Israelis deserve little sympathy. They’ve brought the violence on themselves through the brutality they’ve inflicted on Palestinians for 75 years.
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy (Haaretz) recently wrote: ‘We’ll arrest, kill, harass, dispossess, and protect the settlers busy with their pogroms. We’ll fire at innocent people, take out people’s eyes and smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob, grab people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing and of course continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza Strip’.
It’s this brutal and oppressive occupation, the illegal siege of Gaza and the continuing illegal ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank that causes the violence.
The illegal settlement of Israelis in the occupied West Bank is creating a bantustan system splitting the Palestinians into ghettos separated by barriers, checkpoints and illegal settlements. They’re a chokehold on the Palestinian people.
Israel is an apartheid state. Israelis can end the violence whenever they choose. They just have to lift the siege of Gaza, end the occupation and hand the stolen West Bank back to Palestinians. But they have no intention of doing that. They intend to steal it all.
Israel is responsible for the violence. UN Resolution 37/43 confirms occupied people have a right to use armed force, so it’s legitimate for Hamas to take up arms. But attacking civilians is a war crime and Hamas has attacked civilians. Western media claim 1400 died on October 7 but Haaretz is keeping a list of Israeli war deaths from (and including) October 7. On November 3 the list contained 1087 names, including many military personnel. It seems that up to 700 civilians might have died on October 7.
This, of course, is reprehensible but Hamas’s crime is dwarfed by the number of Palestinian civilians Israel has killed in the 56 years of occupation. Or even in the past three weeks; 9,061 Gazans killed including 3,760 children as at November 3 … and growing.
Israel has done everything Hamas has done, and then some, but on a much more destructive scale because of how it’s armed.
Now Israel is withholding food and water from Gazans; such collective punishment is another crime.
If Hamas are terrorists then Israel is a terrorist state.
It’s the injustices suffered by Palestinians at the hands of Israel which cause the violence and it’s the Palestinians who have the right to defend themselves.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
