The oppression, forced starvation, anguish unfolding in Gaza have pierced the heart of humanity. A torrent of condemnations from UN members, international organisations, and the UN secretary general has denounced the crimes Israel is committing in the harshest words.
The media around the world is exposing the nature of these crimes in gruesome detail: one image after another of children, bones protruding from skeletal frames, almost crying out for their funeral rites. Reports of the horror unfolding in Gaza are increasingly harder to suppress. An Al- Arabiya journalist, relaying the desperate phone call he received from his wife because their child could no longer endure the pangs of hunger, was forced to add his own family to the countless others being deliberately starved.
Images of Nazi death camps spring to mind – the stage of the holocaust that gave rise to the cry, “Never again!” This was a Jewish cry, yet the appalling irony is that the state claiming to speak in the name of Jews is carrying out similar crimes in Gaza. Some Israelis support this. They say it is necessary in order to achieve “victory” – a goal that entails driving millions of Palestinians from their homeland and the land of their ancestors. Others, shocked and saddened, issue statements – simply adding to the growing stream of condemnations.
The basic law of the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict since the beginning of the 20th century is the imposition of de facto realities on the ground, starting with the waves of Jewish migration from anti-Semitic regions in Europe to settle in Palestine. The problem has since become entangled with religion and historic symbols, from the 1948 Nakba and the establishment of the Israeli state to the current war, which aims to displace not only the indigenous inhabitants of that enclave but those in the West Bank as well. The only reality that the Palestinians have managed establish is the survival of seven million of them in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Most ended up in Gaza or the West Bank, while the rest hold Israeli citizenship but are deprived of full civil and political rights.
Now, under Netanyahu’s leadership and the dominance of the religious far right, the Israeli aim is to create a new reality through the forced transfer of Palestinians. Hamas handed them the opportunity for this in the form of the fifth Gaza war. Israel has seized upon it to press hundreds of thousands of civilians into concentration camps, preparatory to their forced expulsion to other countries or forced starvation. The current confrontation is not just a major defeat for Hamas, which had no strategy for resistance, but also a painful episode for Israel which started on 7 October 2023. Since then, the Palestinians have been bleeding, with neither Hamas nor the other Middle East militias of the Axis of Resistance able to protect them.
Now the main Arab task is to stop the current slaughter, the concentration camps, the ethnic cleansing. The time for condemnatory statements is over. What is needed is political action to reach a ceasefire and enable the entry of humanitarian aid so the Palestinians can remain rooted in their land. This step hinges on Israel, which wants to perpetuate the horror, but it depends even more on Hamas, which must recognise that every additional day without an aid convoy means the death of another 100-150 civilians by sniper bullets or starvation.
Since it is clear that the Palestinian National Authority has no power in Gaza and the current negotiations are being conducted through Hamas, the Arab states and Arab League must do Israel and the US a favour and call on Hamas to release the Israeli hostages, end the current military operations, and return control to an authority approved by the leadership in Ramallah.
Sadly, despite Arab efforts to support the Egyptian initiative to reconstruct Gaza without displacing its residents and even though they defeated the first US-Israeli forced displacement plan, a glaring gap remains: they have avoided the question of the future of Hamas in Gaza. The time has come for a comprehensive Arab initiative. This should take as its starting point the removal of Hamas from power, delegitimising and disarming it, and handing its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, which is in line with the approach to all other militias, be they Kurdish, Syrian, or Lebanese.
This Arab initiative will set the region on course to stability and reopen the doors to a peace process from the womb of a gruelling war, which has complicated the Palestinian question more than ever before. A peace would also avert future wars that could engulf the entire region in unimaginable hell.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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