Missing In Gaza: Global Leaders & Peacemakers

If relief was palpable on both sides, the rubble we saw in Gaza was just as stark. Having received both images from Israel-Palestine (to name these intermingled territories in alphabetical order), the world will soon also obtain answers to the question, “What after the truce?”

- Rajmohan Gandhi

On the third day of the truce (November 26), when Prime Minister (PM) Benjamin Netanyahu, unannounced, landed in Gaza to join Israeli troops there, he told them (and everyone else) that “we are continuing until the end — until victory”. Adding, “We have three goals in this war: Eliminate Hamas, return all of our hostages and ensure that Gaza will not go back to being a threat to the State of Israel.” Netanyahu also claimed that Israel had “the force, the strength, the will and the determination to achieve all of our goals.”

Undenied reports claim that Israel plans to wipe out a future threat from the thin Gaza strip (which has an area, roughly, of about 140 square miles, and which Hamas controlled) either by pushing its more than two million Palestinians south into Egypt’s Sinai province — or by forcing them inside a tiny seashore enclave of a handful of square miles within Gaza but close to Egypt.

That would be ethnic cleansing and concentration camp creation in the most literal sense, but for the world to allow it to happen is not impossible. On October 27, 120 countries (including France) indeed voted for a UN General Assembly resolution asking Israel to revoke its call for an evacuation of northern Gaza. However, if Netanyahu orders the evacuation of 90% or even all of Gaza, will Egypt or other Arab countries, Iran or Turkey, or the UN or BRICS (all of whom have condemned the scale and nature of Israel’s retribution after October 7), or any force in the world, intervene physically?