Israel wants a status quo in which Palestinian death is treated as normal
Omar Baddar, a Middle East political analyst, called out the double standards in global reaction to killings in Israel and Palestine.
He said the global concern over the rocket attack on Golan Heights stands in stark contrast to their muted responses to Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip.
“Really, if this incident [in Golan Heights] were to take place a thousand times over, it still would not even come close to the number of Palestinian children that Israel has killed in the Gaza Strip. And even if you isolate [Saturday] alone, you have Israeli attacks across Gaza [that] have killed more than more than 50 Palestinians. So those ought to be much bigger news, if you’re looking specifically at the numbers and the scale of the casualties,” Baddar told Al Jazeera.
“Yet nobody looks at this as a crisis, simply because we’ve normalised Palestinian death. And what Israel basically is suggesting here is that the status quo ought to be an environment in which Israel can slaughter Palestinians by the thousands, with complete and total impunity. But if Israelis get hurt or killed, then this is a crisis and this is grounds for spreading the war.”
Baddar said the international community – if it were seriously interested in de-escalation – must not allow a “status quo in which Palestinian death is treated as normal and Israel has complete and total impunity”.
He added, “If we are interested in resolving the situation, we have to resolve the core issue right now, which immediately means a ceasefire in Gaza. And in the long term, that has to include resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so that tensions with Lebanon and with Yemen and elsewhere can actually be defused and we can move towards a better future for everyone.”
Israel-Lebanon cross-border attacks in numbers
The attack on the Druze town of Majdal Shams that killed 12 people on Saturday was the deadliest in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights since Israel-Hezbollah cross-border attacks intensified last October.
According to Reuters, the latest attack brings to a total of 44 people killed on the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border since October, including at least 21 soldiers.
In Lebanon, at least 543 people had been killed by Israeli attacks as of June, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED).
Hezbollah’s denial of responsibility for rocket attack opens door for de-escalation
Omar Baddar, a Middle East political analyst, says he believes the rocket attack on the Golan Heights was “almost certainly an accident”, regardless of who was responsible for it.
“No party in the entire region has either a political interest or a military interest in targeting a kid’s soccer game in a Druze town in the occupied Golden Heights. And it’s also worth noting that there is a desire on both the part of Hezbollah and Israel to avoid a full-scale war,” he told Al Jazeera from Washington, DC.
“We would need an independent investigation to actually really know what’s unfolded in this case. But Hezbollah’s denial is itself at least an indication even if it were to turn out to be a Hezbollah rocket, it certainly is not an intentional targeting of that soccer game,” he added.
“So this would open the door for some sort of de-escalation and the question is whether Israel is interested in taking that path or do they see a conflict with Hezbollah as inevitable and are they going to take this opportunity as a good PR moment for them to escalate in that direction.”
