The prominent Arab news portal albawaba news reported on Sunday that, “According to the latest figures revealed by the Palestinian Ministry of Information in Ramallah, Israeli forces have killed one Palestinian kid in every three days for the past 13 years. Based on the same source, nearly 1,500 children have been killed during the second intifada or popular uprising between 2000 and 2013”.

Foreboding about a possible third intifada was expressed by the Hindustan Times in its editorial on Sunday: “The recent abductions and killings are set to change things for the worse if reasonable reactions and policies do not prevail. With violence growing over the past two days, there are fears that it might lead to a third Palestinian intifada. As a first step towards easing tensions between the two, Israel must refuse to go down the road of collective punishment as it has done often in the past.”

The futility of Israeli aggression is also underlined in the Palestine Chronicle, where, Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American business consultant in Ramallah, wrote: “This sad round of yet more Palestinian-Israeli violence is creating a nightmare scenario for the Israeli government. The extremist parts of the Jewish-Israeli community and Jewish diaspora, particularly American Jews, are being seen in the open and across social media venues calling for Israel to ‘kill all the Arabs’ and ‘bomb Gaza into a parking lot’... The world is getting a peek into the Israel that Palestinians have been complaining about forever.”

‘Two communities’

On the other side of the planet, in the UK, the Guardian took a sombre look at the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict and said of the latest developments: “Is this really what we have come to? Are these two communities, Israelis and Arabs, Jews and Muslims, so irreversibly opposed, so very far apart, so united in their mutual, unquenchable enmity and so lost to decency that the deliberate, premeditated, random killing of children has somehow become acceptable? Reassuringly, the answer, from the vast majority of people on both sides of the divide, appears to be a resounding ‘no’. But there should be no mistake. The extremists who allegedly committed these crimes exploited the vacuum created by the ongoing failure to forge a lasting peace.”

‘Innocent lives’

The Jordan Times picked up a similar thread in its editorial: “The murder of the Palestinian boy does not serve justice. If anything, it will only further inflame spirits, starting a new cycle of violence that will wreak more havoc on the lives of Palestinians under decades of occupation. How many more innocent lives, on both sides have to be lost before Israelis realise this simple fact? ... The formula for peace exists, it only needs to be applied.”

The need for Israel to respect restraint finds more echo in the Los Angeles Times: “Israel must behave carefully and responsibly rather than emotionally ... Netanyahu must minimise civilian casualties and not engage in the collective punishment of people who have done no wrong ...”