The killing of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in an alleged airstrike at his residence in Tehran has added fresh fuel to an already explosive situation in the Gulf region. Haniyeh was on a visit to Iran to attend the swearing in of Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian. The assassination has put the latest Israel-Palestinian confrontation on the road to a dangerous escalation with Israel signalling its readiness to launch a ground assault. So far the war has claimed around 40,000 Palestinian lives, among them women and children. Images of war circulating on the Internet has laid open its grotesqueness and spawned anger and outrage. However the world has mostly watched on as the conflict piles up sufferings for the Palestinians. What has been most tragic is the raft of horrors that have been visited upon the children, around 14,000 have been killed so far. But this has hardly helped draw sufficient global sympathy for the Palestinian cause, at least from the western governments. Instead the west has generally drawn a proportionality between Israeli invasion and the Hamas’ October 7 raid.
There has been no commensurate outrage as Israel’s military machine has gone on killing Palestinians and driven lakhs out of their homes. This is now a recurrent story. The tragedy is repeated and everytime Israel gets away with it. This is dangerous. For the past 76 years, the Palestinian conflict has been the biggest source of Muslim radicalisation in the world. In a world which has been further shrunk by the new communication technology, the scenes of Palestinian deaths and destruction are triggering shock and outrage at a scale unlike ever before. Haniyeh’s killing has created a fraught situation. It is difficult to see how the situation cannot escalation and suck the region into a devastating war. It is tragic that the US as the still sole pre-eminent power in the world has done precious little to stop the conflict. In fact, the US president Joe Biden has, in a sense, egged on Israeli president Netanyahu to pursue his apocalyptic goals. And now the situation has reached a point of almost no return.
This casts a responsibility on the major powers to act fairly and reign in Israel and also take firm steps to resolve the conflict. More than anything else, a resolved Palestine will go a long way to help the cause of Mideast peace and also terrorism at the global level.
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