“Tonight you will be bombed”. The leaflets informing Gaza’s 1. 8m evacuees from the North and the 1m Palestinians living in the South, of impending Israeli army shelling, have a QR code printed on them, to be read by a cell phone.
The network connection needed, however, is switched on and off at will by Israeli controllers. And anyway, since Gaza’s electricity grid was destroyed several weeks ago, oil-operated generators are needed for charging phones and power banks, and oil is very scarce. . .
If however, you’re able read the QR code, you get access to a map with lots of numbers, indicating “safe and unsafe zones”. It’s complicated and most people can’t figure out what it means. But the experience of the last 2 months is that wherever you go, you’re at risk; nowhere is “safe”.
And even if the small barren plots of land (with no buildings “worth” bombing on them) indicated by the Israeli Defence Force’s “map” won’t be shelled or overrun by tanks, the thousands of Palestinian evacuees who might seek refuge there will have no drinkable water, nor food, nor shelter, let alone the luxury of a toilet.
The Israeli military, (whose latest chosen spokesperson is an ex-Glaswegian, called Richard Hecht) claims that their killing spree is in order to destroy “Hamas and its tunnels”. But it’s obvious that it is driving the whole population further and further south towards the Rafah Crossing. . .
One could be forgiven for seeing this as an effective ethnic-cleansing of Gaza. Does the IDF expect Rafah to be opened by Egyptian authorities, or for the population, in desperation, to break through its gates? The other side - into Egypt’s Sinai Desert - is also unlikely to be a “safe place”, since the Gazans may then have to face the bullets - or at least the counter-force of the Egyptian army. . .
When asked by BBC’s Radio 4 what he had to say about all of this, Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick answered: “well, we support Israel”.
Yes Jenrick and Sunak etc. , and, indeed, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition (minus about 50 Labour MPs who couldn’t stomach it) give unconditional “support” to the Israeli government’s terrorism and mass murder of the Palestinians. And now there’s a 2nd and 3rd front to their one-sided “war”, on the West Bank - where Palestinians are being murdered and interned daily while their homes are bulldozed.
Is this not enough, already, for the rest of us, who watch this horror from afar, not only to withdraw our support from all of these politicians and unite to overturn their rotten, barbaric system? Our collective class force wasn’t used last year; but once organised, it would have the power to get rid of such barbarism, once and for all.