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Most people in the West, even those who follow world news avidly, have probably never heard of Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, a seven-month-old Palestinian child. Israeli soldiers shot him in the face and killed him near Hebron in the heavily populated West Bank earlier this month.
They may not be aware of the ongoing, escalating violence in Israel in the rest of the occupied territories, either. Indeed, the Western press does not like to talk about West Bank villages like Sinjil, which are fenced off by barbed wire, with residents barred from entering their properties. The media does not mention how Israeli residents continue to set fire to houses and cars, torture, threaten and torture Palestinians while they enjoy the full support and protection of the Israeli army. The fact that more than half of Gaza has been de facto occupied and occupied in the past few months, and that the Palestinians in the area mixed with war are still hungry, unable to find the basic necessities of life, buried under the long stories of Israel thinking about security concerns and problems.
As a result, many people in the West, from the United States to Germany, seem to be of the opinion that Palestine is now a thing of the past. When the war with Iran took the headlines, The Gaza Strip collapsed while the killing continued. He believes that Israel has ended its attacks on Palestine with the so-called “ceasefire” in Gaza and has turned to its biggest war of “self-defense” against the “terrorist government”, Iran, and its ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon.
Now that Iran and the US have announced that they have reached an agreement, the headlines are talking about “the end of the war”. But Israel’s war was not over, because it was not against Iran. Iran is another front in the long war against Palestine.
Since the end of the fire in October, the Israeli fire in Gaza continues almost every day, and more than 2,000 recorded in the spring and at least 981 Palestinians were killed, most of them children – shooting for approaching the yellow line that approaches them. The buildings are still collapsing. Children are still dying. Terrorists still exist. Drones are still around. The bulldozers are still there. And it is expected that this is “stopping the fire”.
The hunger is no longer over. Help is taken not as a right, but as a calculation: how to get in a little, how to move slowly, how to keep people alive for a long time without letting them live.
In the middle of March, when the world’s attention moved to Iran, the Israeli army sent a map of aid agencies showing that they had pushed 11 percent across the yellow line, from the 53 percent of Gaza that the ceasefire gave to 64. At the end of May, the prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu was telling the colonial meeting that the army had already captured 60 percent and took 10 percent to take 0 0. and he assured them that Israel was moving in an orderly manner, taking tens seven;
The Palestinians are no longer able to access nearly two-thirds of their territory, including almost all of the Gaza Strip, which lies east of the yellow line. Geography now forces hunger. Farmers are shot trying to reach their fields. Fishermen are killed trying to reach the sea. Families are being evicted for trying to return to their remaining homes. Children who are looking for food are considered as targets for crossing the lines that Israel has cut in their territories. This is a genocide carried out like geography.
And that is what the Iranian story helps to bury. When the Gaza crossing closes, Israel calls it security. When aid is withheld, the region is said to be in danger. When Palestinians are killed, they are drawn to war with Iran, calling them terrorists after the bullet has already arrived. The dead become workers, helpers, threats. The agreement is linked after the murder, as if it would allow shooting children in the head.
And so Palestine is disappearing within another story. The dead are no longer dead because the Israelites killed them. They died because the region is unstable, because Iran is dangerous, because Israel says it is defending itself. Each Palestinian body is designed to provide a greater explanation than the life that was taken.
The same method is also visible in the south of Lebanon, although it is not described as a land invasion, but as another way to fight Hezbollah or Iran. He has ordered to move to bring down all the people south of the Litani river. About a fifth of Lebanon has been ordered evacuated. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced from their homes. Hospitals and ambulances have been hit. The area is burned with white phosphorus. When refugee families try to travel home against Israel’s instructions, they are threatened, because in this system, the punishment imposed, in Gaza and Lebanon alike, is going home.
The destruction in Lebanon does not push Palestine into the past. It just shows what Israel has learned to do after Gaza: order people out, destroy what they have left, and call an empty land a safe haven. The Iranian region turns all this into a matter of regional security. It makes every front look different, every victim looks lucky and every deserted village looks like someone else’s war victim. The same language follows refugees wherever they go. If they are left, they are human shields. If they run away, it is proof that the land has been removed. If they come back, they threaten.
No agreement with Iran can be mistaken for an “end of war” in the region when Palestine is occupied, Gaza is still starving, and the West Bank is still surrounded by soldiers, residents, checkpoints and barbed wire. The region will not settle by taking Palestine as a result of someone else’s conflict. Palestine is where the war starts again and again: where ending the war is another name for control, where hunger becomes policy, where a baby shot in the face can be treated as a footnote.
Sam Abu Haikal was buried wrapped in a Palestinian flag, held in his father’s arms, with his innocent dreams dying with him. Sam was also war, all of it: a story in which each chapter serves as a footnote to the arrows of another. Forgetting, and being forgotten, is Israel’s last weapon.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect Al Jazeera’s influence.
