The Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas killed more than 1,200 people, prompting an Israeli military response that has taken the lives of more than 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
International monitors have documented horrific conditions there.
Tuesday marks one month since Hamas' surprise attack. Israel declared war in response, bombing Gaza and killing many more thousands of Palestinians.
The United Nations and President Biden are asking Israel to pause the bombing so that humanitarian aid –- food, water, fuel to power hospitals –- can reach injured Palestinian civilians.
U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken returned Monday from a Middle East trip, where he tried without success to get Israel to agree to the humanitarian pause.
Ebrahim Moosa, the Mirza Family Professor in Islamic Thought & Muslim Societies at Notre Dame’s Keogh School of Global Affairs, thinks many more Palestinians will die.
“Civilians are being targeted, deliberately, intentionally targeted,” Moosa said. “So Israel is going forth with its activities of genocide and they’re not going to stop right now. For them it is as many Palestinian civilians as they can kill, it is in their strategic interests.”
Moosa says the U.S. has requested the humanitarian pause because it wants to appear to the international community as a nation that cares about Palestinians in Gaza. But if it really cared, he says, it wouldn’t have told Israel after it was attacked that it could respond however it sees fit.
“The sooner we call it out for what it is, the world will react. But the United States, in my view, is now complicit in the killing of 10,000 people, and I’m prepared to say that publicly.
Instead of a humanitarian pause, Moosa says the U.S., as Israel’s most powerful ally, should be urging Israel to commit to a permanent ceasefire.
“My question is why are you asking for a humanitarian pause because people are going to repeatedly going to be killed? So the joke is you’re going to get food in so that people can be killed with full stomachs.”
The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a resolution, by a vote of 121 nations for and 14 against, calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
At this stage, neither Israel nor Hamas have indicated any political will for even a pause in fighting. But history of other disputes has shown that might not always be the case, says Laurie Nathan, director of the Mediation Program at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame.
“One could assume, and reasonably, that the Israeli government has an interest in a ceasefire, a short-term ceasefire, because it wants the hostages, the Israeli hostages that were seized by Hamas, to be released,” Nathan said. “And Hamas presumably would want to bargain for the release of those hostages. It will have its own demands and they may include humanitarian concerns that are currently escalating dramatically in Gaza.”
Nathan, who is South African, was involved in transitioning his country out of Apartheid. He also has experience as a United Nations mediator in the Darfur region of Sudan during the mid-2000s.
“We had this kind of joke at the time that negotiated settlements always seem impossible before they happen and they seem inevitable after they’ve happened,” Nathan said. “But if they’re worried about the costs of fighting, if they’re worried about the humanitarian, or political, or military, or economic costs of fighting, they may become receptive to a ceasefire. Often from experience we know that we the observers and the mediators are caught by surprise. We don’t see the parties’ readiness until they express it.”
