Israel-Palestine war bodes ill for all

The genesis of acrimonious racial hatred derived from anti-Semitism or Nazism created a hotspot of soured relations marked by regular violence and armed clashes at times leading to full-scale wars in the West Bank and Gaza strip. The 'Operation Al-Aqsa Flood carried out by Hamas inside Israel was one such eruption but the fiercest in the 75-year history of the conflict. What was once an Arab-Israeli conflict has now petered out into the suppression of Palestinian people, native to 360 sq km Gaza. Today, more and more Arab countries have normalised or are about to normalise relations with the Jewish state and Hamas finds itself left out friendless. In fact, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 could be a turning point in Palestine-Israel relations but for the intervention by the latter in the area once again following Hamas's election victory in 2006.

Thus the seed of discord and conflict was sowed anew and since then the Palestinians, denied of their basic human rights, have been living a sub-human life. Hamas was quite aware of the terrible response to their sudden attacks on Israeli territories in which more than 1,000 Jewish people mostly civilians died. Indeed, Hamas, branded by Israel and the West as an Islamist group, is no match for the fire power of Israel but then why did it carry out such an attack? Now Israeli fighter planes are pounding Gaza with bombs to reduce the entire settlements to rubbles and ashes. The death toll there is on the rise every hour and it is closer to the number of casualties in Israel and if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's threat of a sustained war to destroy  Hamas and "change the Middle East" is carried out, how and where the war will end is anybody's guess. 

Ever since the UN-backed forcible creation of the Israel on Palestinian land, a kind of paranoia has overwhelmed reason of the peoples in the entire Middle East. Of late, the Arabian countries have accepted the reality and tried to mend fences with Israel. Had it been reciprocated and the Camp David Agreement given the chance to take hold, the vitriolic relations between Palestine and Israel could be tempered with reason and pragmatism. Unfortunately, things have gone the other way and the Palestinians' desperation has forced Hamas to take the apparently preposterous course of action. It possibly knows it cannot win the war against Israel but at least the loss of lives and property in Israel as a result of the attack would make the Jewish people and their leaders feel how the Palestinians suffer in their ancestral homes.

Already the conflict has led to a humanitarian crisis in the confined Gaza strip and the UN has appealed for creation of a humanitarian corridor for reaching medical aid and relief there. Israel claims it has reestablished control over the lost territories. It should be persuaded by big powers and the UN to move no further. Hamas has acted crazily but Netanyahu's policies and actions, as complained by an Israeli newspaper the Haaretz, have been the primary cause behind it. Also, it has to be ensured that innocent people must not suffer for the action of warring parties. The war has wider ramification. The Ukraine war is dragging on and this fresh escalation of war in the Middle East threatens to increase energy prices which may eventually deal a blow to the global economy's recovery.