There’s a lot going on in Gaza these days, as Israel goes on killing as many Palestinians as it can. There is pressure developing for a ceasefire, and it seems that the Israeli Defense Forces want to kill as many Palestinians as possible before that dread day comes.
Of course, friends of Israel are doing their best to prevent such a betrayal of the Zionist cause. The USA has vetoed a UNSC resolution calling for a ceasefire. Of course, even if that resolution was passed, Israel would have ignored it, just as it ignored the resolution by the UN General Assembly for the ceasefire. You’ve got to admire the American persistence in a futile cause. I mean, if they had allowed the resolution to pass, what difference would it have made?
But perhaps the most interesting thing in the last week was how the Israelis were stripping Palestinian prisoners they caught, down to their underwear, and then herding them. The claim is that they were searching them, and they were kept that way to prevent them attacking Israeli troops. I can see how a naked man walking down the street would be easily identified, and recaptured. If he had been allowed to keep his clothes, an escaped Palestinian could just shove his hands into his trouser pockets and go off whistling, but if he had been stripped, he couldn’t put his hands anywhere, could he?
I don’t know whether Hamas has begun a physical training programme for its fighters in Gaza, but it should. I mean, if it allows the typical Palestinian volunteer to get captured, he would probably let the side down, as he presented a pale, slug-like pudgy physique to the Israelis. The problem is, a lot of those being chapters are not Hamas fighters. They’re just people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That means non-Hamas Palestinians should hit the gyms while there is still time. It’s not just the Israeli troops that will provide an audience, but the TV cameras. The Palestinians are being stripped so that multiple messages are sent, not just to the Palestinians themselves, warning all, not just the captives, of the fate that awaits them. Israelis, who have been scared ever since the October 7 attacks, are being shown that Palestinians are not so formidable once you strip them down to their underpants. The Hamas resistance is being shown that surrender is an option, even if it means you lose your pants.
Of course, one of the main ideas is to humiliate the Palestinians, to show them who are top dog. The Israelis are trying to show that they are above the laws of war, even more than their targeting of hospitals and killing of children. Those who cry the loudest about human rights are silent about this. Is this a preparation for genocide on the grounds that Palestinians are not people?
I see that Jemima Khan, one of Imran Khan’s wives and mother of his sons, and guardian of Tyrian White, the young woman who just happens to resemble Imran, has said one of the most fatuous things possible to say about the slaughter in Gaza. She said that it was possible to support both sides. And she also said Imran was shot for his being close to Jews.
Now that must rank alongside the late Nusrat Bhutto’s statement when Senior Minister, back in the PPP’s 1988-1990 tenure, that there was no harm in Pakistan getting missile “provided they are peaceful.”
No wonder Imran got rid of her. My sympathies for him, because he is stuck in jail watching fearfully whether somebody is doing well enough to replace him on the same page. Luckily for him, Shaheen Shah Afridi took only one wicket, that of the fellow Kashmiri Patwari that Nawaz sneaked onto the Australian team, Usman Khawaja. He took it twice, but Khwaja proved that he was conspiring against Imran. He was out for 90 in the second innings, and thus missed a century. Isn’t that what patwaris deserve?
But the match revealed the dangers that were cropping up in Aamer Jamal and Khurram Shehzad, especially the former, whose six wickets on debut were a little better than Imran’s failure to take any wickets in either of England’s innings, and thus proof that he was a patwari.
