Note from The Echo
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been a consistent topic of letter writers to The Echo, even before the latest tragic events.
This newspaper was started when the local media refused to publish complaints of locals about the abuse of police power. Our ongoing commitment to publishing different, sometimes strong opinions, many that we don’t agree with, is why you’ll find the conflicting and contradictory opinions of our readers here. They aren’t our own opinions.
We can’t publish everything we receive, some submissions are not based in fact at all, some are defamatory or too offensive or just too crazy. But while some readers don’t think opinions they disagree with should be given any space in The Echo, we don’t. We publish opinions we disagree with, and we hope everyone will read them and consider their worth, because we believe that this is an essential part of a healthy democracy – to scrutinise ideas even if we choose to discard them.
Common humanity?
Mirror images of warfare continues after 60 days in Gaza between Hamas and Israel as thousands of innocent people including innocent children are offered senselessly (one in every 200) to the power of the ‘military industrial complex’. War is a bloodthirsty creature. We view the ‘hunting out’ of the atrocious enemy, whilst at the same time witnessing another narrative of war, and the ongoing atrocities of war. That being what I’d call the mounting genocide of innocent Palestinians. How does this strategy help the innocent hostages of war? Why do innocent children have to pay the price of the war machine’s lust for death?
Indiscriminate warfare is harming innocent non-combatants. This is considered a war crime.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has no means now of entering Gaza. Many doctors and journalists have died in service to humanity during the genocide of Gaza. The United Nations President has invoked Article 99 which recognises the situation in Gaza as apocalyptic.
Physicians state they are watching as hospitals turn into morgues and ruins. Such facilities are bombed, shot at by tanks and guns killing patients and medical staff. Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) have written to the Security Council imploring for an immediate ceasefire after MSF vehicles were destroyed by tank fire by Israeli troops.
In international humanitarian law, the law governing actions during warfare note that any response must be proportionate.
The military strategy in Gaza according to doctors ‘is based on disproportionality’ the campaign by Israel is a ‘flagrantly excessive reprisal’.
Wolker Turk UN High Commissioner for human rights noted his colleagues on the ground in besieged Gaza stating ‘that there is no safe place in Gaza, as Gaza starves according to the World Food Program. The UN further estimates nearly 70 per cent of those killed ‘have been women and children’.
The issue of peace negotiations has never been more important. We are all responsible for the loving care of species on Earth.
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. 
