Gaza and Lebanon’s silent suffering amid endless war

For more than a year, widespread loss and unimaginable pain have shadowed the conflict in the Middle East. Bodies are still piling one on the other, but the world has by and large moved on, looking back only when it is impossible to look away.

As a journeyman, a carpet-bombed Gaza has been joined by Lebanon, both witnesses to how children, along with their innocent mothers and fathers have had their lives ripped off. Those who survive have their existence upended and they stare at a future as refugees even in their homeland.

Gaza’s official toll has surpassed 40,000 with the daily count far from plateaued but these killings have been reduced to a statistic. It is a similar fate for the 400,000 displaced children in Lebanon after three weeks of Israel’s offensive and warnings of a ‘lost generation’ in that country strike at the core of humanitarian principles.

In Gaza the 1.8 million who have been forced to leave their homes are more than lost, alive they have been eradicated. They don’t count. What could be worse than that?

And yet, there is no endgame in sight. If there is one, it is buried in the region’s rubble. Israel’s offensive is calculated, one front at a time but any conflict that is prolonged gives rise to the question of where this war is headed.

Family members of Israeli hostages speak of a sense that this situation has been normalised. ‘We have been pushed aside,’ a father of a hostage is quoted as saying, adding, ‘a pointless war that has pitted all possible enemies against us.’ A top aide Netanyahu has been arrested over allegedly leaking classified information to foreign media, an intelligence the opposition claims was faked to hinder any hostage deal.

Israel’s war is at a point where it resembles a puzzle where all the pieces don’t fit. With nothing to lose Netanyahu opens one front after another and a protracted offensive has allowed him to climb back domestically, at least among the hardliners.

But the divide in the country between the conservative Israelis who back the right-wing government and those who want the conflict to end is widening. A few days ago, it cut ties with the Haaretz newspaper after its publisher accused Netanyahu of ‘apartheid.’

Needed: A closer scrutiny

How do nations exit a war, the question is perhaps as relative as it is old. There is the obvious — a political solution. Israel’s firm ally, America has been busy with its presidential elections and much depends on who it votes in.

Before looking at any post-war template a closer scrutiny is needed at the current direction of the conflict and where the graph is taking it. Israel has fought multiple wars in the past but the killings in Gaza are unprecedented. With condemnation of its lack of a moral compass, what is the inflection point and how does a nation walk out of that scenario?

So, are endgames then the greed of capturing one more bastion after the last or is it also about knowing when to stop? The toll on the IDF is rising, Reuters reports that more than 700 soldiers have lost their lives since October last year. And, what of the people who deviate from the government’s stance but will be tainted as a whole? Is conflict itself a misleading word in a one-sided war?

Who will calculate the human cost to the people of Lebanon and Gaza? Besides, the survivors are staring at another crisis. A UN report says that 20 per cent of Gaza’s population is confronting starvation while a majority are at the mercy of food insecurity.

Each conflict brings a new set of questions that become a referral point in the future. For instance, who protects international law when it is violated? Is the adrenalin of annihilating like Roman gladiators in combat so intense that in some wars short-term victories overshadow the larger picture, and even the aggressor is left to extricate himself from a swamp?

History it is said is written by the victors who in the modern era also control the narrative that sells domestically for instance America after the Vietnam War and Israel in the present.

Away from battlefields, history as we see and hear can also be a distorted rhetoric of those who have the upper hand. But some victors were also vanquished once and ignoring the past may be the biggest nemesis.