This is humankind's most grievous cancer, for its cells infect conflicts in every corner of the world. We fail as humankind if we do not devise a coming-together.© UnknownPalestinians mourn relatives killed in an attack on a UN-run school in Gaza
She lay in my arms. Just weeks old, a tiny baby. Her Palestinian father had just handed her to me at the infernal steel border building at the exit of
Gaza into Israel. She did not cry. She just looked at me with her beady, dark eyes.
Her father was trying both to open her pram, and steady his wounded wife in her wheel chair. Their luggage was scattered at the final entry gate as if just thrown through it.
We shared no common language, it had just seemed inevitable that as the only other able-bodied human in this absurd transit room, I should care for the baby.
I know not their story, nor how, alone seemingly, they were the only Palestinians, in that brief half-hour of Israeli aerial ceasefire, to have been allowed across.
But holding this girl baby connected me again to the wardfuls of
small children so brutally smashed by this odious war. Connected me too to the ever-present reality that the average age in Gaza is 17 and that a quarter of a million are children are, like the babe in my arms, small children.
Comment: It should be noted that whichever technology Hamas has to manufacture arms, it is far from the kinds of weapons used by the IDF. In fact, most claims of media-spread Palestinian attacks on Israel need to be taken with a grain of salt.
For more information, see SOTT editor Joe Quinn's paragraph 'Staged Palestinian Terror and Rocket Attacks?' in his recent article, and SOTT editor Niall Bradley's paragraph 'Israel and missile deception' in his latest article: Asymmetric Warfare: MH17 False-Flag Terror and the 'War' on Gaza.
Frankly, this is a one-sided 'war' in which Israel repeatedly bombs innocent civilians who cannot protect or defend themselves.