Israel’s airstrike near Lebanon’s largest public hospital in southern Beirut last week killed at least 18 people, including four children, while injuring another 60 people.
The Lebanese health ministry said the attack—one of at least 13 reported across the capital—had caused “significant damage” to the hospital. More recently, Israeli strikes in the Jabalia refugee camp killed at least 20 people, and injured many others. Israeli aggression has also attracted the ire of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which denounced Israel’s accusations that six Palestinian journalists working for Al Jazeera in Gaza were “terrorists.”
Over a year since Israel initiated its genocidal actions in Gaza and its surrounding regions, the West continues to look the other way, voicing perfunctory concerns and pleas for peace while taking no action to achieve the same. Rather, several states, including the U.S. and Germany, continue to authorize military exports to Israel, seemingly supporting its atrocities. And the incidence of the violence shows no signs of abating: Israel has destroyed a residential building in Beirut; targeted a school-turned-shelter in northern Gaza, killing at least seven Palestinians; and killed another three Palestinians in a drone strike in western Gaza. Israeli bombings at the Tawbah clinic in southern Gaza killed four people, while the Ministry of Health in the occupied West Bank reported the death of an 11-year-old boy after Israeli forces shot him in Nablus.
Initially touted as a war against Hamas, Israel describes its latest aggression as a “response” to an “Iranian offensive.” The saber rattling from both sides has brought the Middle East to the brink of war, with both Iran and Israel firing missiles on each other, yielding results of little consequence. Unfortunately, there is little hope for peace in the near future, as each week brings new calamities for people in countries neighboring Israel, whose leaders continue trying to bomb their way to an ever-expanding “Greater Israel.”