MIDDLE EAST

Intro: Following the events of October 7, Israel’s enraged response has plunged the Gaza Strip into a humanitarian disaster. The southern city of Rafah has suffered the brunt of the crisis with a five-fold population increase, vital resources lacking, and no sign of the violence abating. What can be done? Analogies are being drawn with Nazi Germany

AT the southern end of the Gaza strip, lies the city of Rafah. It might be the most densely populated place on Earth right now.

Five months ago, before the bloody atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7, and then Israel’s enraged response since, the city was already overflowing with people.

Since then, its population of around 280,000 has increased five-fold to almost 1.5 million, crammed into 23 square miles. Refugees are living ten to a room, if they are lucky enough to have shelter at all. Most are on the streets.

Vital resources including medication, fuel, food, and water, are in desperately short supply, and what little exists is ruthlessly controlled by the Hamas criminal network.

Rafah is also a terrorist stronghold. If Israel remains intent to wipe out the leaders of this fanatical Islamist regime, Israel Defence Forces (IDF) will have to attack the city.

The cost of civilian lives will be heavy. And the cost to Israel could be catastrophic, too, if Western governments withdraw their increasingly equivocal support. It really is not clear just how much support Western nations are willing to give Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, is under intense pressure domestically to finish off Hamas. But, if he attacks Rafah, he will be falling into a trap.

Israel is facing a hate-filled enemy willing to use human shields. Hamas’s ringleaders are happy to see women and children slaughtered, because they think this will provoke an avalanche of Arab rage that will finally wipe Israel off the map. The Palestinian warlords only have one aim.

For those looking on in horror from around the world, events in Gaza have close and unsettling parallels to the destruction of Berlin or Dresden in Germany at the end of World War II: one Hitler’s capital, the other a military transport hub, with beautiful baroque architecture housing an incalculable number of refugees.

Stalin’s Red Army fought its way to Hitler’s bunker while the RAF razed much of Dresden to the ground in a series of firebomb raids, killing some 25,000 civilians. The Allies were deeply divided over this tactic, and historians still argue over its morality.

Nazism posed a dangerous global threat. By contrast, many perceive the war in Gaza as nasty but local. Israelis, however, living under the shadow of the Holocaust, recognise Hamas as a mortal threat, and one with strong regional support.

For most Israelis, then, debate of any kind is unnecessary. They know that if Hamas is not defeated and crushed, their country is doomed.

This is a war of survival. The October 7 massacre was so steeped in wickedness that Israelis are justified in believing the terrorists want to see every Jew perish in much the same way: raped, burned alive, dismembered. That’s the level of fear and evil that Israelis are faced with.

Prior to events in October, Netanyahu was widely seen by the electorate as a paranoid and corrupt politician clinging to power to avoid prison. But since the Hamas rampage, most in Israel now blame him for not being tough enough on Palestinian violence.

Hamas strategists assumed that their atrocities would draw Netanyahu into a trap. Israel would hit back hard, but its Western allies would forcibly shudder over civilian casualties. Our leaders held their nerve while the IDF invaded from the coast and the north of the Gaza strip, an area 25 miles long and as little as seven miles across at some points. Now, though, the West is losing its stomach for this campaign.

Many of the 29,000 killed so far have been non-combatants. In Gaza City to the north, every other building is reported to be destroyed. Bordered on one side by the Mediterranean, with all exit routes blocked and with residents unable to flee into neighbouring Israel, many had no choice but to trek south to Rafah.

Once in Rafah, they can migrate no further. Egypt has closed its narrow border, fearing a massive influx of Hamas fighters among displaced refugees, risking an Islamist insurrection in Egypt that would overthrow the regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

TWO

SO, what is to be done?

In this international crisis, each country is thinking first of its own priorities.

In Washington, President Biden’s team are all-too conscious of the forthcoming election in November.

The pro-Israel lobby in America is traditionally very powerful and the Jewish electorate tends to back the Democrats – but the growing number of Muslim-American voters could turn crucial swing states against the incumbent.

In Britain, the Labour Party is undergoing its most serious internal crisis since Keir Starmer took over, with the hard-Left demanding its MPs endorse an immediate “ceasefire” – a euphemism for Israeli surrender.

On Britain’s streets, and across the West, hundreds of thousands of marchers have been shouting inflammatory and often vile anti-Semitic slogans for months. A radical sub-culture is definitely spreading, with race hate at its core.

The disgraced former Labour candidate in the Rochdale parliamentary by-election peddled obscene conspiracy theories that Israel encouraged the Hamas massacre, and that all the Islamic world is under attack by Jews.

An audience in a London theatre hounded out a Jewish man who refused to cheer the Palestinian flag. They were whipped up by the comedian on stage, shouting “Get out” and “Free Palestinian” with added expletives. That is a scene redolent of Berlin in the 1930s.

Netanyahu’s ferocious counter-response to the provocation in October has led to a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, but that has played into his enemy’s hands. International courts are considering charges of “genocide” against the Israeli government and military. A Dutch court has already blocked the export of spare parts for the Israeli air force.

Pressure has begun to mount on Jerusalem to accept an “immediate pause in the fighting”, a polite phrase for a ceasefire. British Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, is adamant one can be reached. He is seen as a friend of Israel.

Netanyahu, however, shows no signs of responding to such appeals. The Israeli PM and his generals appear determined to carry on at all costs. It does beg the question: what would constitute an Israeli victory?

After all, even if the IDF does succeed in capturing or killing the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, and his fighters, this would then leave them with the problem of what to do with the 1.5 million embittered Palestinians left to contemplate a miserable future in the devastated Gaza.

Faced with a similar quandary in the closing months of World War II, the Allies opted for a strategy of winning hearts and minds – distributing medicines and restoring water supplies in western Germany even before Berlin finally surrendered, and then funded a massive restructuring programme via the Marshall Plan.

In much the same way, the world’s best hope now might be a deeply counterintuitive one. If Netanyahu reverses his blockade of aid and lets humanitarian relief flow into Gaza – food, water, medicine, and fuel – he might just persuade Palestinians that Hamas is their mortal enemy, not Israel.

True, a rump of Hamas insurgents might seize many of the aid lorries. Those who need this precious cargo most, the women and children, would likely get very little.

But it would be an important gesture for Israel to say: “We do not hate all Palestinians – only our hate-filled enemies who want to kill us.” Such slim hopes are the best we have – and it will take the most dexterous statesmanship, as well as military planning, to avert a host of new catastrophes.