TO say Israel has the right to defend itself is like saying the rapist and abuser has the right to defend himself because his victim hit him.
Israel is not an innocent party under attack and defending itself as it portrays itself in the international media. It is a colonial settler apartheid regime established on the ruins of Palestine and at the expense and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people following their catastrophe (al-Nakba) in 1948.
Colonialists, occupiers and apartheid regimes do not have the right to defend their occupation and apartheid system; it's the occupied who have all the right in international law to defend themselves and liberate their country.
We don't condone the killing of civilians and innocent people. Still, surely the Jewish colonial settlers, most of whom are armed and members of the reserve army, knew what they were doing and are taking the risk by occupying someone else's country and denying them their rights.
When Israel was established in Palestine in 1948, it ethnically cleansed over 70 per cent of the Palestinians, occupied 78 per cent of Palestine, destroyed 531 towns and villages, including 47 villages in the Gaza district, and displaced their 80,000 residents.
The vast majority of them took refuge in Gaza, and their number today reaches hundreds of thousands. Many Jewish colonies and kibbutzes were established on the lands of these evacuated and destroyed villages.
All the kibbutzes and Jewish colonies Hamas fighters attacked were built on those 47 villages around Gaza, such as Jiyya, Burayr, Hamama, Najd, Dimra, Simsim.
Before the Nakba, the Gaza Strip and the area surrounding it, called the "envelope," constituted the mandatory "Gaza District," which had an area of 1,111 square kilometres, now reduced to what Gaza is today, 365 sq kilometres, with a population of 2.3 million. It is 41km long, from 6 to 12km wide, and has one of the highest population densities in the world of 6,300 people per square kilometre.
Seventy per cent of the 2.3 million in Gaza are refugees ethnically cleansed from these villages. Their farms, houses and belongings were stolen from them and they were thrown out to live in misery in refugee camps, the world's largest concentration camp ever, deprived of their human and national rights, abandoned by the international community, and a few hundred metres away they watched Jewish colonialist settlers from around the world living in luxury enjoying the fruits of their farms.
Should anyone be surprised they are fighting for their freedom and their human and national rights?
What enraged Israeli leaders and generals was that a small contingent of fighters was able to penetrate the "invincible army" and within hours destroy all the illusions they had built around an army on which they spent hundreds of billions of dollars.
The fighters inflicted a heavy blow to the Israeli intelligence, spy agencies and electronic eavesdropping technology which failed to detect the attack, a major defeat they will not forget.
What Israeli propaganda conceals from the world public is that Hamas fighters fought the Israeli troops, occupied all their military, security and police bases, seized their weapons and detained dozens of soldiers and officers, among the prisoners, to exchange them for over 6,000 political detainees, including children and women, languishing in Israeli occupation prisons.
Israeli survivors from the attack testified in interviews with Israeli media that most of the Israeli civilians were killed as a result of the Israeli army's exchange of fire and shelling of their homes - where they were hiding and even their own bases as they were overwhelmed by Hamas militants on Oct 7, to prevent the taking of hostages.
According to Haaretz, the Israeli army was only able to restore control after admittedly "shelling" the homes of Israelis who had been taken captive.
Israel believed it had placed 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza in a mass impenetrable concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire, insulated on all sides and that it could forget about them, collectively punish them and continue denying them their inalienable rights.
To cover up the miserable failure suffered by its army, Israel has resorted to tactics used by colonial regimes to punish civilians for the resistance. All colonialists and occupiers called the resistance they faced "terrorists", the French, British, Dutch colonialists, the Nazis, fascists and the South African apartheid regimes, were those resistance acts of terrorism?
And if Australia was occupied tomorrow, would the resistance against the occupiers be acts of terrorism? If so, then the Palestinians are proud to be in this colonial apartheid dictionary.
Israel's claim that it wants to eliminate Hamas is ludicrous because of the fact that it will not be able to eliminate the Palestinian resistance forces, whether Hamas or any other resistance organisation.
What Israel is doing, and the world is witnessing, is the slaughter of civilians and children and the destruction of thousands of houses, high-rise residential buildings, schools, hospitals, ambulances, mosques, churches and public infrastructure.
Israel's war against Gaza is a cowardly war by an army classified as the fifth most powerful army in the world, against civilians, carpet bombing them from the air, day and night, for the last three weeks with thousands of tonnes of bombs. Each has injured and shattered the lives of scores of babies, men and women, and wiped out hundreds of entire families.
Israel has so far dropped 12,000 tonnes of bombs on Gaza—the cumulative size of the nuclear bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima — the Israeli military announced yesterday its ground invasion and destroyed Gaza's Internet and cellphone service.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza documented the killings in two weeks, from Oct 7 to 28 of 7,650 Palestinians, including 3,595 children, 1,726 women and 19,450 injured. In addition, about 1,650 people, including 940 children, have been reported missing under the rubble.
Hospitals reported Israel's use of internationally banned bombs such as white phosphorus. To put it in perspective, this is equivalent to the killing of 84,532 Australians and the injury of 214,922. If we compare the proportion to the USA, it is equivalent to the killing of 1,102,441 and the injury of 2,802,939 civilians.
An estimated 1.4 million people in Gaza are internally displaced and according to Gaza's Ministry of Public Works and Housing about 45 per cent of all houses and housing units have been destroyed. This is in addition to cutting off all means of communication, Internet, water, electricity, fuel and food supplies from Gaza for the past three weeks.
Palestinians have been the victims of Israeli state acts of terrorism and a slow war of genocide for 75 years. They were massacred, women and small girls raped and ethnically cleansed, as documented by Palestinian, Israeli and international historians.
Their factories, farms, banks and furnished homes were seized and they were denied their inalienable right to return to their country. All these crimes against humanity were committed and continue to be committed against them only because of who they are, not Jews, with the full complicity of the Western governments, especially the group of Anglo-Saxon countries of the so-called "Five Eyes".
It is time these countries are made accountable, shoulder the responsibility they are obliged to under the Geneva Convention and force Israel to recognise the Palestinian people's human and national rights, and Palestine's right to exist.
Without the blind support and protection of these governments, Israel would not dare commit these crimes against humanity, and challenge the international community as it's doing.
The writer is a Nakba survivor and former Palestinian ambassador