Killing a chance to make peace

Hamas-Israel war

A supporter of the Islamist Hamas movement reacts as she holds a poster of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh during a protest to condemn his killing, at the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh near the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon.

Every week we seem to reach a new milestone in barbarity in the Israel-Hamas conflict. In the last few months, hospitals have been bombed and children massacred, with each atrocity marking another level of depravity which can hardly be believed.

Recent events have certainly conformed to that trend. Earlier this week, we saw Israeli protestors storming military facilities in that country — their protests were not against Palestine or Hamas, but rather were focused against the detention and questioning of Israel Defense Forces reservists who are suspected of raping and abusing a Palestinian prisoner. A member of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, speaking on the same day as those protests, justified the rape and abuse of Palestinian prisoners.

This apparent collapse of any semblance of adhering to the rule of law in the Israeli state coincided with the killing of Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Haniyeh was killed in an Israeli strike, after he had been attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president. He was viewed as central to negotiations which might bring an end to the conflict, but Qatar’s prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, who has led mediation efforts, summarised the impact of Haniyeh’s killing on those efforts to find peace. Sheikh Mohammed wrote on X: “Political assassinations & continued targeting of civilians in Gaza while talks continue leads us to ask, how can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on other side? Peace needs serious partners.” The obvious retort is that Israel cannot be a serious partner when it comes to peace if it is killing the very negotiators who are trying to create that peace.

As we in Ireland know too well, the road to resolution is paved by getting people around the table but when all the boundaries of decency and humanity have been blown apart, the question that must be asked is — what possible ending can there be to this conflict?