• Cultural colonisation has been propagated by IDF radio
• Many Gazan civilians have split from their families and are missing
Sacha Mendelson, an Israeli soldier returning from Gaza, said on Israeli army radio on Sunday that his close friend Captain Harel Itach took a Palestinian baby out of Gaza to a hospital in Israel. Harel Itach was a captain of the IDF who had been killed while in Gaza, and as a sorrowful testimony to Harel, Mendelson had tried to pay tribute to his fallen friend by praising him for taking a baby out of Gaza into Israel. This highlights the extreme brainwashing that the IDF and Israeli people have had to go through. Out of all of the routes and streams of networks the IDF has or could have access to, such as the Palestinian Authority, Arab charities based in Palestine and Gaza, or even just an occupied hospital, the Israeli soldier believed it would be better that the Israeli baby be handed to a hospital in Israel without giving, noting, or even considering what the consequences would be. According to Israeli media, the baby was taken to an unknown location in Israel. Its whereabouts are still unknown, and since Harel Itach was killed in battle, it is unknown whether the baby’s whereabouts will ever be found.
With the Palestinian death toll in Gaza rising to above 22,000, according to the UN, the entirety of the 2.2 million population of Gaza is starving and at risk of famine, and now there is news that a baby was kidnapped and taken to Israeli territory, whose whereabouts are unknown. It implores one to question: Is this the first time such an incident of kidnapping has taken place? In reality, there are many missing children, men and women, in Gaza. This incident is not one isolated incident; rather, it is the only incident that was admitted by an Israeli soldier on the Israeli army radio. Al Jazeera had interviewed Mohammed Odeh, who is a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in Gaza. Mohammed Odeh was taken along with his family by the Israeli army from Zeitoun in Gaza City. He was tortured along with the rest of his family, only later for his family to be taken from him. He is unsure where his family is and whether they’re alive or not. So this is not one isolated incident, but rather a part of a series of kidnappings.
Reaction from the Palestinian authority
There was an assumption made by the host of the Israeli army radio channel where this revelation was made, in which she assumed that the baby that was kidnapped was orphaned, and its parents had passed away. Something that was neither confirmed nor verified. Later, after a social media uproar, the Palestinian authority strongly condemned the incident, with the Palestinian foreign minister saying, “The kidnapping of the infant girl from the Gaza Strip is evidence that the Israeli occupation army is committing the most heinous crimes against civilians without oversight or accountability.” It must be remembered that the Palestinian authority cooperates with Israel in security and actually helps share intelligence on Palestinian resistance factions within the West Bank. Support for the Palestinian authority has dropped sharply since October 7th, with 90% of Palestinians in the West Bank calling for Mahmoud Abbas’s (PA president) resignation. Only a week ago, Israeli authorities moved house to house in central Ramallah Square, the same location as the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. Yet nothing was done to dissuade, punish, or even show unity for the Palestinian people by the Palestinian authority.
Israel’s recompense
When looking at recent history in South Africa, it must be remembered that the United Kingdom supported apartheid, and former Prime Minister David Cameron even had a trip to South Africa during the apartheid in 1989 that was organised and funded by the SNI (Strategy Network International), which was specifically made to lobby against the imposition of sanctions in South Africa. Yet despite all of this, during the last years of South African apartheid, Britain agreed to economic sanctions. The pressure was building, and not even the UK could hold off economic sanctions after numerous massacres and attacks by the apartheid regime. The decades of human rights abuses and war crimes had built up the need for change to such an extent that it reached a breaking point in the 1990s. South Africa is a clear example of an apartheid government falling prey to the horrors of its own self. Although Israel’s international power, influence, and legitimacy are far more complex than those of the apartheid regime in South Africa, its underlying achievements are the same, if not worse. The continuous massacring of civilians with continued displacement and apartheid enforcement in the West Bank It becomes evident that Israel is really biting more than it can chew. Now, 51% of 18- to 24-year-olds in the US are siding with Hamas, with support for Hamas quadrupling in Saudi Arabia, with one of the biggest protests in UK history taking place in support of Palestine. It becomes evident to both Israel and the world that Israel cannot continue with apartheid forever.
