Gaza: The Red Line Israel Crassly Crossed

By Ismail Salami

Reports indicate that Israel is setting the stage for a full-scale war on Gaza. According to Israeli media, 16,000 reservists are being briefed on a full-scale war on the Gaza Strip while Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has ordered 75,000 military reservists drafted.

There are reports which indicate the units of the Israeli elite paratroop and Givati Brigades have been mustering outside the Gaza Strip.

Israeli sources have confirmed that Palestinian missiles have hit several districts of Tel Aviv and that the Iron Dome missile shield which was proudly thought to be impenetrable has only intercepted one-fifth of the rockets launched at Israel from the Gaza Strip since Wednesday while Israeli media had earlier reported that the Iron Dome was incredibly advanced and that it had intercepted 100 percent of the launched missiles. Israel’s Channel 2 has said that only 210 missiles, out of a total of 650, fired from Gaza have since Wednesday been intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile shield.

Only on Friday morning, Israeli war planes conducted multiple air strikes on the Gaza Strip, including several hits on Gaza City.

“There have been 130 strikes overnight until now,” Hamas interior ministry spokesman Islam Shahwan told AFP.

According to Israeli media, Israel has hit the besieged Gaza Strip some 830 times since Wednesday.

Harry Fear, an activists and a film-maker, tells Press TV what he has witnessed in Gaza, “What’s occurring in the Gaza Strip is what the Palestinians are calling a massacre. We’re seeing the killing of pregnant women, elderly men, and children. It’s a very, very grave situation here in Gaza, with practically every part of the Gaza Strip receiving either Israeli airstrikes or naval shelling. We’re seeing tanks amassing on the border.”

Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have provoked the anger of the Muslim world.

Israel is in a conundrum.

Thanks to the developments in the region, the political equations have drastically turned to the loss of Israel. The regime is no longer supported by a US-installed dictator Hosni Mubarak who contributed financially and militarily to the Zionist regime over the past decades.

Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi has recalled his ambassador from Israel and has berated the Israeli attacks as a “blatant aggression against humanity.”

“Egypt will not leave Gaza on its own… What is happening is a blatant aggression against humanity,” he said after Friday prayers at a Cairo mosque.

“I tell them in the name of all the Egyptian people that the Egypt of today is not the Egypt of yesterday and that the Arabs of today are different than the Arabs of yesterday,” Morsi noted.

The Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil says his country will “pay everything” to end the new wave of Israeli attacks on the besieged Gaza Strip.

“Egypt will pay everything to stop the aggression and achieve a lasting truce. We will be with the Palestinians until their independence… That’s the only way for stability in the region,” Xinhua quoted Qandil as saying on Friday.

For its part, Iran has also slammed the atrocities of the Israeli regime against the Palestinians. Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has voiced Iran’s moral and political support for Palestine.

Surprisingly enough, Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani expressed his nation’s ire and said, “I condemn in the name of Qatar… This filthy crime must not pass without a punishment. The UN Security Council must shoulder its responsibilities in preserving peace and security in the world.”

Some pundits and world leaders believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is perpetrating an act of genocide as a pre-election stunt.

For instance, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said, “Before this election they (Israel) shot these innocent people in Gaza for reasons they fabricated. The dominant world powers are now making the Gaza people and fighters pay, and as the Republic of Turkey we are with our brothers in Gaza and their just cause.”

There is indeed some consolation in hearing these words particularly from Turkey and Qatar. But words are not enough and hardly help the people of Gaza who are in immediate danger of losing their lives. Instead of verbal support, they should contribute financially and militarily to the Gazans, supply them with arms and artilleries (as they do with the rebels in Syria). When it comes to Syria, they insist that they have good intentions in arming the rebels and that they are championing a righteous cause. Let them do that for the people in Gaza and prove that their good intentions are not just reserved for one group but withheld from another.

Besides, popular protests against Israeli strike against Gaza have erupted across the Muslim world with many of them chanting “death to Israel”.

The universal show of solidarity in the Muslim world with the Gazans is a good sign that the Zionist entity will not be allowed to embark on any gory diabolical adventurism and there is a red line which it has so brazenly crossed.

Every death that takes place in Gaza is not just the loss of a human life but a gradual demise of collective conscience which is so agonizingly silent towards the sufferings of a downtrodden nation and to the unspeakable tyrannies of a colonizing murderous regime.

There is some considerable degree of truth in the adage that silence in the face of tyranny is complicity in tyranny itself.

Dr. Ismail Salami

Dr. Ismail Salami (also known as Simon Lee) is a high-profile Iranian journalist and author. He has written numerous books and is the chief editor of the Press TV website.