israeli ground forces entered Gaza a rocket exploded in the parking-lot of the al-Ahli hospital, killing and injuring many people. Israel was condemned for the atrocity and large protest-marches were held in cities around the world. Some days later newsreel footage from American and Israeli cameras and, most importantly, from an al-Jazerra camera inside Gaza, showed that the rocket had been fired from close to the hospital, by members of the Islamic Jihad group, that it had malfunctioned and had then landed and exploded in the parking-lot. Within the cramped conditions of Gaza city most rockets are fired from close to peoples homes, or from alongside them, but Hamas does not worry about such trivial matters.

Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli marches are the expression of peoples who have the obvious legal right to do so, but why were there no such marches with regard to other serious conflicts around the world? Back in the day, for almost five years Russia had used chemical weapons on Syrian “rebels’’, which comprised anyone opposed to the dictator Bashar al-Assad. Putin has overseen the slaughter of thousands of Syrian civilians, the displacement of millions, and the destruction of many towns and villages.

There is also the small matter of Putin’s misadventure in the Ukraine, prompted by his desire to at least partially reclaim the old Russian Empire, where an obvious genocide has been taking place from the very start. Newsreel cameras showed that apartment blocks, hospitals and train stations had been targeted from the word go, while in a number of towns and villages the bodies of many civilians were discovered having been shot in the head, with their hands tied behind their backs. Over 2,400 civilians were killed in Mariupol, some 450 massacred in Bucha, and over 290 in Irpin. (The terrorist group ISIS-K carried out a massacre in March of 2024 inside a Moscow concert hall, where 130 people were killed and hundreds injured. The CIA had intercepted their plans and warned Russian intelligence, but Putin dismissed the warning and later blamed Ukraine for the attack.)

There is also the question of China’s dreadful treatment of its Uyghur population, while it is also a fact that China supports Russia in its war against Ukraine, by not only supplying material and weapons but also, as has recently been revealed, by supplying army units. North Korea ditto.

A number of civil wars continue to rage in parts of Africa, and which fail to register very high on the international media’s Richter scale. One of the worlds worst humanitarian and food insecurity disasters is taking place at the moment in the Congo, after years of fighting, with some 25 million people displaced. There is also food insecurity in north-east Nigeria, where over 7 million people require humanitarian assistance, with 80% of them consisting of women and children. The war in Sudan continues on after two years, with deaths said to have reached the outlandish figure of 150,000, and with famine conditions taking place in parts of the interior.

The current Gaza stalemate where essential food supplies are being blocked by Israel has to be lifted, even if claims that Hamas simply high-jack the food to sell it on turns out to be true. That stalemate is breaking international law, even though the release of the Israeli prisoners by Hamas should also have taken place by now. There are 58 Israeli captive at the moment (May 2025), with over half of them already dead. No respect there for the living or the dead. Not on October 7th, not now.

There have been many protests recently inside Israel against that current stalemate, and against the continuing attempt to eliminate every last Hamas fighter. But if peace is ever to reign in the Middle East eliminated they will have to be, or at least removed entirely from Gaza, while it appears that Israel will have to keep a sharp lookout over its security for a long time, maybe even indefinitely, there is no good reason why peace cannot be achieved. A strong NATO army installed in the region would be an ideal solution, with the power to act whenever necessary, unlike that of a UN peace-keeping army.

Israel is a living entity, and that fact should have been fully accepted by now. The idea that the Jews have no right to be there is yesterdays thinking, just as “Brits out’’ with respect to Northern Ireland comes from the same Neanderthal outlook. Even at this late stage the Arab world itself should be providing some concrete suggestions for peace.

The United Nations should also be in the mix, having been set up back in the day in the aftermath of the Nazi disaster inflicted upon the world. But international trade-deals have weakened its stance since those brave early decades, which has been witnessed many times, none more so than in 2014 when a proposed UN resolution condemning Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea was proposed. That resolution was voted down when the majority of African countries failed to support it, mainly because they had recently cut trade-deals with the rogue country in question. With few friends in Europe nowadays, Russia has been courting Africa big-time for many years.

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In June of 2022 a member of the Irish Senate declared that “Ireland has a proud history of supporting the protection rights across the world’’. A wordy statement, but is it true? Looking back to July of 1943 and the 2nd World War, at a time when Germany was killing thousands of Jews daily, newly elected Independent TD Oliver J. Flanagan urged the government of the day to emulate the Nazis and “rout the Jews out of this country’’. In 1948 the Department of Justice decided to explain why Jews had not been allowed into the country during the war; “Any substantial increase in our Jewish population (which at the time had reached the astronomical figure of 3,500) might give rise to an antisemitic problem’’. How wonderfully considerate of the Department in not wishing to elevate the country’s antisemitic level to a “problem’’.

In 1984 eleven workers from the Henry Street branch of Dunne’s Stores refused to handle fruit from South Africa because of the apartheid situation in that country. Government support for the workers was not forthcoming, quite the opposite in fact, having to endure intimidation from the police, even including the Special Branch. However, after an almost three year strike it finally caved in to public pressure and banned the importation of all South African goods. At the height of the strike a government minister had spoken out against the strikers, declaring that they were “depriving our old people of their vitamin C’’, while another minister advised the public that South Africa was “a hefty net importer of Irish goods’’.

And there’s the rub. Many democratic countries cut trade-deals with countries that have dismal civil-rights records, ensuring prosperity, and also ensuring that commerce triumphs over humanity. The larger the trade the less likely that a rogue country will be censored, if at all. Because of Ireland’s massive export/import arrangements with China it is hardly surprising that the Irish government bent over backwards in not criticising the country over its dreadful treatment of the Uyghur’s.

The minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney, and his officials refused to meet the president of the World Uyghur Congress, Dolkun Isa, when he visited Leinster House in an attempt to seek support for his people. The Chinese embassy in Dublin had opposed the idea, and only a small number of TD’s and Senators turned up, while MEP Mike Wallace claimed that reports of what was happening in China were “grossly exaggerated’’. The Dutch, French and British parliaments stated that what was happening was “genocide’’.

China is Irelands 4th largest trading partner, after the US, the UK, and Germany. In 2024 we exported 4.9 billion dollars worth of goods to the country, while importing over 6 billion dollars worth. Silence is golden, as Australia discovered to its cost after criticising China, causing it to loose a very lucrative trade-deal on wines. Who can really blame anyone for deciding to keep their mouth shut? But what of our “proud history of supporting protection rights’’, while at the same time keeping quite about China’s civil-rights record, and with our criticism of Russia little more than half-hearted. Yes the situation in the Middle East has to be sorted out, and hopefully an international agreement will someday be arrived at, sooner rather than later.

As a country we did not shine in a number of domestic catastrophes either. The original inquiry into the 1981 “Stardust’’ disaster turned into a “cover-up’’, allowing those responsible for the deadly fire to escape scot-free, and at the same time laying the blame for it on a few members of the public. It was 43 years before the truth finally escaped, which resulted in the victims families receiving compensation, funded by the Irish taxpayer. The original inquiry into the 1968 Aer Lingus Viscount plane-crash off county Wexford turned into yet another “cover-up’’, which eventually became so obvious that a second investigation was finally initiated in 2000.

The second inquiry was carried out by an international team based near Paris, and in its 2002 Report the truth finally emerged. However those findings have never been officially recognised or accepted by the Irish government. The non-Irish team involved was reluctant to name culprits, but facts are facts. The tape-recorded radio conversations that had taken place between one of the planes pilots and Shannon ATC (Air Traffic Control) on the fatal day had not been provided to the original inquiry team. What had been supplied were transcripts of the conversations, which had been deliberately altered so as to shift blame for the crash from the dreadful Aer Lingus maintenance record back then, to a conspiracy theory claiming that the Viscount had been downed by a target-drone fired from a military site in Wales. Relevant witness statements relating to the planes flight on the day were omitted from the 1970 Report, in order to bolster the conspiracy theory.

Something that is equally worrying is the fact that the Irish media in general, print and broadcast, appear to be part of the conspiracy of silence. They hear no evil, see no evil, and certainly speak no evil.

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Early in 2024 Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar, while commenting on the Gaza conflict, claimed that Israel was taking revenge on the Palestinian people in retaliation for October 7th. By that comment he displayed his total ignorance of the actual overall situation, completely ignoring Israel’s need to eliminate Hamas and every other terrorist group in the area. There is no doubt that the proportionality of the amount of civilians killed in relation to the number of terrorists killed is extremely worrying, and constitutes a war crime. However the Hamas-run health-ministry provides the figures, making no mention of the number of Hamas fighters and its supporters that have been killed.

If Israel entered Gaza for any other purpose except to eliminate Hamas, then it had no reason whatsoever to move its ground forces into the territory. “Taking revenge’’ on the Palestinians could have been accomplished simply by carpet-bombing the entire region, resulting in no deaths suffered by the IDF whatsoever. For operational and other reasons Israel does not issue IDF casualty and injury figures, although actual combined numbers are estimated to be somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 as of May 2025.

In March of 2025 a UN spokeswoman made a statement claiming that Israel was intent on eliminating every Palestinian person in Gaza. Without attempting to make fun of what is undoubtedly an extremely serious situation, but is simply an attempt to show that Leo Varadkar is not the only person capable of making stupid statements, here is a mathematical reply to that UN spokeswoman. According to the health-ministry there had been a total of 50,000 deaths inside Gaza by March, fifteen months after October 7th. At that rate it would take over fifty years to eliminate every single Palestinian.

The popular current-affairs RTE television programme “Prime Time’’ conducted a number of interviews with the Israeli ambassador to Ireland during 2024, hosted by Sarah McInerney and Fran McNulty. (McNulty had interviewed Israeli president Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem shortly after October 7th.) During those interviews the ambassador was subjected to extremely intense questioning, which was only right, no matter who is being interviewed.

Early in 2025 Miriam O’Callaghan arranged to interview the Palestinian ambassador to Ireland, not in the “Prime Time’’ studio, but in the ambassadors residence. It turned out to be a short ten-minute one-sided affair, with the ambassador given free reign to express her thoughts, and with no interruptions. Nearing the end of the encounter O’Callaghan questioned her if Hamas deserved blame for the deaths that had taken place in Gaza. In her three-minute reply the ambassador managed not to mention Hamas even once. And that was that. No come-back from O’Callaghan such as ‘’Would you mind answering the question that I asked’’. A wonderful lesson in how not to conduct an objective interview.

There is in existence in this country a government department which we are told “regulates the Irish media’’, and is called the “Media Commission’’. Here are a few quotes with respect to its over-reach. The Commission ensures “greater equity, diversity and inclusion throughout the media industry’’, which “underpins our work’’. It also ensures “that there is a balance of people, voices, stories and lived experiences on our screens and on the airwaves’’, while also stating that “diverse viewpoints are vital to a vibrant broadcasting landscape’’. Someone must have been asleep-on-the-job during the O’Callaghan interview. Compare and contrast with the Israeli’s ambassadors interviews.

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Ron Walsh. Copyright 2025.

ronwalsh68@yahoo.com

GAZA AND OTHER MATTERS

GAZA AND OTHER MATTERS.