Gaza war: massacre of over 100 civilians must be condemned – former Lankan Ambassador

Sri Lanka’s former Ambassador to Iran and ex-lawmaker M.M. Zuhair said that Saturday’s Israeli massacre of over 100 Palestinian civilians in a school sheltering them and a Mosque with the displaced at prayers in the same compound, must stand condemned as an inhuman atrocity on the helpless, by an American backed regime in the Middle East. Israel gave no advanced warning of the attack!

The following is the text of statement issued by the former Senior State Counsel: “CNN reported that “all of these people killed were civilians, unarmed children, the elderly and women” quoting Fares Afana, Director of Emergency Services in Northern Gaza. Though the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) claimed Hamas fighters were the target, CNN asked the IDF for evidence and the response was ‘intelligence reports’.

Israel had sufficient expertise- from the well -known July 1976 Entebbe airport rescue mission of 104 Israelis hijacked in a flight from Paris to the present July 2024 killing of Ismail Haniyah in Tehran- to target the Hamas fighters if they were in the school or the Mosque, without having to kill a hundred innocent displaced civilians!

‘The Island’ is one of the few national dailies that had been giving due coverage to the Israeli war on Gaza that had seen the killing of an average of 140 Palestinians every single day during the past ten months of the war and the near total destruction of Palestine as no longer a viable State for human existence.

On 6th November 2023, less than a month after the 7th October war, The Island carried my statement that “..Israel is destroying the two-State solution” in page one of its edition. The October 6th Hamas attack appeared as a welcome excuse for Israel to destroy Palestine and finish off any possible two State solution that was hitherto ‘dangled as a carrot’ before the Arabs.

On 18th July 2024, the Israeli parliament passed a resolution overwhelmingly rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian State with 68 votes rejecting Palestinian statehood and 9 voting for!

Clearly Israel is destabilising the Arab world in the Middle East by destroying not only the two State solution but by destroying Palestine and its helpless people. With the UN having created the problem engineered by Western powers in 1948, it has now and over the past 76 years demonstrated its helplessness to restore Palestine to the Palestinians or to achieve even the alternative offer of a two State solution which presently stands buried with the nearly 42,000 Palestinians killed during the past ten months alone.

With Israel reportedly armed with over 200 nuclear warheads, Iran or other ME countries are unlikely to go for a full- fledged war with Israel, though Iran will seek counter justice for the killing of Palestinian leader and Hamas peace negotiator Ismail Haniyah in Iran’s capital Tehran on 31st July!

Israel has left only one solution in the hands of Hamas as it knows Hamas can never be destroyed and that solution is to push Hamas to go for Super Nuclear War Heads as an excuse for Israel to nuke most of the Middle East. The West and the UN Security Council together will be responsible for the millions who will die.”