Former PM accused of lies and war crimes that led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths would add ‘greater legitimacy’ to genocide in Gaza, says Times of Israel
Israel plans to install Tony Blair as ‘humanitarian coordinator’ in Gaza in what it hopes will,
provid[e] its war effort with greater legitimacy
according to the Times of Israel, quoting the Ynet news outlet and ‘unnamed senior officials’. The Israeli government has already been in touch with Blair and discussions have been underway for weeks, with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu hoping,
to leverage Blair’s experience as former envoy to the region for the Middle East Quartet to temper international concerns over the civilian cost of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
International concerns are about the mass murder of Gazan civilians, including over five thousand children – but the Netanyahu regime appears to think that a PR exercise and a new coat of Blair-coloured paint will be enough to let Israel get on with its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza – which leaked intelligence ministry plans show it hopes will lead to clearing all of Gaza’s population that survives the mass bombing permanently into a permanent ‘tent city’ in the desert of southern Egypt.
The paper claims that the emphasis of the appointment will be “providing medical treatment and medicines, and on the possibility of evacuating the wounded and sick from the Strip” – but with no mention of actually ending the slaughter.
Shortly after the 7 October incident in southern Israel Blair – who has an office in Israel – issued a statement that claiming it meant that “decades of conventional western diplomacy around the Israel/Palestinian issue will need to be fundamentally re-thought“, apparently already justifying Israel’s onslaught and attempting to pre-empt international outrage at the mass murder of civilians:
As the full nature of the barbarity and disgusting savagery of Hamas’ attack on Israel becomes clear, which the perpetrators know full well will result not only in grief and tragedy for Israelis but also for the people of Gaza, it becomes clear also that decades of conventional western diplomacy around the Israeli/Palestinian issue will need to be fundamentally re-thought.
Tony Blair
However, eye-witnesses have attributed many, even most, of the Israeli deaths at the kibbutz to indiscriminate Israeli gunfire and shelling. No evidence has been provided for the more lurid Israeli claims of atrocities, with US president Joe Biden’s office being forced to admit he had not seen pictures he had claimed to see of mutilated babies and raped women. Israeli media recently admitted that claims of rape of Israeli women had evaporated.
A video circulated by supporters of Israel, which had been subtitled to suggest that it showed a Hamas operative threatening a woman with rape, has been shown by a Reuters fact check to say no such thing – in fact, the operative was telling another to leave the woman behind because she is female. Israeli survivors of the IDF onslaught – as well as at least one of the hostages so far released by Hamas – have commented on how kindly and politely they were treated by the Hamas fighters.
The plan exposes yet again the arrogance and contempt of the Israeli regime and the UK political establishment. Blair is widely despised as a war criminal because of his role in the 2003 Iraq invasion – and the lies about non-existent ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that he and his team told to justify it – that led to at the least several hundred thousand civilian deaths, with some believing the death toll to be as high as a million.
War criminals appointing war criminals, to legitimise war crime, about sums up the diseased national and international political order – and will do nothing to protect the innocent civilians of Gaza who are being murdered in their thousands in their homes, schools and hospitals to drive them out of their homeland.
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