Such has been the diabolic nature of Israel’s transgressions in Gaza, that the world has been rendered shock immune. The findings of a recent Al Jazeera investigation have exposed Israel’s use of the internationally banned thermal weapons in Gaza that left no trace of the victims, making them “evaporate” into the air, which might be the most shocking but not unexpected revelation.
The Al Jazeera Arab investigations programme The Rest of the Story, aired on 9 February, analysed field records compiled since the start of the Gaza siege, including testimony from rescue personnel, medical officials and legal experts, while documenting that at least 2,842 Palestinians have “evaporated” since the war began in October 2023, leaving behind no remains other than blood sprays or tiny fragments of flesh.
The obliteration phenomenon is attributed to Israel’s systematic use of internationally prohibited thermal and thermobaric weapons, capable of generating temperatures exceeding 3,500 degrees Celsius. The investigation reveals how the mainly US-supplied ammunition has left behind no trace of nearly 3,000 Palestinians, whose presence was most brutally eradicated from the surface of this earth, like they never existed.
Funds alone cannot rebuild Gaza unless future peace is ensured and past wrongdoings are accounted for; the Muslim bloc must finally play the role it should have played long ago
Israel has a long history of committing the most horrific war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. It has used horrendous annihilation and torture techniques against Palestinians for decades, despite its own ancestors having met horrible fates, persecuted and perished in Nazi gas chambers.
The fact that the Al Jazeera investigation was broadcasted days before President Trump’s Board of Peace is due to hold its inaugural meeting in Washington on February 19, makes the revelation’s timing testimonial.
President Trump has announced that the members of his BoP have pledged $5 billion toward rebuilding Gaza and will further commit personnel to international stabilization and police forces for the territory. And though it would not be on the agenda, BoP’s first meeting should provide an opportunity to take into account all the war crimes and atrocities that have been, and are still being committed after partial ceasefire, by Israeli forces in Gaza. Funds alone cannot rebuild Gaza unless future peace is ensured and past wrongdoings are accounted for.
The Muslim leaders in attendance should particularly ensure that all known transgressions surrounding the genocide that was live-streamed onto the world screens, do not go unlisted and are brought up during the discussions. President Trump has repeatedly billed himself a ‘man of peace’, and yet, in the Western ecosystem, abuses, real and alleged, committed by geopolitical adversaries are amplified, while those carried out by allies are ignored or denied.
Hence, the Muslim bloc in participation must finally play the role that it should have played long ago; for Gaza’s future, but also to set the record right for its continued suffering. The constant use of illegal weapons against Palestinian non-combatants, the land grab in the West Bank, the fact that nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in Gaza, since October’s partial ceasefire. Israel’s latest move to register large areas of the occupied West Bank as “state property” was largely condemned by Pakistan today, through a Foreign Office statement and must be brought up at the BoP meeting.
While the implementation of the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement has started, its progress is slow after an equally low-output phase one, which was meant to establish ceasefire, increase humanitarian aid, return hostages and their remains to Israel, and release Palestinian prisoners. Phase two is meant to focus on governance through the establishment of the Palestinian technical committee, demilitarisation, including Hamas’s disarmament, and the beginnings of the strip’s reconstruction.
In phase one, Israel agreed to reopen the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, but only a very small number of Palestinians have been allowed through. A Palestinian technocratic government has been established, but is working from Egypt, as Israel has blocked the technocratic administration that was to govern Gaza under Trump’s peace plan, from entering.
The Trump administration and other mediators, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, are in the early stages of trying to reach a demilitarization agreement with Hamas, without which Israel will not withdraw its forces from Gaza or allow reconstruction, already creating a deadlock. Israel is clearly unwilling to relinquish its control over more than half of the territory.
It is going to be a tough ride with Israel itself being a part of the BoP, and the veto powers resting with Mr. Trump, who is beholden to his powerful Zionist backers. Trump has already called upon Israel’s president to grant pardon to Netanyahu for his corruption, labelling it ‘disgraceful’ if the president fails to do so.
Netanyahu is also scheduled to meet President Trump at the White House on February 18, perhaps also to set the pace for the BoP forum and if Netanyahu also attends the BoP meeting the very next day, it will be his first with Arab and Muslim leaders since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023. The meeting is also meant to serve as a fundraising event for the reconstruction of Gaza.
With a two-year UN Security Council mandate, Board of Peace is tasked with ensuring long-term peace and stability in Gaza, though cutting through the bundle of interlocking interests and human passions in Gaza won’t come easy. And unless implementable steps are taken to fulfil its purpose, the BoP will remain a pointless entity.
The world could not put a timely stop to the genocide in Gaza but can now, at least, provide timely succour and sustenance to the besieged strip, where the official unemployment rate, as estimated by the UN, is 80% and the economy has shrunk to 13% of its former size.
A recent article in Middle East Eye highlights the connection of depravity of the western elite that exists between Gaza and the unfolding Epstein scandal. The article emphasises how Gaza was not a deviation from the morality of the financial and political global elite that oversaw its annihilation, but its culmination.
Calling it a matter of entitlement and impunity, the article compares the exploitation of children and young women by Epstein and his accomplices and the cheering on of the bloodbath in Gaza by the same global elite and how profit was the common motive everywhere.
It further draws parallels in these words: “Children abused on a private Caribbean Island; children buried beneath rubble in Gaza. Children placed aboard aircraft chartered to satisfy the appetites of the rich and powerful, flown discreetly, quietly, to be used and abused without consequence. Children killed by aircraft dispatched openly and repeatedly to serve the strategic interests of the powerful, bombed from the sky at their discretion, their deaths ignored, minimised, or narrated as necessity.”
Last week, a Human Rights Watch report was blocked for documenting that Tel Aviv’s denial of the Palestinian right of return, that allowed Arabs and their descendants ethnically cleansed by the Zionists during the Nakba, to come back to their homeland, was a “crime against humanity”. The Israel-Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, Omar Shakir, resigned in protest following the blocking of report’s release. Mr Shakir also remarked that he had lost faith in HRW’s impartiality, henceforth.
The Gaza conflict has already well exposed the hypocrisy of the developed world and its claims to stand for fundamental rights. However, if credible human rights organisations like the HRW resort to self-censorship in order to appease powerful lobbies, what will become of a world already gone disarray; a world where most states remained brazenly unmoved even after hundreds of thousands of its citizens marched and mobilised repeatedly to condemn the complicity of their governments.